Greg Bear: Queen of Angels

“Martin Burke, please.” A pleasant, aggressive male voice.

He coughed. “Speaking.”

“Mr. Burke, you used to work for the Institute for Psychological Research—”

“Used to.” Pause. Sounded like a journalist. “I had nothing to do with—”

“No, of course not. My name is Paul Lascal, Mr. Burke. I’m not a reporter and I’m not interested in the Raphkind scandals. I am interested in what you know about IPR. Would it be possible to speak with you soon?”

A LitVid simulation of AXIS itself floated before him, narration muted. The craft’s deceleration vanes were shown spread wide a spidery thing of deep space. The vanes withdrew with unreal speed and AXIS’s children flushed like a thousand handsful of nickels smeared by gravity in a gray pointillistic curve around the second planet of Alpha Centauri B.

“The last thing I want to talk about is IPR,” Martin said. “Where did you get my number?”

“I represent Mr. Thomas Albigoni.” Lascal paused for some sign of recognition, then continued smoothly without it. “Carol Neuman gave him your name and phone number. She thought you might be able to help him.”

“I don’t see how. I haven’t worked at IPR for a year. How is Carol connected with Mr. Albigensi—”

“Albigoni. Thomas. Mister. She was a therapist for his daughter. They became friends. I understand you’re no longer in the silky with the regulators. That could make you doubly useful to us. Just a short talk. Say, over lunch?”

Martin looked at the mess in his small kitchen. He had not mustered the energy to tell the apartment arbeiters to clean it up. He had not eaten since early evening of the day before. “You seem to think I should know who Albigoni is.”

“He’s a publisher.”

“Oh? LitVids?”

“And books,” Lascal said pointedly. “Far more lit than vid.”

“Is he after an exposé?”

“No. Another matter entirely.”

Martin rubbed his nose. “In that case, and considering it’s Carol, maybe I’ll accept.”

“Do you know—” Lascal named a shoreline La Jolla restaurant, very expensive.

“I know it.”

“About one hour from now? Just ask for Mr. Albigoni’s table.”

Martin gave an assenting grunt and put the receiver down. He leaned back in the weak cushions of his aging armchair. On the battered coffee table sat a ceremonial and condensed printed copy of his twenty year old atlas of the human brain, a seminal work from his salad days. Sometime during the previous night he had drunkenly opened it to a plate of the olfactory nerve and system. Next to the plate he had drawn a crude cartoon of a vampire, teeth trickling teardrops of blood, with branching arrows connecting cartoon and pink and white cauliflower flesh of prepyriform cortex, olfactory bulb and rhinencephalon.

From the armchair he could see into the apartment’s small bedroom. In one corner beyond the bed a tall metal case supported stacked cubes of data. Martin’s life had centered on those cubes until President Raphkind’s downfall and suicide had ushered in the new era of constitutional cleansing and investigations. He had not been part of the Raphkind scandals—not directly—but his research had been targeted. Federal had shut down IPR and tucked him away from his true calling.

He turned up the sound on the AXIS report pushed himself forcibly from the armchair and walked into the bathroom to shave and dress.

Martin had once hiked the Country of the Mind. Now he was reduced to accepting luncheon dates with curious strangers just to get out of the apartment.

Why put on eyeglasses? Why look out and ahead? You won’t go there, I won’t. We are all Moses staring into Canaan. Who in hell cares if our children get there? My this has been a bitchy evening, hasn’t it?

LitVid 21 (Science and Philosophy Nets) Scheduling 12/23/47

1: AXIS MultiNet Coverage 24 hr reports four tiers

A Net: PubAcc David Shine and Team

B Net: PubAcc Direct Data Downlink (Hobby-Tech)

C Net: Australian Squinfo: Analysis (Pay)

D Net: Lunar Squinfo: Analysis (Pay)

2: Designer Babies Conference Tucson AZ 0800-2200 (Member Conference Pay)

A Net: Health and public acceptance

B Net: Future social change

C Net: Religious, Historical and Scientific Images of Humanity

3: Public Science Issues Forum PubAcc MultiNet 0900-2100

A Net: Diane Muldrow-Lewis-Taper Playback Interviews with Science/Tech Pers. (Expanded Schedule for subjects)

B Net: Senate Transform Law Debates Discrimination in Eastern States?

C Net: Arbeiter Design Conference Cleveland, Ohio

D NET: NANOTECH NEWS (Chosen for Recording, $20.00 Fee)

E Net: END SELECTION

Selection made: 1/AXIS Multinet A Net B Net switch at will No fee

LitVid 21/1 A Net (David Shine): “AXIS has been on the road for fifteen years, at a cost of over one hundred billion dollars, a lot of treasure for such a distant piece of metallic fluff many have said. But the overwhelming voice of the world community spoke loud and clear three decades ago, and it said Yes. AXIS, an acronym for Automated eXplorer of Interstellar Space, became the grandest project in recent history, perhaps more important overall than the manned Mars missions, the return to the moon, the orbital platforms and stations…For in planning, building and launching AXIS the world propelled itself deliberately and with historically unprecedented foresight into a new industrial revolution.

“The technologies necessary for AXIS’s success—the nanotechnologies of machines smaller than living cells—have already changed our lives and promise much more in the very near future. But which is more important, the economic and industrial benefits, or the philosophical and psychological?

“Through AXIS we might find our doppelgangers, our soulmates; we might find mankind’s future husbands and wives among the angels who the Bible tells us once cohabited with Earthlings.

“AXIS may be therapy for us all, for the great uncured, unhealed human race, with so far to go on its breathless course through history. We may finally be able to compare ourselves to our superiors, or our equals, and know where we stand.

“As for yourself, you’ll find more formal telecasts on other LitVid 21 channels. We are taking the universal feed and simulated report from Australian and lunar farside mission control, and adding our own cultural spin.

“In the past few weeks, AXIS has returned images of three planets circling Alpha Centauri B. As yet these worlds have not been named, and are called only B-1, B-2, and B-3. B-3 was already known to moonbased astronomers; it is a huge gas giant some ten times larger than Jupiter in our own solar system. Like Saturn it is surrounded by a thin rugged ring of icy moonlets. B-l is a barren rock hugging close to Alpha Centauri B, similar to Mercury. But the focus of our attention is now on B-2, a just-right world slightly smaller than Earth. B-2 possesses an atmosphere closely approximating Earth’s, as well as continents and oceans of liquid water. It is orbited by two moons each about a thousand kilometers in diameter.

“AXIS’s sensors and telescopes discovered B-2 almost three years ago. Now AXIS is making its move on this Earthlike world. That is, it made its move over four years ago, for AXIS is sending us information at the speed of light across four light years. The signal has been relayed by fifty transponders across almost forty trillion kilometers of empty space. The reports are only reaching us this week, in compressed form, to be decoded, enhanced and analyzed by thinking machines in California and by planetary scientists around the world.

“This is as close to live and realtime as God allows us to be.”