“Della! Della, are you all right? Della! It’s me, Willy! God, I’m sorry, Della, I had no idea you’d flip like that . . . are you all right? Look how fast your heart is going!” Willy stopped and looked closer. “And, Della . . . “
Della looked down at her heartshirt. The red circles were racing out from her heart. But something had been added to the pattern. Circles were also pumping out from a spot right over her swollen belly. Baby heart circles.
3
Berenice
In 2030, the Moon had two cities: Einstein (formerly known as Disky), and the Nest. They lay within eight miles of each other at the southeastern lobe of the Sea of Tranquility, not far from the site of the original lunar landing of 1969. Originally built by the autonomous robots known as boppers, Einstein was now a human-filled dome habitat about the size of Manhattan. There was a spaceport and a domed trade center three miles east of Einstein, and five miles east of that was the Maskelyne G crater, entrance to the underground bopper city known as the Nest.
Cup-shaped and buffed to a mirror sheen, Maskelyne G glittered in the sun’s hard radiation. At the focus of the polished crater was a conical prism that, fourteen days a month, fed a vast stick of light down into a kind of mineshaft .
In the shaft’s great, vertical tunnel, bright beings darted through the hot light; odd-shaped living machines that glowed with all the colors of the rainbow. These were the boppers: self-reproducing robots who obeyed no man. Some looked humanoid, some looked like spiders, some looked like snakes, some looked like bats. All were covered with flickercladding, a microwired imipolex compound that could absorb and emit light.
The shaft went one mile straight down, widening all the while like a huge upside-down funnel. Tunnels punched into the shaft’s sides, and here and there small mirrors dipped into the great light beam, channeling bits of it off through the gloom. At the bottom of the shaft was a huge, conical sublunar space—the boppers’ Nest. It was like a cathedral, but bigger, much bigger, an underground pueblo city that would be inconceivable in Earth’s strong gravity. The temperature was only a few degrees Kelvin—this suited the boppers, as many of them still had brains based on supercooled Josephson-junction processors. Even though room-temperature superconductors were available, the quantum-mechanical Josephson effect worked only at five degrees Kelvin and below. Too much heat could kill a J-junction bopper quickly, though the newest boppers—the so-called petaflop boppers—were based on fiber-optics processors that were immune to heat.
The main column of sunlight from the Moon’s surface splashed down to fill a central piazza on the Nest’s floor. Boppers danced in and out of the light, feeding on the energy. The petaflops had to be careful not to let extraneous light into their bodies; they had mirrored bodyshells beneath their flickercladding. Their thoughts were pure knots of light, shunted and altered by tiny laser crystals.
Crowds of boppers milled around the edges of the light-pool, trading things and talking. The light-pool was their marketplace and forum. The boppers’ radio-wave voices blended into a staticky buzz—part English, and part machine language. The color pulses of their flickercladding served to emphasize or comment on their digital transmissions; much as people’s smiles and grimaces add analog meaning to what they say.
The great clifflike walls of the Nest were pocked with doors—doors with strange expressionistic shapes, some leading to tunnels, some opening into individual bopper cubettes. The bright, flickering boppers on the upsloping cliffs made the Nest a bit like the inside of a Christmas tree.
Factories ringed the bases of the cliff s. Off on one side of the Nest were the hell-flares of a foundry powered by light beams and tended by darting demon figures. Hard by the foundry was the plastics refinery, where the boppers’ flickercladding and body-boxes were made. In front of these two factories was an array of some thousand chip-etching tables—tables manned by micro-eyed boppers as diligent as Franz Kafka’s co-workers in the Workmen’s Insurance Company of Prague.
On the other side of the Nest were the banks of pink-tanks. These were hydroponic meat farms growing human serums and organs that could be traded for that incredibly valuable Earthly substance: oil. Crude oil was the raw material for the many kinds of organic compounds that the boppers needed to build their plastic bodies. Closer to the Nest’s center were streets of shops: wire millers, flickercladders, eyemakers, debuggers, info merchants, and the like.
The airless frigid space of the Nest, two miles across, swarmed with boppers riding their ion jets: carrying things, and darting in and out of the slanting, honeycombed cliffs. No two boppers looked the same; no two thought alike.
Over the course of the boppers’ rapid evolution, something like sexual differences had arisen. Some boppers—for reasons only a bopper could explain—were “he,” and some were “she.” They found each other beautiful; and in their pursuit of beauty, they constantly improved the software makeup of their race.
Berenice was a petaflop bopper shaped like a smooth, nude woman. Her flickercladding was gold and silver over her mirror-bright body. Her shining skin sometimes sketched features, sometimes not. She was the diplomat, or hardware messenger, for the weird sisterhood of the pink-tanks. She and the other tankworkers were trying to find a way to put bopper software onto all-meat bodies and brains. Their goal was to merge bopperdom into the vast information network that is organic life on Earth.
Emul was a petaflop as well, though he disdained the use of any fixed body shape, let alone a human body shape. Emul had a low opinion of humans. When at rest, Emul’s body had the shape of a two-meter cube, with a surface tessellated into red, yellow, and blue. But Emul’s body could come apart—like a thousand-piece Transformer robot toy, like a 3D jigsaw puzzle. He could slide arms and legs out of his bodycube at will; more surprising, he could detach chunks of his body and control them like robot-remotes. Emul, too, was a kind of diplomat. He worked with Oozer, a brilliant, dreak-addicted, flickercladding designer who was currently trying to build a subquantum superstring-based processor with one thousand times the capacity of the petaflops. Emul and Oozer wanted to transcend Earth’s info rather than to merge with it.
Despite—or perhaps because of—their differences, Emul was fascinated by Berenice, and he tried to be at the light-pool every time she came to feed. One day late in November he told her what he wanted.
“Berenice, life’s a deep gloom ocean and we’re lit-up funfish of dementional zaazz, we’re flowers blooming out till the loudsun wither and the wind blows our dead husks away.” Emul unfolded two arms to grip Berenice’s waist. “It’s so wonder whacky that we’re here at all, swimming and blooming in the long gutter of time. Rebirth means new birth means no more me, so why can’t we, and I mean now or nevermore, uh, screw? Liddle baby Emerinice or Beremul, another slaver on the timewheel, I think that’s what the equipment’s for, huh? I’m no practical plastic daddy but I’ve done my pathetic mime, Berenice, for to cometh the bridegroom bright. In clear: I want to build a scion with you. The actual chips are in my actual yearning cubette right this realtime minute. I propose! I’ve hacked my heifer a ranch, you bet: laser crystals, optical fibers, flickercladding . . . and heat, Berenice, hot heat. Come on home with me and spread, wide-hipped goldie sweet toot pots. Today’s the day for love to love.” As Emul jittered out his roundabout proposal, various-sized little bumps of flickercladding kept moving up and down his body, creating the illusion of cubes moving on intricate systems of hinges. He was trying to find a formation that Berenice could love. Just now he looked like a jukebox with three arms.