Aristoi, page 2
Above him was the Shadow Mask on its pillar, the giant robot face— gears, pneumatic systems, and hologram projectors— that Gabriel had designed for his play Mask. The Shadow Mask was set in an expression of harlequin satisfaction, white-featured, thinly-smiling, black triangles over the eyes, rosy circles on the cheeks.
Gabriel looked from the Mask to the dancing boy below, and approved of Yaritomo’s choice of place. The Shadow Mask was a symbol resonant with Yaritomo’s pronounced intent.
The young therápon chanted the Sutra of Captain Yuan over and over as he danced in a circle beneath the mask. He’d probably been at this since the previous evening, and he had worn a weary circle in the patient grass. The spears rattled in their frame, driving of their own weight into his flesh. Sweat fell from his forehead.
“Let madness take my mind,” he chanted. “Let daimones take my soul.”
There was remarkably little blood. Gabriel noted approvingly that even under severe physical and psychic stress Yaritomo had managed to retain mastery over his narrowed capillaries.
“Let the spirit rise through my body. Let the spirit fill me with power.”
Gabriel, using his Aristos Override, pulsed a query through his reno concerning Yaritomo’s pulse rate and blood pressure. His reno connected with the house reno, which queried Yaritomo’s own implant. The therápon’s reno, monitoring his state from its nest at the base of Yaritomo’s skull, returned a reassuring answer. Yaritomo was young and in good condition and with the proper focus of concentration could probably keep this up for days. Gabriel inquired again regarding the level of fatigue toxins, but Yaritomo’s reno, unlike Gabriel’s, didn’t have the ability to make that measurement.
Certain mental states were aided, sometimes even initiated, by the extreme alterations in body chemistry caused by stress. Yaritomo had doubtless been on a moderate fast for several days, lowering his body’s reserves against stress, rearranging his brain chemistry. The dancing, chanting, and the extremes of pain would have raised stress and fatigue toxins to a high level while lowering reserves of strength, all intended not as an assault on the body, but on the conscious mind.
Yaritomo, however, wasn’t trying to drive himself out of his mind.
He was trying to drive himself into it.
“Let the daimon come. Let me wrestle with this daimon. Let me overcome the daimon and make him a part of me. Let me take the daimon’s power!”
The last words were a hoarse, determined cry, a shout of triumph over pain, of mental over physical self.
Gabriel quietly withdrew.
The pain, he knew, was far from over.
*
Vermilion columns, capped with gold, supported the roof of the Apadana. The walls and pillars were encrusted with both the original Persian script and the complex Involved Ideography of Captain Yuan. Aristoi, plumed and feathered, thronged the room. Sebastian, whose oneirochronic body was a shimmering, floating sphere, was conspicuous by his presence.
Entering with Akwasibo, Gabriel acknowledged a few waves and nods. “I wish I could say that I always knew you would achieve this,” he said. “But in those days I didn’t have the experience to predict these things. And I was too busy to try.”
“Well.” She smiled. “I’m not certain that I ever knew myself. Not till the last three or four years or so, when all my work started coming together.”
Akwasibo’s route to the rank of Ariste was the more common: decades of hard work followed by a kind of synthesis in which the years of diligence paid off, when the accumulated knowledge and ability reached a transcendent fusion. Gabriel’s route was more direct, a blazing vertical ascent that ranked him as an Aristos when he was still in his twenties. Some had predicted that he’d burn out, but were of course wrong— instead, nearing the age of eighty, he was more productive than he’d ever been.
“Do you know everyone?” Gabriel asked. He glanced over the room again and summoned most of his daimones— dealing with his peers en masse was usually challenging.
“Sebastian’s hard to miss,” Akwasibo said. “I’ve apprenticed with Coetzee and Tallchief. And I probably know most by sight.”
“Their real appearances, certainly. But here, if you see a dark, hovering creature, like a bat, it’s most likely Dorothy. And Salvador likes to appear as a bird of prey— that bird over there, the,” consulting his reno, “Harris’s hawk, that’s probably him.” (Cliché, said Cyrus, voice echoing in Gabriel’s head. Boring, said the Welcome Rain.)
“I’m glad I recognized you, at least.”
“I spent a lot of effort on my physical appearance as well as my oneirochronic one. No sense in altering it now.”
“I remember your eyes being a different color. And the epicanthal folds . . . ”
“Give me a sense of wisdom and maturity, I’d like to think.”
Akwasibo craned her long neck to a somewhat unnatural angle. (Cyrus and Spring Plum argued back and forth about whether she had slipped up or not.)
“Who else won’t I know?” she said.
“Shankar will look like someone historical from old Earth1, Abraham Lincoln or Li Po or Charlie Chaplin. Dorothy St.-John, as distinct from Dorothy, likes to surprise people, so she floats around as something small, a moth or mantis or— ”
“A pair of gold cat’s eyes,” said a pair of gold cat’s eyes that had been gazing from the nearby pillar. Akwasibo couldn’t quite hide her start of surprise. Gabriel, who had far more practice at this, efficiently disguised his own.
I hate that! yelped Spring Plum.
“Hail, Dorothy St.-John Ariste,” Gabriel said, assuming a Posture of Formal Regard. “How’re you hanging?”
“Cheshirely, thanks. And you?”
“I hang together, not separately,” Gabriel said, meaning himself and his daimones.
“Pleased to hear it, Flame.” The eyes detached themselves from the lintel and floated between Gabriel and Akwasibo. Cyrus and Spring Plum commented on the eyes’ lustrous amber glow; Augenblick lamented the lack of kinesic clues. “Have you heard what Astoreth and her clique are up to?”
“No.”
“They think we’re failing in our duty to motivate and educate the therápontes and the Demos. Or succeeding all too well. They don’t seem to be quite certain on that point. But at any rate they want changes made.”
“I thought Astoreth’s critique was mainly aesthetic.”
“She or her colleagues seem to have discovered a political dimension to their ideas.”
“Who’s involved?”
“Astoreth. Ctesias. Precious Jade. Han Fu.”
“Except for Astoreth they’re mostly young,” Gabriel said.
“No younger than you. I wouldn’t dismiss it as a generational thing.”
“I have no intention of dismissing it as a generational thing or anything else.” Gabriel gazed into the slitted pupils. “What do you think of their ideas?”
The eyes fluttered like butterfly wings. “They possess a certain merit. But they are expressed with too much force to win over any significant fraction of the Aristoi. The means are too confrontational.”
“Astoreth has always been that way.”
“She’ll regret it eventually. If they’d spent a few decades gathering data, then drawing conclusions, their ideas would have a better foundation— as it is, their notions seem more an artistic impulse than a political creed. If they can’t prove their premises, no one’s likely to respect their conclusions.”
“Far be it from me,” Gabriel said, “to denigrate artistic impulse.”
“I didn’t think you would, Flame.” The eyes winked. Dorothy St.-John began to flutter away. “I should go adhere to some other surface and see what news I can gather.”
“Best of luck.”
“Nice meeting you,” Akwasibo said, craning her neck after the golden eyes. (Aha! said Cyrus. Told you it was deliberate.)
Akwasibo turned back to Gabriel. “I hadn’t heard of any of these political developments.”
“We have a way of keeping them to ourselves,” Gabriel said. “If there’s one thing people don’t need to see, it’s Aristoi yelling at each other.”
Akwasibo’s eyes widened slightly. “You yell?”
“Not me personally, no. But if you were in a debate with someone like Virtue’s Icon or Sebastian, you’d be tempted to, wouldn’t you?”
“I see your point.”
“I should offer my respects to Pan Wengong. Shall I introduce you to him?”
“I met him earlier.” She looked about her, absorbing the sight of the Apadana. “Quite a place he built, eh?”
Gabriel laughed. “You should see what he did for Alexandreia, Byzantium, and Peking.”
*
Manfred at his heels, Gabriel entered the Residence’s Biomedical Wing and walked through its invisible, sterilizing doors.
Therápon Hextarchon Marcus was stretched comfortably on the padded couch in the circular operating theater with its geometrical black-and-white tiles. There was no audience in the seats above. The simple surgical equipment, concealed in a dark wood cabinet brightened by parquetry and bright inlaid silver, had wheeled itself into place. A vase of fresh-cut sunflowers perched happily atop the cabinet like a beaming visitation from Arles.
Marcus wore a dark blue dressing gown over which white birds flocked, in darting flight, through a series of hovering Corinthian columns. His skin was pale, his hair, eyes, and lashes black. Sitting next to him on a stool was Clancy, Therápon Tritarchon in charge of the Biomedical Wing. She held Marcus’s hand. As Gabriel entered, she rose and assumed, from force of habit, the Second Posture of Formal Regard. Her rosy skin flushed with pleasure.
Marcus, on his table, attempted an approximation of the same stance.
Gabriel kissed them each hello. Affection for Marcus floated warmly through his heart.
“I brought you a gift,” he said. He removed from his long red hair a pair of ivory-and-silver hair clips and presented them to Marcus. The ivory had been carved into delicate long helixes, resembling DNA, and each DNA curve had been carved with a delicate bas-relief face resembling either Gabriel or Marcus or some blend of the two.
“The genetic code of our child has been microscopically inscribed into the silver,” Gabriel said.
Marcus’s pale skin flushed with delight. He kissed Gabriel’s hands in thanks, then sat up and pulled away the bands that held his black hair. Gabriel idly combed with his fingers through Marcus’s hair. Manfred jumped on the couch between Marcus’s legs, and Marcus hugged the dog hello. He stroked Manfred’s neck and ears.
GABRIEL: Reno, give me Marcus’s pulse and pressure, please.
RENO:
GABRIEL: Reno, keep that data coming.
“Can I read the code?” Marcus said.
“If you like,” Gabriel said. He took the hair clips from Marcus and placed the first, frowned, adjusted it more to his liking. “But it will tell you the sex of the child. I thought you didn’t want to know.”
Marcus frowned. “Perhaps I can just look at the rest.”
“I created a more-or-less random mixture of our genetics— a classical zygote, if you like. I added nothing, I subtracted nothing-- I only assured myself that the embryo would be free of genetic defect. I don’t think you’d necessarily learn anything from the study.” Gabriel fixed the last of the hair clips in place and studied the result. “Are you nervous?” he asked.
“Not as much as I thought I’d be, no.”
Marcus’s vital signs indicated that he was nervous, though only mildly so.
“Lie back,” Gabriel said. “Perhaps the couch could give you a massage.”
“It won’t disturb the procedure?”
“Not at all.”
Marcus leaned back on the couch. A faint hum announced he had called up the deep-massage function. Marcus closed his eyes and, with a slight visible effort, summoned his daimones. Gabriel called up those of his own who he thought would have an interest in the procedure.
Horus. Bear. Cyrus. Spring Plum. Psyche.
HORUS:
CYRUS:
BEAR:
SPRING PLUM:
PSYCHE:
Gabriel looked up at Clancy. Sunflowers beamed from over her shoulder.
“Thank you for your offer of assistance.” Gabriel had never actually qualified as a doctor and wanted, for form’s sake, to have one at hand.
“My pleasure.” Clancy stroked Marcus’s arm through his dressing gown and smiled down at him. “I’ve performed a number of these myself, back on Darkbloom.”
“I hope you will offer advice when it’s needed.”
“I doubt I’ll be necessary at all,” she smiled, and gave a little shake of her head. Cyrus, ever the aesthete, called Gabriel’s attention to the pleasant surge of motion through the mass of her hair, to the play of light on its dark sheen. Complex pleasures sang through Gabriel. Clancy was new here. Gabriel had met her several times while discussing this procedure, and found her enthusiasm invigorating.
Gabriel turned to Marcus. “You know you’ll have to be a little more careful with yourself than you’re used to,” he said. “Actually carrying a pregnancy to term within the human body is far more hazardous than other methods.”
“I want it, Gabriel Vissarionovich. I want to know every day that it’s there.”
Gabriel smiled, waved his hands. He found it difficult to refuse anyone a harmless folly. “So be it,” he said.
Gabriel undid the buttons of Marcus’s dressing gown and revealed the smooth, porcelain-skinned body that had caused him to nickname Marcus “The Black-Eyed Ghost.”
SPRING PLUM: “The expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists . . .
GABRIEL:
SPRING PLUM: “To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more.”
CYRUS:
RENO: Pulse 92, pressure 139 over 90.
BEAR: The boy is too nervous.
Spring Plum was a female Limited Personality, the most complete and self-possessed of his LPs yet revealed to Gabriel, and though she was as complete a connoisseur as Cyrus, she had firmer aesthetic standards for male beauty, standards that shimmered with complex structures of desire. Cyrus, Gabriel found, was forever and in contrast calling his attention to women.
Marcus was in his forties but had stabilized his body at the age of twenty, as soon as he had graduated from the Demos to the status of Therápon. The catlike musculature was distinct, but had a pleasant late-adolescent softness that Gabriel found entrancing. The pale, translucent skin was Marcus’s own; the contrasting black hair and lashes were benign genetic tinkering. Marcus had served his previous apprenticeships under Deborah and Saigo, and failed his exams the one time he had taken them. He had put off taking them a second time, but finally, with Gabriel’s urging, had prepared himself to try again within the next three years.
CYRUS:
Perhaps Marcus suspected what Gabriel knew: he would never graduate to the ranks of the Aristoi. He was talented, illustrious in his own chosen sphere of industrial design, but he didn’t possess the blazing and brittle brilliance, the cold and all-consuming ambition, needed to rise to the highest ranks of humanity.
Still, Gabriel felt, it would help him to know it, one way or another. Know that he hadn’t missed an opportunity, that he was right to be just where he was.
It wasn’t a coincidence, Gabriel thought, that Marcus’s most developed daimon was a child, an unformed and naive personality who approached the world with delight and transcendent joy. Marcus’s aspirations were not those of a steel-willed Aristos, turning the universe to his own account, but those of the talented, ingenuous, warmhearted young man whose body he had frozen at the age of twenty, and with whom Gabriel had fallen instantly in love.
Perhaps the inner knowledge of his upcoming failure was why Marcus suddenly wanted this child— and not any child, but the child of himself and an Aristos he loved. Some palpable memory of Gabriel, some hope that the child would achieve what Marcus would not . . .
Gabriel had good reason to suspect Marcus’s hope. The children of Aristoi did not often achieve their parents’ status. None of his other children had— all were talented, but only half had become therápontes-- and the odds were against this one being any different.
But Marcus’s child— a girl, Gabriel knew— would be loved. Marcus had a stable future as a talented therápon and his own child-daimon would attach his daughter to him with bonds of affection and shared interest.
GABRIEL: Reno, give me command of the surgical array.
RENO: Do you wish full video?
GABRIEL: Yes.
CYRUS:
RENO:
GABRIEL: I’m largely blind. Spring Plum, take command of my body.
SPRING PLUM:
Gabriel placed a mental finger into the oneirochronon and triggered the surgical cabinet, which rolled forward and deployed its array. He reached into the pocket of his brocade jacket (Spring Plum contrasting Marcus’s pale skin and black hair with the black-and-white tiles of the theater), brought out the mechanical egg in which the blastocyst lay. The textured surface impressed itself on Gabriel’s fingertips, white porcelain lace on Wedgwood blue. Through his reno’s connection with the oneirochronon he ordered the egg to open (Spring Plum showing him brightness gleaming on sliding silver bars as the egg opened, as the blue ceramic turned inward, as he found himself with an open metal lotus in his hand, all gleaming silver petals with the treasure at their center).
Gabriel (through Spring Plum) glanced down at Marcus’s abdomen, and (through the deploying surgical array and its peritoneoscope) marked a spot just below the navel with a bright spot of low-intensity laser light. “There, Manfred,” he said. “Two hundred microns, okay?”
