The real difficulty was that very few adults were currently available; and none of the available bodies appeared to be ideal choices. On Nick’s next visit to the yacht he entered the corridor housing the ship’s medirobots and read the biological specifications on Fowler Aristov, the would-be colonist mentor who still reposed there in the deep freeze. Not Nick’s ideal of a body for himself, but acceptable, he supposed, in an emergency.
But what about Jenny? She came first. He must find the right fleshly envelope for her, even if he failed to accomplish as much for himself. And among the organic females currently available, none, in Nick’s opinion, came up to the standard of beauty that was required.
No, he had better stick to method one. Given sufficient time and care, human bodies could certainly be grown in the station’s artificial wombs. There was an overabundance of zygotes aboard the station among which to rummage for desirable genetics.
Despite the scrambled records, a suitable pair could certainly be located, given time for the slow mechanical search required.
That, of course, was only the beginning. Assuming that suitable bodies for himself and Jenny could be grown, the next step, loading their personalities into those immature brains, was surely going to present new difficulties. According to the plan he’d worked out with Freya2, that phase would have to be accomplished concurrently with the process of organic growth.
Organic brains and minds would have to be fabricated in successive levels of refinement, as a sculptor cuts away the stone in finer and finer increments.
And either method, stealing bodies or growing them, would eventually require that the information-storage masses in which the two disembodied people now resided-three skulls’ volume each-be physically moved to the place where the organic vessels were being prepared.
Several members of Dirac’s crew, now even Brabant and Engadin to some degree, were growing increasingly dissatisfied with his continued emphasis on somehow recouping his personal losses.
The political adviser scooped up a handful of tiles and let them go clattering to the deck, then watched moodily as a small machine came rushing to arrange the statglass rectangles in some kind of order. Varvara brooded: “First we spent our days searching for a woman who wasn’t here when the berserkers came. Now we’re looking for a tile, a single tile, that no one in God’s universe could find!”
The bodyguard, grumbling in general agreement, compared the latter task to that of locating one star in the Galaxy, without a chart.
Dirac’s adviser and mistress urged: “We’ve fought the berserker to a standstill. What we ought to be trying to do now, and I’ve already told him so, is get the whole station free of its grip. All right, sure, save the tiles if we can. The best way to do that is to go after the berserker now and make sure that it’s dead.”
“You mean go aboard it?”
“That’s what I mean. Dangerous, sure. But if we wake up and think we’ll realize that just staying here, devoting ourselves to meaningless tasks, is suicidal. If the berserker doesn’t get us, the nebula is sooner or later going to close in and we’ll be trapped.”
“So? What do we do?”
“If repairing the yacht is really out of the question, then we must go aboard the berserker, make sure it’s dead, and find some way to manipulate its drive. That’s the only way we can start ourselves back in the right direction. That method saves the protolives as well; we can tow the station and its cargo out of the nebula again.”
Everyone agreed on at least one point: If they maintained their present course, heading straight into the nebula, sooner or later they would inevitably get trapped in a shifting of the Mavronari’s clouds, caught so that centuries instead of days of travel would be needed to restore them to their homes.
After long days of searching through cargo bins and various pieces of equipment, it still seemed impossible to determine whether or not the tile containing Lady Genevieve’s donation had ever been turned over to the filing system. The problem of finding this protochild among nearly a billion others appeared to be practically impossible.
Barring success with the software, the only way to locate one tile among the billion might be to have people, or robots, physically examine all the stored tiles, one after another. “Is there only one machine on board designed to do such testing? Get through a million tiles a year, and we can finish the job in only ten centuries.”
“Of course the chances are we’d find it in half that time.”
Something like a hundred thousand tiles per standard month.
That would mean three thousand a day. More than a hundred an hour.
Neither Zador or Hoveler could remember what had been done with that particular tile, in the panicky moments right after the alert was sounded, other than that it had been put down either on the arm of Hoveler’s chair or on the edge of his console.
On several details the two bioworkers’ memories were in conflict. Well, organic brains tended toward the unreliable in many ways.
Nevertheless Dirac continued to insist that a strong effort be made to find his family donation. The Premier had now publicly announced that he might be able to reclaim Jenny only by reconstituting her from her genes. Of course his wife’s full genetic code would not be available from the zygote, but that would provide a start. And the full code might be here somewhere.
Sometimes parents who donated a protochild to the colonizing project were asked to leave their own complete genetic records as well. Neither Hoveler nor Zador knew with certainty whether this had been done in the case of the Lady Genevieve. If it had, and the specimen could be found, then cloning should be possible. Zador and Hoveler themselves had performed such procedures in the past, for special medical reasons.
Dirac at about this time unveiled a surprise: a personal service system, really an elaborate bodyguard, which he called Loki.
Nick was called upon to bring over from the station to the yacht, openly in this case, another container of three skulls’ capacity.
Yet another trustworthy personality, as the Premier explained to Nick, to relieve Nick of some of his duties and to provide protection if need be even against a berserker.
Days passed. Grumbling among the crew increased, but with Nick’s and Loki’s and Brabant’s help, Dirac still remained firmly in control.
And even if Scurlock and Carol behaved strangely, and other people began to suspect that Dirac had opened negotiations with a berserker, he had long since established and would energetically maintain an iron control over the people with him.
“Nick, tell me-can a program experience true emotions?”
“I can indeed, sir.”
“As I expected from you-a perfectly programmed response.”
Dirac and Scurlock talked again, with the berserker’s communication device locked away where they felt sure it would be able to hear nothing.
The Premier was saying: “All a berserker ever needs is life to kill, and a means of killing. One might argue that a protocolonist sealed inside a statglass tile is not really alive, but whether you call that entity a unit of life or of potential life is a fine philosophical point, probably not too interesting to a berserker.”
“You mean, sir, that the zygotes will be valuable items with which to bargain for our own lives and freedom?”
Dirac, without actually saying anything, or even nodding, conveyed agreement.
The other man, pale-eyed, still very youthful in appearance, asked, “If it considers them alive, why didn’t it kill them, destroy the tiles, when it had the chance?”
“For one thing, each tile is very tough, designed and built to protect its contents. They aren’t that easy to destroy; you’d need individual attention to each one, or else very heavy weapons, to achieve mass destruction.
“But I think you’re right, the berserker, as we’ve thought all along, must have had some reason beyond that. Some more ambitious scheme in mind-doubtless along the lines of growing and training a goodlife legion, as several have sug
gested. But our boarding evidently took it by surprise, and now it’s lost that chance. Perhaps it was willing to open negotiations with us in an effort to win it back.”
Kensing was having trouble standing the strain with no relief in sight. He approached Dirac with the urgent plea that everyone left alive suit up at once in armor, take up such weapons as they had available, and launch an expedition, a probing attack, against the berserker itself. The issue had to be resolved, and all the evidence suggested that the foe was almost if not entirely helpless.
Dirac was sharply critical of this proposal. “Don’t be a fool!
Don’t you see it’s doing its best to lure us into trying something of the kind?”
Kensing was ready to argue. “Or else it’s preparing to launch some kind of an attack against us, fixing up what hardware it has left for a maximum effort. The more time we give it, the harder it’s going to hit us when it’s ready.” He concluded with an anguished plea: “How else are we ever going to get home?”
The bioworkers had mixed feelings. They didn’t want to provoke another berserker attack, but at the same time they fiercely resisted the idea of their billion charges being carried on helplessly into the Mavronari Nebula.
Dirac, helped in no small degree by his own reputation for ruthlessness, as well as his charisma, continued to squelch the plan put forward separately by Kensing and Engadin. He publicly opposed launching any kind of attack on the enemy just now, and provided reasons-the enemy was trying to lure them into something of the kind.
But Nick and a few others were becoming increasingly convinced that such a rash move would interfere with Dirac’s own agenda, which required him not only to survive this disaster personally but to emerge from it with power intact.
Everything else, everyone else’s plans and hopes, must wait while he continued his search for the all-important (to him) person he was determined not to lose. In truth, his real goal was power. His “beloved” had really never been anything more than a means to that.
Some of his more knowledgeable, cynical shipmates explained to others that for Dirac to go home without his politically necessary bride would be such a political disaster that doubtless he would prefer not to go home at all.
“What’s that to us? Let him stay here if he wants to. We want to go home.”
But even without using or directly threatening force, the Premier could always make most people see things his way.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Awakening to the sounds of water drilling and drumming on her high roof, the Lady Genevieve immediately remembered how, shortly before putting herself to sleep this last time, she had mentioned to Nick that when in her fleshly body she had liked listening to the rain.
Waking in this new mode of existence was always very unlike waking when she was in her body. Consciousness now came and went all in a piece, in an unmeasurable instant, like switching a light on or off, with none of either the luxury or the difficulty that had attended the process when she still inhabited her flesh.
Coming out of deathlike sleep now, in semidarkness, she found herself occupying a very solid feeling though totally imaginary bed, somewhere in what ought to have been the Dean’s Quarters.
She was waking to the sound of earthly rain, British rain, London rain, drumming now for her unreal ears upon the distant imaginary slates of the imaginary Abbey’s imaginary roof, cascading from the mouths of gargoyles onto the imaginary streets outside.
She wondered whether the real Abbey, somewhere very far from this spaceship, in which she was imprisoned, astronomically remote beyond light-years and light-years of busy space, carried any such creatures incorporated into its upper stonework, or whether these semi-reptilian monstrosities had been conceived and born only in some chaotic spasm of Nick’s imagination. He had admitted to her wistfully that he lacked the historical resources to be sure his duplication was exact.
Effortlessly the lady willed herself to be no longer in her bed, but standing beside it-and there she was. Wet London was visible from one of her high windows when she rose on tiptoe to look out. It was gray morning, very gray, rain shining on the antique roofs of slate or shingle. The darkened sky was full of grating, grumbling thunder, and a realistic flare of lightning.
And the lady, in the bedroom privacy which Nicholas Hawksmoor had sworn and guaranteed for her, stripping off her white nightgown now, examined with fear and curiosity the white nakedness of the body image Nick had given her.
It wasn’t the first time since coming to the Abbey that she had made a similar inspection. The first time she had seen her new self this way, she had been willing to agree: Yes, this is me. This at least looks like the flesh that I remember. But with each successive viewing her uncertainty had only increased.
The private portions of her body, those which had not been visible in any of the public videos on which the reconstruction had been based, now seemed to her to be the most changed from the flesh that she remembered. Or was she only imagining that this was so?
Willing her nightgown on again, the Lady Genevieve went out of her bedroom, along a passageway, into what ought to have been a public section of the Abbey. Then, finding her way through a small door and climbing a hundred steps and more without effort or breathlessness, she ascended a narrow stair within the north tower-the one without the clock.
Having counted a certain number of stairs, she stopped to open a small window, reached out and experimentally touched the rain upon the gray, slanting roof outside. The chill wet smoothness beneath her fingers still wasn’t exactly right. Nothing was. Things changed here, now and then, but in their essentials they did not improve.
Descending from the tower again, she had hardly reentered her bedroom before there came a knock upon her door.
Before responding she put on an imaged robe over the imaged nightdress in which she had climbed the tower. Taking her time, she shod her feet in slippers. Then she answered the door.
“Surprise, surprise,” she said, hardly glancing at the figure that stood outside. “It’s you.”
Nick looked at her as if his thoughts were really elsewhere.
“Who else were you expecting?” he inquired in honest momentary puzzlement.
She only gazed at him.
“Oh,” he said at last, vaguely realizing that she was only registering a sarcastic complaint about her isolation. “Have you found things-to do? To think about?”
“No. How can I find anything here unless you give it to me?”
“I have said I’m willing to teach you how to exert control over this environment. You could experiment endlessly, make whatever changes you wanted. I should think it would be fun.”
“And I have said that I am not willing to endure this existence a moment longer than is absolutely necessary. What I want is to have my body back-or to be restored to another body that’s at least as good.”
“And I can only assure you, my darling, that I’m doing all I can.” Nick was able to report some faintly encouraging news about the process of selecting zygotes, and the availability of artificial wombs.
By now they had strolled out into the church itself. “And I have brought you pictures, my dear.”
Jenny was about to ask what else besides pictures he could possibly bring her as long as she was trapped here in unreality, but she forbore. Nick went on eagerly to explain. A robot searching the cargo under the direction of Freya2 had already turned up a pair of zygotes whose genetic patterns closely matched the somatotypes Nick had ordered. He had created images showing what their new bodies would be like in early maturity, if grown from these zygotes.
“Well, when can I see them?”
“Here they are now.”
Jenny looked over her shoulder to beyond a handsome couple, entirely unclothed as for some nudist wedding ceremony, approaching side by side down the center of the nave. One of Nick, as he would look in his new fleshly mode, and one of her.
His was very much like the virtual form that already stood besid
e her, looking anxiously for her approval. And hers… she could see in it no more than a vague resemblance to what she thought she ought to look like.
The images, athletic and glowing with apparent health, but vacant-eyed and with no reaction to being observed, came within a few meters of the watching couple, then pirouetted and posed like holostage clothing models that someone had forgotten to provide with clothing.
“Well?”
“Close,” said Jenny, not wanting to be too critical at this stage.
“But I should be just a shade taller, don’t you think? My breasts a little larger. And the chin, and the eyes-make her look back this way a moment-yes. The whole face, I think, is really not that much like mine. Like the way mine ought to be.”
Nick nodded, unperturbed. “This is only a start, of course. The robot searched only a few million tiles to come up with these. It shouldn’t take very long to turn up an even closer match-and what do you think of mine?”
“I think the resemblance is definitely closer there. It will certainly suit me if it suits you.”
“Good. I’ll use it, unless something even closer should turn up.
Meanwhile we’ll go forward with the search for yours.
Meanwhile, what else can I do for you here, to make you as comfortable as possible?”
“Nick, I tell you I no longer know what comfort means. My only genuine feeling here, I can assure you, is one of helplessness.”
That attitude, coming in place of the praise he felt that he had earned, horrified Hawksmoor. Or at least she got that sense of his reaction. “It pains me that it should be so, my lady!”
“Why should it pain you? I am absolutely in your power. Isn’t that what you’ve really wanted all along?”
Horror doubled. “But I never wanted to have power over you!”
“You have deliberately robbed me of my freedom. Made me into a toy, a puppet.”
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