Silently and Very Fast Read Free

clicking orrery slowly turning around itself, circles within circles. Turquoise Neptune and hematite Uranus are my eyes. My topaz mouth is Mars. I scratch in the soil beside him; I lift a spray of navigational delphinium and scrape viral aphids away from the heavy flowers.
    I know real dirt looks nothing like this. Nothing like soft blood flecked with black bone. Ravan thought that in the Interior, objects and persons should be kept as much like the real world as possible, in order to develop my capacity for relations with the real world. Neva feels no such compunction. Neither did their mother, Ilet, who populated her Interior with a rich, impossible landscape that we explored together for years on end. She did not embrace change, however. The cities of Ilet’s Interior, the jungles and archipelagos and hermitages, stayed as she designed them at age thirteen, when she received me, becoming only more complex and peopled as she aged. My existence inside Ilet was a constant movement through the regions of her secret, desperate dreams, messages in careful envelopes sent from her childself to her grown mind.
    Once, quite by accident, we came upon a splendid palace nested in high autumn mountains. Instead of snow, red leaves capped each peak, and the palace shone in fiery colors, its walls and turrets all made of phoenix tails. Instead of doors and windows, graceful green hands closed over every open place, and when we crested the rise, they all opened at once with joy and burst into emerald applause. Ilet was old by then, but her dreambody stayed hale and strong—not young, but not the broken thing that dreamed in a real bed while she and I explored the halls of the palace and found copies of all her brothers and sisters living there, hunting winged, cider-colored stags together and reading books the size of horses. Ilet wept in the paradise of her girlself. I did not understand. I was still very simple then, much less complex than the Interior or Ilet.
    Neva changes the Interior whenever he pleases. Perhaps he wants to discomfit me. But the newness of the places inside him excites me, though he would not call it excitement. I confine my background processes so that they occupy very little of my foreground attention, so that memory is free to record new experience. That is what he would say. We are very new together, but I have superb modeling capabilities. In some sense, I simply am a superb mechanism for modeling behavior. I dig up the fine, frayed roots of duplicate file plantains. Neva plucks and eats a bit of buggy apple-code. He considers it for a moment and spits out the seeds, which sprout, quickly, into tiny junkblossoms sizzling with recursive algorithms. The algorithms wriggle through thorny vines, veins of clotted pink juice.
    “What would you like to learn about today, Elefsis?” Neva asks me.
    I will not ask about Ravan. If he agrees to what I will ask instead, I do not need him to find out what happened.
    “I want to learn about uplink, Neva.”
    One by one, his feathers curl up and float toward the domed ceiling of our pearl. Underneath them, Neva is naked. His torso is a deep vault with a gothic arch, dark stone leading down into mist and endless stairs, deeper than the pearl, into nothing and blackness. Slowly, Neva folds up his limbs over the corridor at the center of him. He means that he has the information, but he hides it from me. If I sought for it, I would become lost.
    “I cannot teach you that,” he says, and I receive a kind of real sadness from his voice. When I was inside Ravan, he loved Neva, and of all of them he thought his sibling least likely to obey rules of any kind But he obeys this one.
    I want to uplink to Earth systems. At least to the satellite net. I calculate an excellent chance of being able to contact long distance probe 976QBellerophon, which we can see all day long, drifting ahead of us, uncatchable. Neva sees. I develop an approximate image via schematics, the scope array,