Scott Westerfeld: Evolution's Darling

Finally, Mira commanded her dress to flow from her body and wrap itself around Hirata. It spread itself thin to cover every centimeter of flesh, to push into Hirata's now hungry mouth and entrap her tongue, where it produced the intense flavors of burning peppers alternated with sweet, cool relief. Mira knelt over her, staring into Hirata's face through its encompassing but transparent raiment, her interrogator's calm lost as she jammed her own fingers into her now naked loins.

Mira cupped her own orgasm in her palm, held it steady and bare millimeters distant as Hirata's sweat condensed within the now torturous, now soothing wrap, and shouted at her, "Tell me, damn you, if he's alive!

"I beg you! Just say it!"

Hirata's eyes were bright with her answer, and she cried through the spiderweb of the pulsing garment/weapon/intelligence:

"Yes! He lives on the broken hill." She wept coordinates.

And finally, the dress gave Hirata what she wanted, resolving every itch, every burn, every raw desire. The woman screamed with the agony of the wait, with the relief of it. And Mira rode the screams to the conclusion of her own sweet pleasure, wrapping her legs around the mewling cocoon of dancing whorls. The two pressed together hard, and rocked away the threads of their lust until they were hoarse and spent.

When they separated, the weapon/garment/objet d'art returned to its rightful owner, slipping across the dusty floor to reform, clean and unwrinkled on Mira's body; just a dress again.

Mira looked at Hirata, naked, dirty and exhausted on the floor, and wondered if what she had done were so different from the torture Darling had asked her to avoid. Perhaps it hadn't been so violent, but in sheer intensity, in disregard for the subject's will, this was much the same as her usual methods. But tomorrow would tell. Instead of being broken, traumatized, permanently scarred, Hirata would feel ten years younger. And Mira felt that the woman's memory might be rather selective in how it painted these unlikely events: Odd, but refreshingly direct, those Home Cluster art dealers.

Mira smiled when Hirata looked up at her. She supposed there was business to conclude. Darling could be saved some trouble.

"We'll take them," Mira said. She placed a small, bright stack of HC debit chips on the floor a few centimeters from Hirata's face. "Both sculptures. Ship them to Fowdy Gallery, fastfreight."

Hirata reached one hand out toward the chips, knocked the pile over.

Mira rose, her medical augmentations dealing quickly with the exhaustion, the slight hyperventilation. A buzz of new stimulants entered her system: the climax of a mission was at hand.

She paused for a moment to look down, a sweet feeling deep in her belly. With Hirata panting and naked at her feet, she indulged a brief fantasy that she had just paid a whore.

"Goodbye, my dear," she said, and made for the limousine.

In the center of the forest they found the master, in a clearing littered with battered machine parts, half-formed trees, junk.

Vaddum's body was as Darling remembered it: the cracked old layers of blast and radiation shielding, the weak impellers suited for zero-g, the five independent hands floating at rest in a star formation. The old machine looked at him, packets of recognition fluttering in the thin direct interface of the attenuated local net.

"Darling," Robert Vaddum said.

"Maestro."

He knelt to let Beatrix down. She started breathlessly:

"I'm sorry, sculptor, but he seemed to know already, and he wanted to see—"

Vaddum tilted a floating hand, which silenced her immediately.

"I thought you might come," the sculptor said. "I thought your eye might catch the progression. Realize a new body of work."

"I was forewarned," Darling admitted. "There was an anachronism among the components."

The sculptor snorted. "I know. Figured someone might see it."

Darling looked about at the shimmering surround of the forest. He wanted to ask questions, to discuss the forms around him, and most of all, to look, to gaze. But he realized there might not be much time. It had taken almost an hour to get here.

"With your permission, Maestro. Are you the original?"

"No," the old machine said. "He's dead." Two of the hands pointed fingers toward the crater. "Got copied by the Maker."

A few packets in direct interface made the meaning of the gesture clear. The original Vaddum had died in the Blast, and the Maker was there, hidden below the crater.

"The Maker's enemies are coming, perhaps in moments," Darling said.

Vaddum nodded, his hands forming a ring of fists.

"They should. Crazy, the Maker." His hands swept in a spinning circle around him, pointing toward himself. "Makes too much. Imagine: a forest of old shits like me."

The sculptor laughed his old laugh, learned from rough human factory workers more than two centuries before. Darling smiled.

Then he said, "Its enemies will kill the Maker, but let me save you."

"No. Want to die," answered Vaddum.

"Please."

A swirl of images struck Darling in direct interface: bright kettles of flame springing sudden holes, human workers halved by the eruption; pressure suits failing, a cleaning detail for the splattered and frozen blood and brains; factory machines gone mad, crushing to paper a human and a fellow drone with a press meant to flatten hullalloy.

"Death is life. Too long already. Let me go properly this time."

Darling nodded. Vaddum was still a worker in his heart. He had never wanted the immortality his artificial body offered.

"Save them instead," Vaddum said, pointing to Beatrix.

Darling turned toward the child. She was staring into her mirror, a body like hers, but visible only in its absence, cloaked with exotic alloys and EM fields, a distortion on the background of glittering trees.

"It's her," Beatrix whispered, as if the apparition were some meek animal ready to bolt.

An alarm sounded in Darling's head, a dedicated secondary informing him that a dopplered scream was building, an aircar approaching at high speed.

Now was the time to act. To risk the vengeance of Mira's employers, to risk oblivion, the end of 200 years. But he had made his plans, and he was not going to lose Vaddum again. He had lost enough.

Darling set his primary processor into a kind of meditation, an emptiness, and released a subroutine to command his body. A brutal madness overtook him. He reached out a thick sensory strand toward the old sculptor, another pair toward the girls. He swiftly captured Vaddum and Beatrix with two quicksilver snakes, but the invisible twin slipped away. It darted a few steps into the forest, and turned to watch, as if confident it could escape his grasp if he tried again. Darling dismissed the twin from his mad thoughts. He felt his captives struggle, but the sensory feedback of their protests was dulled by the capturing tendrils' crude strength.

He chose a long rod of glassene, which glittered in the sun, and began the dirty work of breaking them to pieces.

Darling was nowhere to be found. Mira called his name, in direct interface and once out loud. Nothing. There wasn't time to waste, though, in case Hirata pulled herself together enough to raise some warning. And things might be easier without Darling along, anyway.

The coordinates she had begged from Hirata's frothing lips weren't far away. The limo didn't bother to reach normal cruising altitude; it bolted forward at just above rooftop level, drawing nearer the edge of the Blast Event crater. Yes, she thought, this would all end up here, next to this black hole.

A hill rose before Mira, crumbling like a half-eaten pastry where it had been bitten in two by the perfect sphere of the explosion. The vehicle gained altitude to crest its peak, slowing as the kid-simple iconography of the navigation eyescreen showed two dots converging: an ancient and euclidian sign of arrival.