Charles Stross - Tarkovsky's Cut

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Tarkovsky's Cut

by Charles Stross

Once a lifetime Jewel swims in the Folded Rose lagoon. She strikes out through the mirror-still

water until she can just make out the Hub wall, and then she swims a little further. She lies back

in the water and lets things pass her by for a while. On a clear day she can just make out, directly

above, the fields and forests she explored as a cild. She smiles, and maps the vague topology,

sharpening it with memories.

Then, for the first time in many years, she turns off her Wisdom, and thinks back, unaided, to

what it was like. The feel of landpussy fur. The strong savour of barbecued cockroach. The first

exquisite tickle of the Wisdom uplink behind her eyes. She swims in memories and falls like a

stone, into childhood, and into the black depths of the lake.

Now Jewel is an old woman again, nearing the end of her fortieth lifetime, and she is ready to

swim again.

She stands on the foredeck of the houseboat, fingering the jewel, which hangs on a silver chain

about her neck.

The craft turns in the water, and Jewel watches as the Hub -- a craggy, rust-stained rock wall --

swings into view. She looks up, and up and up. The rocks climb all the way to the forests of her

childhood -- there, on the opposite side of the oneil. The Hub's fault lines and discolorations are

not, like the lagoon, a builder's whim. They are real. The Heaven Eleven oneil is ten thousand

years old.

The houseboat is anchored to a smaller, grey and scree-swept slope, which curves so that its

lips meet the hub at either edge, forming a pouch some five hundred feet above the lagoon. In it lie

the remains of an ancient city and there, built over their ruined heart, stands the Folded Rose

Sanctuary. There are no landward approaches to the Sanctuary. The slopes, naturally rugged and

inhospitable, have been seeded with things lethal to man. Birdmen patrol the rocky crests,

watching for airborne intruders with senses enhanced by a secret process.

Jewel stretches in satisfaction and turns to the wrought-iron table. On it stands a small glass

cafetiere. She presses down on the filter arm and watches the brew darken. She pours herself a

cup and sits down. Soon she will have to go and kill her wife. As always, the thought of it excites

her.

She sips her coffee. They feed coffee berries to Wolfmen. As the berries are digested, so the

beans within them partly ferment. It has become a kind of ritual -- to drink wolf coffee before killing

her lovers.

Jewel opens a small bottle of hash oil and slurs it into her coffee. The scent is delicious.

She drinks, and rides the slow, gentle hashish swell into the First House of Contemplation.

She fingers the jewel around her neck. It has seventy facets -- one for each of her lives.

She thinks of her wife, and of their lovemaking. Marget's breasts are small and too far apart and

her orgasm is a raucous laugh. The taste of her wetness is rich and sickly.

Jewel withdraws from the play of images, and clasps her hands. Conciously now, she draws

from these erotic images the shapes and movements of Marget's body, the relative suppleness of

each limb in each plane. When she is finished she knows how to kill her.

She knows the poise to adopt, the angle to hit, the force necessary for the blow, and the speed

of the strike. This is the Second House.

Warmed by the drugged coffee, she unclenches her hands. The bright morning sunlight casts

shadows of her fingers onto the table beneath. She waves her fingers and the light threads over

the table. The movement of light and shade is erotic. She enters the Third House, and reads

violence into the movements of the shadows. Violence and sexuality fuse in a single, simple

rhythm.

Her breasts engorge.

The Census is over by evening. The stench of molten insulation drifts across the street from the

Recidivist's nest. By Three tomorrow morning, all subversives will be retrodden. The managing

director of the census, Harvey Mishima is in a teleconference with other officers of the Census.

His fellows appear behind his eyes, faces black with ash and hands sticky with housejuice. They

all have exactly the same smile.

"Report by numbers," Harvey drawls. He lifts up his legs and rests his feet comfortably on the

bar table. Harvey Mishima is a middle-aged retread who has been programmed to think that all

Recidivists should be recycled. His number two sits next to him, convinced that in some previous

incarnation she was Eva Braun. She likes killing ragheads.

A bartender mixes cocktails and twitches his whiskers nervously: Eva Braun is field-stripping

her gun.

Two. Seven subjects in the block, now cared for.

Three. None in the block, but we found a sewer rat.

The bartender twitches its whiskers in terror.

Four grunts and howls and masturbates in front of the camera. Semantic engines do their best

to draw meaning from the display. Four is a psychopath on test-release from the Domino Factory.

He's killed as many beastmen as Recidivists.

Five. None in the block. Tried to link with six but got whitenoise.

Six. A practical knowledge of nursing the elderly is essential, but not necessarily gained in the

private sector.

Harvey's Wisdom tries making sense of the whitenoise where six should be. Harvey turns it off

and spits. He calls up Cleansing, using his Wisdom to port a description of Six to them.

No dice. He turns to Eva. "Six is out -- alive and missing."

The ratman sets their drinks down at the table.

"Too slow," Eva drawls and blows him to bloody fragments all over the plastic fascia of the bar.

"Eva," Harvey sighs, "are you listening?"

"Sure," says Eva. She drops on all fours and sniffs the ratman's roast remains

Harvey drains his drink. "Mixed a good cocktail," he says.

Eva grunts. Her mouth is full.

Wolfmen trace Six's scent, and find a house. It lies on a slant, mouthparts buried deep in the

conduit running under the road. Sawtooths drill the door to bits and find Alia in the bedroom. They

pin her to the wall with beetle limbs and chew off her clothing. Wolfmen slavering toxin and

mucus fling her to the futon; they rub themselves against her, wet her with their secretions,

deafen her with howls of orgasm.

When Alia starts to bleed Harvey Mishima calls off the beastmen and hands Alia a handkerchief.

Nanotech robots in Alia's blood have already repaired the physical damage done to her. The

purpose of the attack is to traumatise, not her body, but her mind. Even these limited objectives

have not been achieved. It hasn't worked. It never does. Alia, like all of them, has no soul. She

feels nothing.

Alia considers it likely that the human cultures' conquest of mortality and pain led directly to this

Fall.

This makes her a Recidivist.

Harvey offers her a pill. He smiles a smile she has seen many times before. "I am going to kill

you," he says, "either by beasts or by this little bomb. If your cooperation is satisfactory I will

detonate the bomb. If you have not swallowed the bomb, though, or if your behaviour is an any

other way unsatisfactory, I will let in the wolfmen."

Alia snatches the pill out his hand and swallows it. A few seconds later something green and

slimy blinks behind her eyes. Good. Alia is better equipped than Mishima realises. The snake icon

has confirmed that her tonsils have disarmed the bomb.

Mishima tells her to shower and when she returns to the bedroom he is naked. It will be that

kind of interrogation. Afterwards, when there is nothing more for her to open up to him, in the

physical as well as the semantic sense, they have a drink together. Mishima sips and smiles and

lies down on the bed, breathing rapidly in a shallow, gasping manner that reminds her of

vivisected beastmen.

It is time. She calls up her Wisdom. It is a sophisticated black market system which can alter

the data stored in other units based upon the simplest of semantic instructions.

Alia tells her Wisdom to keep beastmen and other callers away from the house. It goes to work

and befuddles the beastmen and all the other paraphernalia of a Census Enquiry.

Gnats seeded by the census to observe events in the room are fed a self-editing intuitive

video-loop of Mishima and Alia copulating. Observers within the Sanctuary of the Folded Rose will

be amazed at the sexual energy of the pair, long after Alia has escaped.

Alia bends over Mishima and places a transdermal patch on his neck. The room shimmers a

pale blue -- a shade which induces calm and contemplation.

Mishima feels the patch and sees the light and doesn't care. "How much drink did you put in that

alcohol?" he asks, draining the glass. Selective blockers have taken out his ethanol

dehydrogenase complex. He is drunk on a single bourbon. His own Wisdom persuades him it has

taken longer for him to get drunk than it actually has.

"You feeling okay?" says Alia.

"Check. My mind's off for servicing tomorrow ... I mean it's my ... I should be caring and

sensitive to the needs of young people ... oh shit" Mishima's syntactic engine is playing up again.

His last concious act is to turn it off.

Alia takes a deep breath, then goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. She takes out a

braindrain.

It has eight tentacles and no eyes. Like its octopoid ancestor it only survives for about four

hours outside its usual habitat -- in this case a highly oxgenated saline sponge.

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摘要：

Tarkovsky'sCutbyCharlesStrossOncealifetimeJewelswimsintheFoldedRoselagoon.Shestrikesoutthroughthemirror-stillwateruntilshecanjustmakeouttheHubwall,andthensheswimsalittlefurther.Sheliesbackinthewaterandletsthingspassherbyforawhile.Onacleardayshecanjustmakeout,directlyabove,thefieldsandforestssheexplo...

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Charles Stross - Tarkovsky's Cut

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