“AAhhhhhh,” Miri crooned triumphantly.
I rolled us both over, so that I was on top. Miri preferred it that way. I thrust hard, then harder. She liked it really rough. Eventually I felt her shudder under me, and I let myself go.
Afterward, I lay still, my eyes closed, Miri curled against me with her head on my shoulder. For a brief piercing moment I remembered how love was between us a decade ago, in the beginning, when just the touch of her hand could turn me shivery and hot. I tried not to think, not to feel any shapes at all.
But making a void in the mind is impossible. I suddenly remembered the thing that had tugged at my mind about Jason Reynolds, Kevin Baker’s great-grandson. Last year, the kid had nearly drowned. He had taken a skimmer out on the Gulf straight into Hurricane Julio. Huevos Verdes had found him only because Terry Mwakambe had developed some esoteric homing devices, and Jason had been brought back from death only by using on him some part of the project that hadn’t even been tested yet.
When he revived, Jason admitted knowing the hurricane was coming. He wasn’t trying to commit suicide, he said earnestly. Everyone believed him; Sleepless don’t commit suicide. They’re too much in love with their own minds to end them. With all of them hanging over his bed, his parents and Kevin and Leisha and Miri and Christy and Terry, Jason had said in a small voice that he hadn’t known the sea would get quite that rough quite that fast. He just wanted to feel the boat get pitched around a lot. He just wanted to watch the huge, angry sky, and feel the rain lash him. He, a Sleepless, just wanted to feel vulnerable.
Miranda whispered, “Nobody ever makes me feel like you do, Drew. Nobody.”
I kept my eyes closed, pretending to sleep.
In the late afternoon we went to the labs. Sara Cerelli and Jonathan Markowitz were there, dressed in shorts, barefoot. One of the requirements of the project was that at no stage did anything need to be sterile.
“Hello, Drew,” Jon said. Sara nodded. Their concentration on their work made closed, muddy shapes in my mind.
A blob of living tissue sat in a shallow open tray on a lab bench, connected to machines by slender tubes and even more slender cables. Dozens of display screens ringed the rooms. Nothing on any of them was comprehensible to me. The tissue in the tray was flesh-colored, a light dun, but no particular form. It looked as if it could change shape, oozing into something else. On my last visit, Miri had told me it couldn’t do that. No Sleepless are squeamish. I’m not either, but the shapes that crawled in and out of my mind as I looked at the thing were pale and speckled and smelled of dampness, although diamond-precise on their edges. Like the nanobuilt walls of Huevos Verdes.
I said, stupidly, “It’s alive.”
Jon smiled. “Oh, yes. But not sentient. At least not. . .” He trailed off, and I knew he couldn’t find the right words. It should have made a bond between us. It didn’t. Jon couldn’t find the right words because any words that he picked would be too easy, too incomplete, for his ideas — and still too hard for me to follow. Miri had told me that Jon, more than any of the others except Terry Mwakambe, thought in mathematics. But it was the same with all of them, even Miri: her speech was a quarter beat too slow. I had caught myself talking like that only a month ago. It had been to Kevin Baker’s four-year-old great-grandson.
Miri tried. “The tissue is a macro-level organic computer, Drew, with limited organ-simulation programming, including nervous, cardiovascular, and gastrointestinal systems. We’ve added Strethers self-monitoring feedback loops and submolecular, self-reproducing, single-arm assemblers. It can … it can experience programmed biological processes and report on them minutely. But it has neither sentience nor volition.”
“Oh,” I said.
The thing moved a little in its tray. I looked away. Miri saw, of course. She sees everything.
She said quietly, “We’re getting closer. That’s what it means. Ever since the breakthrough with the bacteriorhodopsin, we’re getting much closer.”
I made myself look at the thing again. Faint capillaries pulsed below the surface. The pale, damp shapes in my mind crawled, like maggots over rock.
Miri said, “If we pour a nutrient mixture into the tray, Drew, it can select and absorb what it needs and break it down for energy.”
“What kind of nutrient mixture?” I had learned enough on my last visit to be able to ask this question.
Miri made a face. “Glucose-protein, mostly. There’s still a way to go.”
“Have you solved the problem of getting nitrogen directly from the air?” I had memorized this question. It made a tinny, hollow shape in my mind. But Miri smiled her luminous smile.
“Yes and no. We’ve engineered the microorganisms, but tissue receptivity is still foundering on the Tollers-Hilbert factor, especially in the epidermal fibrils. And on the nitrogen receptor-mediated endocytosis problem — no progress.”
“Oh,” I said.
“We’ll solve it,” Miri said, a quarter beat too slow. “It’s just a matter of designing the right enzymes.”
Sara said, “We call the thing Galwat.” She and Jon laughed.
Miri said quickly, “For Galatea, you know. And Erin Galway. And John Gait, that fictional character who wanted to stop the motor of the world. And, of course, Worthington’s transference equations…”
“Of course,” I said. I had never heard of Galatea or Erin Galway or John Gait or Worthington.
“Galatea’s from a Greek myth. A sculptor—”
“Let me see my performance stats now,” I said. Sara and Jon glanced at each other. I smiled and held out my hand to Miri. She grasped it hard, and I felt hers tremble.
(Quick, fluttery shapes filled my mind, fine as paper. A dozen molecular levels thick. They settled on a rock, rough and hard and old as the earth. The fluttering grew faster and faster, the fine light paper grew red hot, and the rock shattered. At its heart was frozen milky whiteness, pulsing with faint veins.)
Miri said, “Don’t you want to see Nikos’ and Allen’s latest work on the Cell Cleaner? It’s coming along much faster than this! And Christy and Toshio have had a real breakthrough in error-checking protein-assembler programming—”
I said, “Let me see the performance stats now.”
She nodded once, twice, four times. “The stats look good, Drew. But there’s a funny jag in the data in the second movement of your concert. Terry says you need to change direction there. It’s rather complicated.”
“Then you’ll explain it to me,” I said evenly.
Her smile was dazzling. Again Sara and Jon glanced at each other, and said nothing.
The first time Miri showed me how the Supers communicated with each other, I couldn’t believe it. It was thirteen years ago, right after they came down from Sanctuary. She had led me into a room with twenty-seven holostages on twenty-seven terminal desks. Each had been programmed to “speak” a different language, based on English but modified to the thought strings of its owner. Miri, sixteen years old, had explained one of her own thought strings to me.
“Suppose you say a sentence to me. Any single sentence.”
“You have beautiful breasts.”
She blushed, a maroon mottling of her dark skin. She did have beautiful breasts, and beautiful hair. They offset a little the big head, knobby chin, awkward gait. She wasn’t pretty, and she was too intelligent not to know it. I wanted to make her feel pretty.
She said, “Pick another sentence.”
“No. Use that sentence.”
She did. She spoke it to the computer, and the holostage began to form a three-dimensional shape of words, images, and symbols linked to each other by glowing green lines.
“See, it brings out the associations my mind makes, based on its store of past thought strings and on algorithms for the way I think. From just a few words it extrapolates, and predicts, and mirrors. The programming is called ‘mind mirroring,’ in fact. It captures about ninety-seven percent of my thoughts about ninety-two percent of the time, and then I can add the rest. And the best part is—”