The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  I hung the last of my clothes on the robot’s arm and said, “Clean, press, hang; dupe anything with holes, faded dyes, or frayed seams.”

  “Yes sir,” the robot said.

  “Why do you do that?” Paxa asked.

  “Do what?”

  “You have the robot programmed to say things like ‘yes sir’ and ‘as you wish’ and so forth. Most people just use a chime, or check the green light.” She looked puzzled. “Giraut, do you enjoy making the machines obey you?”

  I shrugged. “They’re robots. They do whatever I tell them.”

  “Would you enjoy it more if they were people?”

  “People have feelings!”

  “So do robots.”

  “To function around people. They’re robots.”

  “Robot, are you equipped with pain and fear modules?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” it said.

  “This is silly,” I said. “Of course it has pain and fear. How could we train it if it didn’t? Robot, do you have pride or dignity?”

  “Currently I do not have those modules, sir. They are not recommended for a robot with my duties, sir, but if you wish I can order more, sir.”

  Paxa stuck her tongue out at me, so I suppose the argument was still friendly. “No, you’re fine as you are,” she said to the robot. “We are very pleased with you. Do you have a module to feel pleasure when I tell you that?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” it said.

  “Then we are very pleased with you. You may return to your regular duties.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” It said that at its own option. Probably Paxa had activated its pleasure center for the first time ever. I thought about reprimanding it for the unnecessary speech, but Paxa would doubtless treat that as an example of something or other. It rolled through the springer, back to our rented house in Noupeitau.

  “Now what was all that about?” I asked.

  “I’m just appalled that a man I love can treat a thinking, feeling being the way you do. I wonder if maybe you’ll treat me like that sometime.”

  “It’s a rolling armoire, Paxa, it just feels and thinks for our convenience. It has fear so that if the house is on fire it will flee outside and not waste the money we spent on it, loyalty so it will grab as much of our stuff as it can. Pain so it won’t take it through the fire. Pleasure so if we like something it does for us, it will remember to do it for us next time. It has the feelings we need it to have. That’s nothing like relations to another human being. The robot is just a complex of things it knows how to do, experiences it remembers, and a sense of when to do them.”

  “And what is a human being in a psypyx?” she asked.

  “A human being. The OSP expended a lot of blood and money to establish that.”

  “But a psypyx is just a piece of black plastic the size of a thimble. And it doesn’t even talk or move the way the robots do, or think and dream like the aintellects—”

  “Paxa, what is this about?” I didn’t want to become angry. She might be picking a fight, but she did that very rarely.

  “Remember that time you got frustrated with the chamberlain that couldn’t get right how you like your shoes shined? Three before this one, remember?”

  I shrugged. “I had a tantrum, I’ll admit.”

  “You ordered it to upload and store its memory, and you made it order a replacement for itself—so that it knew you were going to get rid of it—and then instead of selling it used—”

  “It’s not nice to sell a defective robot—”

  “You sent it into the regenner to be disassembled and recycled into raw materials. You didn’t even turn it off first.”

  “Paxa, I am not going to do that to a human being. And it isn’t the same thing anyway. And I don’t know what’s going on. Did you become a robots’-rightser overnight?”

  “No.” She looked down at her feet. “I want to tell you something important, something I think is wonderful, and I’m afraid to say it, so I’m thinking about everything about you that has ever bothered me, and the way you’re callous toward robots matters more, now.”

  “Now what? What’s changed?”

  “Don’t be angry.”

  I took a deep breath and said, “Paxa, I can’t promise not to react, but if I lose my temper I’ll go in the next room and kick the furniture—the nonsentient furniture. Okay?”

  “Okay.” She sighed. “There’s just this thing I never told you.” She sat on the bed, holding herself in her wrapped arms, looking at her feet. “For a long time after Piranesi was killed, with no psypyx left behind—for me, it was the end of the world. That’s why I didn’t accept the accelerated grief treatments, and mourned him for more than two stanyears. I think I was expecting to pine away and die; I thought just before I did I’d have my psypyx wiped too, go off to the void with Piranesi. You know how much I care for you, but you also know …”

  “That I will never be Piranesi Alcott.” I said it quietly, I think without bitterness. It was just true. Part, maybe most, of Paxa’s heart was buried beside him, overlooking the Western Ocean from a hilltop in Hedonia.

  “Yes, thank you for saying it. So for all these stanyears that you and I have been together—while I recovered with you as my friend, while we became lovers and partners and then a comfortable old couple—this is the hard part to tell you—every time the OSP requires me to get psypyx recordings, I have been wiping them as soon as they were made.”

  She looked for a reaction; I must have looked blank. She shrugged. “I just punch the erase as soon as I wake up. Never even gave them time to do a brain-body type on me. I don’t even know what my type is.

  “I was doing that so my affair with you will be gone from my memory whenever I finally die and come back.”

  At least this was a piece small enough to understand. “Someone would tell you, or you’d read about it in a document—”

  “Oh, I’d know about it, of course, but I wouldn’t feel it. When I came back I wanted to be as if I had just left Piranesi that morning. And if that recording I made a few days before his death was the oldest recording of me, that’s who I’d be. I had special instructions in my will not to use any newer copy if one got made or saved by mistake. You see? That’s what I chose to do, every three stanweeks when the OSP made us record a psypyx again. That was my choice.”

  “It’s always been your choice, Paxa. I thought at first you were having an affair with me to recover before finding someone else to be serious about. Eventually I realized you didn’t want to be serious about anyone, ever, again, and that was why you stayed.”

  “It was. It’s different, now.” She clutched herself more tightly than before. “Giraut, I don’t want to lose our times together. I’m going to have a current psypyx made, and keep it, and change my will.”

  “I’m honored,” I said. I was, and I didn’t know what else to say. Part of me wondered, what if she had died on a mission before now? I would only have found out when they went to revive her. But what I didn’t know hadn’t hurt me then, and now it never would. Rather than try to say more, I just kissed her.

  Sometime later, I said, “So what did this have to do with ‘robot abuse’?” (I said the phrase as a joke but she seemed not to notice that).

  “There are things that are acceptable in a friend-and-lover that I’m not sure about in a life-companion,” she said. “These last few weeks I’ve been looking at everything about you. I’ve noticed the way you stand up to Margaret for me, every time, even though you’re still in love with her. I’ve noticed that even though you sometimes behave very badly, you do apologize and try to make amends and rarely try to defend it. And so on. Watching and thinking. And then I was just about to tell you, and you were harsh to that robot—did you know it’s very, very afraid of you? It knows what you did, once, to another chamberlain. Do you read their emotion logs at all?”

  “Never,” I admitted. “If I did, I doubt that I would care.”

  “Well, and so … Giraut, cruelty to machin
es isn’t something that makes me say never, never, never, but it is still cruelty, and it did stop me, just then. And I had to remind myself to go through with it. Can you try to be kinder?”

  “I can try. I’ve done harder things for you many times, gladly. And really, I would never treat you or any other real person like that. Really.”

  “I know you believe that.”

  I kissed her again, afraid of more discussion. I wasn’t entirely sure I would pass whatever test this was.

  We had a great window for this trip, one that matched Trois-Orleans local solar time to Noupeitau local solar time closely enough to avoid spring lag, though it would still feel a little odd, crossing over at noon, to have had fourteen hours from midnight to noon, and then have less than ten hours from noon to midnight. With everything confirmed, and the robots authorized to finish the move and com us about any uncertainties, we stepped through the springer in one wall of the apartment bedroom, forty-six light-years in one single step onto a crowded, busy street between the spires and arches of Noupeitau. Paxa coughed beside me—her springer sickness was generally mild—the daylight went from golden straw to medium amber, and the slight increase in gravity felt as if we were on an elevator that had started with a lurch.

  “Bull’s-eye noon,” I said.

  Arcturus, dead, overhead, was a tiny dot, barely more than an extraordinarily brilliant star, surrounded by a tight circle of gold, a broader ring of blue, and a most-of-the-sky circle of mauve, and the horizon was rimmed in crimson. Bull’s-eye noons usually happen the day after a big thunderstorm clears the air of Wilson’s endemic natural pollution. “It’s going to be a really nice afternoon.” I took Paxa’s hand and we let whim take us up the dear old familiar street.

  Wilson was almost exactly between Darks, the every-six-stanyear continental fires that dimmed the skies of my homeworld. The fine black soot never fully cleared from the atmosphere, so that Arcturus’s already ruddy light was exaggerated into almost blood red at dawn and dusk, but today the veil of fine carbon particles in the atmosphere was much thinner than usual. Colors became garish. Increased visual acuity ruined fine effects on the buildings—much of what normally looked like shadowing was revealed as dark carbon smears.

  Yes, as I had guessed, it had rained earlier. Robots were scrubbing off the black and white lines of the rivulets.

  “How often do people here need treatment for lung cancer?” Paxa asked suddenly. “With all the horrible stuff you breathe?”

  I shrugged. “Occitans are genetically modified in the womb to be resistant to lung cancer, and we have enhanced regeneration to control emphysema. The polar grasslands and forests are low-tar species, as much as they can be when they have to be able to resist a six-stanyear-long freeze. Everyone who lives here gets anticancer vaccine regularly. And all of us have a few spare lungs grown and waiting in the freezer. My mother has had two replacements so far, and Dad had one before he moved into his clone body. And how much skin work does a Hedon commonly need?”

  She laughed. “Fair enough.”

  Hedonia was a culture of fair-skinned nudists, located along a desert coast straddling the equator of Söderblom, which orbited at the inner edge of the habitable zone of Eta Cassiopeia, a G star slightly hotter than Sol. Whatever bureaucrat had arranged that had done the equivalent of settling Swedes in Kenya. “Still,” she said, “I’d rather need my hide repaired than what I breathe with.”

  “Oh, agreed. But, at the same time, on a day like this …”

  My arm swept out, embracing Palace Square, the day, the city—possibly the planet Wilson and the twenty-ninth century. It was good to be home.

  We had sprung into broad, cobbled Lei Street just where it debouched down a wide staircase into Palace Square. Under the dozens of thick-boled oaks in the center were countless tables where Occitans came to sit, eat, drink, argue, do nothing, and watch people.

  The jovent costumes of my youth (flowing tapis, clinging tunics, billowing breeches, and elegant boots) were long gone, and so were the full dresses and skirts (and, alas for my tastes, the plunging necklines and waist-length hair) of the donzelhas. Still, Occitan men wore their fashionable jackets, tunics, and slim straight-leg trousers tucked into lower, square-cut boots in a way that recalled the bravos of the past, and the fuller pants and occasional slim skirts on women had a grace and a certain nonsaique that still marked them as Occitan.

  In the decade just after Connect, Nou Occitan had convulsed between a passion for the Interstellar Metaculture and an equal and opposite Traditionalist passion; Inters and Trads had brawled in the square, often, and one of the best ways to get into a brawl had been to wear the right suit with panache. Nowadays what remained was a tradition of always dressing well.

  “You’re having thoughts,” Paxa said.

  “I often do. But, yes, I’m a little sad. Thinking … if you had died in one of the fights a couple of nights ago, I would have just found out you had kept your psypyx out of date, and that you wouldn’t be coming back with our shared memories. And this square would be the loneliest place in human space.”

  “Oh.” Paxa shrugged. “But we’re here. And human space is covered with good places to be, and this is one of them. And tomorrow I will go in and get my psypyx made and not wipe it. Even find out what my type is; do you think, if she’s compatible, Laprada would agree to wear me while they grow my clone body?”

  “I don’t know, midons, but I’ve just managed to make my morbidness contagious—now you’re talking about dying.”

  “You’re right,” she said, and made a face at me as if I had done it on purpose. “With all this safety and love and laughter around you, why are you mentally living in some universe where you’re crying?”

  “An unfortunate tendency in artists, I admit.”

  We took a table and commed an order to a café we could see across the square, for a light, spicy seafood soup and orangeslice-and-spinach salad to split, with a large carafe of Caledon apple wine.

  The café’s aintellect said, “The robot will arrive with your food and wine within an estimated fifteen minutes, Donz Leones. Are there children at the table, donz?”

  “No need for any balloons, but there are sentimental people here. Is the red harlequin available today?”

  “He should be, donz, and I will try to get him for you. Welcome back to Noupeitau, Donz Leones. We are always glad to see you again.”

  “Thank you.”

  My very first time in Noupeitau, with Dad and Mother when I was six, we had gotten steamed-sausage-with-peppers, fried dumplings, and ice cream, brought to our tables by the red harlequin robot, who was at least a hundred stanyears old even then. I had requested that same robot the first time I had brought Margaret here, shortly before we were married.

  The stanyears had wheeled around, the marriage and much of my hair had gone, and the red harlequin (by then a springercarrier rather than a food-carrier) had delivered a round of drinks to celebrate Raimbaut’s getting a new body—and my being able to drink again, now that his psypyx was off me. I remembered that warm red twilit evening: Raimbaut, blissfully drinking his Hedon Gore in his brand-new four-year-old body, feet dangling from his adult-sized chair; Rebop, my dear Earth friend, grimly drinking seltzer water because she was still wearing Laprada’s psypyx; and Paxa, laughing and smiling almost for the first time after Piranesi’s death. “Remember the first time we were here together?”

  “Oh, yes. Now Raimbaut and Laprada are in their own bodies (and into each other’s),” Paxa said. “And poor Rebop—she wasn’t really cut out for the physical life, was she?”

  I sighed. I hated to think of her having gone into the box. Once in a great while she would still send me a message, but now it was always text. Psychically Rebop lived in a virtual Regency Bath, pursued by endless handsome young beaux; physically she stayed in her once-charming apartment, now stale and dusty, on the beach of one of the Floridas. Her balcony had a spectacular view of the rain forest, and she had once kept a r
ecording scope out there—when I had first known her, she had sent me vus of jaguars stalking the wild cattle around the pool formed by the small artificial falls down one side of her building, eagles fishing in the muddy salt channels where the Floridas are silting into reunion, and a mother bear standing between a huge alligator and her cub.

  Probably her recording scope was still out there, now gray with clinging rain-rivuleted dust. Thoroughly in the box, Rebop had not ventured onto that balcony in years. Her last few letters had been about nothing but intrigues and romances in Bath, circa 1815. I could not be sure that she remembered that I lived in this century, or that anyone did.

  “She did well enough visiting places like Hedonia and Noupeitau,” I pointed out. “Remember how she laughed when she first saw the red harlequin? She only started the downward spiral into the box after that evening when we were having dinner and that Caravaggio goon showed up to shoot at us.”

  “She wasn’t hit.”

  “Stray rounds went close to her. That’s scary to a civilian. And she didn’t like seeing me break his neck; that’s not a way most women want to see a man they like. Rebop really did try, Paxa. If the outside world were a better place, she’d be out here with us, still.”

  “I didn’t mean to criticize your friend, and yes, I agree, if this were a better world, she’d have stayed out in it. And yet—we love it. Giraut, let me ask you this—we’re nearly immortal, we just keep living from physical age four to physical age whatever, over and over. Are we completely insane that we want to do that in a world that is so violent, where things get broken so badly? Did Rebop maybe have the right idea, just move to someplace where you can enjoy life till you die?”

  “There’s no variety where she is.”

  “There could be at one request from her to her aintellects; she could wake up in a new world every morning forever if she wanted to. Maybe she’s sane and we’re crazy.”

  “Morbidness is definitely contagious,” I said. “You and I like that the world around us wasn’t made for us and isn’t there to please us.”