Greg Bear - Slant

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OTHER BOOKS BY BREB BEAB

Hegira

Psychlone

Beyond Heaven's River

Strength of Stones

The Wind from a Burning Woman

Blood Music

Eon

The Forge of God

Eternity

Hardfought

Tangents

Heads

Queen of Angels

Anvil of Stars

Moving Mars

Songs of Earth and Power

New Legends

Legacy

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A TORN OOBEBTY

ASSOCIATES BOOK

NEW YORK

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This is a work of fiction. All the characters

and events portrayed in this novel are either

fictitious or are used fictitiously.

reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in

any form.

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

A Tor Book

Published by Torn Doherty Associates, Inc.

175 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10010

Tot Books on the World Wide Web:

http://www, tor. com

Tor®is a registered trademark of Torn

Doherty Associates, Inc.

Book design by Judith Stagnitto Abbate

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bear, Greg

[Slant] / Greg Bear. -lst ed.

p. cm.

The title consists solely of the slant sign.

"A Torn Doherty Associates book."

ISBN 0-3 I 2-85517-6 (hardcover: acid-free paper)

I. Title.

PS3552.E157S55 1997

813'54dc21

97-7063

CIP

First Edition: July 1997

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

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FIRST

RESULT

Budget: Select, Restricted

SEARCH FILTERS

KEYVVORDS?

> Knowledge, Sex, Datafiow

TOPIC FILTER: >Community

"Tell all the truth,

but tell it slant''

EMILY DICKINSON

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RIVERS

Oataflow today is money/blood, the living substance of our human

rivers/arteries. You can steamboat the big flow, or slowly raft these rivers

up and down the world, or canoe into the branches and backwaters, with

almost perfect freedom. There are a few places you can't go--Saudi Arabia,

Northern Enclave China, some towns in Green Idaho. Nobody much cares to

go there anyway. Not much exciting is happening in those places.

--The U.S. Government Digiman on Dataflow Economics,

56Revision, 2052

I EDUCA TED CORPSES

Omphalos dominates Moscow, Green Idaho. It glows pale silver and gold like

a fancy watch waiting to be stolen. A tetrahedron four hundred feet high, with

two vertical faces and a triangular base, it is the biggest thing in town, more

ostentatious than the nearby Mormon temple, though not so painfully white

and spiky. The leading edge points at the heart of Moscow like a woodsman's

wedge. The vertical faces descend, blind and windowless, to sink seventy feet

below ground. The single sloping face is gently corrugated like a dazzling

ivory washboard for the leaden sky.

Omphalos is a broad-shouldered edifice, Herculean architecture for the ages,

given the kind of shockproof suspension and massive loving armor once reserved

for hardened defense installations and missile silos.

Jack Giffey waits patiently in line for the public tour. It is cold in Moscow

today. Thirty people stand with him in the snaking line, all clearly marked

by their gray denims as young tourists biking through Green Idaho; all youthfully

unafraid of the reputation of the state's Ruggers, the legendary gun-wielding

rugged individualists, who see themselves not as lawless brigands but

as steely-eyed human islands in a flooded, corrupting stream.

But the state's reputation is exaggerated. Not more than three percent of

the population could accurately be labeled Rugger. And fewer than ten young

tourists each year vanish from the old logging trails in the regrowth timberlands,

their forlornly beeping Personal Access Devices and little knit caps

nailed to posts on the edges of the abandoned national forests.

In Giffey's opinion, Green Idaho has all the individuality ora zit on a corpse.

The zit may consider itself special, but it's just a different kind of dead meat.

Giffey is known to his few friends as Gill. At fifty-one he looks mild and

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10 GREG BEAR

that attract the interest of children and discouraged women past their picky

twenties. He doesn't like Green Idaho any more than he likes the rest of the

nation, or the world, for that matter.

Old-fashioned radiant outdoor heaters mounted on poles glow raw-beef red

overhead, trying to keep the people in line warm. Giffey has been here before,

thirteen times; he's sure Omphalos knows his face and has tagged him as worth

paying marginal attention to. That is okay. He does not mind.

Giffey is among the very few who know that Omphalos absorbs knowledge

from the outside at the extraordinary rate of fifty million dollars a year. Since

Omphalos is publicly assumed to be a fancy kind of tomb for the rich and

privileged, its dead and near-dead must be very curious. But few ask serious

questions about it. The builders of Omphalos paid a lot for freedom from

oversight, the kind of freedom that can only be bought in Green Idaho.

The rulers of Green Idaho, true to their breed, hate the Federals and the

outer society but revere money and its most sacred benison: freedom from

responsibility.

Giffey has been to the Forest Lawn Pyramid in Southcoast California Omphalos

is, architecturally, by far the classier act. But he would never think of

robbing the truly dead in Forest Lawn, with their few scattered jewels adorning

rotting flesh.

The frozen near-dead are another matter. Entombed with all their palpable

assets--precious metals, collectibles, long-term sigs to offshore paper-deed se-curities-the

corpsicles racked in their special refrigerated cells in Omphalos,

Giffey believes, might be worth several hundred million dollars apiece.

Those rich enough to afford such accommodations have their choice of packaged

options: cheapest is capitation, bio-vitrifying and cryo-preserving the

head alone. Next is head and trunk; and finally, whole-body. There are even

more expensive and still-experimental possibilities ... For the wealthiest of

all, the plutocratic highest of the high.

The sloping face of the wedge gleams like a field of wind-rippled snow. The

line begins to move in anticipation there are sounds from within. Omphalos

opens its tall steel and flexfuller front doors. Its soothing public voice spreads

out over the crowd, only mildly funereal.

"Welcome to the hope of all our futures," the voice says as the line pushes

eagerly into the tall, severe granite and steel lobby. Great shining pillars rise

around the student tourists like steel redwoods, daunting and extra human.

The floor is living holostone, morphing through scenes of future splendor

beneath their feet: flying cities high above sunset mountains, villas on Mars

and the Moon, idyllic valleys farmed by obedient arbeiters while beautiful,

magisterial men and women of all races and creeds watch from the balconies

of their spotless white mansions. "This completely automated facility is the

repository for a maximum of ten thousand two hundred and nineteen biologically

conserved patrons, all expecting long and happy lives upon their recon

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SLANT 11

"Within Omphalos, there are no human employees, no attendants or engineers or guards..."

Giffey has never met a machine he could not beat, at chess, at war games,

at predicting equities weather. Giffey believes he may be one of the smartest

or at least most functionally successful human beings on this planet. He succeeds

at whatever he wants to do. Of course--he grins to himself---there are

many things he has never wanted to do.

He looks up at the distant lobby ceiling, studded with crystal prisms that

project rainbows all around. Above them, he imagines stacks of cold cells filled

with bodies and heads. Some of them are not frozen, he understands from secret

sources, but are still alive and thinking, suspended in nano baths in what is

euphemistically called warm sleep. They are old and sick and the law does not

allow them to undergo any more major medical intervention. They have had

their chance at life; anything more and they are classified as greedy Chronovores,

seekers after immortality, which is illegal everywhere but in the quasi-independent

republic of Green Idaho, and impractical here.

The terminally ill can, however, forfeit all but their physical assets to the

republic, and enter Omphalos as isolated wards of the syndicate.

Giffey presumes the still-living are the curious ones. They stay current as

they sleep.

Giffey does not care what they're dreaming, half-alive or wholly dead,

whether they're locked into endless rounds of full-sensory Yox, or preparing

themselves for the future by becoming the most highly educated near-corpses

in the datafiow world. They should be honorably gone from the picture, out

of the game. They don't need their assets.

Omphalos's occupants are just a different set of pharaohs. And Jack Giffey

is just another kind of tomb-robber who thinks he can avoid the traps and

break the seals and unwrap the mummies.

"You are now within the atrium of the most secure building in the Western

World. Designed to withstand catastrophic earthquakes, volcanic activity, even

thermonuclear explosions or microcharge dispersals--"

Giffey is not listening. He has a pretty decent map of the place in his head,

and a much more detailed map in his pad. He knows where the arbeiters must

come and go within the building's two entrances. He even knows who has

manufactured the arbeiters, and what they look like. He knows much else

besides. He is ready to go and does not need this final tour. Giffey is here to

legitimately pay his respects to a remarkable monument.

"Please step th-is way. We have mockups of hibernaria and exhibits usually

reserved only for prospective patrons of these facilities. But today, for you

exclusively, we allow access to a new and vital vision of the future--"

Giffey grimaces. He hates today's big lies--exclusively, only, I love you alone,

trust, adore, but ultimately, pay. Post-consumer weltcrap. He's glad he has paid

his money for the last time.

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GREG BEAR

and behaviors. The system passes them through to the display area. The casket

room. Lie in silken comfort throzigh a/l eternity.

The young tourists in their denims and warm, upscale Nandex stand agape

before the ice-blue enamel and fiexfuller hibernarium, a long flattened tube

stretched across a mocked-up cubicle like a dry-docked submarine cemented

at both ends. Giffey knows what the tourists, the young students, are thinking.

They are all wondering if they will ever be able to afford this kind of immortality,

a chance at the Big Downstream.

Giffey doesn't care. Even riches and the high life do not matter to him

because unlike his partners, he has severe doubts they will ever be able to fence

such goods, nearly all of which will be marked with ineradicable tracers. Besides,

gold means much less than it used to. Datafiow is all.

He's in it to tweak a few noses, and to play against the machine he suspects

lies within. Hardly a machine at all...

"Our exclusive method of bio-vitrifying cryo-conservancy was pioneered by

four doctors in Siberia and perfected fifteen years ago. The fluids of a human

body normally crystallize upon freezing, but by vitrifying these fluids, making

them smoothly glassy, we eliminate crystals completely--"

Giffey believes he will face an unauthorized artificial intelligence--Omphalos's

own advanced petafiop INDA, perhaps even a thinker. He's always

wanted to go up against a thinker.

He suspects he'll lose. But maybe not.

And what a game!

M/F, F/M, M/M, F/F

e is what

between us

happens

/ is what separates us.

We are all different sexes, though with only two brands of equipment.

--The Kiss of X, Alive Contains a Lie

2 S T 0 N E H A M M E R

Alice Grale believes this is cataspace, all interaction but no motion. In the

small black room off the long black studio, waiting can be a dull chunk of

time filled any way at all. She and her co-star, Minstrel, are talking, waiting

for adjustments on the stage. Minstrel lounges naked on the old low couch,

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/ SLANT 13

"So why don't you like those words?" Minstrel asks. "They're ancient and

traditional, and they describe what we do."

"They're ugly," she says. "I say them if I want to or when I'm paid to, but

I've never been fond of them." Alice sits on the folding metal chair before him,

illuminated by a soft free spot of white light, wearing a flimsy black robe, her

touching knees exposed. There is some relief in old friendship. She has known

Minstrel for nine years. They have been talking for twenty minutes and Francis

is still not ready for them.

"You never fail to surprise me, Alice. But I'm making a point. Try saying

the word," he challenges. "The tetragrammaton."

She considers, then says it, with a rise of her cheeks and a curve of her

lips and derogatory tilt of her head, her voice not very loud and void of

emphasis.

"You're not doing it justice," Minstrel complains. "God knows I've

heard you say it often enough. Say it professionally, if you can't get into it

personally."

Alice glares at him.

"I mean it," he says. "I'm making a point here."

Minstrel seems a little intense today, pushy. But she says the word once

more. Her eyes narrow and her nose wrinkles.

Minstrel sniffs. "Your heart isn't in it," he says dubiously, "but even so, it

brings a snarl, feel it?"

Alice shakes her head. "It's what somebody else wants me to say, and that's

the way they want me to say it."

Minstrel chuckles and taps her knee with one long square-tipped finger.

"Like all women, you are not your art."

Alice is both perplexed and irritated. "What's that mean?"

"The word is a snarl. It's old and hard and blunt--it's a stone hammer.

You say it when you really need the person you're with and you aren't embarrassed

to show yourself deep down. It means what's happening touches your

feral instincts."

"Bullshit."

"You say that casually enough," Minstrel observes. He stands, applies finger

to cheek and inclines his head. In this pose, long and loose, he reminds Alice

of an E1 Greco saint. All he needs is a slack blue loincloth.

She feels the familiar deep appreciation, the yearning that has not diminished

in over fifty professional encounters in thirty-one vids, beginning with

her first when she was nineteen. That was ten years ago, and he was thin and

ribby, hollow-chested and uncertain of his peculiar talent. Now he is lean and

omni-asian brown, muscles finely toned and defined, his body a temple as well

as an office, long hair pulled back from a high forehead, long thin patrician

nose almost too sharp, lips proud as if recently slapped.

Alice pretends languid boredom, then shifts suddenly into seductive speed.

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GREG BEAR

"Still not convincing," Minstrel teases.

"Fuck me with your.., penis," Alice says. They both laugh.

Minstrel's face crosses from saint to ascetic cherub. "Utterly, desperately

limp. Only a doctor or a therapist would call it that, to make you feel inferior.

Most men prefer cock."

"Crows only in the morning," Alice says. All conversations with Minstrel,

even in the down time between plugs, are contagious. "Penis sounds like a

planet or a country."

"Vagina. Labia. Clitoris," he prompts.

"Like characters in a Renaissance vid," Alice says. She muses. "They are all

royalty in the land of Penis. Vagina never touches another person without

wearing gloves. She is cool and dresses in black lace."

Minstrel's face lights up. "Labia is a dangerous woman, sister to Vagina and

Clitoris," he says. "A vampire and poisoner."

"Clitoris is the youngest, virginal sister," Alice says. She loves games. "They

are all daughters of..." Tongue tipping through her lips, catlike, while she

thinks. "Lucrezia Menarchia."

"Bravo!" Minstrel says. He applauds.

Alice bows and continues. "Clitoris is the only one with any decency. She

blushes with shame at how her family carries on."

Minstrel reddens with subdued laughter. They should not be too loud up

here; it might upset Francis, who can be very testy while preparing for a plug.

"All right. Cunt," he suggests.

Alice pauses, scowling. "That's a tough one."

"Not yours, my dear."

Alice gives him a beneath-me face and taps her finger on her nose, thinking. "Cunt is a barbarian

princess from the outer reaches. She is raised by the outland

tribes of the province of Puberty."

Minstrel squints. "Not Puberty. Not quite right." He works at it and substitutes, "Pudenda."

Alice grins. "Pudenda it is. Cuntia is her name when she travels in the

civilized realms."

Minstrel snaps his slender fingers. "We're on to something. Maybe Francis

will make us writers. Listen: Cunt is swapped in a hostage exchange between

Lucrezia Menarchia and Cunt's father, King Hetero. Lucrezia sends her daughter-her

hopelessly moral daughter Clitoris to learn the barbarian ways and

loosen up a bit. Clitoris finally lets her hair down and finds fulfillment in the

arms of Cunt's heroic brother, Glans. Cunt, however, must preserve her honor

in Menarchia rather than submit to temptation, for Lucrezia rules a corrupt

land."

Alice takes a deep breath, pretending to be stunned by this burst of genius,

then laughs out loud, the hell with Francis, who shouldn't keep them waiting

so long. She seldom laughs this way, it sounds so much like an ass's bray to

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