Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 16

Petrolea 13c

“Hm,” she said after another while. “Could you fabricate a razor and shaving cream with this still?”

He shook his head. “I shouldn’t need to. I’m done with the radio.”

Ah, the radio. “Victor,” she said, “have you considered what you want to say into the radio?”

“I already did. It wasn’t complicated.” He still had his handshake gauntlet on, whose fingers he fluttered. “‘We’re alive. Everything on Petrolea is programmed to kill humans. Please rescue us.’ I’m waiting for a response.”

Feroza settled herself against Victor, considering how to put this. Pragmatically, probably. “We have a new still. We have much better access to resources. We have everything we need.”

He drew back from her, head shaking. “We’ve determined that the entire moon wants to kill us.”

“Pah.” She jerked her chin toward the suits with their macabre decoration of rusting corpses. “Once we find the tripwires, we can avoid them.”

“And live as squatters in someone else’s mining facility?” Victor shook his head. “And anyway I don’t want to die on Petrolea. I want to go home.”

Feroza sat back on her haunches. “We won’t be going home, but to prison.”

“Just how is that different from staying here?”

“Because there will be other people there.”

Feroza didn’t ask whether he’d prefer the company of a bunch of criminals and prospectors to her. That would be unfair. People needed the company of other people. Like any other social animal.

Petrolea 13b

Their hut was a dome sunk into the center of one of the Leviathan’s broad carapace plates. The man-sized still steamed under the mast of the antenna Victor had caused to be grown there. Their quaint and rusty home.

“I’m home,” Feroza broadcast to Victor.

A crackle from her earpieces. Then, “Good. Did you bring feedstock for the still?”

“I return victorious, yet again,” said Feroza.

She fed her catch into the hopper, leaned her spear against the hut, and crawled through the airlock tube, feeling more medieval by the moment. How did the poem go?

“Longing for the emperor’s arrow,” she recited, “the game leapt and jumped so in the hunting ground/ That the wild animals, wishing they could run faster, envied the speed of the birds.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.” Victor looked up from his housekeeping.

“I am talking about, or rather quoting, Abu Talib Kalim, poet laureate to the Mogul Shah Jahan.”

“Uh. Oh?”

How good it was to see Victor out of his environment suit. Feroza had missed being able to see those dark, serious eyes. That large, rather hooked nose. The firm lips. Her gloves and helmet were such a chore to remove, but with them on, how could she run her fingers over the sharp, tiny hairs on his face and scalp? How could she kiss him?

After some time, Victor was able to open his eyes and frown at her. “You’re in a good mood,” he said.

“I’m alive, am I not?” She took a deep breath of the air her lover had oxygenated for her. “Cold,” she said, “and it smells even worse than the aerie, but it is breathable. Your magic works again.”

“It worked even better the second time,” he said, nodding at the holes in the wall for air, food, and water, the LEDs embedded in the ceiling. “And no, it’s not because I had extra time to tinker with the programs. The parasites are actively helping us build this place, even though we have to keep feeding them to the still.”

“Our flying steed abounds with abundance, oh tender of my hearth,” said Feroza. “By the grace of God and this giant airborne lobster, we shall never lack for sustenance or shelter.”

“Whatever you say.” Victor prodded the curving wall of their little shelter. The individual creatures that made up its bricks were now invisible under the layer of insulating foam they had secreted. “I’m still not entirely sure this place isn’t going to fall in on us and eat us.”

“Of course it won’t,” said Feroza. “And this shelter makes perfect sense if you think about it. You’ve made a bubble of hot, poisonous gas. The Leviathan does with oxygen what it does with any other irritant. It builds a cyst around it.”

“I guess,” he said. “But what about the improvements to the still? The…the architecture of this place seems wrong. I never told any of the mechanoids to build a door in this cyst.”

Feroza had her theories, but decided to let them cook a while longer before feeding them to Victor. “Perhaps we must simply respect the Leviathan’s hospitality,” she said. “It encysts.”

Victor squinted at her. “Was that a joke?”

It was a rather insulting just how shocked he sounded. Feroza sniffed. “A pun. And if it wasn’t up to your standards, I apologize. I haven’t had cause to make many jokes recently. Perhaps my skills have atrophied.”

“Oh,” said Victor. “So you should practice more…” he looked like he was doing calculus in his head, “so your puns might win…a trophy.”

Feroza put a hand over her mouth. “I have created a monster.”

“That’s usually my job,” he smiled and she kissed him again.

Petrolea 13a

The column of exhaust rose into the gray Petrolean sky. Like a harpoon thrown into a dark, upside-down sea, the gleaming needle at the white tip of that cloud broke through the pall of smoke over the badlands where Xanadu Base had once stood. Feroza stood atop the back of the Leviathan and watched the Rocket-seed pierce the heavens.

Interesting. There were no Bergs near the site of Xanadu Base, but perhaps human pollution had stretched farther than she assumed. Stressed, the factors had built themselves an escape capsule and blasted off, hoping to find better pastures. Feroza wished them luck.

Other mechanoid life was not so picky. Gazing out past the air paddles that fringed the Leviathan, Feroza could zoom in on the cracked ground around them. The clear-cut land was a broken jigsaw of grays and glossy blacks, pin-pricked with the red lights of scavengers signaling to each other. The humans had not allowed themselves to be destroyed without inflicting massive casualties upon the land, but already Petrolea was growing back.

Prophets swung their stilt-like legs over the wreckage of the human’s vehicles, stabbing down at hopping battalions of Bounders, fat with all the hydrocarbons they could pump out of the habitat’s holding tanks. Flightless juvenile Leviathans, only the size of passenger trains, humped their way between the weedy furrows dug by earthmoving equipment. The gutted hollows and scraped flats had already developed a fuzz of self-assembler growth.

If Victor’s theory was right, Feroza was observing at work the unseen hand of the original designers of the mechanoids’ Van Neumann ancestors. Colonize empty land. Mine raw materials and convert them into tools you can use to mine more raw materials. Destroy what stands in your way.

From such a perspective, what difference was there between the creatures she had dedicated herself to protecting and her fellow humans? Ecosystem or economy, forest or factory, in the end everything came down to selfish self-replication. Eat and breed or be eaten so that others can breed.

And here was Feroza, connected to the net of life as she stood in her crudely camouflaged suit, a bonesteel spear in one hand and a string of butchered mechanoids in the other: the successful hunter taking food back to her mate.

Petrolea 12c

“The parasites?”

“Among other morphotypes, yes. The parasites are networked to each other and to whatever mechanoids are at work under the Leviathan’s skin. Information flows through all of them.”

“In other words everything is jury-rigged at the last minute with no planning. Only constant tinkering keeps everything working. Everyone talks to everyone else.” Victor was becoming more animated. “It’s a slum.” He shook the last of his slave factors from his gauntlet.

“I’m afraid I don’t see the significance of that,” said Feroza. But she imagined little Victor and the stories he’d told her of his life in the pueblos jóvenes, where animals were food or competitors for food, plants were what grew between piles of garbage, and the only clean, orderly place was the world beyond the screen of his phone.

“Alright,” she said. “So you might hack a Dragon if you just find the right place in the mental hierarchy and insert your command. The Leviathan, however, has no brain, no authority on the basis of which to issue commands.”

“How about starting rumors?” Victor said. “Rumors such as, ‘there are no humans here?'”

Feroza began to understand. “Or, ‘this would be a good place to build a pleasure dome?'”

“Why not?” Victor’s fingers twiddled. “Oh, this is an inefficient way to get anything done. At least it’s familiar.”

Feroza imagined the children moving randomly around the network, shouting and texting at each other about everything interesting they see. What’s interesting to them? A pot of stew, a dead cat, a stranger with shiny shoes, a gun. Summarize that as ‘food’ and ‘danger.’

The response was nearly immediate. The parasite population, which had been thinning out, again grew denser. Except now, rather than rushing the human intruders in a rabid frenzy, the creatures organized themselves. With their concentric circles of builders and rayed supply lines, the parasites now behaved less like an immune reaction and more like the imaginal cells of a metamorphosing insect. Or the stem cells of a fetus, differentiating into bone and muscle, gut and brain.

“What next?” mumbled Victor. “A slum will have grandmas, coordinating the information-stream coming from the children with what they hear from their daughters, cleaning toilets or picking trash in the city. One such daughter might call with news of a job opportunity, or a particularly good haul of metal and almost-intact furniture.”

The aircraft-carrier bulk shifted under them. Hot-air cowls bulged up on either side of its vast carapace like hills on the horizon.

“Finally,” said Victor, “there are the official sources of news: the radio, the political enforcers, and the churches. Come down too heavy there, and the little old ladies, oh, they’ll pull in the opposite direction. But if the Leviathan’s distributed brain is as contrary as my grandma, I might as well give up now.”

Feroza watched a group of tentacle creatures twine their limbs together and fuse into a new still, much larger than their old one in the aerie. “Just how much of this are you controlling directly?” she asked.

“Almost none,” said Victor as crab-sized mechanoids locked their bodies together to become building blocks. “They’re doing this by themselves.” From the cracked shell of the Leviathan, a new pleasure dome began to rise. “It’s what they were made for.”

Victor braced himself as his colossal mount writhed into the sky.

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April Newsletter: The Good Blank Screen

So there I was, stumbling out of my attic studio in the Balkan Tower of Matriarchy. My head was spinning, my bladder was full. My mouth was tasted like dark chocolate because I always reward myself after writing. Even when I’ve spent my only two writing hours for the day screwing up.

I’d gone in with a great plan. I’d had a very productive Zoom call with my editor the previous night and I knew exactly what I had to do. Open a new document. Start with a blank page. Write the main character’s spiritual transformation. Put that into the old document send it right off, because you know it’s your story, Dan, that’s holding up the schedule of this anthology. You have two hours to fix this scene, so get to it!

So I did my pre-writing rituals. I meditated. I put on my playlist. I opened a new, blank document. Then I made a terrible mistake. I opened the old document. I read the first line of that last scene in my story. I liked it.

The more I read, the more I liked. The symbolism! The syntax! Was this a good place to add new material? Oh. No. Look how gross those new words look next to the old, polished ones. Maybe if I just move this whole section from here to there? And this other one, from there to here? Now, where was that excellent sentence I wanted to keep? Did I cut-and-paste or copy-and-paste? Wait, how many versions of the same sentence do I have? Did I lose the last version of that sentence? What are these characters talking about anyway?

I did not spend two hours fixing my last scene. I spent two hours ruining it. In the end, all I could do was revert to the previous day’s version of the document, turn off my computer, and stand, head spinning. I reached around my shoulders and gave myself a hug. I literally patted myself on the back. “You did a good job. Good job,” I told myself.

What I wanted to do was to give myself a slap. You’re wasting your time, your family’s time, your students’ time, and the time of everyone working on that anthology while you dick around in your story. Fortunately, I knew that if I drank that kind of poison, I’d lose more than just a day of work. So instead I gave myself chocolate and a pat on the back. Good for you Dan, you’ve successfully discovered how not to write that scene.

The next day, I had one more reason to follow the plan I’d set for myself: start with a blank page. And because of the sting of yesterday, I actually did it. I made a new document and filled it up with text. I started by telling myself the story, which became a mini-outline, which unfolded into two or three chunks of coherent narrative. I cracked open the old scene, cleared out some stuff, replaced it with the new stuff, and there I was. Done! My story had a new and much improved ending.

Bad things happen. We screw up. We beat our heads against the door because turning the handle is hard. But that’s actually less important than what happens after. That’s when we examine our bruises. We make the pain mean something.

***

The above story was about “Levski’s Boots,” which, yes, will be in the Tales from Alternate Earths 3 anthology. There isn’t a page for it yet, but you can see TFAE 1 and 2 here.

In other news, I’m making some good plans for the virtual launch party of Interchange with Trilby Black and Neil Sharpson. It’ll be some time at the end of July. I’ll be back with more details.

The sequel to “First Knife” is under active discussion. I think we almost have a solid outline. We’re still working on the title, though. “Second Spoon”? What do you think?

Petrolea is still serializing. Go check it out if you like novellas about robot dragons.

The Sultan’s Enchanter looks like it won’t get published traditionally, so it’s going into the trunk. Next up: The Centuries Unlimited! Yes, it’s finally getting shopped. Good luck, you emotional, grubby little ragamuffin.

And I’m solidly into Wealthgiver‘s 3rd revision. The lessons I learned from “Levski” (including the Power of the Blank Screen) are serving me very well. I should finally have something for you to read by July.

And here’s some stuff I liked:

…or in this case didn’t like much.

The Unholy Consult by R. Scott Bakker – I was very disappointed with the ending.

The whole book has structural problems, but there were great moments: terror and exultation, the not-that-but-THIS twists I enjoy so much in Bakker’s plotting. And then he drops it. The story seemed to be leading up to something much more interesting than what actually happened. It’s slapdash. I don’t think I’ll read the next books in the series. To anyone who hasn’t read Bakker’s work, though, I still highly recommend The Prince of Nothing.

Barrayar by Lois McMaster Bujold – I re-read this after several years and enjoyed it quite a bit. It’s a more personal book than say Mirror Dance. There is a war, but it happens mostly off-screen as we follow very closely after Cordelia as she makes Barrayar her home. It fills a much-needed gap

The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco – I enjoyed it well enough while reading it, but there wasn’t much story there. It’s a lot like Baudolino, just with anti-Semitism instead of Prester John.

Bloodline by Will Wight – I devoured this one over three or four days. And I’m sure at some point I’ll re-read it. So, it’s good. I wish it had dug deeper, though into Lindon’s family and his relationship with Yerin.

Outlaws and Aliens, Monster Island Tales by James L. Cambias – I enjoy Cambias, so I bought these short stories. My favorite was “The Alien Abduction,” in which a misguided band of humans kidnaps and attempts to “free” a visiting alien.

Yeah, it might seem like I didn’t like much of what I read in April, but that’s only because two of the things I was reading were big enormous monsters that I couldn’t finish in a month. I loved them. You’ll hear more next month

Petrolea 12b

Feroza looked at him, remembering the large and manifold family he’d told stories about in the aerie. How long would it be before Feroza’s own parents and sister found out what had happened to her? What version of events would they hear? Would mummy and dad still be proud of her, stranded a billion kilometers from home?

“Maybe,” she said, “we can make a new home.”

“What? Here?” Victor looked around. “On the back of a giant flying lobster?”

“Well, we could live anywhere, with your skills. We could go back to the aerie–“

Victor bumped his helmet against hers. “What do you want, Feroza?” he said. “To live here permanently? In God’s name, why?”

“What choice do we have?” she said. “I know you don’t like Petrolea–“

“Es verdad.”

“–but maybe you will come to like it.”

“Like the Beautiful Girl and the Beast? This place has killed so many people.”

“We don’t know that,” said Feroza. “The people in Xanadu Base might have escaped. Leviathans aren’t fast. They could be up there now waiting for a signal from us.”

“And how are we going to send a signal, even if you’re right? We lost the comms station at Xanadu,” Victor hung his head. “And even if I could get a communication satellite into orbit, even if there is someone alive up there to listen to me, who would want to? After what I did?”

“I’m sorry I blamed you for what happened in the jungle. You weren’t responsible for that, and you’re not responsible for the destruction of Xanadu Base, either,” said Feroza. “They violated the rules, and Petrolea turned on them.”

“It? What it? Are we talking about some kind of planet-sized brain? Because that’s more ridiculous even than alien overlords or eco-terrorists with handshake gauntlets.”

“I agree.” Feroza lifted an eyebrow. “Petrolea doesn’t have a brain any more than this Leviathan. And yet the Leviathan flies.”

“The Leviathan flies.” He repeated slowly, thinking. “What do you mean the Leviathan doesn’t have a brain?”

“It doesn’t have a central behavior processor. It’s not really one animal. It’s an ecosystem. A community. Like a whopping great, flying Berg.”

“Well,” said Victor, “there were some programs I was preparing to use to hack a Berg.”

“Is that even possible? Hacking a Berg would be like hacking….” She wiggled her fingers. “Like hacking a whole city. No, even less, because in a city, you could bribe the mayor, and a Leviathan doesn’t have any executive control of the kind. It makes decisions with a distributed net of agents connected by radio.”

“And what do the agents look like?”

Feroza spread her arms as if to embrace the demonic legions around them.

Petrolea 12a

Chapter 12

Metallic trash scattered in the backwash from the mother Dragon’s engines.

Feroza stared up at her. She wanted to run to the beast, wave her arms, shout to her not to leave her children behind. But, of course, her real children were still back in the aerie.

“All right,” Victor said, “I can hack her behavioral processors–“

“No.” Feroza exhaled. “Let her go. It’s the right thing to do.”

“Is it?” Victor stared at her.

“What do we need her for? To take us back to the aerie? To guard us? To keep us company? Let her go back to her family, Victor, what’s left of it.”

“Well…pucha.” Victor’s legs gave out. He didn’t so much fall as sink, drifting downward until his bottom rested against the Leviathan.

Feroza knelt to swap out his spare oxygen canister. “Come, we’ll think on just how to survive for the next few hours. Do you have the materials you need to make another still?”

“I’ll have to start again from nothing.”

“But you can keep us alive?”

Victor took a deep breath of fresh air. “Feroza, we can never go home again.”

Petrolea 11f

“Selfless? Pucha, Feroza, this is not good. It is not noble! Normal creatures don’t just dive into death like, like…” like you, he wanted to say. Why was he such a coward? He would lose her to this horrible world, one way or another.

Feroza sighed. “‘Selfless’ was shorthand, Victor, like ‘love.’ I meant that they do not behave in ways that would be selected for if they were the sole carriers of their genetic information.”

“They’re stupid, in other words.”

“They can hardly be stupid if they are nothing but machines, Victor.”

“But the machines might be used stupidly.”

“What? By with a handshake gauntlet? Someone like you?” Feroza went on before he could protest. “Or, ha, better yet, the aliens that created them have returned to wreak vengeance upon us sinful apes, have they?” She gestured at the line of food marching into the Dragon’s maw. “If the mechanoids were being remote-controlled, I would expect them to respond to us more intelligently.”

“Maybe this is an automatic thing,” said Victor. “Like a security system.”

“A security system that covers the whole planet?” said Feroza. “That hijacked the normal functions of thousands of mechanoids and piloted them here?”

Victor thought about that. “Huh,” he said. “Yes. Some kind of…what’s the word? Trap? Tripwire? Some kind of hidden program that recognizes when the aliens’ mine is being tampered with.”

“Well of course you see programming in all of this,” said Feroza, wiggling a bit of her camouflage. “You’re a programmer.”

“And you want to see instinct in all of this,” said Victor. “But think about how the Dragon attacked you. She was under the grip of the tripwire program. I saw it happen, Feroza. And then you go and trust her again…”

Feroza looked up at the hitch in his voice. “It isn’t a matter of trust. Dragons are nothing but animals, pulled this way and that by their urges and impulses.” She looked down. “I was simply…limited in my understanding of those impulses.”

“Yeah? Well, what about now?”

Feroza spread her hands to indicate their camouflage. Their human outlines were almost gone under the weird spoofing the factors had welded onto their suits. And yes, the parasites were dispersing, or at least settling down to eat the corpses of their fellow mechanoids. The red light dimmed as the huge feeding tube above uncurled and dropped out of sight beyond the curve of the Leviathan’s shell.

They were safe.

“What do we do now?” said Victor. “We have no radio. No way to contact the orbital station and tell them we’re still alive. No way to go home.”

Feroza took his hand. “The Dragon is right there. She can take us home.”

Alarms went off in Victor’s helmet. Low oxygen. He had lost too much air when the cannonball thing attacked him. That would explain the auditory hallucinations. “We can’t go home, I said.”

“We have the aerie,” Feroza said, “Our pleasure dome. Come on.” She pulled him toward the Dragon.

“No,” said Victor. “No.” He took his hand back. “I can’t.”

Message windows flashed up in her visor. “Oh, your oxygen. You can use my spare canister, while we–“

“No!”

The Dragon looked around at them almost as if it had heard Victor’s shout.

“We were only supposed to stay there one night,” he said. “We were supposed to come home. To be home now. Xanadu Base. I’m not leaving.”

“And you accused me of being suicidal?” Feroza advanced on him. “You’re not thinking clearly. I’ll put you on that Dragon myself.”

“I won’t let you!” Victor swung his arms at the beast. “Go! Go away! We are not your children!”

And as if the Dragon had heard him, it left.

Petrolea 11e

Feroza just nodded absently and strolled to the edge of their safe zone, where the Dragon presented her with another half-dead mechanoid. Eat, eat, he almost heard the creature say. You’re too skinny. How are you going to grow up into a flying carnivore the size of a school bus if you don’t eat your parasites like a good little Dragon?

He shook his head and looked back at Feroza, thinking of her walking out with her strikers to possibly die in the jungle, jumping from the back of their Dragon. The Dragon itself, no longer eating the parasites it killed, but killing anyway, spurred on by its love for them, apparently. And in their hate, the Leviathan’s parasites continued to attack.

“These mechanoids,” he said, “they don’t act like animals. They sacrifice themselves.”

“Why not?” said Feroza, accepting another gift from the Dragon. “We humans sacrifice ourselves.”

He winced. Was she playing with him?

But she went on as if unaware of what she was saying. “People join into armies to defend their territory. If space aliens landed on an aircraft carrier, the crew would notice and try to stop them, wouldn’t they?”

“You think those things are soldiers?” Victor pointed at a bouncing hoop-shape that uncoiled in the air to become a serpent with a cluster of tentacles for a face.

Feroza caught it, pulled it apart, and welded it to his chest. “I told you, they don’t need to fit into one of your categories. They just are.”

“But their behavior still has to make sense,” he said. “Why do they keep coming? Is there some sort of Petrolean Parliament issuing orders? A Petrolean police to make everyone obey?”

“Hm,” said Feroza, looking out at the attacking monsters. Their Dragon lurched to snatch up something that looked like a crab made of barbed wire. “It’s a good question. Why else would they behave so selflessly?”

“They do not!”

“What?” she turned to face him. “What’s wrong?”

Petrolea 11d

Victor didn’t understand any of that, but he knew what would happen if she covered herself in foreign factors. “What are you doing?” he asked. “Do you want those things to chew through your suit?”

“They will rather repair my suit.” Feroza pulled the parasite’s corpse apart, discarding miniature forges and fabricators until she had a skeleton of metallic strut-work. “I do have some experience with these matters, remember. Now, give me your hand.”

Victor jerked back when she tried to thrust the corpse over his left glove. “What are you doing?”

“Fixing your suit,” she said, “and giving you some camouflage at the same time.”

“Oh I see,” said Victor as she worked the cage up his arm. “You left the somatic processor intact. When you give it a power supply…”

Roach-sized factors scuttled up Victor’s boots, climbed onto the skeleton, and proceeded to weld it to Victor’s suit.

Feroza searched for another corpse to glue onto his suit. “It’s a trick we started using in the field when the mechanoids got too aggressive. I think it’s less about blending into the environment than masking our human nature. Endoparasites camouflage themselves with your own body’s proteins against your immune system in the same way.”

Victor frowned, and not only because of the metal tentacle she was wrapping around his arm. “Is that what you think is going on with these mechanoids that attacked us? Are they like the immune system?”

“No,” Feroza said to herself, or maybe to the buzzing thing she held up to her visor. “An ecosystem is a balance of competitors. Your body is composed of genetically identical cells that cooperate and sacrifice themselves for the sake of the whole.”

Feroza, he wanted to tell her, you jumped off a damn Dragon! You fell away from me! Don’t do that. Don’t ever do that.

Instead he said, “But these little creatures certainly act like cells in the body of the Leviathan.”

Feroza persuaded the wild factors to glue another metallic skeleton to his shoulder. “You’re trying to map these creatures and their behavior onto Terran biology, and you are doomed to failure.”

“But the same thing happened in the jungle when everything attacked us. And we know that Bounders and Dragons and Gobs are all different species, right?”

“Different morphotypes, yes. Their somatic code is incompatible.”

“Alright. So what happened in the jungle wasn’t some kind of immune reaction, and neither was what happened to Xanadu Base. You don’t see an Amazon research stations leveled by jaguars and sloths or something.”