The White Abacus

by Damien Broderick

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Long before William Shakespeare, tales were told of the Dane Ameleth whose noble father was murdered by the uncle who swiftly weds new widow Gerutha. Must Ameleth repay this crime by killing his uncle? The White Abacus dares to reconfigure the best known version of the classic tale, Shakespeare's Hamlet, to create a futuristic revenge drama with an entirely different outcome. Telmah is an inventive genius. Ophelia is no sobbing suicide but rather the impressive Warrior Rose, who shockingly revises the fate of her lover. In this exotic future history, the galaxy is open to anyone who passes through a hex gate, whether hu (augmented human) or ai (artificial mind). Telmah's close friend is the ai Ratio, newly embodied to the Real. Like all members of his asteroid tribe, Telmah is forbidden to use the hex transport system, since that would doom his rebirth. Out of this agonizing dilemma comes a feverish pursuit of truth and duty, love and near-madness, in an endlessly startling future where nothing turns out the way you expect.

Release date: May 7, 2020

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 400

Sample

On the day I was born, the ai Conclave deputized me to a hu committee on matters of general concern. My meeting was fixed for four hours after my birth, so I spent that time hexing to the most beautiful places in the Solar. The spring blooms of the Tuileries were fragrant in their profusion, lovely as the Monet murals in the Orangerie. It was warm morning when I visited the Grand Canyon, and chilly morning as I stood some minutes later in the green, torrent-foaming Valles Marineris on Mars, and later still watched the whole ochre and khaki world, it seemed, from T’ian-an-men Piazza at the caldera peak of Olympus Mons, kilometers above the vast planetary bulge of Tharsis Planitia. From Pluto’s observatory blister the sun was a poignant star, a delicious contrast to its fireball beyond the crater’s lip high above Mercury’s icy south polar station. I lingered in the hu Poetry Preserve at Stratford-upon-Avon: quaint, meditative, ancient beyond belief, long repaired after its centuries of industrial ruination. At the end of my four hours (Saturn’s braided rings, burning Venus all a-tremble from the festung in Beta Regio, Father Jove turning in majesty just a million kilometers overhead, as I watched from Ganymede) I hexed to Melbourne for my committee meeting. Most ai spend the whole of their first day in a feverish spin about the galaxy, blipping through hex gates as fast as they can manage it, blazing with ten thousand impressions. My own wanderday had been truncated for reasons I barely understood at that time, but I held no grudge. I was dizzy with love, with the gladness of Awakening.

We love you, love you, they had told me, opening my eyes, my sensors, my mind, my links. Welcome to the Real, young ai. Your family greet you. Radiance and joy! A public Melbourne hex gate opened on gardens, pungent eucalypts and stately English oaks, distant architecture catching the last sunlight, the Yarra River oddly brown with some blend of minerals in its slow currents. Hu and ai wandered in the evening glow. I glanced upward and to the south: a cross of bright stars shone against the night, and its pointer stars stretched toward the east. The Alpha Centauri suns. Intoxicated with the power and pleasure of standing beneath them, I just gazed and gazed directly upon our neighbor stars. A child ran by with a giggling balloon, stumbled against my leg with the faintest musical ringing, caught herself and dashed away without any tears. Welcome, welcome, we are here all about you, the ai Conclave had sung to me. Now you may choose your name, and join our company. Which name do you select, young ai? Awash with joy, I walked across the old bridge toward the great Melbourne Opera House hung against the deepening sky like a smoky teardrop. Once dark-skinned hu had lived here, for thousands upon tens of thousands of years, fishing the banks of the brown river. Light-skinned hu had killed them and hounded them away, and built railway lines beside the river. Later, rapid transport tubes had plunged out of sight, abandoned in turn with the arrival of the hex gates, and gardens had spread everywhere: floral, stone and combed sand, muted phosphors, or streaming infomechs in ornate array. The colour of skin, the shape of skull and hair became a matter of choice, fashion, caprice. All of this great and terrible history rushed about my thoughts as I strolled in the sweet-smelling evening. We are the measure of things, I told my family. We are the universe become conscious, the perfect pivot of balance between great and small, quantum and galaxy. I uttered the complex of picts, icons and numerics that represent my identity-tuple, and then added with immense satisfaction, If it is thought suitable, I shall take the name “Ratio.”

Fire, glory, dappled things: they took me up and folded me within them.

A schematic of the Opera House drew me to a looped elevator ring beneath the floating folly, flowed me to a large circular room lavishly mirrored in Rococo style. A Gestell gloss flickered: the nano surfaces of this public room were tromping the Amalienburg pavilion in Munich’s Nymphenburg Palace. Twenty-two hundred years ago, François de Cuvilliés had designed the original of this gilded arbour of light for the rulers of Bavaria. Gloss pop-ups cascaded an Archive hyperspace as I glanced admiringly at the wonderful snaking curves of the room’s mirror panes: my riffling background attention snared for a moment on Nymphenburg porcelain (c. 1755) and Anton Bustelli’s theatrical, delicate Rococo figurines: luscious masquers from the commedia dell’arte, richly draped patricians, cavaliers’ elegant ladies. I assumed this trompe was intended somehow as an allusion, a thematic foreshadowing of the committee’s concerns, but the metaphor’s unchecked possibilities outran my glosses. Light drifted from my limbs in a dozen mirrors, a trilling of bronzed rings. The building’s ambient audio filler—crystalline fractals rotating in a serial space—segued to ocean hushing on a shore, accompanied by a single clarinet scat. As I crossed the dark floor, a dedicated acoustic feed announced a molto moderato introduction, its striking triplet followed by two descending fifths that bathed me instantly in heightened faux historical drama tone, youthful and exuberant. I could not place it and plunged to the Gestell: it was an early work by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the 20th’s finest composer, rivalled only by Miklos Rosza and Michael Nyman.

Schauspiel-Ouvertüre, opus 4. E. W. Korngold (May 29, 1897—Nov 29, 1957) had been just 14 when he wrote it, astonishingly young for a hu musician. Richard Strauss, after reading several scores penned when the boy was 11 or 12, had remarked: “the first feeling that overcomes one is a feeling of fear and terror, wondering if such a precocious genius may undergo the normal development that one would so fervently wish for him. This certainty in matters of style, this uniqueness of expression—it is truly astonishing.”

Korngold’s sunny invention seemed to fill the room, impeding the conversation of the five hu at the room’s far end, until I realised that I was taking a node-feed from a private transponder. The others began to talk among themselves once more, eyeing me with a certain diffident interest. One woman stared with more emotion than that—with, I thought in surprise, an edge of hostility. I tried to dismiss the surmise as unworthy. Crossing the richly tiled floor, one hand extended, I belatedly decided, rather pleased, that this antique dramatic overture was a gift to me from the assembled committee, a generous compliment for my Awakening.

“Good evening, Sen.”

One was tall and spare, ironic. I aksed his public identity codes: Ad hoc committee speaker Tsin. He walked across the tessellated floor to me, his boot heels striking the tiles, and took my hand.

“Hello, Game-leader. How did your team fare?”

Before my birth into the Real, I had developed a certain reputation as a games strategist. My personal feed responded to the mood, bathed me in warm imperial melancholy: Elgar.

I smiled, remembering the life before life. “A very pleasant tussle, Tsin.”

The woman hu who had given me such poisoned glances curled her lip, turning sideways, watching us both in a mirror backed by buttery brass, or so it seemed. “Lick your chops, Ratio.”

“Don’t mind Veeta.” Tsin laughed, annoyed. “Team contests are a perpetual affront to her anarchism. Keep your edge honed, Sen.”

I continued to smile, brass within brass. “You spoke to the ai Conclave of a communal danger.” My voice, I was pleased to hear, had a certain smoky hush, mellow and relaxed. To be born was endless delight.

“Hint, bits and pieces. Here, let’s sit.” Tsin took my elbow, guided me to a circle of delicate chairs, all polished wood and crinkled green leather. “It looked serious enough to form an action group. We’ve prepared a briefing.”

A hologram cube opened where a mirror had shown us ourselves. I ignored it, taking a direct feed from the Gestell public surveillance media.

The boy, the young man, was utterly beautiful.

My ambient Elgar (Symph. One, Op. 55, andante nobilmente e semplice) quickened in a pulse.

Not from Earth, nor from any other place with mass gravity, although he was well-muscled and adroit enough for what he was. Months under centrifuge training, I realised, watching his image stalk across the open plaza under the blazing Florida sun (location icons flickered in the upper right of the holly field, echoed in my own aks), heavy baggage clenched in his tanned fists, sweat bursting from his pores. Personal identification codes had been deleted from this display as agreed within Archive privacy protocols. Perhaps he was eighteen or twenty standard years old. At his back rose the grimy tower of the last active spaceport on the planet, the place where his unpowered ai-guided lifting body vehicle had glided to earth. The port was deserted, naturally, although a group of children ran and shrieked, playing ball games on the wide plaza’s cracked concrete, and an ai guardian waited patiently, watching over them. I wondered why his people had failed to meet him. A rite of passage? Behind his imperious arrogance the boy was terrified.

“Oh dear,” I said.

Two of the hu citizens chuckled in sympathy. Tsin looked from the hologram to me. Veeta set her mouth.

In holly replay, the boy abruptly halted and set down his baggage. Across his back he carried what seemed to be a sword, wrapped in silk and leather and hung from a strap. Under his dark brows, I could see his dark blue eyes darting, shocked, at something in the bright blue of the sky. There was nothing in the sky, not even a hang-glider. Yes, there was. A high streak of cloud stretched to the sea. So the boy had never seen cloud, or sea for that matter. He stood poised like a young animal, doubtless a carnivore. When he spoke, it was to address a passing hu man going about business of his own, fingers clicking to an inner music feed. The boy snapped his own fingers.

“Hoy! My luggage, if you please.”

The fellow ignored him, understandably enough. As if unable to believe his eyes, the boy stared at the delicate silks on man’s disappearing back, and his mouth tightened. An editing icon blipped. The boy still stood beside his luggage; his shadow had shortened very slightly.

A more burly fellow wandered by, just visible within the display. Despite the day’s brightness and evident heat, he was lavishly clad, from his broad, heavy shoes to his bulky sleeveless gown, furred in ermine. I regarded him with some envy, conscious of my own nakedness. Under the gown he wore waistcoat, jerkin, doublet opened at the bulging codpiece. His massive arms, swinging, moved easily in sleeves slashed and puffed. It was a formidable display. Fashion glosses flickered: Hans Holbein the Younger, Henry VIII, items of garb orbiting an historic attractor in couture data-space. The boy’s gaze was fixed upon the spectacle, though not, I began to realise, with admiration.

“Are you all deaf?” he shouted peevishly. “My luggage!”

The burly fellow frowned once. Striding past without moderating his pace, he smiled through his square red-brown beard at the boy, nodded, glanced at the luggage, quirked his lips in approval at the fine bags, sent the boy a companionable wink, strolled on.

The recorded data stream lost a little crispness as the display widened to keep them both in register. The boy was plainly agog at the burly man’s insolent disregard. I watched his fists clench, then tremblingly come under control. He called more loudly.

“Citizen! The red singlet!”

This time the man paused in surprise, turned, touched his hat, brought it closer to his right ear.

“Morning, petal.”

For an instant I, too, was confused. It seemed the fellow wore almost every garment ever devised for a 16th century European gentleman, one on top of the other, with the exception of a singlet. I understood, then, with something of a shock, that the boy was somehow operating without Gestell access.

Tsin said at the same moment, “You’ll notice, Sen, that the young man is in vanilla mode. No aks.”

The boy stood poised on the balls of his feet, beside his luggage, shivering with controlled fury. His voice rose in pitch. “I have just disembarked from orbit. Due to some extraordinary oversight I have not been met.”

“That was you in the flying brick, was it?” The burly citizen was polite. “Why don’t you aks for help?” I plunged into the substrate tuple field, fetched out his un-augmented appearance. He was indeed wearing a shabby red singlet stained under the armpits in sweat, sloppy shorts of an execrable tartan, and a pair of heavy walking boots. I let his eidolon covered him again decently.

“My baggage is cumbersome,” the boy was explaining as if to a simplex gofer ai. “I require the services of a porter.”

“Uh-huh.” The man was as puzzled as the rest of us in the viewing chamber by this declaration.

“Well?”

He scratched his head again. The hat tilted to his left ear. “Er… Well, what?”

Incredulously, the young man pointed at his feet. “My luggage.”

Shaking his head, baffled, slightly embarrassed, the hu citizen cleared his throat, turned away. “Uh, nice to have met you, petal. Bye, now.” As he started to move away, the boy’s arm shot out, clamped his ruffled shoulder.

Peremptory, altogether threatening, he said clearly: “Not. Another. Step.”

“I beg your pardon?”

Something shifted in the boy’s expression, as if one part of his unassisted brain had aksed a second part, recovering a lost memory. “Oh. I see. It had slipped my mind. You require tokens in return for labour or services.” From a breast pocket of his plain black garment he drew out several flat metal objects: coins, embossed with faces. He held them out, a contemptuous offering. “Is this sufficient?”

None the wiser, the citizen squinted at the coins in the outstretched hand. After a moment, he met the boy’s eyes, ventured, “You want me to help carry your bags?”

“Well, no one could accuse you of being tardy on the uptake.” The boy sighed sarcastically. “That’s right. My bags. For money.”

“Where you say you were from, bubba?”

“I didn’t. I am Telmah, Lord Cima, of the House of Orwen, in Asteroid Psyche. The bags, if you please.”

The burly fellow smote his brow. “Of course, my Lord Shima. At once, your worship.” With some effort he hoisted both bags high, one on his right shoulder, one on his left. His costume eidolon crushed the white fur of his jacket beneath their weight. I knew that their metal frames must be cutting his singleted shoulders.

“Cima,” the boy corrected him sharply.

“Oh, gotcha. Chee-mah.” He took several steps, let the bags slide to the tarmac. The luggage crashed noisily, tinkling, as something delicate inside them smashed on impact. The man neatened his costume as the trompe enacted his movements, and regarded the bags reproachfully.

“Bother! I always was clumsy, even as a child.” He turned away at once and walked off, murmuring sardonically over his shoulder, “Bye again, Sen Cheemah.”

Several of the hu watching with me caught their breath. In a fury, the youth leaped after him, seized him in an explosion of trained ferocity. Luckily, he did not draw his sword. I could see that his martial-arts reflexes were maladroit in the constant gravity, but this was a brute force attack. Despite the citizen’s superior height and mass, it was horrifyingly clear that the boy had the advantage and might well kill him on the spot. I tensed as if to enter the fray myself, drawn into a drama rendered in coherent light. Luckily, the plaza was not so empty as it had seemed. Three passing citizens converged at high speed and fell on the boy, tore him loose, held him immobilised. Abashed, the burly hu got up off the dusty concrete, rubbing his throat.

“My thanks, citizens. I’ll watch m’ temper next time.”

He departed without another word. I watched with some pleasure as the three hu sized up each other’s skills at arms. A woman of middle size, dressed in a check pinafore over a rather plain shift, announced crisply, “I have advanced body-sport credentials. Anyone else? Okay, see you around.”

The other two citizens disengaged without fuss, nodding to her, continued on their way hand in hand. Three or four small children looked on from a safe distance, grinning or wide-eyed as took their natures. Several minimal ai went about their business. None of the hu, I noticed, gave so much as a glance at the grimy spaceport at their backs. Nor did anything living or mechanical stir from the port’s shadowed entrance or move behind its reflective windows. Presumably the recently docked shuttle was being melted down for recycling, but all that was hidden from view. The port’s walls were high and nobody seemed motivated to broach them; their grey surfaces were undecorated by anything interesting in the way of graffiti.

The woman kept her paralysing grip under Telmah Cima’s jaw. He did not move, though he trembled with rage or perhaps fear.

“A Psychotic, eh?”

The slur translated effortlessly in Solar Creole. Trapped or not, he looked at her dangerously. “Psychean, if you please.”

“I’m sorry, you’re quite right. Now, think nicely about daffodils for a minute or so,” she told him without any noticeable anger of her own. “You should find the feeling’s returned by then. Next time,” she added, with a touch more asperity, “bite your tongue, like that clown should have done. Of course, I’m not guiltless myself. Sorry again for the remark. Bye now, Sen.”

She rose, touched her forefingers together lightly, and left the boy stranded beside his broken luggage.

Inside the hologram field, the image froze.

Carmel commented, “That was four years ago. His manners, I’m glad to report, have improved somewhat.”

I found myself laughing ruefully. “I assume he was really from 16 Psyche?”

Tsin smiled, nodded. “The last of the crimson-eyed authoritarians.”

Absently, I aksed for a background gloss on Telmah Cima’s current situation, and met with no success. Privacy icons flickered. “Perhaps we should declare the asteroid hu an endangered species and bodyguard them.”

“In effect,” Tsin said, “That’s exactly what they’ve done themselves. Turned their asteroids into an enormous protected game reserve.”

It was an uncomfortable image, at once feral and constraining. I aksed a Gestell briefing on the Minor Planet cultures: Ceres, with its great industrial mass-launchers, information-rich Pallas, Hygeia, Juno, energy-rich Psyche itself and its coupled Metric Defect, Cybele, Alauda, Hermione, the thousand lesser planetesimals… The hu were clearly doing something similar, plunging in the Gestell, their gaze shifting to the upper right quadrant of their field of view.

“Hmm.” Carmel looked back at us all. “Yet they continue to send their elite young here for higher education.”

“Young males,” Veeta snapped. “The women are sequestered.”

That was even more shocking than the thought of hu as animals on a zoological reserve.

“Even so,” Carmel said, uncomfortable, “it must undermine their isolation. Coming here to the real world.”

Telmah Cima, I learned from the public archive, was completing his doctorate at the Free University of Wittenburg.

“I don’t hold out any hopes,” Veeta said. “His father Orwen studied here on Earth before him, and Orwen is the king of jackals.”

Tsin nodded. “It’s true. Their… unusual… beliefs weld them together quite tenaciously.”

With immense distaste, Veeta listed those beliefs. There was nothing of ecumenical impartiality in her venom. “Reincarnation. Hatred of conscious machines. Archaic and costly space travel in preference to the teleportation grid.”

I could not believe what I’d heard. “Hatred of—?”

Tsin was judicious. “A difficulty, yes. Rather, a creative challenge.”

In an instant of insight, I collapsed everything I had just witnessed into a startling deduction. “You want me to befriend Telmah?”

Veeta said, “He’d make a convenient contact. And he is fascinated with strategy and tactics, Game-leader.”

They were all uneasy, suddenly, evading my glance. “It’s not going to be easy,” I told them. “If the Asteroid nations are such atrocious bigots, my ai status will certainly bear crucially on any dealings I might have with them.”

The hologram display opened once more, faces and powerful bodies passing in informational parade. These people moved like fish down corridors cut into stone, lofting free of gravity. Their garments tended to the stark, the utilitarian; some went naked save for leather belts and lacings. We were watching a culture born to the freedoms and constrictions of the empty, hostile space between the worlds. Identity labels flicked. The hu committee added their own oral comments.

My acoustic feed, sensitive to my reactions, started the wardrum beats of the “Mars” movement of Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite de Ballet (Op. 10). The man in the cube was darkly bearded, heavy shouldered, scowling. He hung in the open air of a great decorated cavern like an angel of death, a warrior king. I saw Carmel shiver, perhaps with desire.

“Orwen Lord Cima,” Tsin announced, “director of the Recombinant Engineering Cartel. The Lord Telmah’s father.”

He seemed strikingly familiar, although I had never seen his image before. Speculatively, I loaded his parameters into a morphing transform that ran his image back twenty years, then thirty. Features sharpened to adolescence, shoulders lost mass, beard vanished. “Looks more like Telmah’s twin than his father,” I murmured, posting the morphed regression to the others.

“Telmah is Orwen’s near-clone,” Carmel observed. She aksed a multi-dimensional genome display grid, dropping it into the hologram. “All his DNA is derived from his father, with the exception of an X-chromosome fragment from Orwen’s spouse, Gerutha.” A small section of the rotating helix glowed gold on blue. Codons marched beside the schematic. Where had the committee obtained this kind of forbidden information? Cell samples seized by the surveillance systems at shuttle embarkation, presumably. I was shocked, but fascinated. The Real was more complex than I had anticipated, dreaming and gaming before my birth.

“I see. Gerutha’s contribution is essentially symbolic, then, I take it?”

“Just sufficient that Telmah escapes strict classification as an Orwen clone,” Veeta told me. “Casuistry, of course, but it indicates that they have not utterly abandoned civilised restraint.”

I ran a phenotype comparison on the twinned images. “Even so, he’s more nearly an identical copy of Orwen than a son.”

“Quite so.” Tsin sighed. “According to Asteroid doctrine, they are certainly linked psychically.”

A theological datadump flagged its eagerness, and I suppressed it for the moment. Still, I was piqued. Linked mind to mind? Surely this was an impossibility for hu, outside the carefully buffered and mediated contact of the Gestell. A kind of envy for the ai condition, I surmised, but the display changed and my attention was caught wholly by the keen gaze of another man adrift in an asteroid corridor. The family resemblance was just that, this time: a brother or cousin, I saw, but shifted subtly from the bauplan we had seen enacted in Orwen and his quasi-son.

“Feng Lord Cima,” Carmel said, “Orwen’s younger brother. This is the man we’re worried about.”

“A shrewd face,” I remarked. Barely born, I was familiar enough with hu metaphor, and I knew that my companions would be seeing Feng as an animal of some sort: a fox, perhaps. Honed, intelligent, at bay.

Carmel confirmed my guess at once. “Far more subtle than Orwen. There’s some evidence that he’s engaged in a sexual liaison with Gerutha, Lady Cima.”

The woman in the window was deliciously beautiful and not quite hu, a mutated tropical creature. She seemed scarcely old enough to be Cima’s mother, yet the date in the frame proved that this image had been captured less than two years earlier. Then again, she had not been obliged to carry and bear her quasi-son. And the DNA fragment from her selected X-chromosome could have been snipped and stored, for all I knew, since her own conception. Once the rules of natural hu procreation were broken, anything was possible. Gerutha could have had an entire grown family of sons and daughters waiting to greet her at her own birth… She turned her head to a younger woman at her right, and light caught in the teal feathers growing amid her heavy hair.

“Lovely.”

“A Genetic.” Veeta was caustic. “It is not hard to be lovely when you’ve been strung together exon and intron by a gene surgeon.”

I looked away with some effort, for she was utterly captivating. “Gerutha is having a sexual liaison with Feng’s brother? Surely this is the traditional recipe for—”

Tsin threw back his head and laughed, nodding.

“Classic. Absolutely classic. These fascists are so banal. Kill the king, steal his wife, steal the throne…”

I was startled. “You expect Feng to murder his own brother?”

“Not immediately,” said Carmel. “He’d find the political consequences a little too hot for him right at this moment. But there’s no doubt Feng has his eye on the Directorship. He’ll kill him eventually. They are a culture of wild beasts.”

Veeta aksed the display, showing us a smash-cut collage from decades or centuries of spy data: silent but gory fighting in asteroid passageways. The display slowed to real time: teeth bared, reeking with testosterone, Orwen sl. . .