Castles in the Sky
by Gabriel S. de Anda
Jose Luis Espejo-Alatriste, a diplomat from Earth, travels to the world of Alebrije on a mission of coercive diplomacy. He also wishes to claim the body of his deceased son, Amado Alatriste, who has died in a work-related accident. However, wires get crossed, and Amado thinks that it’s his visiting father — and not himself — who has met an untimely end.
To complicate matters, father and son each wants to keep the stored consciousness of the other from realizing that it is, in fact, dead. Between the two of them stands Eta Alatriste-Greschoff, Amado’s wife and Jose Luis’s daughter-in-law. Who can resolve this misunderstanding and its consequent split in reality?
Meanwhile, Jose Luis has interstellar relations to worry about, as well. Alebrije is on the cusp of being invaded by Earth, and there is the specter of imminent war.
Chapter I: Jose Luis Espejo-Alatriste
part 1
We were five klicks east of the fabled city of Avignon Lux when the quake hit. Part of a small Terran delegation visiting the world of Alebrije, we worked our way along a hand-railed and open-aired gravlibre path leading away from the massive starship docks, buoyed meters above a vast mesa which overlooked an expansive desert valley 1,500 meters below, sprawling between two horizons.
Excited hands with pointing fingers directed us to look toward the faraway evening skyline, and we watched as the immense but distance-dwarfed city of Avignon Lux responded to the grinding tectonic plates. We could hear the growling of the earth, a sound like remote, unceasing waterfalls or explosions but, as the platform walkway we were on was floating with an artificial gravity no doubt similar to that which was now elevating Avignon Lux off the ground, we would not know until later that the temblor had measured 8.25 on the Moment Magnitude Scale.
At this distance, the vertical structures of Avignon Lux lacked architectural detail, core monoliths surrounded by splintering rainbows of light, looking for all the world like a school experiment in crystal formation. One of the planetary government security detail assigned to us handed me an antique set of digital binoculars for a better view, but my OAR ocular implants had already telescoped my vision.
In the early evening light, the skyscrapers looked like illuminated dominoes upended and arranged in a staggered, circular pattern that resembled a gracefully levitating sea anemone of rose quartz, citron and lapus lazuli. The buildings were of varying sizes, the smallest apparently over 125 stories in height and with a 2,000 square-foot footprint. They had become unmoored by the quake and, by design, were rising languidly into the sky to escape the fiercely shaking and grinding ground.
The structures all rose in unison, more or less, with a slow, ponderous grace, a gorgeously massive flower of plazcrete, metaglass and quantum smartstone trailing a cloud of lightly glowing dust and debris. For a very specific circumference of real estate, gravity had been temporarily suspended.
It was alarming to think that the distant buildings were occupied by a literally captive audience of live people.
It was an awesome sight, of course, one of the Nine Engineering Wonders of the Humanized Galaxy, a vision few would ever be lucky enough to witness other than in a museum virtual reality diorama. And we had seen it happen just minutes after landfall, while we were still debarking from the scarred and burnt-tiled shuttle that had brought us down from the TSE frigate still in orbit.
A part of me was, of course, touched by the terrible and magisterial poetry, a vision of nanosculpted stonework rising with the seemingly effortless magic of flying Chinese lanterns. Its magic, however, left me cold and hollow, for it was neither work nor pleasure that, ultimately, had brought me to Alebrije.
I had traveled nearly a hundred light years across a vast gulf of black emptiness to face the deeper, unbridgeable void of retrieving the lifeless body of my only child.
* * *
This was not to say that there were no ulterior motives for my visit to a world that had proven a thorn in the side of Earth’s sovereignty. But the magic we were witnessing was both a testament to this world’s breathless mastery of a technology rivaling that of the Terrestrial solar system, as well as its death sentence. Death, it seemed, was something I could not avoid, enjoined to be reminded of it at every turn.
As a Cultural Diplomat from Terra Alba, I was ostensibly a Man of Some Importance and, while this was mostly a ceremonial rather than a substantial distinction, these were troubled times. Times of trouble and tribulation play wicked tricks on our perceptions, and this was only to my advantage, or rather, my paymasters’ profit.
My inevitable grief had, of course, compromised my court training. How could it not be otherwise? That being said, however, I was by professional training compelled to see that my cloudy state of mind would not have gone unnoticed by my superiors. It would prove too much a temptation for the players on the shadow councils of the Gahzentine Penumbralty back home to resist. In my compromised state of mind, they would see me as their perfect tool. Through the fog of my inner turmoil, I had enough clarity to understand their motivations. And I was their man, economically constrained to take as much advantage of them as they of me.
They would, of course, know that I knew that they knew.
And that worked out fine. The Axis needed an unobtrusive advance guard behind the scenes to engage in some coercive diplomacy. Various economic consortiums were jockeying for the inevitable coming redistribution of wealth that any invasion entails. And I... I needed my son. Broken, I had few illusions left. I knew I could not do what I wanted to do on my own, even as a Solarian Cultural attaché. I would need the full power of my masters — or the threat of their full power — behind me for that.
I flowed within enclosed watery skywalks that led to a taxis-shuttle zone, high walls lined with blocky murals of oversized proletariat fantasia. I turned at a bend and almost walked through a trembling scrawl of bright GPS graffito, a virtuality tailored for offworlders with just the sort of implants we wore. Shivering in the air before me, I read:
Memories enslave the heart.
Engineer your dreams and be free
* * *
When I arrived within the main reception dome, there were two men waiting for me. My first and only appointment was with a risk management specialist for the sector branch of the Banco Fabricanista Amerikano de E y R, Julian Dwell, an old contact from a posting at Saint Catherine’s over twenty years earlier, not quite a friend but more than a mere acquaintance. Banco Fabricanista was the most important of the system’s banking nets.
From a distance, Julian smiled cautiously, nodding circumspectly in the direction of a second man not on my agenda and whom I did not recognize, a man in uniform looking solemn, important. It was apparent that Julian knew who he was.
Julian sat down at a bar table in a dusky far-away corner, tapped the side of his nose and pointed with his chin, then shrugged his shoulders, all as if saying that he would wait. He turned away, his hand raised, presumably to order himself a cocktail. How long was this going to take?
I turned back to the uniformed man just as a window in my upper left field of vision gave me the details, the name and rank of the geosector’s representative from Alebrije’s fancifully named Ministry of Probabilities. He’s not really here, my data link told me. He is an avatar.
Human? I asked it.
Interesting, was the response. Very sophisticated and polished. Can’t see behind the logic matrices. Might be an illegal AI drone.
“Federico Garcia-Rifenstahl, at your service,” said the avatar. He extended his arm. I hesitated, but then we shook hands. The warmth of his hand pleasantly surprised me: he was a satellite nanocule-swarm configured to look and feel human. A tangible, interactive hologram.
“I must say, I am impressed,” I said to Garcia-Rifenstahl, not unkindly, and I smiled warmly, wanting to test the avatar’s cognition protocols. “I can clearly see that Terra Alba has cause to be jealous. Such an aggressive display of technologies.” I made a fuss of grabbing its — his? — shoulder, which proved solid enough. “Wait. You are human, yes?”
Garcia-Rifenstahl’s demeanor was a convincing choreograph of facial cues. The smile was toothy and seemed genuine, but the jaw was tensed with a hint of some opaque agenda. The eyes and the muscles around them, however, surprised me, for they were blurred with the humanizing tics of sadness and sympathy. The juxtaposition made me think of Amado, and I felt the thorn in my heart twist.
“My sincerest condolences, Sen Espejo,” said the avatar. It paused and, with narrowing eyes, said, “I had a child, once. A daughter, lost in the Ikon Wars.” It sighed and, turning away for a moment, looked beyond the mural window overlooking the valley below, now dark except for the fireflies of busy air traffic. Turning back, it said, “’The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.’”
And the name that can be named is not the eternal name.
An avatar? With a child? “What was her name?”
“Amélie.” Its — his — eyes glistened with the three syllables.
I nodded, my eyes feeling dark, grainy and hooded, and I took a deep involuntary breath. It angered me a little that he — or it — was probably using my son’s death to mask hidden political machinations.
Garcia-Rifenstahl didn’t explain his presence but, as a Cultural Diplomat I’m tasked with deducing the local customs of various worlds and cultures. Sen Garcia was essentially a policeman of sorts for the Collective, tasked with linking the seemingly unrelated dots that any death messily leaves behind like the splatters of an errant droplet of ink. Or blood. The avatar’s face was chiseled with angular, pale features under a tousled blond mane whose manicured wildness tended to fall over one eye. That he was a card-carrying member of One World Militia would be a given.
If he were, of course, actually real.
“You know,” I said, “I am quite surprised that your Ministry didn’t have me hauled in and interrogated.”
His eyes narrowed with scrutiny, searching mine for clues. “I thought you understood. We were not the ones who attacked your ship.”
The avatar’s body language was, if orchestrated, orchestrated well, the head slightly tilted as it first nodded, then abruptly shook from side to side. Unlike other holograms I’d dealt with, the eyes glimmered with a convincing counterfeit of humanity. Perhaps he — it — was programmed with sentience algorithms, and that, by itself, would have been an illegality. But such things, rare as they are, are amazingly eerie things to watch. The culture that had created cities that could float like translucent soap bubbles had created this Garcia-Rifenstahl. What other things could they do?
What else had they already done?
Copyright © 2021 by Gabriel S. de Anda
