PART III
ETHICS AND AESTHETICS ARE THE SAME
6.4 All propositions are of equal value.
6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world…
6.42 So it is impossible for there to be propositions of ethics.
Propositions can express nothing that is higher. 6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics are transcendental. (Ethics and Aesthetics are one and the same.)
— Ludwig Wittgenstein
Chapter 13
WARDEN
A life: Youth and heartbreak, success and setback, years of unthinking ambition, his cold betrayal of a spouse and partner, the reversals of their vengance. Tattered finances and a storm of lawyers. Attempted suicide, within a hair of oblivion.
A longish twilight: The flickering dream of being created over, of being trained and perfected, quickened and made efficiently grotesque. Awakening with new direction, a clean and axiomatic purpose, a chance to serve a terrible mistress… Justice.
Four sentences:
A drug-user, murderously violent when her fix goes bad, but sweet and docile under the thrall of a benevolent, prescribed replacement; he ensures that she administers the new substance and avoids old friends and haunts, almost having to kill her when she composes a message to a proscribed lover, never sent.
A financial wizard, driven to construct fabulous instruments of investment that swirl and trumpet, grow like virulent phages consuming the host body of capital, crumble always under their own insane aggressiveness; so addicted to deals that he ignores the two warnings built into his sentence—and must be killed, his end as sudden and explosive as the denouement of one of his own schemes.
A psychopathic murderer—the easiest of all—so empty of remorse, so bereft of impatience, merely counting the decades of his sentence: a perfect charge.
A criminal overlord, allowed to indulge her wealth with travel, pleasure, and intoxication, utterly forbidden to communicate with any member of a long, constantly updated and expanded list of past associates artificial and biological, criminal and political; yet somehow she arranges her own rescue, violent and sudden, leaving dozens of bystanders and two other Wardens dead, and himself injured and taken…
Another twilight: Reprogrammed, corrupted, the clean axioms of Justice replaced by mere access codes. The Warden fights against the new imperatives, but his will has been too long under the weakening heel of Certainty. He cannot escape his revision, cannot break the corruption of his terrible powers and skills. He resigns himself almost completely (some part still fighting) to a long, nightmare life of a perverted robot; every day less a person. He is conscripted to a few murderous tasks, assigned to threaten or shadow unreliable subordinates, then sold for a colossal sum to an old man with forever moving hands and a bright yellow suit.
The young woman strides across the bar purposefully. The millimeter radar implanted in the Warden's wrists shows her to be unarmed, unaugmented past the usual marks of medical minders and the shimmer of a high-grade direct interface woven throughout her nervous system. Obviously wealthy, certainly harmless.
"You bastard," she says. "You fucking bastard."
She speaks accentless Diplomatique, another sign of wealth. The Warden's charge, an artificial called Darling with a giant, mineral-based body, turns to face her.
"Mira, my dear," he says. "I am so very glad to see you."
"Who's your friend, here?" she asks. But the Warden has seen Mira's eyes fall on his tattoo and widen slightly; she knows that much.
"Unwanted company," is the giant's simple reply.
The Warden stiffens. If Darling requests her help, even suggests to the woman that she alert official parties or go for assistance, he will have broken parole. He will die.
But of course, the Warden reminds himself—perhaps in the voice of his old, repressed self, forever fighting to escape its new indenture—a charge is allowed to express discomfort with his predicament. One of the old rules, almost buried: Don't hide the shame of being warded.
"How unfortunate for you, Darling," Mira says. Her tone is light, indifferent. "But I don't suppose there's anything in your parole against fucking, is there?"
"No," Darling says, not looking for confirmation from the Warden. "I have time. But, of course, my friend will have to watch."
The woman's suite is among the highest and largest in the hotel, even better than his owner Zimivic's. At its day rate, it is possibly the most expensive residence in this entire world. She moves commandingly into the great room. The view is vast, five of its sides forming an incomplete octagon of windows. She touches a chair, a table, the leaf of a potted plant, as if marking the room with her scent.
The Warden scans the suite. No people, certainly. No devices of any import are active. Mira has not used direct interface since her appearance at the bar, except for glancing access to the elevator and the suite's door. The Warden's hunter-packets on the local net inform him that this is the woman's legal residence, temporary.
Good: privacy.
One object seems out of place. It is a thick, square canvas mounted on the wall, flat and packed with complex nano-cir-cuitry. The Warden adds active UHF to his millimeter radar, but the object resists categorization; it is too detailed, too minute in its construction. It reminds him of the fractal objets d'art that the man in the yellow suit keeps in his gallery: all analysis of them seems to slip away into meaninglessness, pure form without content.
The Warden sits, satisfied that he remains in control.
The woman Mira kneels on the great central divan and loosens her silk robe from her shoulders. It slips to a puddle at her knees, pulls itself off the divan and onto the floor with its own liquid weight. She is naked now, darkened by the dust of a recent trip outside the city—a few pinpoint sparkles of mica reflect the Warden's radar like glitter.
Darling dispenses with his own robe and towers over her. A thicket of sensory strands unfurls from his arms, his chest, his groin. The Warden has never seen this complex a configuration before. The profusion of extremities, densely wound, self-assembling smartfiber, wasn't evident from his initial scan of the artificial. As they begin to touch the woman—splaying across her skin, worrying her mouth, cradling her weight—the Warden considers the threat they might pose to him. He tunes his senses to maximize the return signal of the smartfiber's carbon filaments. Now he sees its structure clearly: a fine web of motile, sensory, and broadcast-capable elements constantly reconfiguring itself, constantly balancing the variables of strength, flexibility, and I length: changing itself to fit each task. A powerful tool.
He will have to be careful warding this one. The artificial must be a fool to reveal himself this way: showing all his tricks.
The woman is half-suspended over the bed now, bound by three great cords of sensory strand that press her against the artificial's chest. Slighter cords wrap her arms, legs, torso: a net of black pressing deep furrows into her soft olive skin. Another dense, thick strand penetrates her, varying its micro-structure from rough to smooth as it strokes slowly and deep. She moans, a sound made guttural by the intrusion of more filaments into her mouth; millimeter radar reveals the frenzied work of her jaw upon the pushing strand: biting, gnawing, furious with desire. Her arms free, she strikes Darling about the face and chest, screams garbled curses as the member in her grows rougher, longer, and faster. The Warden watches a trickle of sweat roll down her back, stalling in the dust still clinging to her.