Deus X Read online

  Norman Spinrad

  www.sfgateway.com

  Enter the SF Gateway …

  In the last years of the twentieth century (as Wells might have put it), Gollancz, Britain’s oldest and most distinguished science fiction imprint, created the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series. Dedicated to re-publishing the English language’s finest works of SF and Fantasy, most of which were languishing out of print at the time, they were – and remain – landmark lists, consummately fulfilling the original mission statement:

  ‘SF MASTERWORKS is a library of the greatest SF ever written, chosen with the help of today’s leading SF writers and editors. These books show that genuinely innovative SF is as exciting today as when it was first written.’

  Now, as we move inexorably into the twenty-first century, we are delighted to be widening our remit even more. The realities of commercial publishing are such that vast troves of classic SF & Fantasy are almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of these books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing has changed that paradigm for ever.

  The technology now exists to enable us to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan is, at its simplest, to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  Welcome to the new home of Science Fiction & Fantasy. Welcome to the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled.

  Welcome to the SF Gateway.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Gateway Introduction

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter II

  Chapter 3

  Chapter IV

  Chapter 5

  Chapter VI

  Chapter 7

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter 9

  Chapter X

  Chapter 11

  Chapter XII

  Chapter 13

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter 15

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter 17

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter 19

  Chapter XX

  Chapter 21

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter 23

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter 25

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter 27

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter 29

  Website

  Also by Norman Spinrad

  Dedication

  About the Author

  Copyright

  1

  They say these are the last days, Moma Gaia’s been murdered by her idiot children, reefs all coral corpses, ice still going, waters still arising, biosphere melting away in the supertropic sun like a big jellyfish beached on the Martian shore.

  For sure we’re the grandsons and daughters of less than wise old monkeys, but on the other hand, we all made of mud, one of the good books says, so considering where we come from, maybe we haven’t done too bad. And in my line of work, I’ve become convinced that even the entities on the Other Side are just playing the cards that someone else dealt as best they can.

  I’ve been told that’s a bad attitude, but a lot of the people who say it pay me good money to use it for their own devices. ’Cause that’s what it takes to deal with what’s on the Other Side, whether you think you’re dealing with electronic loas, or your dearly departed, or just the expert system ghosts haunting the bits and bytes.

  Even if you believe there’s nothing on the Other Side capable of feeling anything, there’s plenty can model it well enough to pass any emotional Turing test, so when in postmortem Rome you better model yourself some manners, because the entities there have no trouble at all convincing you when your realer-than-thou attitude pisses them off.

  Me, I ain’t faking it, man, I may have been born into the last days, but even what’s left of this sick old biosphere’s still gonna be around long after I’m gone to my chosen reward.

  Maybe it’s the Herb that gives me a sunny spirit. Old Sol, he don’t seem so friendly now without the ozone to shade our poor hides from his death-ray glare, but I say it ain’t the Golden Boy who’s changed, besides which, without him there’s only the dark, so me, I grease myself with sunscreen, put on my old straw hat and shades, light me up a spliff, and set my course through sunlit seas.

  So call me Ishmael, it’s not my name, but I’d rather do the Great White Wail than join the funeral march.

  My real name’s Marley Philippe, and I live on the Mellow Yellow. That’s my boat, man, not the Herb talking, and it’s as real as it gets for me. I bought her with ill-gotten gains, better you don’t know, six years past, and she’s still the perfected state of the art.

  The Yellow’s a forty-foot windfoil sailer, and the foils double as solar collectors, and in the dead of night on a glassy sea she can still do seventeen knots on a full three days’ charge for ten hours and run my working hardware with plenty of juice left over to give me fifty watts of traveling music. In a bad-ass hurricane, the foils deflate into the masts, the masts fold into the deck, the cockpit canopy goes up, and I can seal up a cabin with a neat little galley and a great big fridge and everything I need to stay on the Board and make like a submarine if I have to.

  What more can a poor boy ask? Except of course a sea full of leaping fish and tropical islands laden with sweet fruit and dusky damsels basking in the balmy sunshine. Admittedly, that’s a bit hard to come by, what with the Caribbean paradise of my ancestors reduced to a series of huddled masses clinging to highland remnants surrounded by moribund coastal swamp and all but the larger citified islands of the Pacific long since drowned in the desert sea.

  But if the dumb hand of man has taken away the sunshine isles of yore, human stupidity giveth too, with the same blind chance. It giveth fjords in Scandinavia where you sail between great rugged cliffs dripping with subtropic jungle on crystal waters where refugee seals come to graze on shoals of sardines. It giveth the Great Egyptian Sea where you glide through half a thousand miles of reeds infested with birds fleeing the Central African Waste. It giveth scuba diving over the verdigreed emerald streets of New Orleans. It giveth most of all the transformational shores of the Mediterranean, where I spend the months between November and April.

  With sunscreen, and straw hat, and shades, the sun’s not so bad then; if you’re lucky enough to be black as me, you can even enjoy it.

  I like to sail through the Gibraltar Bight long about the end of October and cruise east off the northern shore, what was once called the Costa Brava and the Côte d’Azur. It’s an old, old part of the so-called civilized world, mountains to the sea in some parts, coastal plains and deltas in others, and it’s been accumulating interesting ruins since before the Romans started kicking Greek ass.

  Most of the latest and least romantic layer, the late-twentieth-century beach strip of turista tickytacky that ran all the way from the Rock to Nice, is mercifully sunk beneath the rising sea, leaving only the bargetowns of the boat people floating above the drowned hotels, now refugee camps for what few fish remain in the dying sea.

  Where the old coast was more rugged, the little towns and villages retreated slowly up the cliffs as the water rose in some places, in others former clifftop towns find themselves sitting on the shore. Along the eastern shore of North America, the North Sea coast, places like that where depopulated cities huddle behind the great seawalls, it seems like a battlefront where you know who’s gonna lose, but down here, the people who remain seem to have literally gone with the flow as they always have, their perpetually crumbling seacoast towns and villages rising and fallin
g with the time and the tide.

  These days I usually follow the boot of Italy about as far down as Sicily, then make the passage to the African coast. Sometimes I used to go up the Adriatic side as far as dear dead Venice to smoke the Herb among the pelagic ruins and get nice and maudlin at the noble follies of Old World Man, whose most lasting monuments are those to an endless succession of the Glory That Was.

  The last few years, I haven’t ventured that far; I do not like to sweat the race with the summer sun back out into the Atlantic and up to the fjords to sit out the summer in endurable climes.

  Once, early on in my migratory career, I sped along my eastern course and down the Italian coast so I could swing down through the Greek islands before I had to turn back to beat the sun. Bad mistake, man. My sense of timing turned out to be muchisimo optimistic, and so did my classical illusions.

  The Greek islands got it bad. When the fish died and the sun turned lethal to the tourist trade, the economy went Haitian and worse, and the die-off of the trees and ground cover did the rest, and now there’s nothing left of the magic kingdom of Homeric myth but boneyard isles, abandoned now to handfuls of human ruin-rats swimming pathetically toward you with knives in their mouths and starvation in their eyes.

  Black boy, don’t let the summer sun rise on you here!

  But it did. There were hundreds of islands still more or less rising out of the dead azure sea, not a one of them without the bleaching bones of towns and villages that were a thousand years old when my ancestors were dragged out of Mother Africa to durance vile in the American Babylon. I don’t know what I was looking for as I sailed for weeks around this vast stone Sargasso of quaint seatown corpses and beautiful bleak marble monuments, too dead even for Homeric ghosts.

  Whatever it was, I didn’t find it. Instead, an unseasonably early rise in the ultraviolet count found me while I was still off Algeria, and I had eight days sealed in cockpit and cabin to brood on the awfulness of it all, afraid to even partake of the Herb.

  I decided that I hadn’t bought the Mellow Yellow to become an intrepid explorer, or to darken my skies with reminders of what this world must once have been, but to sail endlessly round as languid seas as I could find, fulfilling as best I could the ancestral dream in all those retro-Reg songs popular in the New York of my boyhood.

  I want to play Columbus venturing out into deep unknown waters and wondering whether I’m going to sail over the edge into the void, I’ve got more than enough on the Other Side.

  Fish no longer jump out of the sea into a beach-comber’s net, nor can I step ashore and pluck my fill of fruit from the trees, and one has other expenses in this life, man, so even I need a job.

  More jobs than not still mean going somewhere to work, which means staying somewhere to live, but the Big Board is everywhere and nowhere, and those of us who work it can sail round their chosen circuit to their hearts’ content.

  I’ve got a hammock slung in the cabin next to the console, and a sat-dish spinnaker, and all I have to do is lay out in it, put on the dreadcap, and plug right in.

  I’m what you might call a private detective of sorts, ears and eyes, and a sleazehound nose for hire, and back in New York where I worked in the meatware, it was eyes to keyholes, stakeouts of hotel rooms with the meter running, bimboids and sleazoids, and cheating husbands with antique straight razors on the nightstand.

  These days my turf’s the Other Side. Some might say it’s not exactly better for your mental health, but believe me, man, it’s safer for your tender black ass.

  The transcorporeal boundary line is a mother-lode of bounty for the legal profession, and hence for what few P.I.s have what it takes to weasel for same with the entities on the Other Side.

  Been a legal plankton bloom ever since the well-heeled started cloning themselves meatware successor entities way back before silicon became the upscale way not to go.

  Even now, with your uniclones legally recognized as continuous with their original meatware templates in most jurisdictions, there’s still plenty of legal action in sorting out the status of dupes. Guy’s meatware expires holding a mountain of debt and the hand of a wife he’s waited ten years to ditch and he’s got a bought-up policy for a fiver. So they bring up five genotype clones and dump his software in all of them.

  Which one’s him? None of them? All of them? Who does the bank holding his paper go after? Who’s his wife legally married to? Who has custody of the kids? Who gets the house? And the stock?

  And that’s only the meatware tip of the iceberg. Your meatware duplicants are at least generally recognized as civil humans, but the software successor entities on the Other Side are the legal Big Rock Candy Mountain.

  They’ll never get it all sorted out legally. Nothing outside of a meatware matrix has ever been recognized as legally human, but I’ve been involved in plenty of cases where the heirs have yet to collect on the terms of a will abrogated in realtime by the transcorporial successor entities. In less savory jurisdictions, the denizens of the Other Side have no more legal rights than a spreadsheet program, and the heirs have been known to peddle subroutines or even complete copies as expert system slaves for the corporate bits and bytes.

  Sometimes the meatware template presells expert system reproduction rights to his own transcorporial successor. Sometimes the heirs contest it and peddle their own dupes and they all sue each other for copyright infringement. I worked a case where a successor entity sued his own deceased meatware template to break one of these contracts and won.

  So I get all kinds. Sharks from the corporate feeding frenzy. Lawyers for meatware and lawyers trying to represent the successor entities themselves. Government spooks and spookier creatures still.

  After all, everybody plugs into the Big Board all the time, you do it when you consult a phone-operator program, or call up a lecture from Einstein, or dump some stock, or find yourself confronting Ugly Tony or the Taxman. The world’s phone systems, data banks, communication nets, corporate and government systems, traffic control, satellite grids, eco-monitors, all pop their bits and bytes at us up on the shiny surface of the Big Board.

  You 2-D it on a flat screen, it mutters in your ear, you can talk to it and it can talk to you, you can put on the dreadcap and gloves and step inside, or you can just type on a keyboard and get back answers in letters and numbers.

  The surface of the Board is all that most people care to see, and the official surface is a nice clean workspace with predictable function keys and certifiable interface entities a mother could love.

  But there’s a vasty deep beneath the surface of our official electronic reality, and hey, boys, there’s sharks in those waters, or anyway there are expert system simulations of same, and that’s where they pay me to go.

  You might call me a private eye, but your great-great-granddaddy might call me a shaman. From a certain point of view, I do conjure up the dead, though there are times when I find myself believing that the spirits are conjuring me.

  But my job precludes me from taking such positions. Like all private eyes, I’m available for a price. And like all shamans, I am an interface between this side of the Line and the Other, a communication medium, not an active agent. Or so I keep telling myself every time deeper destinies than my balance sheet sink the spear of their reality into a soft spot in my soul.

  Even the first time I did business with the Roman Catholic Church.

  You remember the Roman Catholic Church? Time was, all of Christendom was ruled from the Vatican. Even as late as the early twenty-first century, the Roman Catholic Church was a major transnational player, more adherents than any nation state.

  It started losing followers fast when Pope John Paul IV issued his bull against clonal immortality, and though Roberto I managed to weasel them out of it a few Popes later, by that time software successors were already the postmortem vogue, and even he couldn’t bring himself to bless Transcorporial Immortality in electronic disneyworld heaven, and the membership list has been going
south ever since.

  After all, unlike the Herb, the Catholic sacraments delivered no realtime communion with the godhead, the only payoff they were offering for the walking of their straight and narrow was pie in their sky in the great by-and-by.

  Which, of course, would not be forthcoming until after you died. Nor had anyone ever sent back picture postcards from the Catholic version of immortality on the Other Side. You took it on faith, or not at all.

  Descartes’s gamble, they called it. Might as well believe. If you’re right, they give you a harp to play and wings to fly. If you’re wrong, you’ve lost nothing because nothing is all any of us is gonna get in a godless void anyway.

  But once you could dump your consciousness hologram in silicon, in gallium arsenide, in superconductive buckyball chips, once you could be guaranteed your software’s persistence beyond the expiration of the original meatware matrix and select your own version of electronic afterlife from the media menu of the Big Board, the odds shifted hard.

  The Roman Catholic Church sure didn’t improve them by forbidding Transcorporial Immortality to its believers on pain of eternal damnation, and these days, there’s maybe sixty or seventy million Catholics left, not exactly impressive even in this latter-day depopulated world.

  But they are well heeled, and they’ve got more than two thousand years of costumes and choreography and music and mystique, and in these last days of our planet, there’s still a resonance to a mission from the Vatican, even to a boy like me.

  It was December, and I was lying off the Mediterranean coast of Italy, maybe 300K from Rome. It was a bearably sunny winter day in the Med, and I was lying back in the open cockpit with a beer and a spliff pretending to fish in the dead waters when the console piped me the opening bar of Beethoven’s Fifth, which was my call-cue at the time.

  It came through on speaker and flat screen. Just a head and shoulders shot of a white man in a black suit, make him a corporate legal type, only there’s something strange about the collar, and a gold chain dangling something off-camera, and he’s wearing some kind of little red cap, it all seems like it should be familiar, but I don’t make the connection until he does, and then I find it right hard to believe.