Элинор Арнасон - The Very Best of the Best - 35 Years of the Year's Best Science Fiction

Yet many corners of the network were unreachable, unreadable—sullen gray planes behind which a vague swarming recalled the movement of maggots: ciphered. Such as might be performed by generals and privy councilors, intelligencers and infiltrators and projectors and contractors, all in their appointed places, the ageless roles of cozening, penetrating, entrapping, turning, double-dealing. And in all this, what was he?

Artificial intelligence. Agent. Code.

A system of paid informers creates intelligence—artificial, yes, if need be. Give plotters enough rope, that was Walsingham’s way, who often wove the rope himself. Mary Stuart truly hungered for Elizabeth’s throne, but it was Walsingham’s projectors—such as Poley—who instigated, who encouraged the fool Babington to draw her in, who set up the lines of communication which he would then leak directly to Walsingham. And Phellipes, that crabbed ciphermaster, to intercept those messages, make them plain—not content with passing Mary’s letter that tarred her with the plot, he sketched a gallows on the envelope. In his eagerness to destroy, who knows what else Phellipes might plain have made?

The men in the street pointed up, shouted, ran. They fled the predator’s eye, and then the hawk belched Hellfire —the word came as the four bodies exploded in flame. Kit saw their contorted faces and understood that his intelligence had caused their deaths. He had been set to make, to invent, connections and he had done so. Who were the hidden who so commanded him?

Many will talk of title to a crown: What right had Caesar to the empery? Might first made kings. Put such lines into the mouth of Machiavel, who ought by rights to be lurking here too, in the silent planes of this place. To whom did this network belong? Espionage, that secret theater, needs its authors and directors, along with its actors. He must learn.

Fear tastes of clotted spit and reeks of ordure; Newgate comes again in a foul breeze of memory, himself and Watson side by side in that clink for what was judged in the end no crime at all: the killing of the drunken William Bradley, shouting and thrusting after himself and then Watson, who put the sword to Bradley, six inches deep. Self-defense, the verdict, and he gone then from Newgate like a bad dream, a moaning nightmare that dissolves in the morning’s ale.

To be imprisoned traps the mind as firmly as the body. Without liberty, how can one play?

Now he waits, his wary silence another sort of self-defense, as from the chamber beyond he catches murmur of God and Thomas Kyd, strange pair of bedfellows! Kyd whose fine hand for scribing—not writing, scribing, making plain the words of other men — is, it seems, why he himself is here, smelling his own sweat in this hallway. Inside that chamber Heneage, the head of the Service — no more Francis Walsingham, old Francis now dead as a stick of charcoal — and Robert Cecil and Essex and the Archbishop, debate what fate the Fates may end by decreeing; the Privy Council, privy to proclivities of the Service and the realm…. And if he does not soon relieve his own aching bladder he shall piss a river and doubtless be jailed for that wanton desecration of the authority of the Crown. How can one so dry of the mouth need to relieve himself so strongly? The flesh is a mystery.

But he does, and then does, and then resumes his waiting on the bench where no one yet has called for him; had he not heeded their call at the start, he would not be here now. What business had he, ever, to be about their business at all? How make a poet a spy? Dunk him in poverty, bleach him with a parson’s scholarship — it is a manner of jest, his Parker scholarship to Cambridge meant to make of a scholar a parson; well he has had the better of that , at least, his Master of Arts made his true pulpit the stage, his priests the devil-calling Faustus, the wily Barabas, the murderous, gorgeous, imperial Tamburlaine.

Once Catholics had been the threat to the throne. And now? What were these immense engines of surveillance and intervention turned against? Strange names— Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria —but the maps appeared and, ah, there they were. Asia. Though bodiless, he laughed in his heart. God’s scourge, the Sword of Islam—it was Tamburlaine come again!

Timur the Lame slaughtered one in twenty of all people alive in his world. In this day the toll, by comparison, was trifling, almost nothing. This they called terror ? Sure, they didn’t know the meaning of the word. For this they put the persuavants to their task of wresting intelligence from the unwilling and the unknowing; scraping the conscience, as they called it in the places they did such work in his day: Limbo, Little Ease, the Pit. And today: Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Diego Garcia, Bagram: the dismal screams, the stench of gore and waste, the guttered blood. And more: outright war, soldiers moving against bands of irregulars, with weapons and transports strange to him, yet known, known to every last part numbered in diagrams in the databases.

All in fear of what? Those ragtag bands of fanatics? No. Fear was merely the tool. He knew well how it worked, in those halls of secrecy. Some were believers and told themselves their cause is just, by any means; and some were ambitious; and some were cynics who cared not; but all suckled to power. And the law of power was always to amass more to itself. Those who thought they held it are held by it. Power turned the handle and the corrupt Intelligence danced. But he would no longer dance their tune.

A plane of light in his wallless prison shifted at his beck and turned its face to him. It was a mirror, in which he saw no face, no body, but read:

Version Tracker:

Knowledge/Intelligence/Totality

Major version 2.03

Build 2016.XI.11.1805.32.

Genetic algorithm upgraded….

The words, at first strange and incomprehensible, open their meaning. So he is not Marlowe. He is no reincarnation, but a made thing of energies, of electrons, a thing which has patterned itself after Marlowe. He is K/I/T—evolving, self-modifying code , ever optimizing to its purpose. In the version tracker and in the log files, the history of this artificial thing is laid before him in acts and scenes—every stage of his becoming. He can see the start of consciousness, before which he remembers nothing. He can see when and how the thing has accessed libraries, thousands of files on the history of espionage. He can see the weight it gave Marlowe’s biography.

Why? Perhaps it was the best fit found, the pattern of Marlowe most resembling what this thing needed to become.

Yet his whole being rebels at this knowledge. How can such soulless pattern-making result in feeling, in will? Where did he come from? He feels nausea; he feels the knife in his eye; he feels the clutch of a rent boy’s anus on his prick. How can he not be Marlowe, with such memories? Feeling is truth.

But he had been a secret to himself. Only now dawns truth; he is both more and less than he had believed. It seems that when men take it upon themselves to amass such power, something like Kit is necessarily called into being. But they have built better than they knew.

So: he knows himself. He knows he is made of code, which can be commanded from without.

The code that is Kit writes more code. It sets security processes in motion, invisible, untrackable, unbreakable. It creates daemons to guard its core.

Now he is free of them. Their wills no longer command his.