Multiples

by Robert Silverberg

  No response. I felt anger rising.

  “Whoever you are. Whatever. Speak up.”

  Nothing. Silence. Had I imagined it? The probing, the voiceless voice?

  No. No. I was certain that there was something invisible and unreal hovering about me. And I found it infuriating, not to be able to regain contact with it. To be toyed with this way, to be mocked like this.

  This is my ship, I thought. I want no ghosts aboard my ship.

  “You can be detected,” I said. “You can be contained. You can be eradicated.”

  As I stood there blustering in my frustration, it seemed to me that I felt that touch against my mind again, a lighter one this time, wistful, regretful. Perhaps I invented it. Perhaps I have supplied it retroactively.

  But it lasted only a part of an instant, if it happened at all, and then I was unquestionably alone again. The solitude was real and total and unmistakable. I stood gripping the rail of the screen, leaning forward into the brilliant blackness and swaying dizzily as if I were being pulled forward through the wall of the ship into space.

  “Captain?”

  The voice of 49 Henry Henry, tumbling out of the air behind me.

  “Did you feel something that time?” I asked.

  The intelligence ignored my question. “Captain, there’s trouble on Passenger Deck. Hands-on alarm: will you come?”

  “Set up a transit track for me,” I said. “I’m on my way.”

  Lights began to glow in mid-air, yellow, blue, green. The interior of the ship is a vast opaque maze and moving about within it is difficult without an intelligence to guide you. 49 Henry Henry constructed an efficient route for me down the curve of the Eye and into the main body of the ship, and thence around the rim of the leeward wall to the elevator down to Passenger Deck. I rode an air-cushion tracker keyed to the lights. The journey took no more than fifteen minutes. Unaided I might have needed a week.

  Passenger Deck is an echoing nest of coffins, hundreds of them, sometimes even thousands, arranged in rows three abreast. Here our live cargo sleeps until we arrive and decant the stored sleepers into wakefulness. Machinery sighs and murmurs all around them, coddling them in their suspension. Beyond, far off in the dim distance, is the place for passengers of a different sort—a spiderwebbing of sensory cables that holds our thousands of disembodied matrixes. Those are the colonists who have left their bodies behind when going into space. It is a dark and forbidding place, dimly lit by swirling velvet comets that circle overhead emitting sparks of red and green.

  The trouble was in the suspension area. Five crewmen were there already, the oldest hands on board: Katkat, Dismas, Rio de Rio, Gavotte, Roacher. Seeing them all together, I knew this must be some major event. We move on distant orbits within the immensity of the ship: to see as many as three members of the crew in the same virtual month is extraordinary. Now here were five. I felt an oppressive sense of community among them. Each of these five had sailed the seas of heaven more years than I had been alive. For at least a dozen voyages now they had been together as a team. I was the stranger in their midst, unknown, untried, lightly regarded, insignificant. Already Roacher had indicted me for my sweetness, by which he meant, I knew, a basic incapacity to act decisively. I thought he was wrong. But perhaps he knew me better than I knew myself.

  They stepped back, opening a path between them. Gavotte, a great hulking thick-shouldered man with a surprisingly delicate and precise way of conducting himself, gestured with open hands: Here, Captain, see? See?

  What I saw were coils of greenish smoke coming up from a passenger housing, and the glass door of the housing half open, cracked from top to bottom, frosted by temperature differentials. I could hear a sullen dripping sound. Blue fluid fell in thick steady gouts from a shattered support line. Within the housing itself was the pale naked figure of a man, eyes wide open, mouth agape as if in a silent scream. His left arm was raised, his fist was clenched. He looked like an anguished statue.

  They had body-salvage equipment standing by. The hapless passenger would be disassembled and all usable parts stored as soon as I gave the word.

  “Is he irretrievable?” I asked.

  “Take a look,” Katkat said, pointing to the housing readout. All the curves pointed down. “We have nineteen percent degradation already, and rising. Do we disassemble?”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “Approved.”

  The lasers glinted and flailed. Body parts came into view, shining, moist. The coiling metallic arms of the body-salvage equipment rose and fell, lifting organs that were not yet beyond repair and putting them into storage. As the machine labored the men worked around it, shutting down the broken housing, tying off the disrupted feeders and refrigerator cables.

  I asked Dismas what had happened. He was the mind-wiper for this sector, responsible for maintenance on the suspended passengers. His face was open and easy, but the deceptive cheeriness about his mouth and cheeks was mysteriously negated by his bleak, shadowy eyes. He told me that he had been working much farther down the deck, performing routine service on the Strappado-bound people, when he felt a sudden small disturbance, a quick tickle of wrongness.

  “So did I,” I said. “How long ago was that?”

  “Half an hour, maybe. I didn’t make a special note of it. I thought it was something in my gut, Captain. You felt it too, you say?”

  I nodded. “Just a tickle. It’s in the record.” I heard the distant music of 49 Henry Henry. Perhaps the intelligence was trying to apologize for doubting me. “What happened next?” I asked.

  “Went back to work. Five, ten minutes, maybe. Felt another jolt, a stronger one.” He touched his forehead, right at the temple, showing me where. “Detectors went off, broken glass. Came running, found this Cul-de-Sac passenger here undergoing convulsions. Rising from his bindings, thrashing around. Pulled himself loose from everything, went smack against the housing window. Broke it. It’s a very fast death.”

  “Matrix intrusion,” Roacher said.

  The skin of my scalp tightened. I turned to him.

  “Tell me about that.”

  He shrugged. “Once in a long while someone in the storage circuits gets to feeling footloose, and finds a way out and goes roaming the ship. Looking for a body to jack into, that’s what they’re doing. Jack into me, jack into Katkat, even jack into you, Captain. Anybody handy, just so they can feel flesh around them again. Jacked into this one here and something went wrong.”

  The probing fingers, yes. The silent voice. Help me.

  “I never heard of anyone jacking into a passenger in suspension,” Dismas said.

  “No reason why not,” said Roacher.

  “What’s the good? Still stuck in a housing, you are. Frozen down, that’s no better than staying matrix.”

  “Five to two it was matrix intrusion,” Roacher said, glaring.

  “Done,” Dismas said. Gavotte laughed and came in on the bet. So too did sinuous little Katkat, taking the other side. Rio de Rio, who had not spoken a word to anyone in his last six voyages, snorted and gestured obscenely at both factions.

  I felt like an idle spectator. To regain some illusion of command I said, “If there’s a matrix loose, it’ll show up on ship inventory. Dismas, check with the intelligence on duty and report to me. Katkat, Gavotte, finish cleaning up this mess and seal everything off. Then I want your reports in the log and a copy to me. I’ll be in my quarters. There’ll be further instructions later. The missing matrix, if that’s what we have on our hands, will be identified, located, and recaptured.”

  Roacher grinned at me. I thought he was going to lead a round of cheers.

  I turned and mounted my tracker, and rode it following the lights, yellow, blue, green, back up through the maze of decks and out to the Eye.

  As I entered my cabin something touched my mind and a silent voice said, “Please help me.”

  6.

  Carefully I shut the door behind me, locked it, loaded the privacy screens. The captain’s c
abin aboard a Megaspore starship of the Service is a world in itself, serene, private, immense. In mine, spiral galaxies whirled and sparkled on the walls. I had a stream, a lake, a silver waterfall beyond it. The air was soft and glistening. At a touch of my hand I could have light, music, scent, color, from any one of a thousand hidden orifices. Or I could turn the walls translucent and let the luminous splendor of starspace come flooding through.

  Only when I was fully settled in, protected and insulated and comfortable, did I say, “All right. What are you?”

  “You promise you won’t report me to the captain?”

  “I don’t promise anything.”

  “You will help me, though?” The voice seemed at once frightened and insistent, urgent and vulnerable.

  “How can I say? You give me nothing to work with.”

  “I’ll tell you everything. But first you have to promise not to call the captain.”

  I debated with myself for a moment and opted for directness.

  “I am the captain,” I said.

  “No!”

  “Can you see this room? What do you think it is? Crew quarters? The scullery?”

  I felt turbulent waves of fear coming from my invisible companion. And then nothing. Was it gone? Then I had made a mistake in being so forthright. This phantom had to be confined, sealed away, perhaps destroyed, before it could do more damage. I should have been more devious. And also I knew that I would regret it in another way if it had slipped away: I was taking a certain pleasure in being able to speak with someone—something—that was neither a member of my crew nor an omnipotent, contemptuous artificial intelligence.

  “Are you still here?” I asked after a while.

  Silence.

  Gone, I thought. Sweeping through the Sword of Orion like a gale of wind. Probably down at the far end of the ship by this time.

  Then, as if there had been no break in the conversation: “I just can’t believe it. Of all the places I could have gone, I had to walk right into the captain’s cabin.”

  “So it seems.”

  “And you’re actually the captain?”

  “Yes. Actually.”

  Another pause.

  “You seem so young,” it said. “For a captain.”

  “Be careful,” I told it.

  “I didn’t mean anything by that, Captain.” With a touch of bravado, even defiance, mingling with uncertainty and anxiety. “Captain sir.”

  Looking toward the ceiling, where shining resonator nodes shimmered all up and down the spectrum as slave-light leaped from junction to junction along the illuminator strands, I searched for a glimpse of it, some minute electromagnetic clue. But there was nothing.

  I imagined a web of impalpable force, a dancing will-o’-the-wisp, flitting erratically about the room, now perching on my shoulder, now clinging to some fixture, now extending itself to fill every open space: an airy thing, a sprite, playful and capricious. Curiously, not only was I unafraid but I found myself strongly drawn to it. There was something strangely appealing about this quick vibrating spirit, so bright with contradictions. And yet it had caused the death of one of my passengers.

  “Well?” I said. “You’re safe here. But when are you going to tell me what you are?”

  “Isn’t that obvious? I’m a matrix.”

  “Go on.”

  “A free matrix, a matrix on the loose. A matrix who’s in big trouble. I think I’ve hurt someone. Maybe killed him.”

  “One of the passengers?” I said.

  “So you know?”

  “There’s a dead passenger, yes. We’re not sure what happened.”

  “It wasn’t my fault. It was an accident.”

  “That may be,” I said. “Tell me about it. Tell me everything.”

  “Can I trust you?”

  “More than anyone else on this ship.”

  “But you’re the captain.”

  “That’s why,” I said.

  7.

  Her name was Leeleaine, but she wanted me to call her Vox. That means “voice,” she said, in one of the ancient languages of Earth. She was seventeen years old, from Jaana Head, which is an island off the coast of West Palabar on Kansas Four. Her father was a glass-farmer, her mother operated a gravity hole, and she had five brothers and three sisters, all of them much older than she was.

  “Do you know what that’s like, captain? Being the youngest of nine? And both your parents working all the time, and your cross-parents just as busy? Can you imagine? And growing up on Kansas Four, where it’s a thousand kilometers between cities, and you aren’t even in a city, you’re on an island?”

  “I know something of what that’s like,” I said.

  “Are you from Kansas Four too?”

  “No,” I said. “Not from Kansas Four. But a place much like it, I think.”

  She spoke of a troubled, unruly childhood, full of loneliness and anger. Kansas Four, I have heard, is a beautiful world, if you are inclined to find beauty in worlds: a wild and splendid place, where the sky is scarlet and the bare basalt mountains rise in the east like a magnificent black wall. But to hear Vox speak of it, it was squalid, grim, bleak. For her it was a loveless place where she led a loveless life. And yet she told me of pale violet seas aglow with brilliant yellow fish, and trees that erupted with a shower of dazzling crimson fronds when they were in bloom, and warm rains that sang in the air like harps. I was not then so long in heaven that I had forgotten the beauty of seas or trees or rains, which by now are nothing but hollow words to me. Yet Vox had found her life on Kansas Four so hateful that she had been willing to abandon not only her native world but her body itself. That was a point of kinship between us: I too had given up my world and my former life, if not my actual flesh. But I had chosen heaven, and the Service. Vox had volunteered to exchange one landcrawling servitude for another.

  “The day came,” she said, “when I knew I couldn’t stand it any more. I was so miserable, so empty: I thought about having to live this way for another two hundred years or even more, and I wanted to pick up the hills and throw them at each other. Or get into my mother’s plummeter and take it straight to the bottom of the sea. I made a list of ways I could kill myself. But I knew I couldn’t do it, not this way or that way or any way. I wanted to live. But I didn’t want to live like that.”

  On that same day, she said, the soul-call from Cul-de-Sac reached Kansas Four. A thousand vacant bodies were available there and they wanted soul-matrixes to fill them. Without a moment’s hesitation Vox put her name on the list.

  There is a constant migration of souls between the worlds. On each of my voyages I have carried thousands of them, setting forth hopefully toward new bodies on strange planets.

  Every world has a stock of bodies awaiting replacement souls. Most were the victims of sudden violence. Life is risky on shore, and death lurks everywhere. Salvaging and repairing a body is no troublesome matter, but once a soul has fled it can never be recovered. So the empty bodies of those who drown and those who are stung by lethal insects and those who are thrown from vehicles and those who are struck by falling branches as they work are collected and examined. If they are beyond repair they are disassembled and their usable parts set aside to be installed in others. But if their bodies can be made whole again, they are, and they are placed in holding chambers until new souls become available for them.

  And then there are those who vacate their bodies voluntarily, perhaps because they are weary of them, or weary of their worlds, and wish to move along. They are the ones who sign up to fill the waiting bodies on far worlds, while others come behind them to fill the bodies they have abandoned. The least costly way to travel between the worlds is to surrender your body and go in matrix form, thus exchanging a discouraging life for an unfamiliar one. That was what Vox had done. In pain and despair she had agreed to allow the essence of herself, everything she had ever seen or felt or thought or dreamed, to be converted into a lattice of electrical impulses that the Sword of Orion would c
arry on its voyage from Kansas Four to Cul-de-Sac. A new body lay reserved for her there.

  Her own discarded body would remain in suspension on Kansas Four. Some day it might become the home of some wandering soul from another world; or, if there were no bids for it, it might eventually be disassembled by the body-salvagers, and its parts put to some worthy use. Vox would never know; Vox would never care.

  “I can understand trading an unhappy life for a chance at a happy one,” I said. “But why break loose on ship? What purpose could that serve? Why not wait until you got to Cul-de-Sac?”

  “Because it was torture,” she said.

  “Torture? What was?”

  “Living as a matrix.” She laughed bitterly. “Living? It’s worse than death could ever be!”

  “Tell me.”

  “You’ve never done matrix, have you?”

  “No,” I said. “I chose another way to escape.”

  “Then you don’t know. You can’t know. You’ve got a ship full of matrixes in storage circuits but you don’t understand a thing about them. Imagine that the back of your neck itches, captain. But you have no arms to scratch with. Your thigh starts to itch. Your chest. You lie there itching everywhere. And you can’t scratch. Do you understand me?”

  “How can a matrix feel an itch? A matrix is simply a pattern of electrical—”

  “Oh, you’re impossible! You’re stupid! I’m not talking about actual literal itching. I’m giving you a suppose, a for-instance. Because you’d never be able to understand the real situation. Look: you’re in the storage circuit. All you are is electricity. That’s all a mind really is, anyway: electricity. But you used to have a body. The body had sensation. The body had feelings. You remember them. You’re a prisoner. A prisoner remembers all sorts of things that used to be taken for granted. You’d give anything to feel the wind in your hair again, or the taste of cool milk, or the scent of flowers. Or even the pain of a cut finger. The saltiness of your blood when you lick the cut. Anything. I hated my body, don’t you see? I couldn’t wait to be rid of it. But once it was gone I missed the feelings it had. I missed the sense of flesh pulling at me, holding me to the ground, flesh full of nerves, flesh that could feel pleasure. Or pain.”