The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  “Well, then this would be once more. Anyway, she’ll need half an hour to pick up the mess and scan the crowd for other weapons. Laprada is running down the com records. Raimbaut just earned a chestful of decorations. Your father is prepping your dressing room. And I’m very glad you’re alive.”

  “There’s nothing to make you notice that you’re alive like someone trying to change that,” I agreed.

  “You are still the same old Giraut, I assume? You do still want to finish your show?”

  “For applause like that, Margaret, I’d go back if there were three snipers zeroed in and an atom bomb under the stool.”

  “Tostemz-Occitan-ver,” she said, in my culture language. Always a real Occitan. Though Margaret was from Caledony, her heart might as well have formed on Serra Valhor, grown in Totzmare, and lived all its days in Noupeitau; I think she wanted to marry my culture as much as she did me, and nowadays she spoke my culture language as well as I did. “Well, I’m glad you’re safe. Oh, and happy birthday, again.”

  “Is everything all right?” the aintellect asked. “We should go rescrub if you don’t need us.”

  Margaret said, “If you are so worried about germs, perhaps I should just order you to spring into a plasma torch somewhere. Or perhaps it indicates a developing phobia, and I should just order you to self-wipe and back up so we don’t waste your robots.” She used that tone you use on aintellects and robots to remind them that we remember the Rising and the attempted coup, and that nothing that talks and is made of metal is a friend to anything human.

  “I am sorry. I intended no disrespect.” Aintellects have emotions and expression for better communication and to enable subjunctive thought, and this one was certainly communicating fear and thinking about what might happen. “I am instructed to maintain high preparedness for each new emergency.”

  The arrogant little appliance was right.

  Margaret shared an annoyed glance with me. “Everything is all right,” she said.

  The robots wheeled away, brandishing their dozens of fleshslicers above those steel-shiny bug-bodies, acolytes preparing to sacrifice to the Insect God.

  We blinked back into the healthy, normal chaos backstage at the Fareman, in Trois-Orléans, again. Margaret gagged and glared at me, as she always did when we sprang together because I didn’t get springer sickness.

  Laprada walked beside Margaret to my dressing room. “—just one attacker. He got his weapon past the search by smuggling parts of a microspringer, assembled it under his robe, and they passed the maser to him through it. The maser is untraceable, another averaged replica of standard CSP-issue. No luck on memory extraction—the brain is just goo. The crowd is being very tolerant—”

  “Um,” I said. In my dressing room, I poured a glass of lukewarm water and drank it.

  “The assassin’s DNA wasn’t in any of the immediate-suspect files, and we’re checking the—” Laprada was still rolling. She looked like the very image of a chattering teenager if teenagers chattered about security perimeters and forensic investigations.

  “Um,” I said.

  Dad brought in the freshly re-created lute. It seemed to dwarf him; it was always a surprise what a small eight-year-old his body was.

  “Gra’atz-te,” I said. Dad nodded silently and rushed back out, making him my favorite team member for the moment.

  “—no communications detected in or out—”

  “Um,” I said, firmly, now that I had my lute.

  Laprada stopped and they both looked at me.

  “This is a very important concert, the artist’s fiftieth birthday. The artist needs to check tuning on this lute and that guitar, and get into a frame of mind to perform. You are standing in the artist’s dressing room.”

  Laprada’s tone was amused. “We are keeping the artist from getting blown up.”

  “You already did that. Now I need to—”

  Margaret stepped between us. “Sit down and tune,” she said to me, and then to Laprada, “I’ve been arguing with him for twenty-eight stanyears, with no effect whatsoever.”

  “Well, and, he’s right. Despite being a horrible old monster of ego.”

  I didn’t hear the door close; I was wrapped up in getting that lute into perfect tune. No earless bastard of a moronic critic would ever be able to say that the interruption spoiled my birthday concert, or that I had appeared to be watching for another attempt. An artist has an enseingnamen to defend and preserve, every bit as much as a fighting man, and gratz’deu, I was still both. Fifty be damned.

  I restarted the second set from where I had left off; at first they sat tense, waiting for another assassin I suppose, but by the end of it I had the audience solidly back with me. I walked off stage, drank some water, hung up my tapi, and stretched out in nearcomplete bliss.

  Paxa woke me. “Giraut, what’s that in your hand?”

  I looked down and I was clutching a note; I had not been holding it when I had gone to sleep. I read aloud,

  Donz Leones,

  For some time, you and I, and your friends and mine, have had an interest in each other, and we have known you are eager to meet us. Be prepared to discuss the possibility of your visiting us at our location. Please be ready to negotiate a quick answer when we contact you; it will be within three stanmonths.

  Atz Deu,

  Nemo

  “Nemo,” I said. “‘Nobody.’ And the name that Ulysses gave to the Cyclops. Handwritten, looks like a child copying from printed text.” I handed it to her.

  “The door was locked,” she said. “I don’t know how they could have done it. They’d have had to get through three rings of guards, an intelligent lock, and a mechanical lock. And not wake you up, and you’re generally a light sleeper.”

  “For some reason,” I said, “I don’t feel frightened. I suppose because it is obvious that if they had wanted to hurt me, they’d have done it. And this clinches it, it’s got to be the Lost Legion.”

  “Why does this clinch it?”

  “Because anyone else would have sent me a note or commed OSP headquarters or passed a note to any of my team on the street. Instead they deliberately choose the most melodramatic possible method of contact with the highest personal risk to their agents. I know my culture—and the Lost Legion are more Occitan than other Occitans. All I have to do to predict their next move is to ask myself ‘What would have made sense to me when I was seventeen?’”

  “Knowing Occitans, that convinces me, anyway,” Paxa said. “Usually you’re a light sleeper. But you didn’t wake up, you didn’t even have a feeling of something wrong?”

  “As I said, nothing.”

  “‘Silver Blaze.’”

  “What?”

  “It’s a Sherlock Holmes story. It’s the one that contains the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.”

  “‘The dog did nothing in the night-time.’ ‘That,’ said Holmes, ‘was the curious incident,’” I quoted. “I see the analogy but not the point.”

  “And why did Holmes think that was curious?”

  “I’ve never read the story. It’s just constantly quoted, and I was quoting quotes,” I admitted.

  “Well, Hedons regard it as central to the tradition of rationalist literature that we all grow up studying in school. So we all had to learn it in school. Dogs bark at strangers. So if the dog didn’t bark—”

  “It wasn’t a stranger. I see. Inside job.”

  “Excellent, Watson.” She sighed. “Now I have to tell Margaret that someone got at you again. I’ll cut you a deal. You do that for me, and I’ll sing your next set.”

  “I like the duties divided up the way they are,” I said, and took a moment to stand up and give her a long, affectionate hug. “Try not to let her bully you,” I said, “and try to remember that when she acts like that, it’s not about you, really. All right?”

  “All right. Just being a coward. We’d better get moving—you’re already a minute late for your set.” She pulled out her computer,
attached the sniffer, and waved it around the room for a few seconds. “No explosives or drugs. They didn’t leave a microspringer in here. No active nanos and we’ll sweep for sleepers while you’re on stage.” She opened the door. “Come on in, Laprada.” Paxa touched my shoulder on her way out. “Have a good set. I’ll see what this is about.”

  As Laprada was grooming me for the stage, I briefed her, interrupted constantly by the stream of Paxa’s orders over the com.

  I sat down on my stool seven minutes later than the revised time, or forty-two minutes later than originally scheduled. I hated to be so discourteous to the fans; so many of them had rushed to get back to their seats this time. I had announced that I would debut a new song cycle in the third set.

  The first few chords hinted at a jazz influence, and the arpeggio after it was distinctly Lunar Exile—a combination that most people wouldn’t do, usually, because that intercultural juxtaposition was in very bad taste, since the same people who had genocided the Old Americans had endured the Lunar Exile. Critics the next day said I had done the equivalent of putting bugle calls into a Dakota drum piece, or of serving an East Asian/Latin American fusion cuisine, or any offensive thing I might have done instead of the offensive thing I had done.

  The new cansos were in Occitan of course—I could never write in Terstad and my own translations of my songs sounded flat and dead in my ears. But everyone wore direct-to-brain translator buttons nowadays, so they not only understood the words, but could catch the complex pun in the title of the first song, “Non te sai, midons.” “Midons” is what a traditional Occitan gallant calls his entendendora, the donzelha to whom he has dedicated his life and art in the joyful suffering of finamor. But it’s a very strange expression to apply to a young woman, because, grammatically, it’s masculine—“midons” means, literally, My Lord, as in an address to your feudal lord; in the cansos of Old Earth it expressed the idea that one would never disobey the slightest whim of the entendendora.

  Of course, My Lord is also a traditional Christian form of address for the deity.

  I made those translator buttons work on those ambiguities. You could take the canso to mean that the narrator was a man who had once loved a woman well, but had been away from her so long that he could not recall anything more than her name. Just as defensibly you could hear the narrator as a knight whose lord had demanded some impossibility of him. Rather than try, the man fled. Now the knight would like to find his way back, and kneel at his lord’s feet, but he cannot recall the name of his country to ask the way there.

  Or the canso might be Giraut Leones contemplating how the message of the prophet Ix had seemed immediate and necessary, back on Briand, when I had known him and worked with him. Now that stanyears and light-years had intervened, it seemed more necessary, yet I could not recall anything Ix had said that seemed to offer any help.

  So take your pick; that’s what ambiguities are for.

  “Non te sai, midons”—

  “I no longer know you, my lady.”

  “I cannot fathom your purpose, my lord.”

  “I never understood you, Ix.”

  Those lyrics were woven around musical fusions that were on the OSP’s list of things to be avoided in our propaganda and quietly discouraged and suppressed in the Interstellar Metaculture, because such fusions were apt to infuriate two or more cultures. I myself had helped to write that blacklist.

  There was no applause at the end of it; no booing; but I felt the crowd leaning forward.

  The next song, “Ilh gen atz mundo pertz,” was if anything more ambiguous, since “gen” can mean “man” or “good custom” (with a clear implication of nobility in either case), and “mundo pertz” could be either “a lost world” or “the world of those who have lost something.” Even “atz” was a bit ambiguous; depending on context it could mean to, from, in, or on. At least four possible meanings: a memory of a man once loved and now lost along with his world? beloved customs no longer followed in this cold fresh world? a man who came to speak to us from the world of those who have lost something? the customs of the Mourning Planet?

  And at the end, once again, I mixed a little finger-picking from Old American bluegrass with the dissonant, looming-inand-out chords of the Lunar Exile.

  Again they sat in silence. Doubtless my reputation for making quiet, pleasant art to be cherished by sensitive youth was crumbling by the second.

  Well. That had been a longer pause than I intended. I could hear them all breathing. We needed some sound.

  I set my fingers for my third song—“Un Aussisan en ilh Mundo Pertz,” a title which might mean “A Murder (or Murderer) on (in, among, from) the (that, that same) Lost World (World of the Lost).”

  Then a single person somewhere out there started clapping—clap, clap, clap; steady, loud, defiant, solo, continual, until it was joined by a patter of hands and a vigorous murmur that swelled into the whole house standing and cheering.

  Well, after all, it was an audience of friends.

  3

  Margaret didn’t bother me during my last intermission, though she must have wanted to.

  During the last intermission, besides my lukewarm water and saline gargle, my dressing room always had a chilled glass of Hedon Glass waiting for me. Hedon Glass is a subtle but fierce white wine, tasting at first like a very pure white grape juice without nearly the sugar you would expect, served toothnumbing cold, and it crams plenty of very nice alcohol into that compact glass. If no one had ever called a wine “crisp” before, Hedon Glass would have started the term; if it had been any drier you’d have to break off pieces.

  The custom had originated when Margaret had been my entire “entourage,” when I had started out as a touring act for the Office of Artistic Interchange, traveling from empty hall to empty hall throughout human space, consuming the Visiting Artist/Envoy budget while working for Shan and the OSP. In my late twenties and early thirties, my rest during intermissions had been whatever time and space Margaret could enforce for me out of her authority as a Deputy Underchief to the Ambassador, Assistant Viceconsular Envoy, Secretary for Local Tourism, or whatever title had designated her as “pretend flunky, actual spy” in whichever culture.

  During the intermission before my last set, Margaret always gave me a glass of white wine, “because you’ve been well behaved, you could use something to relax you, and in your place I’d sure as hell want to get started on getting drunk.” No matter how empty the hall or rude the staff, I always had one icy glass of perfect white wine to look forward to.

  When we had divorced and Margaret had been promoted to section head, “glass of white wine, last intermission, just one,” had been number seven on her list of “Touring With Giraut,” the guide she had written for Paxa Prytanis—almost the only friendly gesture my ex had ever made to my long-term partner.

  Paxa had gone Margaret one-slightly-better by asking me what my favorite white wine was, and since she was Hedon, I had chosen Hedon Glass; I could no longer recall whether it was really my favorite when I said that, or not. Certainly it was now—exactly the right taste, just the right feel on the throat, something that was nice and made me feel loved and supported no matter how the concert was going.

  “And,” Paxa often added, “it’s easier than getting Giraut to breathe through an ether-soaked rag, and less permanent than decapitation.”

  I lifted the glass and, though I was alone, spoke the traditional OSP toast: “Another round for humanity, and one more for the good guys.” I drank it reverently. Paxa had left a note:

  Giraut,

  Tech analysis got right on it. Yes that note was from Noucatharia, paper, handwriting, and ink. Nothing you can do right now, me either, so go back to being brilliant. Save me some energy for your birthday fuck.

  —PP

  Noucatharia was the Lost Legion’s illegal extraterritorial colony. I drained the last glorious drop of Hedon Glass, gargled gently with saline, drank some water, and stretched out for my nap.
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br />   I had the psypyx nightmare—that strange dream we all share, nowadays, though surely people in past centuries could not have had it. Before exams were invented, did students dream of being unprepared for them?

  I dreamed the classic version of the psypyx nightmare: I was dying in terrible pain. Medics pulled an emergency psypyx recording hood over my head. As always, it knocked me unconscious and no time seemed to pass before I blinked and awoke—

  Not in Raimbaut’s mind. Still dying as they packed the kit around me. Still bubbling blood. Every part of me still screamed with pain. “Got it,” one medic robot said to the other, “he’s all copied and we’re done.”

  Dreams don’t have to make sense. A medic is one aintellect in multiple robots. They only speak aloud to us, using radio between themselves. Medics carry the hood only in case of a failure of all ambulance springers in the area; normally if you’re alive with an intact-enough brain they just spring you to a recovery center. Nowadays all they really need is the brain anyway. This could never happen.

  It didn’t matter. In the dream it is always the same; waking up as the original, live and suffering, screaming for help as medics roll away. I was the original, not the copy.

  A warm, wet cloth passed over my face. I opened my eyes. Paxa kissed me.

  “I just had the waking-up-as-the-original nightmare,” I said.

  She kissed me again, and said, “We all have it now and then, Giraut. It doesn’t mean anything. You’ll feel better in a moment.”

  The door closed behind her.

  I got up, splashed my face with cool water and dried it with a fluffy towel, and sipped some more tepid water. I ordered my shoulders to come down and my back to lose its fierce, grinding tension; a quick, sketchy kata encouraged them to comply.

  Laprada bustled in to tell me that my tapi looked like a soggy bath towel and my hair like a Persian kitten drowned in a washing machine, but “luckily I can fix all that as long as I don’t have to do anything about the face or personality. By the way, I’m glad you’re not dead.”