Linda Nagata - The Bohr Maker

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THE BOHR MAKER
by Linda Nagata
A Bantam Spectra Book / April 1995
Copyright © 1995 by Linda Nagata
ISBN 0-553-56925-2
To my husband Ronnie,
whose support and confidence
made this book possible.
CHAPTER
1
Just past dawn a dead man came floating down the river. The current carried him under the old
river-straddling warehouse, where he fetched up against one of the fluff booms Arif had strung between
the rotting pilings. Phousita found him when she came to gather the night's harvest of fluff. He floated
facedown. His head had wedged under the fluff boom; his long black hair swayed like a silk veil in the
current.
Phousita glanced nervously overhead. The trapdoor that opened onto the main floor of the
abandoned warehouse hung open. She debated with herself a moment. It would be so easy to slip into
the water, ease the dead man's body off the boom and guide him back into the current before Arif
discovered he was here. She would never have to worry about who he might have been or what bitter
spirits still haunted his flesh. Let someone else farther down the river have him!
But her conscience wouldn't let her do it. Even in the dusky light under the river warehouse she
could tell he'd been a wealthy man. Such fine clothes! And he might have money on him, jewels. The clan
was hungry. She glanced again at the trapdoor. "Sumiati," she called softly.
The termite-eaten floorboards creaked, then Sumiati peered through the door. She had an empty
bucket in her hands, ready to pass it to Phousita. "So fast today! Did you fill the first bucket already? It's
about time our catch improved!" Her dark eyes widened when she saw the body. She sucked in a little
breath of surprise. "Phousita, he's still got his clothes! Hold him! Don't let the current take tuan away. I'll
come down. Look how beautiful his robe is. Oh, do you think we're the first to find him?" She put the
bucket down, then turned to climb through the trapdoor, moving awkwardly as she bent over her
pregnant belly. She hung for a moment from the insulated wire rope, looking like some rare, ripe fruit.
Then she dropped gracefully to the narrow metal plank that Arif had lashed between the pilings. It
shivered under the impact.
Phousita reached out a hand to steady her. Sumiati was a small woman, but even beside her,
Phousita was tiny. She stood no taller than a petite child of seven or eight, though she was nearly
twenty-five years old. Despite her size, her body was that of a woman: slender and beautifully
proportioned, endowed with ample breasts and rounded hips, but on a scale that seemed unnaturally
small. With her pretty round face, her dark eyes, and her thick black hair carefully coiled at the nape of
her neck, she might have been a diminutive spirit out of some forgotten mythology.
Her unusual appearance had once attracted many clients after hours in the business district. But
she'd promised Arif she wouldn't venture down there anymore. She was hungrier these days. The clothes
from this dead man would buy a large quantity of rice.
And yet she hesitated. Easy wealth was so often cursed with misfortune. "I don't like finding the
tuan here," she told Sumiati, instinctively using the traditional honorific. "There's no telling what evil
influences tuan carries with him. Let's work quickly, then I'll shove him back into the river."
Sumiati looked suddenly concerned. "Maybe we should call Arif."
"No!" Sumiati jerked at the sharp tone of Phousita's voice. Phousita hunched her shoulders; she
looked across at the dead man. "No," she said more gently. "No need to wake Arif. We can do it."
Pulling the close-fitting skirt of her sarong up above her knees, she eased herself into the water until her
tiny feet touched the clean gravel that cushioned the river's concrete bed. The current swirled in cool
streams around her waist, gradually soaking her faded blue breastcloth. She reached back to help
Sumiati down, then grabbed the empty fluff bucket and started wading toward the dead man, one hand
on the fluff boom for balance.
Arif had constructed the boom shortly after he'd moved the clan into the abandoned warehouse.
He'd gathered rare old plastic bottles, the kind that didn't disintegrate in only a few weeks. He'd cut them
in half and then lashed them to a plank stripped from the warehouse. They floated half-submerged in the
water and when the fluff came floating down the river they trapped it, like huge hands grasping at the
feast. The system had worked well for many months. It would still work, if only there were more fluff in
the river ... or fewer hungry people. Her gaze scanned the thin line of brown foam bobbing against the
boom. A dismal catch. Not enough there to feed three people and there were thirty-nine empty bellies in
the clan. Forty, counting Sumiati's soon-to-be-born. Phousita tried not to think about it.
Fierce rays of yellow light lanced under the river house as the sun leapt up over the city. Phousita
touched the dead man's head. Bright white flecks of bone and torn pink flesh could be seen through his
black hair. The back of his skull had been caved in by a blow. The current still washed dilute puffs of
blood from the wound. He must have been only minutes in the water. She lifted his head carefully by the
long hair. His face was pale, nondescript European. His eyes were closed. A single kanji glowed in soft,
luminescent red on his cheek. She couldn't read it. "Look, tuan was robbed," she said, pointing at the
torn lobes of his ears where earrings must have been. Sumiati peered over her shoulder.
Out of principle Phousita touched his neck, checked for a pulse. It was a ceremony the Chinese
doctor insisted upon, even when the patient was obviously dead. Perhaps it helped ease the frightened
spirit still trapped within the body. Sumiati looked on, a worried pout on her lips until Phousita shook her
head. Sumiati smiled.
"Even if tuan was robbed, he still has his clothes," she said. "Maybe the thieves overlooked
something." She quickly checked his pockets, but found nothing. Phousita worked at the fastenings on his
robe. In minutes they had the body stripped. Phousita stepped back in relief.
Sumiati's eyes glowed as she held the fluff bucket stuffed full of fine clothing. "Push him off the
boom," she urged. "Let's hurry. We have to take these to temple market. It's a long walk, but we'll get
the best price there. We can take some water to sell too. And then we can buy rice. Enough for
everyone to eat until their stomachs complain! And clothes. Henri and Maman need new clothes. And
medicines, of course. You'll know the ones to buy. And the Chinese doctor is always glad to see you...."
Phousita smiled at Sumiati's nervous chatter. The dead man had indeed brought them good
fortune. And now she could send him on his way. She reached for the dead man's arm. Twisted it gently,
to ease him off the boom. Hurry now. In a moment he would be gone.
"Phousita!"
Her hands jerked back in guilty surprise. She looked up as Arif dropped through the trapdoor.
He landed on the metal plank. His slim, hard body—clothed only in worn snorts—was poised in a
fighter's stance. Arif was always fighting, she thought bitterly. And he'd do anything, anything at all to
survive.
He stared at her, cruel violet eyes so out of place amongst the swollen, exaggerated features of
his laughing, yellow, bioluminescent joker's face. Sumiati, blind to his moods, started to bubble forth in
her good-natured way with the tale of their find, but Arif cut her off with a gesture. "Phousita," he
growled softly. "What are you doing?"
Phousita glanced at the nude body of the dead man. Without his clothes he seemed a pale,
ghostly thing. "Take the basket up, Sumiati," she said softly. "Arif will help me now."
Sumiati nodded, confused. Arif helped her out of the river and onto the plank, then stepped
back, out of her way. She climbed the rope. "Close the door behind you," he said. He still stared at
Phousita. In the harsh shadows under the warehouse, his ogre-ugly face glowed brilliant yellow with its
own generated light.
By his own admission Arif had been a wicked child. His mother had sold him to a sorcerer who
poisoned him with a spell that exposed his sins upon his face. With his ridiculously elongated nose and
chin, his cheeks as round and full as overripe guavas, and his glowing yellow complexion, he resembled
one of the comical servants of the wayang theater. Except his eyes.
His gaze flickered upward as the corrugated metal door closed with a creak. Soft footsteps
moved off across the warehouse floor. When Sumiati was out of earshot, Arif spoke: "He's food,
Phousita." He walked to the end of the plank. "Why would you throw away food?"
Suddenly Arif dove, slicing like a sunbeam through the water, his thick black hair, tied up in a
short ponytail, trailing behind him. He surfaced next to Phousita, startling her with an explosion of
bubbles. He threw his swollen yellow head back and laughed, then hugged her tiny figure quickly, his
arms encircling her waist. "Don't be afraid, Phousita," he crooned. "The old witch filled your head with all
kinds of lies. It's just a body. Tuan's spirit is gone."
Phousita was trembling. She sank into Arif's arms while the cool river rushed past. "You don't
know what kind of man he was," she whispered.
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters if we take his body into ours."
"Not his body. Only the fluff that grows from it. You helped me plant them before. You ate the
fluff."
She laid her head against his chest. He'd dismissed her reluctance then too. "Sutedjo and Piet
were part of our clan," she said. "We knew them; they would wish us no harm. But this man is a stranger;
we don't know what evil he's done."
"It's gone with him."
"His spirit clings to the body."
But Arif's patience had eroded. "Spirit rides in the head and his head's smashed in," he snapped.
"Stupid country girl, he's gone!" He ducked under the water. A moment later, he surfaced on the other
side of the boom. Grabbing the dead man's wrists, he twisted the body roughly off the boom. "I wish
you'd never met that old witch! She chased your brains away. You want to be a sorceress like her? Fah!
She was just a stupid old hill woman. I'm glad she's dead. I wish I could have planted her too!"
Phousita slapped the water. "Stop it, Arif. Stop it! You pretend you know so much. You don't
know! You hear rumors on the street and you think they're true. Shiny new magic. But even the new
sorcerers don't know everything. Arif!"
He wasn't listening. He'd turned his back on her, hauling the dead man up the river. She took a
deep breath and ducked awkwardly under the boom. Fear filled her as water swirled past her face. Then
she burst to the surface, gasping and splashing for air. She didn't know how to swim. Arif had promised
to teach her. Oh, why did she get angry? It did no good. Arif only wanted the best for her, for everyone
in the clan. It hurt him when she let her doubt show.
"Arif." She caught up with him; helped him drag the body against the current. They reached the
edge of the river house. Arif stopped. Phousita glanced down through the clear water to the gravel
beneath her feet. Scattered there she could still see the remnants of Sutedjo's bones, bright white slivers
that hadn't yet turned to fluff. She glanced up. Arif studied her with violet eyes. "It wasn't the old witch
who cured you, Phousita. It was the Chinese doctor. The old magic is dead."
He ducked under the water, hauling one leg of the dead man with him. Phousita used her tiny
body as an anchor to keep the corpse from drifting downstream while Arif secured the man's foot to a
mooring stone on the bottom. He surfaced, took the other leg, hauled that down too.
Over the next few days the body would slowly dissolve into a rich harvest of fluff that would float
to the surface and gather downstream against the fluff boom. The clan would never know the reason for
their good fortune. They'd attribute the abundant harvest to luck.
Fluff hadn't existed when the old woman was alive. That was only a few years ago. Phousita
could remember it easily. She'd been perhaps twenty-one, still trapped in a child's body. The river had
been a stinking sewer then, a deadly thread of water draining the city's filth. When the fluff first started
collecting on the river's banks, they'd paid no attention to it, assuming it was just a new kind of pollution.
Then Arif had seen the rats eating it....
Now the river ran clear. The water was clean, drinkable, though the city's filth still washed into it
with every rain.
Arif surfaced again, took the dead man's right arm. "Help push him under," he said gruffly.
Phousita nodded. Arif stretched the arm of the corpse beyond its head, then reached underwater for the
mooring stone. He found it, and glanced over his shoulder at Phousita. "Now." She placed her palms flat
against the cold, slippery chest and leaned hard, forcing the body under.
Something gave way beneath her right hand. She could hear it more than feel it, a sharp metal
snick! The chest opened like a blinking eye. A golden needle shot out of the black orifice, to bury itself in
Phousita's breast. She reared back in horror, swiping at the spot of blood just above her breastcloth that
marked the point where the needle had disappeared. She stumbled through the water. Her chest was on
fire. She could hear herself bleating like a terrified child: "Unh! unh! unh!"
The corpse twisted in the current, the shoulders rolled. She saw a little white tear in the dead
white chest before the corpse turned facedown again. Her gaze shifted to Arif. The horror in his eyes
must have echoed her own. Help me. She tried to say it, but her mouth had gone dry. Her tongue grew
puffy and swollen as the needle's poison spread through her system. The bubbling song of the river
seemed to rise in volume, building like a wall around her before it collapsed into a chaotic buzz. Her
vision blurred. She could see Arif reaching for her. But the current was swifter. Her eyes closed as its
cold hands caressed her face and swirled through her hair.
CHAPTER
2
"Name?" the majordomo program asked.
Nikko, who was in truth only a program himself, a modern ghost, an electronic entity copied
from the mind of his original self, had little patience for Dull Intelligences. "The name's Nikko," he
growled. "Rhymes with psycho. Nikko Jiang-Tibayan. I've only been here a hundred times you decrepit
excuse for a secretary."
He could hear Kirstin laughing, somewhere over the electronic horizon, a dim sound in the
majordomo's limited sensorial world. "Are you going to admit me or not?" he snapped.
"Of course, sir. The lady is expecting you." A pathway opened, and the electronic pattern that
constituted Nikko's ghost slid through it into Kirstin's mind. Physically, his ghost occupied her atrium, an
accessory organ that had been induced to grow as a filamentous tissue in her brain. But the atrium had
drawn on her sensorium to create for him a psychic environment that was a precise duplicate of the room
which Kirstin occupied. From her point of view, he was simply an overlay on her physical reality, a virtual
companion—invisible to anyone but herself—yet she could host him in the real-space of her house. And
though he was only a ghost, she could see him, scent him, touch him, taste him again ... as she'd done
many times before.
Today, though, he carried with him a sense of urgency, a certainty that his time was running out.
He had a few more weeks at most, Dad said. The end was impossible to predict precisely, but it
wouldn't be long. Nikko could already feel the gathering presence of death, manifest in the clumsiness
that had begun to afflict him as his nervous system degenerated under a preprogrammed genetic code ...
a clumsiness that was replicated perfectly by his ghost.
Kirstin held a hand out to him, the gold rings on her fine fingers bright against the perfect ebony of
her skin. She smiled a cool, possessive smile as she anticipated his touch—no, the simulation of his
touch, a tactile hallucination of the atrium, inspired by this electronic ghost inside her mind.
He took her hand, his own extraordinarily long, china-blue fingers twitching uncontrollably. She
frowned at this latest disability, but for the moment she chose to overlook it.
Still, he felt her scorn. He would have scowled at her then, if he could. But his face wasn't made
for that. He was, after all, only an experimental model, a singular prototype of an artificial human variant
that had since been banned by the Commonwealth. A unique freak. The myriad small platelets that
composed his enameled hide could conceivably perform a clumsy imitation of most human expressions.
But Dad hadn't attached much importance to that aspect of Nikko's design. Instead, he'd rerouted the
cranial nerve that would normally control the tiny muscles in the human face to service the kisheer, the
symbiotic organ that sealed his mouth and nose and ears under vacuum, providing him with oxygen on the
Outside. But Nikko didn't spend much time mourning his lack of expressions. A cold stare served most
of his purposes well enough.
"I've been asking to see you for nearly a week," he growled at Kirstin. His fingers wrapped
across the back of her hand and then around her wrist, though he was careful not to flex the muscles in
his arm. The atrium would simulate that. In the tiny pseudogravity of Kirstin's home, an object would take
over two seconds to fall one meter to the floor, and a lover could be swept off her feet with only a small
investment. But Nikko wasn't in the mood for games like that. He said: "Maybe I'll find another lover, if
you don't want to fill up my last remaining days."
"Ah Nikko, as charming as ever, I see." She lifted his hand, to stroke the smooth enamel of it
against her dark face. Her coppery hair was coarse and kinked, floating in an undisciplined cloud around
her shoulders. Her features were Northern European: a blocky nose and a heavy, rectangular face. The
cream-coffee eyes that measured him seemed too light for her skin. Nikko found her plain. But he wasn't
here out of love, as she well knew.
He gazed past her in sudden surprise. She had a painting of him on her living room wall! He
recognized her style. "That's a romantic bit of trash," he said, as he slid carefully around her to take a
closer look.
"What's wrong with it?" Kirstin exclaimed, her voice a curious mix of amusement and anger. "I
thought you'd like it."
He glared at the piece. If she'd depicted him under conditions of atmosphere his kisheer would
have lain across his shoulders like a short gray cape. But instead she'd placed him in the vacuum forest of
glassine trees that grew on the outer walls of Summer House, displaying him with the respiratory organ in
active position, its supple gray tissue raised over his mouth and nose and ears like a veil. There was
something feral in the poised stance she'd given him; he crouched, his toes wrapped securely around a
low branch while his intent gaze seemed to track some object offscreen. His hands were half-raised,
ready.
"Is that how you see me?" he asked. "Like an animal? In my 'element'?"
"Take it as a compliment, Nikko."
"When it's meant as an indictment?"
In the portrait he seemed something other than human. His head was smooth and hairless with a
high forehead. His face was half-masked, his flat Asian nose and petite ears barely visible beneath the
kisheer. He had no eyebrows. Dad had substituted a dramatic ridge of black. His eyes were blue, and
quite human-ordinary—though behind their protective crystal lenses they were difficult to see. In the
portrait he was nude, as always, his body a smooth, elongated masculine sculpture covered in living
armor designed to protect him from the zero pressure of the void, gleaming in a shade of blue called
nikko. An accessory organ closed over his genital and anal zones like a living loincloth, a bow to the
modesty of society, and protection for him under vacuum.
"I'm an historian," he told Kirstin. "Not a zoological exhibit."
Kirstin's arm slipped around his waist. She pulled herself against him. Her breasts felt too soft
and vulnerable against his enameled skin. But bedded in them, the hard thrust of her nipples seemed to
warn of her armored soul. "You're beautiful," she said. "And I won't have you much longer. Why
shouldn't I remember you as you really were?"
His face couldn't show contempt, but his voice communicated it well enough. "So why don't you
paint me plugging you in your bed?"
She grinned. "And admit to the world that I practice bestiality?"
He pulled away from her. "I am not an animal!" He was what every person inhabiting the
thousand celestial cities of the Commonwealth should be—a graceful being adapted to the new
environment, able to function in vacuum without pressure suit or air supply, equally at home in a corridor
of one of the orbiting cities. And that was why the Commonwealth despised him—he was the future they
were afraid to accept.
Kirstin taunted him with her cool gaze. "Don't chide me, Nikko. I wasn't the one who made you
what you are. That was your dear old dad. Fox Jiang-Tibayan: he thought he could be a better designer
than the Goddess herself. Too bad for you he didn't examine the consequences before he started."
Nikko felt his long fingers close into a fist. The Goddess. Mother Earth was a fucked-up old
tyrant. She could use a little outside help in the evolutionary process. But Kirstin didn't see it that way.
Her Gaian philosophies condemned any artificial advance in the physiology of the human species—a view
that meshed nicely with the secular laws of the Commonwealth.
Kirstin approached him again. She laid two fingers against his smooth chest. "You're an
historian," she said, tracing a slow circle on his skin. "You studied under Marevic Chun and you've
dedicated your life to stirring up trouble. You've had fun, haven't you? Selectively exposing scandal and
corruption to wound the corporations that compete with Summer House. Even attacking the police. But
you've never looked into your own history."
"You're wrong," he said, turning away from her, uncomfortable with this subject. "I know that
litany."
She smiled. "Ah, but you've only had it from one side. You know that Fox created you on the
authority of a research permit, but did he tell you that he obtained that permit by bribe and threat and
political favor? You're an historian, Nikko. You should know the facts. I testified against the permit, but it
didn't matter. Fox knew all the right people." Her chin tilted up and she laughed lightly, remembering.
"You should have seen him. He was so pleased with himself. He never considered what would happen
when the permit expired."
The permit had been issued by the Congressional science advisory committee for a period of
thirty years. Dad had been required to build the expiration date into his design. At the time he hadn't seen
that as a problem. In thirty years, Fox had expected artificial humans would be commonplace, and that
he would have no trouble in getting the permission to reverse Nikko's condition. But instead the passage
of time had ossified the nascent bigotry of the Commonwealth. There had been no extension on the
research permit that allowed Nikko to exist. In a few more weeks, it would expire.
Kirstin slid her hand up to his shoulders. Her fingers dabbled at his kisheer: a gesture calculated
to arouse him. He'd come to her as a last resort. Kirstin Adair, Chief of the Commonwealth Police,
charged with enforcing the laws that limited the use of nanotechnology. It was one of her duties to ensure
that society remained human. Yet she also had the authority to grant him a reprieve.
Nikko was an historian. He'd learned his trade from Marevic Chun, one of the founders of
Summer House. She'd taught him how to hunt the data trails, to dig beneath the civil veneer most people
and corporate entities presented to the world, to forage amongst forgotten electronic notes, reports and
memos, to finagle interviews with reclusive people and ghosts, all to reconstruct the veiled events of the
very recent past and with any luck to embarrass the Commonwealth and the police, to expose their
corruption, to generate a backlash of disgust that would drive the trend line of history toward a more
liberal political climate that might allow him to live.
He'd failed in that. But he'd succeeded in other things. He'd used his skills to track down Kirstin's
past, and he'd come to understand her, long before they met.
Without further words, they retired to the bedroom. Nikko's gaze swept across the collage
mounted on the wall above the bed: an impressionistic melange of teeth and bone and hair and shreds of
skin in bright, artificial colors, all knit together with airbrushed genetic patterns he hadn't the skill to read.
Kirstin had already slipped out of her gown, leaving it to drift slowly to the floor. Her
one-hundred-and-twenty-odd-year-old body waited for him on the bed, as fresh and full as any
teenager's. He joined her.
She pulled him toward her in her silent, hungry way. His belly slid across hers: smooth, hard
enamel skating on yielding flesh. Her nails slipped across his armored breast. He flexed his arms and
slowly sank against her. His mouth found hers. He knew what she felt: kissing him was like kissing a china
statue come to life. But his mouth and tongue were as soft and warm as hers and more intricate, a sea of
papillae designed to mesh with the kisheer when he needed that to breathe.
His kisheer had shriveled in his body's excitement. It lay like a wrinkled kerchief around his neck.
She licked at it, teasing it open. His hand was on her throat. He stroked her fine black skin, feeling her
pulse beat a fierce rhythm beneath his sensitive fingertips.
Suddenly, unexpectedly, her teeth sank into his kisheer. He screamed in pain and dove against
her. "Stop it!" he hissed, while his fingers squeezed a gentle warning against her throat ... fingers long
enough to encircle her entire neck....
But she hissed at him in turn. "You need me, Nikko."
She knew what she was doing. She controlled the situation. It was her atrium, and she could
throw him out at any time.
She bit deeper. The pain began to cloud his brain. He felt himself begin to overheat. He couldn't
dump heat with the efficiency of a human-ordinary. So he did the only thing he could: gave in to her
completely, hating her, even as her body took command of him, drawing his sterile seed out in a
prolonged burst of wracking, shivering lust.
Later, as he daubed at the blood still oozing from his kisheer, he had to remind himself that none
of this was real. He was, after all, only a ghost of his true self, existing within Kirstin's atrium, nothing
more than an overlay on the reality of her world.
But ghosts were not simple, inconsequential fantasies. A scarred ghost could return home and
scar its master. Over the years, many of his ghosts had never returned to him. He knew that some had
simply been erased. But sometimes, he suspected, a damaged ghost would choose not to return home, to
save him from its pain.
He lay back on the bed, feeling his body settle slowly down upon the sheets. Kirstin snuggled
against him, her hand stroking his belly over and over again. She loved to touch him.
He put his arm around her. He knew he should say something sweet now, make himself
endearing. But he didn't think he could pull it off.
His gaze fixed on the collage mounted over the bed. The thing repulsed him. It was Kirstin's
perverted way of displaying the human trophies she'd collected over the years: illegal body parts gathered
from her victims, artfully arranged in collage to suggest the jagged slopes of a forested mountain. Here,
diamond teeth became an exposed escarpment. There, the cropped bits of hair grown of actual gold
were trees blurred by mist. Silver-gray skin stretched in mystery across the gullies, blue skin a pale
canopy of sky. And running through it all, like woodland spirits, the twisted, translucent genetic patterns
describing modifications to human systems that went beyond the bounds of the law.
Kirstin could claim a long and illustrious career of enforcing the law.
The law: there was no simple, profound statement that could contain it. The law of the
Commonwealth was a very human thing, built on conviction and avarice, riddled with loopholes, as alive
as the genetic record of the species and in as constant a state of change. An edifice built to address a
primary concern: what is human? With the passing years, the answer to that became ever more difficult
to define.
Unlike the ancestral type, a modern human need not grow old. Aging was considered a defect in
the human genome, not as a defining parameter of the species. But the inclusion of artificial genetic
structures was forbidden. There were exceptions. There were clauses. But a basic summary of the law
could be held to say: mix and mingle active human genetic material as you like—change your color,
change your size, change your face. Replace the genes for disease, for aging, for personality disorders
with more socially acceptable versions. But do not mingle the human inheritance with nonhuman or
artificial instructions. Do not augment the human mind with machine intelligence.
The law had much to say about nonhuman intelligence. Commonwealth society could not have
functioned without an army of Dull Intelligences to oversee routine regulatory and analytical functions. But
adaptive, volitional, or conscious machine intelligences were banned. By law, creativity was a function
reserved for human minds.
Kirstin was a firm believer in the law.
She touched his shoulder. "You remind me of Leander Bohr in his last days."
Nikko shuddered. Leander Bohr. She brought up that name to torment him! Bohr had been a
Gaian terrorist when he'd taken on a very youthful Kirstin as protegee and lover. He was still considered
the greatest molecular designer who'd ever lived. Entirely self-taught, so the legend said. Unnumbered
orphan from the slums of Berlin—some contemporaries swore Leander hadn't known how to read until
he'd designed Bohr's Maker. Then the molecular machine taught him, illegally rewiring his neural
architecture in the process.
Legal Makers were programmable molecular machines endowed with a Dull Intelligence that
would enable them to execute only one function, or at most a series of functions leading to a single
objective, such as the construction of a ship's hull or a set of clothes. By contrast, the Bohr Maker's
capabilities were more open-ended. It could adapt itself to the needs of its host through an illegal
self-programming feature.
At its essence, the Bohr Maker was a microscopic packet of instructions. But once the
instructions were executed, it became a molecular communications and design system that would
insinuate itself throughout the body and mind of a single host, resulting in profound physiological change.
The host individual would own the talents of an expert in molecular design, along with the physical
mechanisms to execute those designs.
Most Makers had a learning function that would allow them to refine their programming through
experience. But the Bohr Maker could develop entirely new programming functions, at a rate that far
exceeded the best human minds. The Bohr Maker was illegal under the law, not only because of its status
as a volitional intelligence, but because its activities compelled the corruption of human physiology.
"I feel strange," Kirstin mused, her breath blowing soft over Nikko's kisheer. "Almost regretful. I
haven't felt this way since those final hours with Leander."
Nikko felt the dry wings of panicked butterflies beating in his belly. He felt as if he were about to
float away from the bed. "Did Bohr know he was doomed?"
She smiled indulgently. "I didn't have the same reputation then, Nikko dear. But I knew he was
doomed. It's the same sense I have with you."
Nikko rolled away from her. She was toying with him. Daring him to ask for a reprieve ... so she
could turn him down.
He lay on the bed, staring at Kirstin's collage. Futility weighed on him in defiance of the tiny
gravity. He felt he could hardly move. But Kirstin was as moody as a rock. "I'm glad you came today,
Nikko darling," she said cheerily. "I've really had a bad day."
"Oh? What went wrong? No mutant babies for lunch?"
"If only." She laughed. "If only I could selectively terminate certain constituents of our research
division ... that Jensen Van Ness in particular."
Nikko felt his heart begin to thunder in his chest; his kisheer went still across his shoulders.
Jensen Van Ness. Had she finally fixed him at that address? "Van Ness," he muttered, as if the name
were a mere historical curiosity. "He was with the cops the day you brought down Leander Bohr; part of
the investigative team, right?"
Kirstin ran a long-nailed finger down his forearm. "That's right. Why have you never interviewed
him?"
摘要：

[frontblurb][versionhistory]THEBOHRMAKERbyLindaNagataABantamSpectraBook/April1995Copyright©1995byLindaNagataISBN0-553-56925-2TomyhusbandRonnie,whosesupportandconfidencemadethisbookpossible.CHAPTER1Justpastdawnadeadmancamefloatingdowntheriver.Thecurrentcarriedhimundertheoldriver-straddlingwarehouse,w...

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