Adam Roberts - Stone(2002) Read online

  The jailer and her deputy were charged to look after me, to make sure I couldn't escape (but escape was impossible!) and that I didn't harm my surroundings too savagely if the mood was upon me. But mostly they left me to myself, and I wandered the little hills and dived into the river and threw myself on to the grass to sleep.

  I would happily have drowned myself, if I could have. I really would. I was ready to die, bitter in my imprisonment, hating myself. I tried ripping at my skin with my nails, but that is a hard thing to do – have you tried it? I would lie awake, with the artificial sky dark and the stars fuming and shining a few hundred metres over my head, and I would imagine it. Grow my nails, bite them into sharp shapes, and then tear the flesh at my wrists to destroy my life, to kill myself. But it is not easy. The scratching does not penetrate the skin; then it starts to hurt, and your body recoils almost in spite of yourself. Then the dotTech kills the pain, and knits together your skin, and you're back where you were.

  So I threw myself into the water and tried to drown, but as with the red-skinned deputy, the dotTech kept me alive. Try as I might, the caustic sensation of water in my lungs and all my agonised underwater coughing did not prevent my bloodstream taking in oxygen and delivering it to my body. It is clever, this nanotechnology, it can solve any problems presented to it. Its goal, its reason for existing, is to keep us alive, ana it kept me allive. EVEN me, even a badman like myself.

  Then I told myself this as I lay on the bank by the river, looking up at the broad plastic leaves of the trees over me; I told myself that when I was executed, and the dotTech left me, then I would be able to kill myself. (Dribbly shades of light against the canopy of leaves. Wobbling and transcendent, bright and warm.) That thought gave me comfort. If you were me, you'd have wanted that death too.

  I had brought my dotTech with me when I had first come to the jail. Funnelled through the narrow gate, which the gravity engines had opened in the body of the star, and dropped from the artificial sky to swoop round and land. The jailer, the lemon-coloured woman, had picked me up as if I were a parcel and taken me to the river, to wash the last of the charred and crumbling foam from my body. Then I had been left to myself.

  The realisation that I was in prison had been a terrible thing. I had spent days unable to do more than lie on the ground, or cry to myself on the grass. I didn't sleep well. I was used to beds under roofs, inside rooms. Sleeping on the grass under the sky (even an artificial sky) takes some getting used to. This long, slow, melancholy period was interspersed with my abrupt fits of rage, screaming and running about, dashing myself against the plastic trees and colliding head first, hurling myself into the river to try and drown myself, ripping off the last of my clothes and doing violence to my hair. I suppose this is why they left the dotTech in my body for those first weeks, to compensate for my self-destructive rages. So that the bruises I bashed upon my face could heal in minutes, the tiny machines in my bloodstream mending the rips in my capillaries, ferrying away the dark dead matter, making everything smooth and pure again. So that the hair I pulled in fistfuls from my scalp could come extruding out again, like a magic trick.

  And then the morning of my execution came. Of course I knew I was slated for execution. When the day itself came, I knew something was happening because the executioner (as I realised she was) approached me with a serious expression on her face. Her partner came too, his svelte little red body gleaming in the light. I remember thinking how odd it was that he decided to remain a man, given his mania for swimming; why not let the dotTech modify his body to become a woman, to lose that drag-creating tangle of organs between his legs? But he stayed a man. Perhaps it had something to do with the dynamic of his relationship with the executioner.

  'Are you ready?' she asked.

  This meant I was about to be executed.

  'No,' I said. 'By no means.' I think I started crying. It is a frightening thing to contemplate. If I did cry it would have been in a restrained way; little gulping sobs, not great howls.

  But she reached forward, smiling all the time. Her big yellow face, with its sagging jowls and drooping nose; the whites of her eyes bright against the sallow hue of her skin, and then her purple irises a starburst with darker lines, and in the very middle of those eyes her pupils, completely black. As black as stones – as black as you are yourself, dear stone, excepting only the vague, submerged mottling that is just visible underneath your surface sheen. She leant towards me, and I had a long time to study her face, so I remember it particularly vividly.

  What she was doing was pressing her finger against my wrist. She took up my left hand with her right, and pressed a finger tight against the skin. She was the executioner because in her body there were nano-machines specially designed to communicate with the standard dotTech in my body. They passed through her skin to my skin, ana into my system. She held my wrist tightly, and I could smell the faint papery, almost dusty smell of her close in my nostrils. She was humming to herself a little. She had been loaded with this charge, and it was a rare responsibility. Human beings will take all manner of adaptive dotTech into their bodies, but this particular adaptation was unique. Who would want to purge out all the dotTech? I'm sure she carried her charge with a due sense of gravity. The machines she had gathered in her finger-ends were designed to command the machines in my body to quit me.

  When she was finished she let go of my arm and stood away, looking at me with a certain detachment. I began to feel queasy. Then I had a sharp sense of thirst, and then a pain bubbled up out of my deep insides and spread across all my skin. I started bleeding from my pores. My eyes went dizzy with rheum, and mucus came spurting as if under pressure from my nostrils. I could feel my muscles go limp, and a stream of urine come hurrying out to splatter on the turf. I hurt. More blood came until my whole skin was slick with it. My ears were wet, my mouth filled up with blood. I started screaming, but my fluid-filled mouth bubbled and gargled the sound — perhaps it even sounded comical. I staggered, flapping my arms with the pain. Pain is a rarity for the people of t'T, because the nano-machines protect us from the worst of the sensation. I did not enjoy it at that moment, I can tell you. I lurched forward, fell, somehow landed on my knees.

  I coughed, wept. The hunger to die, as sharp and tangy as a physical hunger, overwhelmed me again. But I stayed alive. Fluid poured from me; vomit from my mouth, tears and rheum from my eyes, mucus from my nose, urine from between my legs. Even my pores wept myriad little dots of blood. And the stream I produced coagulated and tracked its way down the incline towards the water. Nano-machines prefer a fluid environment, although they can exist in dry ground, or even in dead vacuum if they need to. They are tough; amazingly so.

  Then the convulsions passed, and I fell forward. A half-throated gasp was coming out of me, regular as a drumbeat. I don't know how long I lay there. I lay there a long time.

  I dragged myself up, eventually, because I was so thirsty. I had lost a great deal of fluid, my skin was hot and my throat felt dusty and burnt. I staggered, my legs wobbling as if they were rubbery, but I made it to the edge of the artificial waterway and tumbled in. The cool enveloping of the river was delicious to my skin; I opened my mouth and gulped water. It was half in my mind to sink to the bottom and drown, but to my surprise I found myself swimming to the other side of the bank. Then I lay in the water under the bright light of the star-shaped holes in our blue, plastic, arched, artificial sky. I lay with both my arms stretched out on the dirt of the bank, and the back of my head on the ground, but with my body and legs floating out in the water. I was drained. That word is insufficient to express how emptied-out and weak I felt.

  3rd

  Dear Stone,

  Let's talk about you, yes? You know, do you, that you were brought to this prison, like me? They built the prison a hundred or more years ago, for another criminal, another statistical freak such as myself. I don't know where s/he is now. But they built the prison in as remote and inaccessible a place as possible. This is what t
hey did:

  They chose a star at the far reaches of t'T space, a star without an inhabitable planet, circled by nothing more than a few rocky asteroids and one atmosphere-free planet of iron. The star is close to the Wallows end of the Great Gravity Trench, but apart from that there is nothing remarkable or noticeable about the stellar environment. This star has a designation, although I couldn't quote it to you.[1] Generally it is now known as the jailstar, because it houses the jail. Its nearest neighbouring system is Rain.

  A hundred years ago they came, flying faster than light across space, and arrived in orbit; from there they built spaceships and orbital platforms. Using these they broke up one of the asteroids, manipulating its mass to collapse together short-lived strings of superdense material. The strings focused gravity, because of their immense mass for a brief time before other atomic forces broke up the effect. Using these gravity tools, the builders carved out a hollow sphere a kilometre or so across out of the iron planet. This was the basic structure, the underpinning of the jail. This iron-nickel hollow globe was treated and adapted; its portals fixed, some of its inner features sculpted and filled. Perhaps it was at this stage, dear stone, that you yourself were brought in; taken from the surface of the dead world, perhaps, where millions of years of gravitational tug and pull had moved countless bits of rock back and forth in dry ocean-like sinks so that they became smoothed, rounded, shaped. (This is only my imagination, you understand; I can't be sure for certain.) Perhaps the builders shaped you themselves, dear stone; setting Haüd-machine workers to carve homely pebbles out of asteroid rock, oxidising the surface of the new-turned stones to give them that blue, flinty, worn look. I don't know. But you were certainly brought and placed inside the globe, along with the aggregate filler for covering the fusion engines and the large scale computers and processors that attend to the day-to-day operation of the jail. After this, the inside was landscaped properly; the water added and pumped to move the river from the lake through the miniature hills and back to the lake. The plastic grass and fake plastic trees were added. And the blue plastic coating that gives the sky its vivid colour.

  Then this jail was dropped into the body of the star itself; not too far inside, because they wanted the gravity of the star's mass to operate, making the grass 'ground' and the ceiling 'up'. A few kilometres down. This was the most complicated part, I'd imagine. The heat inside the body of a star is great enough to melt and vaporise any ordinary matter. But what is heat? Heat is atoms and particles moving with greater and greater agitation. Heat melts and dissolves matter because the particles of the heat are so energetic, they bounce about so violently, that they punch down the bonds that hold together structures. To insulate against heat you must make the bonds very strong; or else you can persuade the hot atoms to move in a different direction; to deflect, as it were, the vigour of their motion. This is what the machines embedded in the walls of the jail are designed to do; they set up a gravitational interference pattern, drawing their effectiveness from loops of dense-matter strings wrapped around the jail. The immense heat of the star rages around, a sort of quantum slipstream; but the jail stays cool.

  Indeed, if it were not for certain carefully structured gaps in the fabric of the prison walls, this insulation would be so effective that everybody inside the jail would freeze. Freeze, in the midst of all that heat – imagine it! So the builders dotted the artificial sky with certain regularly-spaced vents, which they made in the shape of five-limbed stars. These portals, which can be several metres across, are narrowed to allow the immission of only a tiny stream of photons from the stellar fires on the outside. The gateways are mostly magnetic. This provides light and heat for the artificial world inside.

  There is another portal; in the very top of the artificial sky. Through this gateway, which opens and closes in a peristaltic pulse of magnetic compression every four months, new visitors, new prisoners, new jailers enter; and old visitors and jailers (but never prisoners) leave. It was through this hole in the sky that I dropped into the world, wrapped in deep-space foam, and fell to the water directly beneath.

  So this hollow globe was dropped into the fiery matter of this small star; it sank through the plasma to a predetermined depth. Now it hovers there, seven great motors on the outer skin balancing it like a submarine in a massive sea of flames. It has existed for many decades, and will exist for many decades more. At the moment, indeed, it exists only to house me. I suppose the builders of this world flattered themselves into thinking that nobody could escape from it; for who could cross the moat of stellar plasma and fire? Who could travel beyond that into the immense cold of deep space beyond? Who could rescue a prisoner in such isolation?

  4th

  Dear Stone,

  My jailer had, I suppose, chosen to be inside the jail. She must have had her reasons for wanting to spend years of her life in close proximity to a criminal. Perhaps she was curious about the criminal frame of mind; perhaps she was researching murder, or planning to compose a great poem or sculpt an asteroid into a great piece on the subject. I expected, in the weeks after my execution, when I was getting used to living without the dotTech in my body, for her to begin asking me questions. Perhaps for her to test or study me in some way. But she barely interacted with me.

  Mostly she swam with her partner, the red-skinned man. Sometimes they would retreat inside their shelter (they were allowed a shelter; I had nowhere to go and nothing to do but climb the plastic-grass hillocks, stare at the clinking rivulets, swim in the lake). From time to time she would give me a 'wellhello', mention something or other. It was only ever pleasantries.

  It dawned on me that she was in no hurry. With the benefit of nanotechnology in her body, she could live many many hundreds of years. In the elaborate, filigree civilisations on some of the turnwards worlds of t'T, human beings more than a thousand years old were not uncommon. I, on the other hand, was now condemned to live out the term of a 'natural' life. Before the adoption of dotTech, humans rarely lasted more than fifty years. In the Wheah, for instance, where religion prevents the adoption of dotTech, a human being who reaches a hundred years of age is given a mighty celebratory party, so unusual is that feat. (Or so the rumour goes – to be honest, we know little about the Wheah.) But this was now my fate; I had a few decades of life left to me. Maybe years. Maybe less.

  In the months immediately after my execution, in fact, I mostly spent my time contemplating how ubiquitous and yet how invisible dotTech is. I grew up with the nano-machines in my body, as did everybody on my world, everybody in t'T. After my execution, though, I was possibly the only t'T human to have no such technology inside me. Those minuscule machines, self-constructed and self-maintaining, are built from the bricks of atoms themselves. Whirling around in the blood and lymph, housing themselves in human cells and fluids, and working! Efficiently, problem-solvingly, intelligently, tackling decay, infection, free radicals, pollutants, toxins; rebuilding tissue, balancing electrolytes and hormones, reducing the intensity of pain signals in the nerves, enhancing the bliss of sexual connection, fiddling with the very strands of DNA itself to prevent them unwinding – keeping the whole organism in perfect shape. How little I thought about these machines when I had them in my body! How much I missed them when they were taken away!

  I noticed small things at first. I would graze myself in the usual, careless way of humanity; catching the back of my hand against the rough plastic bark of a tree, or knocking my face against the stones at the bottom of the river. Where this cut would normally fade and vanish within minutes, I now discovered it was still alive, still hurting, days later. I would bruise myself, often without knowing how or remembering when — I might simply notice a bruise, like a gaseous discolouration inside the translucent matter of my skin. Before, bruises would be cleaned and healed in an hour; now they lasted days. My joints became stiff. My hair fell out. I developed sore patches on my face; and when I touched and scratched these they became more sore.

  Mostly I was eating pro
tein fruits, manufactured by the processors in the trees, and drinking the water from the lake. This food had been fine and sufficient before. Now I began experiencing bubbling stabs of pain in my stomach. My bowels loosened, and wicked-smelling matter started dribbling out of me in place of a regular stool. The temperature of my head varied alarmingly. I might wake in the morning with my skull star-hot, warm sweat trickling from my forehead and into my eyes. Or I might wake trembling and jittering with the cold.

  It was physical torture; nothing less. The cultures of the t'T pride themselves on being civilised, unlike (they say to themselves) the barbarism of the Wheah. It is undeniable that I had committed terrible crimes, and other cultures would simply and cleanly have executed me. But the t'T went to this enormous effort to secure me away from humanity, that I might not harm anybody else. They did this in the name of civilisation – and yet they stood aside, passive, whilst I endured the miseries of life without dotTech. The illness, the weariness. It was an unhurried execution; my body wearing itself out in the 'natural' course over a few years to die slow and painfully. A quick death would have been kinder.

  I tried to raise this with my jailer on several occasions; but her big yellow face was impassive, unresponsive. I might start reasoning with her, but soon lose control; without the dotTech regulating my hormonal level it was easy to froth at the mouth, to rage and become incoherent. I may even have tried to attack her, to beat her with my now feeble arms, my disease-weakened fingers. But she was a big human, and adept at dancing – she would hardly have been taken on as jailer otherwise. She pushed my blows away, or sidestepped them, and I was left on the false soil weeping and weeping.