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  Solip:System

  Walter Jon Williams

  BOOKS BY WALTER JON WILLIAMS

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  Copyright (c) 1989, 2012 by Walter Jon Williams. All rights reserved.

  Smashwords edition published by Walter Jon Williams.

  Cover art by Innovari. Used with permission.

  Special thanks to Kathy Hedges for copy-editing this work.

  SOLIP:SYSTEM

  Somewhere a voice is screaming. Reno is moving at the speed of light, and around him the universe cries in pain. Brightness dazzles his eyes. Odors sting his nostrils. Above him swim the stars, and their soft glow is blurred by tears.

  He lies on his back. Something under him makes a crumpling noise. The stars are staring with gleaming pupils of light.

  Reno moves his arm. A simple thing, but he had forgotten how to do it. He wants to wipe the tears from his face, but he touches his temple by mistake and feels something different, a wire thrust into his head. His coordination has badly deteriorated. The body seems wrong. His throat aches. His mouth tastes foul.

  He remembers where he is, what he intends here.

  He remembers the screams were his own.

  *

  The room is large, high, all swooping curves without a single straight line. Orbital fashion, brought to Earth. Reno realizes the stars above him are holograms, hanging below the cold night ceiling.

  He is lying on a bed, on a tumbled stack of computer printout. The room smells of sweat. He tries to sit up. The stars spin overhead, in his mind. He drags in air.

  “Reno? Reno?” A voice in his mind. His own voice.

  “I did it,” Reno says. “I’m in.”

  “It works, then.”

  “It works. Leave me alone now. I’ll talk later.”

  Something smells bad in here.

  He turns his head, scans the room. There is a computer console, chairs, video monitors, a desk piled high with dirty dishes. A half-open door leads to a bathroom. His bed has burgundy silk sheets, a yellow comforter. He is dressed in white cotton drawstring trousers and nothing else. Reno pulls the wires from his head and tries to stand. He fails. The soft carpet absorbs him. He crawls toward the bathroom. The prickle of the carpet against his feet and arms feels like nails being hammered in. Inside the bathroom, the wallpaper is made of full-size photographs of refugee children, all dirty faces, bare feet, torn clothes, huge dark eyes.

  Reno reaches for the marble countertop and pulls himself upright, then to his feet. He sways as he stares into the mirror and sees a face he’s never seen before. The eyes of dirty children echo his amazement.

  He remembers what his friends asked him to do, in return for certain favors.

  He remembers what it was like to die.

  *

  Once he had been a pilot flying contraband, then later a speculator, riding the face market up and down and making money on every financial wave. Reno’s body died weeks before, the result of a fiery accident; but before the body failed entirely a pattern of Reno’s mind survived in analog form, sitting in a vat of liquid crystal in Havana, in the Florida Free Zone. Reno’s friends are growing a clone body for him. His mind will be read into the clone, and Reno will live again.

  Reno’s friends, who are paying for all of this, are not precisely disinterested. Because something called Black Mind has been uncovered, a project prepared as a secret weapon by the United States just prior to its loss in the Rock War. A project that would use neuronic interface technology against itself, would not simply make information available to the mind, but overwrite the mind with invading data.

  After the U.S. lost the war the developers shut down the project, perhaps because they were unimaginative and had no orders, perhaps because they were afraid of the technology, the power it represented.

  Reno’s friends are not unimaginative. And they are not afraid. And now Reno is an Orbital power himself, his brain-analog read, courtesy of Black Mind, over the forebrain of man named Albrecht Roon, an architect of the Rock War, according to many a war criminal—and a man who is, thanks to a proxy fight and considerable stock fraud, the new chairman of Tempel Pharmaceuticals Interessengemeinschaft, and about to fly from his private home in the Cordillera Oriental to his giant drug factory in the sky.

  Reno looks at himself in the mirror, sees a beardless, thirtyish man with a scalp lock, kohl-rimmed eyes, corroded teeth. There are dark ceramic interface sockets on his temples and over his ears, each decorated with diamond chips. His muscles are lax, and rhe pale flesh sags on his chest and around his middle. Reno’s not himself any more: he’s died, come through the fire, been re-born.

  Earth’s savior.

  He can’t help laughing.

  *

  Albrecht Roon was an old man in his eighties, transferred nine years ago, via crystal analog, into a younger body. Brain transfer is an inexact science, and sometimes leads to problems of adjustment, incomplete transfer, personality changes. Until Roon could demonstrate his mind was unimpaired, he was demoted and dropped down the gravity well to prove himself again before rising on high to his former place of eminence. Dropped down to where Reno and his friends could get at him.

  Where Black Mind could do its work.

  It all seems insane now. Reno has no confidence in his ability to bring off the impersonation. A few minutes ago, when his consciousness consisted of a fractal analog of his original organic neural net, the choice had seemed simple— take over Roon’s mind, take over his company, use it to benefit the planet. Now the notion is merely preposterous.

  Reno runs his hand over his face. There is a sharp stink in his nostrils, and he realizes it’s his own cologne. He hasn’t smelled anything in so long that the sensation is oppressive. There is something horrid in his mouth. Probably his sense of taste is awakening as well.

  He tries to walk. Vertigo tugs at his belly. His feet keep melting out from under him. The body is wrong. The arms and legs are too short. The center of gravity is off.

  Reno perseveres. An appalling taste stabs his tongue like a knife. After an hour, he can walk fairly well, has begun, tentatively, to use Roon’s reflexes. He returns to the bed, takes one of the phone studs and puts it in a temple socket. The phone line is still open.

  “Anyone home?” he asks.

  The voice that answers is his own.

  *

  Suddenly a memory comes back, returning with such force that Reno staggers. It isn’t taste that he’s regained, it’s thirst. His tongue grates on the roof of his mouth. Now that he recognizes the sensation, the discomfort doubles.

  Reno steps out of the room and into the corridor outside. Against the wall, the hologram of a refugee girl-child burns with cold laser fire. The hall curves to the left, falls slightly. He has a hard time walking. His balance isn’t working properly yet, and he has difficulty coping with the way the floor keeps dropping out from under him.

>   Another child appears. Reno thinks she’s another hologram, but then realizes that this one isn’t dirty or round-bellied, that she wears a white dress and has interface sockets on her head. Her hair is clipped short and parted on the right. He thinks she is about ten. She stops her movement as he appears, moves to stand with her back to the wall, like a soldier making way for a general. She stands with her eyes down, waiting. Panic throbs in Reno’s chest.

  “I need a drink,” Reno says. He tries to sound like a man used to giving orders, but his voice grates like an old file on steel and his tongue feels like a dry sponge. “Come with me.”

  “Si, tío,” the girl says. Her eyes are still downcast, as if she doesn’t want to look at him. She turns and leads Reno down the corridor. In a cold sweat, Reno tries to remember what he knows about Roon, whether he has any family on Earth. He doesn’t think so; so far as he knows, the Roon family is all in orbit.

  Another child appears in the corridor. This one is a boy, dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt. His hair is short, his face sockets dark on his temples. He carries a little schoolboy satchel. Like the girl, he steps aside and stands with his back to the wall as Reno walks by.

  A few steps beyond, the girl walks into another room. It’s a lounge with a wet bar. Rare petroleum-plastic bottles stand ranked beneath its long mirror. Reno hurries behind the bar, almost taking a fall in his eagerness, and fills a glass with water from the tap. He drinks it eagerly.

  It’s the first drink in months. Water pours from the corners of his mouth, splashes on his bare chest.

  He fills the glass again, drinks half of it. He puts the glass down and sees a holographic model of Jupiter hanging below the ceiling, complete with slowly orbiting moons.

  The little girl is still waiting, her eyes downcast. Reno holds out the glass.

  “Want some water?”

  “Thank you, uncle.” The reply is barely audible. She takes the glass, sips from it, stands with the glass in her hand. She never looks at him. Reno takes the glass.

  “You can go,” he says.

  “Thank you, uncle.” Moving quickly, she takes his free hand and kisses it.

  As the chill wet lips touch his skin, Reno realizes what Roon has been using the children for. His flesh turns to ice. He stares at her in shock.

  Above his head, frozen moons circle a gas giant, a chill, pale failed star.

  *

  By evening he has almost got used to talking to himself. The crystal analog of his mind is still in the vat in Cuba and is happy to talk to him on the phone, knowing his clone is still growing in a white, sterile room next door. It’s only the Reno in Roon’s body that’s on a suicide mission; the other will live happily ever after on Earth.

  Reno wonders which of them is the real Reno.

  Then he realizes. The real Reno is dead. His brain boiled and exploded from his skull when his house caught fire. ...

  The two ghosts talk long into the night.

  *

  Movies of Albrecht Roon flicker on the monitors. A Western American voice sounds in Reno’s aural centers, someone who’d met Roon and knew him, talking to Reno through a scrambled channel.

  “He talked in aphorisms. Almost as if he was white-brained, but not quite.”

  “A face case.”

  “He had his head in the interface all the time. Trying to keep track of things. He didn’t have access to the big AIs in orbit, and he had to do it all himself. His rivals in orbit would have torpedoed him if they could, and he had to keep informed.”

  Reno watches the way Roon moved, as if he were still in orbit, drifting from place to place. Listens to the way he talked. The architecture of the future is implied by the architecture of crystal intelligence. ...We can integrate our consciousness with the incorruptible perfection of data. ... Crystal recognizes only reality, only necessity.

  Roon, Reno realizes, was crazy. He’s invaded the mind of a madman.

  The recording ends. White noise fills the room.

  “You didn’t tell me about the children,” Reno says.

  There is a moment’s silence. “Yes, I did.” The voice is surprised. “That was the first thing I told you. We wouldn’t have sent you in there without that.”

  Cold talons touch Reno’s nerves as he realizes that the memory failed to implant.

  He’s in the head of a crazy man, and he doesn’t have the information he needs to survive there.

  *

  Roon’s closet is full of orbital-style clothes, shoes with velcro strips, light sleeveless cotton jackets tailored to the body so they won’t billow out in freefall. No ties, since ties can catch on things. The latest cuts, the latest styles; some of the best Moroccan designers. All the clothes fit perfectly. Roon had been planning his return to orbit for some time.

  Reno pensions off the children, puts them onto a shuttle for the Florida Free Zone, where they’ll be put into boarding school in Mobile. He does it by remote control; he doesn’t think he can face them.

  Roon’s slate for the Tempel Board of Directors was confirmed before Black Mind took him. Reno absorbs everything he can find on them before he takes his private plane to the Gran Sabana port. His own knowledge may be faulty: he has to crosscheck everything.

  People are waiting for him at the wide personnel lock, a long, round tube padded in white chamois brought up from Earth. He scans the faces, recognizes members of the board of directors. There’s a man right in front of him, hand stuck out, and Reno recognizes him as someone named Jackson van Allen, an old crony of Roon’s, head of the Orbital Freeport Control Commission before Roon’s demotion, now back in his old slot. He looks older than the photographs in his dossier, more jowly. His blond hair is light as down, and his handshake is firm, dry.

  “Herzlich Wilkommen, Albrecht,” the man says.

  “Jackson,” Reno says, and freezes. He knows what’s expected, and that what’s expected is German, and he doesn’t know the language.

  His heart lurches. He’s been here two seconds, and already it’s over.

  “Viele Grüssen, Kamerad, ” he says, the words just coming out, and somehow he knows not only the phrase, but the fact that it’s more a Bavarian response than a northern ... how the hell did he know that?

  The corporate anthem begins to blare out of speakers. People straighten a bit, look more respectful. Reno tries to calm his panicked heart, slow his breathing.

  He notes that van Allen has sockets on his head, old-fashioned metal ones. Reno makes note of that. He might have to make use of it.

  The other members of the board wait behind van Allen in the airlock. Reno progresses along the chamois-lined tube and greets them all, manages to remember their names and shift the conversation to English. He’s weightless here, and the board members pass him from hand to hand. Security people drift in the background, weightless, their heads turning left and right, scanning like radar receivers for things out of place. They’re all mercenaries from Earth: Reno isn’t about to trust anyone belonging to the previous administration.

  A chill tide surges up his spine. These are some of the people, he realizes, who plotted the Rock War, who schemed not only for independence for the Orbital habitats—an independence which might have some point—but who had planned to seize control of the Earth as well. The men and women who had drowned Earth’s hopes in a barrage of falling stars, artificial asteroids that crushed cities, crushed dreams. ...

  “Ladies and gentlemen, there will be a full board meeting tomorrow,” Reno says. “For today, I want only to get my reflexes back. And celebrate being in space again, and among my friends.” They applaud politely: their grip shoes hold them at all angles, upside-down, rightside-up, cockbill. Reno smiles, his lips tight over corroded teeth. “Tomorrow,” he says, “we’ll start putting our affairs back in orbit.”

  Van Allen follows him out of the airlock. Reno flails for a moment, and van Allen grabs him by the sleeve. With van Allen’s help, Reno manages to plant his grip shoes on velcro strips by th
e airlock door.

  “Reflexes gone, eh?” van Allen asks. In English, thank God.

  “I’ll get them back.” Reno’s heart is thundering. He has the impression that he’s staring wildly: he tries to calm himself.

  Van Allen leans closer. His eyes are hard.

  “What happens now, Albrecht?”

  Reno looks at him. “We take the next step,” he says. It seems to be the answer van Allen wants.

  *

  “Our stock has risen by three hundred percent following the actions of the Orbital Soviet and my announcement of a policy of retrenchment,” Reno says. “In a few more days or weeks, after the common stock ceases to be the subject of such widespread speculation, we can expect it to return to pre-crash levels. And retrenchment is our policy for the present. But I want us to be looking beyond retrenchment, beyond merely maintaining our position.”

  Reno is happy to be in gravity again, in the huge rotating cylinder that is Tempel Habitat One. The long Tempel boardroom table is a half-inch laser-sliced ovoid, asteroid material, coated in smooth gas-planet plastic and gleaming softly with flecks of silicon and nickel. Placed around the table are nine of the fourteen board members. The rest, in Ukraine or South Africa or the Belt, watch through coded communications links. Reno can see their faces on video monitors inset into the ceiling, all except the woman in the Belt, who is so far away that she can’t effectively participate and is recording the meeting for viewing later.