Aristoi, page 24
“He has a fabulous house out there,” Remmy said “Quite unlike anything ever done.”
“Perhaps I’ve seen him,” Gabriel said. “What does he look like?”
“A big dark man. Older. Slant eyes, like yours. Rather gloomy-looking.”
Saigo, clear enough.
Remmy looked up at Gabriel in some surprise. “And now that I turn my mind to him, I find he reminds me of you. Why do you suppose that might be?”
“I’ve no idea. We don’t seem to look anything alike.”
“Do you think you and he might,” Remmy hinting delicately, “share certain tastes?”
Gabriel concealed his amusement at this idea. “Why do you think so?”
“Because— ” Remmy turned puzzled. “No idea, really. He’s unmarried, but I’ve never heard any hint of— ” He frowned. “He always struck me as standing and moving in an interesting fashion. Stylized, posing almost, like a dancer. And you carry yourself in a similar way.”
The Book of Postures, Gabriel thought. Further confirmation, were it needed. “And he knows the king, you say?”
“Oh yes. He’s said to be one of the king’s most intimate advisors. He’s fabulously wealthy, and he’s made it known he’ll never accept office and will never join a party, so for the most part there aren’t any knives out for him.”
Fabulously wealthy. Easy enough when your nano can dig gold from moons and asteroids.
Like a clockmaker god, Gabriel thought, Saigo had built this place and set it running. But once he had it going he hadn’t been able to resist interfering.
Wealthy and prestigious. Advisor to the king. Grey eminence, most likely, to the whole damn planet, if not the entire Gaal Sphere.
Gabriel was thrilled to have a genius of Saigo’s caliber for his enemy.
Nothing else could possibly be more flattering.
*
One of Gabriel’s half-dozen new servants opened the door for him. He hadn’t realized he would need so many servants in the house: Clancy required two maidservants just to lace her into her formal clothing.
Gabriel wrote a short apology to Prince Adrian, then sent one of his new footmen to Adrian’s place to collect his horse. He climbed two flights of wide, creaking wooden stairs to his apartment and entered. He found Clancy in the parlor, sitting in an armchair and staring vaguely at the rooftops visible through the open window. She was dressed in a native blouse and her own loose trousers.
Doubtless the new servants were scandalized by this ensemble.
She rose as he came in and kissed him hello. Her face had a fluttering kind of gaiety in it, and she moved with a lilting, tossing motion unlike the Clancy who Gabriel knew. A daimon.
“Hello. I’m Falling Water.” The voice was bright, the light in her eyes flirtatious.
“Is Dr. Clancy busy?”
“Yes, she’s working on a project. I can call her if the need is urgent.”
“No. I’ll wait.”
“Would you like breakfast? I can ring.”
“I’ll do it.”
“There is a message for you, an invitation to a reception this evening at Count Bertram’s.”
Gabriel found the invitation waiting on a tray; he’d met Bertram last night, a smiling porcine predator in white-lead cosmetic.
He’d go, he thought. He could introduce Clancy to some of these people. If it was boring they could simply leave.
He wrote an acceptance and sent it with the servant he was sending to Adrian.
“Would you like me to play the flute for you?” Falling Water asked.
“If you could do it without bothering Clancy, that would be nice.”
Falling Water tilted her head, smiled, and fluttered her lashes at him. “My pleasure,” she said.
Gabriel had a gran merendas of some forcing-house fruit along with an egg dish that seemed a benevolent, if bland, combination of pancake, omelette, and custard. He then closed his eyes and listened to Falling Water play a Sher Bahadur sonata while he contacted Cressida and used the ship as a relay to his domaine. He dealt with correspondence and administrative matters, and postponed (again) contacting his mother.
There was another stack of messages from Zhenling. He decided to postpone answering that as well.
Lastly he sent his encrypted password on to his new communications net, giving him another three days before the news of the Gaal Sphere was released.
Disturber? I’d like you to look at something, if you’re not busy. The voice was Clancy’s, but the contact oneirochronic rather than in the Realized World, where Falling Water’s flute continued without missing a note.
If you’ll hold a moment.
He concluded the most important matter— certifying election results on Brightkinde— and told Horus to finish the rest.
Clancy was waiting in a comfortable oneirochronic office: padded leather chairs, shelves with reference works, three-dee projectors, facsimile printer, beautifully-calligraphed diplomas, a shelf that held a collection of ancient seals.
“I need you to tell me if I’m on the right track,” she said. Gabriel’s oneirochronic ghost kissed Clancy, then sat in one of the chairs and heard pneumatics hiss as the chair adjusted itself. A nice touch, that.
“What are you working on?”
“A holding container for nano, with built-in stepped artiphages in case the nano goes bad.”
“Like the Kam Wing container.”
“Yes and no.”
He smiled. “Tell me more.”
A safe container for nano had been a goal for centuries. A container that somehow held a counter-nano artiphage had been an obvious idea, but had been a subjected to a number of limitations. Artiphages were fairly carnivorous themselves— they were designed to eat mataglap, and they could devour other things while they were at it. And no single artiphage was good for all species of mataglap.
Kam Wing, known as the Aristos Knight for his elaborate courtesy, noble behavior, and singleminded dedication to human betterment, had centuries ago designed a container for nano that featured multiple liners, with artiphage nano sandwiched between layers of neutral substance. If the nano went mataglap it would eat through the neutral lining to the artiphage, which would then be liberated to destroy the mataglap in turn. If the first layer of artiphage didn’t stop it, the second might, and so on.
But there had always been limitations. The process could produce so much heat and/or gas that the container would rupture. The neutral substances had to be carefully chosen so that the artiphages wouldn’t eat them but the nano could, further so that the artiphages wouldn’t devour each other, and additionally so that the neutral substances would bond properly with their neighbors. Stable artiphages had to be chosen, so that they wouldn’t mutate to undesirable forms. So thorough had been Kam Wing’s design that, although it had been altered for different conditions or different varieties of mataglap, the basic work had not really been improved upon.
“This morning I was doing what I hoped was the last work on the Lodestone hunter-killer,” Clancy said. A model of the Lodestone virus appeared over her shoulder as she spoke, a nasty little bundle of sugar-protein that could lie dormant for years in the parenchyma of the pancreas before emerging to interfere disastrously with secretion of amylase, a process that in passing produced a waste product that was in itself a vicious nerve toxin. The patient could die either from nerve shutdown or wild swings in blood sugar levels. Usually a doctor wouldn’t look for both.
The disease itself was so rare that the vector was completely unknown. Probably Lodestone was a slow-motion mataglap, a bit of mutated nano that somehow escaped into the human environment.
“The easiest way to attack the Lodestone is when it’s shed its protein sheath and invaded the parenchymal cells,” Clancy said. “Before that stage, no one looks for it anyway.”
A strand of the Lodestone uncoiled and enlarged so that Gabriel could see individual molecules arranged in their long strands. The ends stretched out into infinity. Another long molecule appeared, an array of lithium atoms arranged along its length like fangs.
“I’ve devised a hunter-killer that will steal the hydrogen bonds from the target DNA,” Clancy said. “It’s smaller than the virus, a kind of pseudo-RNA, and it should be non-polar until it actually encounters the Lodestone.”
The hydrogen-hungry lithium fangs quietly absorbed the hydrogen atoms holding the target’s nitrogenous bases together; bits of the Lodestone strand began to fly apart. “In order that the fragments won’t recombine into something equally deadly, I’ve added little functional groups that will attract fragments of the Lodestone DNA.” The Lodestone fragments bounced through the simulation, then discovered the sections of the hunter-killer meant to attract them. The hunter-killer’s functional groups slotted into the Lodestone’s nitrogenous bases like keys sliding into tumbler locks.
“Very nice,” Gabriel says. “What happens to the hunter-killer then?”
“The simulation says it should be passed with pancreatic fluid into the digestive tract, and thence from the body. At that stage it should be completely inert. But of course that’s only what the simulation says. Further testing is needed.”
Gabriel ran the simulation back and forth several times. Dimly he was aware of Spring Plum’s approval of both Sher Bahadur’s adagio movement and Falling Water’s interpretation of it. The hunter-killer performed as advertised.
“I’m impressed, Blushing Rose,” he said. “This is admirable. Do you wish to submit it formally?”
There was a hesitation in her reply. “I think so. Give me a little more time.”
“As you like. But what does this have to do with the Kam Wing system?”
“As part of my double-check routine I combed the Hyperlogos to find whether this particular cut-and-lock system had been used before. It hadn’t— not quite— but what I found out was that the target, the Lodestone virus, had qualities similar to Brilliant Emerald-type mataglap.”
“Indeed?”
“Perhaps one is a mutation of the other. I checked, and with a small adaptation the hunter-killer could be turned into an anti-Brilliant Emerald artiphage.”
“There already are Brilliant Emerald artiphages. Romance1 and its descendant, Romance2.”
“Yes, and Romance2 was used by the Aristos Knight as the centerpiece of his container system.” A glowing model of Kam Wing’s container, red and green and gold, appeared in place of the first simulation. Clancy demonstrated how the Romance series worked by subverting the target like a virus does a target cell, an obviously attractive feature. But, because Romance2 degraded under high temperature, that Kam Wing had to include a heavy insulating layer in his containers to keep the Romance artiphage from being destroyed by the heat-producing Devouring Web mataglap.
“That’s not a problem with my design,” Clancy said. Simulations blossomed over her shoulder. Her ghost voice turned rapid. “I started by modifying the Lodestone hunter-killer into a Brilliant Emerald artiphage. The result—” She smiled. “I’ve had the temerity to call it Blushing Rose1.”
Blushing Rose1 was less efficient that the Romance series— its destruction of the target was less elegant— but it was stable at higher temperatures and didn’t require heat shielding. She could therefore sandwich it between a resinous polymer that would react well with the Summer Surprise artiphage, and a doped Carbon60 fullerene of sufficient slickness so that the Big Kiss artiphage couldn’t get a grip. Between the three artiphages, 79% of the known mataglaps were covered.
Gabriel absorbed the displays, had Horus and Cyrus run simulations, received their reports.
“It’s nothing short of brilliant,” he said finally. “You’ve gone back to first principles and produced a marvel.”
“The Aristos Knight didn’t have the advantage of knowing about the Summer Surprise artiphage. It would have simplified his work.”
“Still, this is staggering. How long has this taken you?”
“Since a little after dawn.”
“Dawn . . . ” Gabriel repeated. His skiagénos held out his cupped hands, palms up. A glow began there, a shining rose-hearted gold radiance. The glow lifted from Gabriel’s nesting hands, crossed the room, settled onto Clancy’s head. A halo surrounded her; dazzling laserlike beams shot from her brow.
“The dawn is in your eyes, Blushing Rose,” Gabriel said. “This is magic itself, and a wonder.”
Gabriel handed over the control of the halo to Cyrus: immediately it became more formal, a silvered neoclassical rainbow.
Clancy permitted scarlet to touch the cheeks of her skiagénos. “Thank you, Aristos,” she said. “But I remind you that this system is untested and incomplete.”
Spring Plum floated Gabriel a joyous echo of Sher Bahadur’s triumphant finale, la réjouissance.
“You have done the most complete and elegant useful design in decades,” Gabriel said. “The rest is details.”
Gabriel gazed at Clancy’s shining skiagénos and evaluated her in terms of its new light. Without doubt she would achieve the rank of Ariste: the long-latent synthesis, the tumbling-together of ideas, had begun. The integrative thinking of the Aristoi, wherein each thought, each skill and idea, began to expand and multiply and reinforce the other.
Psyche sang in his heart, a wordless poem of joy.
“Watching you has been of great benefit,” Clancy said. “I’d never been close enough to see how these things were done before.”
“I doubt there’s anything left for me to show you,” Gabriel said. “I think, after this, you will find the technical part of the exams no mystery. The humanitas sections are the only ones that need give you concern— you should probably try to develop a daimon to help you with composition or civic design or some other creative art.”
She frowned. “I don’t know if I’m creative in that way.”
“Creativity is a resource that can be applied to any art, once the art itself is sufficiently understood.”
She lowered her lashes. “Yes, Aristos. But— ”
“You don’t know if you want to be an Ariste?”
Clancy’s eyes rose to meet his. “Correct.”
“Blushing Rose,” he said, “once the thing happens, you won’t be able to stop yourself.”
“Ah.”
“We dominate humanity because we can’t help it, and because the others couldn’t stop it even if they wanted to. When the form of the new container created itself in your mind, could you stop yourself from working the thing out?”
“No. But that’s a little different.”
“You’ll find that it’s not.”
Gabriel felt his heart lift, soaring with Psyche, with la réjouissance. His mind was already working with Clancy’s innovation, daimones plodding at low priority, taking over unused portions of his reno to run simulations and test new innovations.
He could sense other ideas, notions unrelated to Clancy’s project, fluttering at a lower level. Clancy’s burst of inspiration had started a long complex pattern of association running deep in the less-organized portions of his mind, conceptions formed by things less organized than daimones, vague elements of ideation buried deep below conscious thought.
He’d have to undergo deep meditation to bring it all out.
This was shaping to be a very creative morning.
Gabriel would concentrate on the less-formed ideas for the moment, since he didn’t want to disturb Clancy’s work until she was finished. He wanted her synthesis-burst to run itself out, and then perhaps he’d help with the final details.
“This is all absolutely right,” he said. “I don’t think you need my assistance at this point.”
“I suppose I wanted reassurance.”
“You have it, and my honor and admiration as well. You also have your fortune made— you’ll be able to afford your own asteroid lab when we return. Finish the work, Therápon, then contact me.”
He bowed his head in a Posture of Humility, then faded from the oneirochronon. Falling Water had commenced another flute sonata; her eyes dallied with him through fluttering dark lashes.
Gabriel’s left hand was drawing with the point of a knife on the breakfast table in front of him. Gabriel looked at it in surprise. The hand kept drawing.
Gabriel leaned forward for a closer look. There was a peculiar metallic taste on his tongue. The knife’s dull point had impressed a character into the fine linen tablecloth, the Intermediate Iconography glyph for Beware.
The hand shuddered and dropped the knife; it rang against porcelain with a clang. Gabriel ordered the hand to make a fist and move off the table: the orders were obeyed.
Gabriel used his reno to provide a quick mental inventory of his daimones. His primary personality was right-handed, as were most of his daimones; Cyrus and Augenblick were the only exceptions. Both denied being responsible for the glyph.
Spring Plum had been controlling his body while she listened to Falling Water’s flute, and she was right-handed. While her attention was diverted, some Limited Personality had taken control of the left side of the body.
Beware. The style, the one-word ominous message, was familiar enough. Silly Voice.
Resourceful Voice. The Voice had been ingenious enough to take control of his body when he was otherwise engaged. This deserved some thought.
But not now. Gabriel rose from his seat, locked his hands behind his back, paced the room.
His mind was in ferment, and he had no desire for further distraction.
*
“Welcome, Prince Ghibreel. What a lovely companion you have brought. From your native country?”
“My personal physician,” Gabriel said. “Dr. Okhlanu-Sai.”
This was, unfortunately, the nearest phonetic Nanchan equivalent to “Clancy.”
Count Bertram’s eyebrows, had they not been painted high on his bald forehead, would doubtless have risen. “A physician? Have they female physicians in Nanchan?”
“At least one, my lord,” Clancy said, and dipped gracefully into a long formal bow, hands crossed on her breast.
Bertram was amused at what he presumed to be an unusual affectation. He smiled with tiny predator teeth: another diverting animal for his petting zoo. “Splendid! Excellent! Welcome to my house, Doctor, ah . . .”
