The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  I had been tinkering with a song about my image globe. It felt as if that was my life. Start at any micropoint and somehow the bigger you got, the more it kept returning to the micropoint. Like the way that a verse within a canso, no matter whether it is part of the beginning, middle, or end, has its own beginning, middle, and end. And the beginning, middle, end of the canso reflects the beginning, middle, and end of the whole trobador tradition, which in turn is like a two-century microcosm of prespaceflight Western art, which in turn was like one small model of what had happened a thousand times over in the six hundred years of the Thousand Cultures … or going down the other way, each word and phrase and note of each verse has that structure.

  Like nested dolls, like a camera pointed at its own monitor through a distorting mirror … my little square of existence fit into the bigger square of my performing and my team and my friends and family, and all of them into the bigger square of my life … nesting dolls, image globe, rescaling pictures, lines in verses in poems in collections in traditions in languages in families—

  Or like the four-symbol blocks in the carvings that covered the walls that enclosed the squares that grouped in fours to make plazas that stood between four temples … on up till one saw the meaning in the four quarters of lost, vitrified Yaxkintulum. Or like the god-tales containing hero-tales containing digressive comedies containing jokes containing aphorisms that summarized the god-tales, in the stories of lost, vitrified New Tanajavur.

  Strange that these songs—the collection titled Songs from Underneath, from which my second set tonight was drawn—always made me think of the two destroyed cultures of Briand. I had written them years before Margaret and I ever went there, and performed them on tour long before going to Briand, and never sung them on Briand because their message would have started ethnic rioting between Tamils and Maya and brought about genocidal war all the sooner. Yet Songs from Underneath, for me, had somehow become woven into events years after their composition, and I think most of my fans believed I must have written them on Briand, or just after the failed mission there.

  I hated that phrase “failed mission,” which was what Margaret and the OSP in general called Briand, when they talked about it at all.

  We had lost a whole planet. The antimatter cloud weapon had been loosed on human flesh for only the fourth time since the Slaughter itself. The Thousand Cultures had, before that, numbered 1228 cultures on twenty-six planets; now they numbered 1226 on twenty-five. It would still be some years before springships could even reach the Metallah system to see if anything was left, but given the frailty of Briand’s ecosystem, the answer was probably no; probably they would find two smears of black glass, hundreds of kilometers across, under an atmosphere as poisonous as it had been before terraforming.

  To me, anyway, that was something more than a failed mission.

  And yet, strangely, even to me, the cansos in Songs from Underneath sounded as if they had been written about Briand, as if I had dreamed a too-clear vision, which had come horribly true.

  Songs from Underneath had developed in one of those complex mixes of art and propaganda that had been my life for almost three decades. I wrote and sang art songs; I was an OSP agent; if you are an OSP agent, everything you do is, or becomes, part of the OSP’s mission; therefore, I wrote and sang art songs that supported the OSP’s mission, which, shorn of all rhetoric, was to steer humanity down a narrow—possibly closed—channel between two grim canyon walls.

  One canyon wall was the prospect of everyone’s going into the box. As soon as population density and automated production were high enough, as they had been on Earth for centuries, most people elected to go into the box—after their required seven years of public service work, they never left their apartments at all, and spent all but the barest minimum of their waking time in virtual reality. About a quarter of them had “gone Solipsist”—convinced themselves that aintellects created all of reality, including all the people they communicated with online, and that dull apartment they saw when they unplugged. Almost the whole population of Earth, and of its moon, Mars, Ganymede, Europa, Titan, and Triton, were in the box. In the six nearest star systems, with their nine inhabited planets—the Inner Sphere that held just under eight hundred of the Thousand Cultures—about a quarter of the population was in the box.

  The other canyon wall was war.

  There was only one inhabited planet in the nine of the Inner Sphere where the majority of the population was not in the box—this one, Roosevelt. The ninety-two cultures here had fought a generation-long bloody war, barely reaching an uneasy peace less than forty stanyears ago. Since Dji had brokered that permanent truce, insurrections, border clashes, assassinations, threats of war, and riots had been endemic, but no wholesale mutual butchery, so this world was one of the OSP’s success stories. Twenty-two cultures—the entire continent of Hapundo—were still ruled directly by Council of Humanity proconsuls and policed by Council troops. Elsewhere on the planet, terrorist discommodi caused two to five thousand-or-more-fatality events every stanyear. The past stanyear had seen the Stadium Massacre and the assassination of Lopez, obviously but unprovably linked. In some of the cultures of this planet, children grew up learning to dodge snipers; in happier cultures like Trois-Orleans, no one got through a day without having to prove identity dozens of times, and the streets crawled with uniforms.

  Less than three hundred kilometers from here, in Saladin City, a psypyx bank and the adjoining hospital had been blown up this afternoon, causing hundreds of deaths, thirteen of them permanent. New Rajasthan was suspected of involvement, and CSPs were standing guard all along the border tonight while Council diplomats banged heads together to prevent another outbreak.

  But the good folk of Roosevelt had not gone into the box. Say what you like about hatred and killing, it gives people something to do.

  There were two walls into which humanity seemed determined to slam: atrophy in the box, or war till all our planets were slick black glass like Briand.

  The OSP’s job was to help humanity steer between those walls, right down a middle channel that we had to hope would be there, because it was clear that we would be coming around a bend, any day, and meeting the aliens whose ruins we had found all over human space. After decades of archaeology all over human space, an OSP secret expedition had found the ruins of a Predecessor provincial capital on Hammarskjöld, twenty light-years beyond our human settlement surface. While Earth was still locked in its last ice age, the Predecessors had held an empire of seventy-eight provinces—the hundred-light-year-across blob that was now human space took up no more than one-tenth of one Predecessor province.

  And before the first hut stood at Jericho, something tougher than the Predecessors had come through and literally blasted the Predecessor civilization back to the Stone Age. Predecessor ruins were the inverse of human ruins: the oldest and most enduring were at technical levels that our science was struggling to grasp. More recently the Predecessors had recovered as a spacefaring people not dissimilar from us in technology; on some worlds there was a yet more recent Iron-Age layer that eschewed radio and electricity; and the newest Predecessor ruins of all were a pathetic handful of Neolithic farming villages on a few worlds.

  Every Predecessor settlement at every technical level bore the marks of war, and of a genocide so complete that only a handful of Predecessor remains had ever been found. One hypothesis was that the few survivors, with their scant robots and software, had never been able to struggle all the way back up after each attack. I tended to buy the hypothesis that the Predecessors had tried to hide their rebuilding from whatever it was that killed them, first turning off springers, then radio, then desisting from large-scale construction, perhaps even giving up fire, but never hiding far enough.

  Sooner or later the thing that had killed the Predecessors would return. Humanity could not afford to be either in the box, or at war with ourselves. The human race needed to be diverse enough to entertain each other and alike eno
ugh not to kill each other.

  So the OSP tried to steer things that way …

  So the OSP’s agents did things to support that mission …

  Which in my case included writing and performing cansos from my own, Occitan cultural tradition …

  Some of which, collected and publicized as Songs from Underneath, had become popular, as well as being successful propaganda …

  And therefore I needed to give a good performance of them tonight …

  Which meant watching the clock and taking care of myself.

  From relations across thousands of years between at least three species … down to flexing my hands to make sure the fingers were warmed up.

  Fifty stanyears and life was still an image globe.

  One minute to go. Remember that “Don’t Forget I Live Here Too” should seek its dignity, resist its anger, and don’t crop that first eighth note too short! Relax your shoulders just before you sing. It starts on a G. Look at the audience and give them the shy smile, they always love that and it makes them remember the song more favorably. If they remember me being brilliant, I was, so give them a chance to remember me that way. First verse begins with “Ilh gen dit nien …”

  One more sip of tepid water.

  Time. I walked through the door.

  2

  In second and later sets, I never have stage fright; rather I have monkey-mind and think about everything instead of what I’m doing, and have to pull myself back to what should be doing. Tonight that meant that when I looked down at the guitar with which I would be starting my first song, I saw the note I had taped to it:

  REACH FOR THE MEMORIES

  These cansos, and their meanings, might be just memories to me, but my fans had memories too, and they loved these songs. They wanted their memories renewed, not rewritten. So I owed it to their memories to give them yet another memory of me singing the songs the way they remembered. I had to remember the man who I had been before many of my important memories, letting the earlier win out over the later.

  How did anyone, anywhere, ever either perform or listen with all that going on?

  I settled into playing position and into the frame of mind of my early thirties: sincere, dedicated, hardworking, still shocked that you could do well, and intend well, and put your whole heart on the block, and still get knocked face-first into a pile of wet shit.

  When it was quiet, I struck the first notes of “Don’t Forget I Live Here Too.” Applause pounded across the auditorium like breaking surf, flowing around the silent bloc of Ixists, and followed by the crackling hiss of people shushing each other. I couldn’t hear my own picking, so I stopped.

  The house was astonishingly silent.

  I gave them my warmest, easiest grin, and said, “If everyone is ready now …”

  There was laughter, even from the big swath of Ixist robes in the center, and a spatter of applause.

  “All right, then,” I said, and began again. My voice had aged well, becoming richer with its deeper undertones coming out, and I found brittle cynicism in the lyrics that I had not originally intended, and irony that allowed me to both ridicule and enjoy the still-naive, still-optimistic tone that had crept into the last two verses like the perky brightness of a tea commercialthe smug cleverness of using an ancient trick well.

  There are no more than a dozen occupations—political agent and artist are two—in which everything you do becomes part of your job. They are the only tolerable things to do with your time, as far as I’m concerned.

  A song is not a tool for changing a human heart in the way that a wrench is a tool for changing a bolt, but it was the tool I had, and I was the tool the OSP had.

  The cansos in Songs from Underneath were not really as subtle as a wrench. Their primary trope was the ancient trick of making the viewpoint character a victim of oppression, because people identify passionately with a strong viewpoint character, and there is intense pleasure in identifying with the narrator of a sad story or song. In Black Beauty that trick had made people begin to think that beating horses was bad; it was the trope that made privileged white children burn with outrage at Native Son and prudes weep over prostitutes in “Elle frequentait la rue Pigalle” and My Name Is Not Bitch. They also received, at no extra charge, the delicious smug superiority of sympathizing with an underdog, unlike their less-enlightened neighbors.

  It was one of my best performances, ever, of “Don’t Forget I Live Here Too.” I flatter myself that that was why it was not until the last note had faded completely, and the applause was battering at me like a great macerating club, that a man who was not an Ixist whipped off an Ixist robe, and produced, from the scabbard for the ceremonial obsidian dagger, a military maser.

  Raimbaut was patrolling that section. His reflexes had been slow in his born body, but they had fixed that in his clone body, and he had teenaged muscles and nerves which had not only learned ki hara do from me, but practiced it in my body.

  As the assassin raised the maser, and my eye was just catching an odd motion, Raimbaut leapt a row and slapped the back of the man’s head, throwing his aim off.

  I dropped to the floor.

  Darkness. Near silence. I didn’t even hear the fire curtain come in.

  Warm body next to my back. Paxa’s breath in my ear. “Gatorcrawl to the springer backstage.”

  She had covered us with a smart blanket; the fabric covering us would move to keep us covered, turn into rigid armor against a bullet or bomb, and seal to the floor around us if it sensed high temperatures, cryonics, or poison gas.

  We went on knees and elbows, bellies pressed to the floor. Paxa muttered into her com, talking to Raimbaut, Laprada, Dad, and the two other teams that Margaret had loaned us as auxiliary muscle.

  Later I saw recordings of what happened after Paxa dove on me with the blanket. Raimbaut got a grip from the head-slap and yanked on the would-be assassin’s collar. The maser discharged into the ceiling, melting crystals on one chandelier into a red-hot rain that was cool before it hit the floor, but also dropping a twenty-kilogram chunk of hot plaster. No one was hit, though a young woman, to whom I later sent an autographed Complete Recordings, turned an ankle getting out of the way.

  Raimbaut slid the man’s thumb off the firing button, turned his wrist, footswept him to the floor, slammed a heel into the man’s floating ribs, and leaned back. He stretched the man’s arm, twisting it against the joints, and stamped on his neck.

  He tried for a knockout and a live capture, but the aintellect running on a processor in the assassin’s left frontal sinus was having none of that. It set off microfilaments of explosive woven all through the capillaries of his brain, eliminating recoverable tissue for interrogation.

  Raimbaut said it felt like a hard cough through his boot sole, and when he first looked down he thought that that was a really terrible bloody nose, before he realized and backed away, scraping his foot frantically on the carpet.

  Meanwhile, Paxa and I gator-crawled to the emergency springer backstage. When we stood up, the blanket clung to our backs and the springer frame, still trying to protect us. Paxa put in her crash card. Glowing gray mist formed on the black metal plate in front of us, infinitely deep to look into, infinitely thin seen from the edge.

  Paxa shoved me into the gray fog. I fell forward in a shoulder roll, tucking to protect my hands, onto the floor of an emergency operating room in the OSP secure hospital on Dunant, orbiting Alpha Centauri A. I stood up, still holding the neck of my lute in my left hand. The rest must be lying backstage at the Fareman Hall, Trois-Orléans, Roosevelt, Epsilon Indi system; my poor lute had shattered across four parsecs.

  That shattered neck, strings dangling ruefully from the stillfine pegs, made it all so physical. I dropped it, wiping my hand on my tunic.

  The surgeon—an aintellect networked across three robots, each with about twenty metal arms, mounting tools, sensors, lights, lenses, and all—rolled in like a parade of midget tanks. “Are you hurt, hurt, Donz Leones?” t
he aintellect asked, through the speaker in its lead robot.

  On its way from its closet, across the hall, it would have read all of my medical records back to my childhood immunizations.

  “No,” I said. “Not physically hurt.”

  I stretched; no soreness. Hands unscathed when I flexed gently. I could have played at that moment—wanted to, in fact.

  “No,” I said again. “Not physically hurt.”

  The lute was recorded and could be re-created down to the molecule, as it had been, many times before. And I had spares waiting back at the Fareman.

  The springer behind me activated, and Margaret came through, choking and retching. She always had springer sickness worse than anyone I knew. “I told them you’d want to go back on,” she said. “Paxa has it all under control, for once.”

  “She has always handled every one of these incidents perfectly,” I said. My ex-wife was often unpleasant about Paxa. I never let her get away with it.