The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

In the air lane now. The lifters move in strictly regulated traffic zones over cleared terrain. There has not been an accidental drop since Ashwin started on the job, but a five-hundred hexagon of fifty-centimeter glass falling from three kays is the stuff of health and safety legend. HLA 1956 comes up from the glass fields of Gander and slips in ahead of Ashwin: a colleague, though Ashwin has never seen his flesh face, nor knows where his meat is based. He sends a greeting message over the com channels; truckers flashing their headlights. Closing on the target now. The front edge of the construction is visible as a line of white light. Ashwin has never seen the sea, but he always thinks of the edge of the world roof as a line of surf breaking on a beach, frozen, turned to slow-flowing glass, inching forward day by day, hour by hour. One kilometer out, construction control taps into Ashwin’s neural matrix and dispatches him and his load into an approach pattern to Pier 112, 328. As he moves in high over the open fingers of the Main Left Branch, he sees another heavy-lift cluster retract cables and slide away from the pier top. Spider-welders skitter across the glass on delicate sucker feet to bolt the plate to the struts. That is what Ashwin’s friend from Senegal does: Ashwin can see his spider-welder hugging the pure white spar like a tick as he swivels the rig on its belly fans. They earn more than lifter pilots. They have more responsibility.

Lasers flicker from all around Ashwin’s multiple body-another sensation for which his meat has no likeness-guiding him in onto the baffle plates. The alignment must be millimeter perfect. Ashwin tunes the ducted fans to compensate for an unseasonable breeze he can feel picking up across his sensory skin, descends steadily through the mesh of laser light. Thirty meters. Twenty.

Looking good, Ash, says the bolter from Senegal on the innercom.

Ten meters.

Looking good. A simple expression of solidarity, but it opens Ashwin’s extended senses like a key. From skin to horizon in every direction he can look, his world rushes in on him. He sees it all fresh, entire, as one thing. The stupendous canyon, one end to the other, wall to wall. The thin pink sky, the wisps of high cirrus. The surface three kilometers beneath him; the constructions of man, the patterns they make on the soil as they fuse sand to glass. The machines: those above, those below, those between, that crawl upon the pillars and roof of the world. The SkyWheel on its ponderous orbits, ROTECH’s habitats wheeling overhead in a carousel of satellites. The men and minds that looked on this world, and set their will upon it. He sees it all, and it looks good to him. Very good indeed. He is so proud of all that he is part of, this Bharati boy one foot out of the chawl, who is become Creator of Worlds.

Five meters.

And in that instant, everything goes white…

Is this what it is to be dead? he thinks and thinking so, knows himself to be alive. An image: the holy woman, buried alive for righteousness’ sake. Real? Imaginary? Is the darkness of the grave really a white so intense it cannot be regarded by the eye? Is there any difference between outside and inside in this featureless white? A freezing thought. This is the pure white light of cyberspace. There has been an error in the mindlink, a fault in the tap-head technology. The kind of thing that sends some people thrashing and fitting on their couches. You, it has sent into nowhere. No thing. A mind without a body.

He cannot tell if he has flesh perception or machine sense: everything in every direction looks the same and therefore robs him of dimension. An uncle driven blind by cataracts once told him the horror of blindness. It is not not seeing. It is everything white.

A mind, with no senses, no connection to the outside world. He could be lying on his couch at the Ambedkar corporada, in a hospital, at home. A mind with only its own thoughts for company. A thought to make the heart kick coldly in the chest. At least, he can still feel. And if he can feel…

“Hello?” Ashwin ventures. He can hear himself. His own voice, inside, and outside. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

Does he hear an echo, or is it the resonance of his own skull? If he does, is it in another voice, another accent?

“Hello?”

Hello.

And the white: is it moving, are there shapes within it, like figures in a fog? Ashwin is sure now; the fog boils like milk and he can sense up and down, forward, back. Dimensions. Gravity. Slowly he becomes aware that he has a body, his own body, his home flesh. There is a surface under his feet, and there is a human shape walking toward him through the white fog. A white man in a white fog, an old man, dressed for cold, with a compass in his hand. He steps into clear focus and frowns at Ashwin.

“Who the hell are you?” he says.