by John Barnes
“You started the morbidness, dear one, and you’re the one who keeps reacting to it.”
“I know, I know, I’m sorry. I’m very edgy.”
The red harlequin robot’s obscene grin, eye-dazzling diamond pattern, and ancient line of patter were exactly the same as always when it rolled up, opened the springer on its chest, and set out our food and the sweating pitcher of wine. We said nothing for a while, busy enjoying the thin, fiercely-peppered soup, picking at the chilled fruits and vegetables, and drinking the icy Caledon wine.
Something moved in the corner of my vision.
I rolled low out of my chair and came to my feet crouched and with all senses forward toward—
—a robot delivering food, sightless inane sweet smile on a bobbing head, a big bunch of silver balloons tied to one of its long bunny ears. Boy about seven, girl about five, older man (grandfather?) at the table.
As I watched, it presented a balloon to each child. They insisted that the older man take a balloon too. Grinning, he tied it onto his jacket’s pocket flap.
“Put that away, Giraut,” Paxa said, and I looked down to see that my maser was in my hand, safety already clicked off, though at least I still had it turned away from me and pointed up. Of course we were under a tree, so I might have blasted off a limb or set the tree on fire, but usually it’s better to irradiate the sky than explode the ground under your feet. Decades of training ensured I succumbed only to safe madness.
“Deu,” I said. I set the safety, reholstered, took a deep breath, looked around again.
Perfectly safe tables and people under the oaks in Palace Square.
I felt my quads and hamstrings tightening so hard I shook. I boing-marched back to my chair in an awkward, puppet-jerkedon-a-string way. When only half your muscles are flexing, and the rest are locked, the world fights you.
Paxa poured me the rest of the wine and ordered more; she slid her chair around to where she could rub my back. Hedons rub the human body the way Occitans sing, Thorburgers fight, or Trois-Orleanians cook—automatically, easily, the most natural thing in the world. Her strong fingers worked at the knots through my shirt and jacket, and the big gulps of wine I had taken began to give me a warm, flushed feeling.
“Deep breaths,” she said. “Deep breaths. We’ve done this before, Giraut.”
About the tenth deep breath, I felt a raggy, catching sensation in my throat.
“The thing that amazes me the most,” Paxa said, digging hard with her thumbs into the hinge muscles just above my tailbone, “is that it always takes you by surprise.”
“It surprises you too,” I said.
“I meant generic, any-old-body you, Giraut. No particular slur on you. Or me, for that matter. You were a target twice within five hours. The second time you killed an assassin with bare hands and improvised weapons, fighting stark naked and on two seconds’ warning, while you were already stressed out from the previous attempt and from a concert that ran late, and debuting your most controversial work in decades. Not a lowstress thing to do, non be? This is how you react to stress after the stress is over. I’ve seen this before. I know what to do.” She paused in her rubbing to stand up and hug me around my chest, her hands squeezing my pectoral muscles, chin digging into my shoulder muscles. “If I minded doing this I’d long ago have left.”
“Seems unfair that you have to do your job and fix me up after I do mine.”
Her small, strong fingers dug in as if she were trying to lift off my shoulder blades. “And how often have you given me a candlelit hot bath with cannabis fudge and cunnilingus, after I’ve had a close one? And you never even complain about the Hedon music I want to listen to while we have one of those evenings, even though I know that to you it sounds like a ‘lethargic child trying to teach himself the xylophone.’ Now get nice and drunk and let me rub your back. When are we visiting your mother?”
“Sixteen o’clock this evening,” I said. “Twenty-hour day, here, remember, so that’s an hour after sunset—”
“I know Wilson’s day,” she said gently. “Another sign of the stress being over is that you over-explain. I just asked to make sure I don’t need to feed you a scrubber anytime soon, because I want the alcohol to have the time to do its job. Now let me see if it’s possible to rub you until you dissolve into a warm sloppy puddle, let’s get you very, very drunk, and let’s see how much nothing we can do, just how luxuriously.”
It was still a beautiful day, and after all, I was home. I could feel the blessed balm of a thousand small pleasures: the way one couple walked together. A snatch of an old melody from a street musician far away. Sooty-red sunlight on the golden West Dome of the Palace. The crisp-and-sweet taste of the Caledon wine, so reminiscent of the sugary apples of that cold planet Nansen.
Blissfully drunk and wrung out, I sat back, and watched, and did my best not to think about tomorrow’s recording sessions, or Ix or the Lost Legion, or much of anything. Paxa held my hand. At fifteen o’clock, I swallowed the scrubber. Renervating cool damp air swept over us. Arcturus blinked out. Colors vanished into red monochrome—Wilson turns fast, and Arcturus is just a dot in its sky, so the direct light cuts off very fast indeed, though the sky glows pink for almost an hour after sunset. “There’s time to walk, midons, instead of spring.”
“Would it please you?”
“Time with you always does.”
“Any Occitan male always talks like that, I know, but I like the way you always mean it.”
We climbed the steps out of Palace Square. Hazy red stars burst in a spatter across the sky between the towers in front of us.
“Usually in the past,” Paxa said, “when we’ve come here, you’ve gotten together with your mother in the first hour.”
I didn’t answer, trying to think of what to say.
After a few more steps, Paxa asked, “Is it anything awful?”
“It involves love. Of course it’s awful.” I put an arm around her, resting my hand lightly on her shoulder. “Lately Mother’s letters contain no gossip about friends, no news of Noupeitau, and although she’s publishing papers as fast as ever, nothing about her work. Lately she writes about just one subject: how much she misses Dad.”
“Oh, no.” Paxa looked slightly sick.
“She went so far as to be retested.”
“I take it she’s still UT?”
“They never make mistakes like that, especially not twice. She’s UT. She’s going to grow old and die, and it could be a decade, or a century, or never, before they have a way to get her off a psypyx. He’s physically six and he’ll be able to recopy forever. She’s working on accepting that they are really parted. Even if they do find a way to bring her back, it’s likely to be decades in the future. He could easily be a couple of lifetimes ahead of her.”
“Oh, Giraut, that’s terrible.”
My parents had decided to divorce and not write when Mother tested UT. They thought it would be easier.
“Midons deu, Paxa, what a strange world. When you and I were kids we didn’t know there was such a thing as UT. Now it’s almost the worst thing that can happen to a human being.”
Mother had a fine mind and a healthy brain, but they were the wrong type—actually UT wasn’t a type, the U was not a Chandreseki Protocol Group and the T was certainly not a Ramirez Microstructural Number. UT stood for Untransferrable—and you were untransferrable because they couldn’t type-match you.
The transfer of a mind to your clone body required first that you develop the Chandreseki bonds over which your mental processes would operate your new brain and body, and across which your mind would gradually migrate into the clone brain, taking twenty to forty stanyears to copy over completely. Chandreseki bonds were nano-scale synthetic synapses unlike anything that occurred naturally, and the mind in the psypyx had to learn to work them, very much as it had to learn to operate artificial ears or replacement eyes. You couldn’t just start in the clone body because there was nothing to grow the bonds to, no feed
back that said, down at the brain-cell level, “Yes, getting you, turn up the volume, can you do something about that scratchy sound, picture’s blurry, better …” until the bonds had developed properly.
To learn to work Chandreseki bonds, you needed a fully functional brain on the other side of the bonds for at least a few months, until your Chandreseki bonds were numerous, varied, and clear enough to let you take control of your clone body. Clone bodies were expensive and didn’t keep well, so they only grew you a new one after your born body died. Thus, normally, you spent a couple of years riding in the back of someone else’s mind, developing your Chandreseki bonds, until they had grown your clone to the physical age of four in the tank, a four-year-old’s brain being about the least-developed human brain that can cope with an adult mind; younger transfers had emotional problems later in life.
None of that applied if you were UT. If you were UT, you couldn’t form Chandreseki bonds because there was no mind-body type that worked with yours. It was like having a one-ofa-kind blood type and needing a transfusion, or “being a flathead screw in a Phillips world,” as the joke went—everything was the same except nothing would fit your head.
If you plugged a UT mind, like Mother’s, into a host brain, it adapted normally at first but within a couple of weeks it could not contact its own geeblok for emotions or emblok for short-term memory, and shortly vanished into raving, terrified solipsism.
When Dad had died, Mother had thought she would psypyx transfer to a new body so that she and my father could emerge at about the same physical age. The first exam was when she found out she was UT.
They would keep making psypyxes until her mind began to go, taking the last one in which she had all her faculties as the definitive version of her, but until her particular UT problem was solved, she was stuck, first in her body, later in her psypyx—as doomed to die as anyone in an old novel.
Paxa said, “Does it ever bother you that no one human has ever checked Chandreseki’s work, or Ramirez’s?”
“They’re aintellects, Paxa,” I pointed out. “Both named after their labs. No human being can check their work; nobody can hold that much information in the mind all at once. And actually, I’m glad that they are aintellects.”
“Really?” she asked.
In Noupeitau all the street lighting and advertising was required to be directional and equipped with réverbères, so there was little sky-scattered light. When you stepped into a shadow, at least a few bright stars would be visible, white lights at the centers of tiny red disks. We were descending one of the steep streets that look cobblestoned but are far stronger because the whole street was built in a single piece, stones and cement and all, by nanos. We went down a long flight of steps, with the sway already built into the center (which would naturally have occurred by the passage of millennia of feet, but not when the steps were made of single-piece dyed quartz).
Everything was intended to look just as natural as it did, and everything was just as artificial as it needed to be for everyone’s convenience.
My real answer to Paxa’s question was this: my home city was pleasant because it had always been designed to please, just as the aintellect scientists, engineers, and doctors did perfect work because they were designed to be perfect for us; why would we want a fallible human being on the job?
The more her question turned over in my head, the more confusing it became to me, especially that she hadn’t accepted my straightforward answer. “Why do you ask? Why would I not want Chandreseki and Ramirez to be aintellects?”
“Well, you have that horror of aintellects.” She reached up to rest a finger lightly on my mouth, her hand moving as delicately and precisely as it did with a knife or garrote. “You can skip reminding me of your personal story. I understand that you hate and fear aintellects and robots, Giraut, more so than most people, and that you’re from a culture that never tolerated humaniformed robots and hid its aintellects as much as possible. I even understand that after the things that happened during the attempted coup, you have more reason to hate and fear them than most. But, you know, the same things happened to me during the coup, and I lost Piranesi in it, and he really was the great love of my life And I don’t feel anything like your horror of inorganic intelligence; I just have to accept that you do. All right, so you have this irrational loathing, anger, and disgust toward any mind that doesn’t run in meat. Accepted, granted, stipulated, don’t get off the subject by explaining it. Now, why are you glad that psypyx technology, on which we all depend, is completely developed and controlled by millions of copies of Chandreseki Corporation Aintellect Number Eighty-Four and Ramirez University Laboratories Aintellect Pi Gamma Sixteen? Why does a human-supremacy-first-last-always type, like you, want his future survival controlled by aintellects?”
“I like the idea that Mother doesn’t just get care from doctors who studied with Chandreseki and Ramirez, she gets it from Chandreseki and Ramirez, who have worked in every clinic in every city in human space, accumulating millions of years of experience every year, because what one copy knows they all know. I also want aintellects and robots to fly any spaceship I ride on, and I prefer that if there’s a dirty, dangerous job to be done, a robot goes there to do it.”
“But for the recordings you insisted on human musicians, trained the old way.” She glanced at me and held up a finger, as if mocking her own point, “But (second-order ‘but’!) you yourself have made downloadable brain recordings that people use to learn the lute.”
“If I were a pimp, I wouldn’t necessarily want my daughter to work for me.”
“So you’re a hypocrite.” She danced lightly in a little circle around me. “Aren’t you, aren’t you, aren’t you?”
“Well, yes, midons, I am. I like everything to be human and physical, except when it’s uncomfortable or inconvenient for it to be.”
“After all these years, I’m finally turning you into a Hedon.” She pulled my head down and put her mouth on mine. We kissed for a long time there in the street; I wish I could say I was lost in the wordless wonder of it all, but actually the part of me that is eternally posing for promotional posters and vus noted that under the starlight, backlit by distant streetlights, someone could have taken a phenomenal monochrome vu or flat photo, perhaps for the cover of a career retrospective recording.
6
Mother had chosen to move into an apartment in Noupeitau; she said she had had about all the quiet country nights she could stand, on the outskirts of Elinorien, the small town up the coast where I had grown up. She had kept enough mementos to fill two large cases in the front entryway, and enough photos and vus to cover the walls everywhere else, a small fraction of what had been around when I was growing up.
Wherever you looked in her apartment, endless photos and vus showed her standing next to other distinguished scholars, accepting medals, cups, and various other objects of congratulation.
I particularly loved the solid brass assegai that she had been given at Chaka Home, above which Mother displayed a vu that showed her frantically trying to hang on to that heavy, slippery object after it was handed to her, and all of her fellow scholars struggling not to smile as she wrestled it to the ground and sprang back up, inadvertently handing it back to the tall, elderly presenter, dressed in the traditional fatigues and beret of Chaka Home, who recoiled and handed it back to her, so that she almost dropped it a second time.
It was an almost twenty-second vu, and she had cut it so that it looked as if she and the man were playing catch.
“Isn’t that about half a minute before—” Paxa began.
“Oh, less than that,” I said. “Probably five seconds?”
“Before what?” Mother said, bringing out a tray of canapes.
“Before the vu that Giraut keeps on our wall. He says it helps him to explain you to his friends. I think it needs audio.”
Mother laughed. “The pleasures of parenthood. You go from the person who does everything perfectly to the person who is painf
ully embarrassing, then eventually there’s this grown child out there who thinks your most embarrassing moments are the really endearing ones.”
“It’s lovely that Occitans are so attached to your parents,” Paxa said. “I was crèche-raised, barely knew my mother, and couldn’t pick my father out of a police lineup, though I understand that might be the right place to look for him.”
We went out on Mother’s balcony, up above light level, to look at the sky. Mostly, I just listened, as she talked about her research. “Geometry is a wonderful thing, even if I could never pass a class in it,” Mother said. “Take a sphere, and surround it with another sphere that’s twice the radius of the inner one. The outer sphere will have eight times the volume of the inner. So whenever you double the size of a sphere, you get seven more spheres’ worth of space. Now that the exploration ships have reached most of the stars out to a hundred light-years or so, there are hundreds of terraformable planets and potentially tens of thousands of colony spaces. And it’s easier to get there.
“There are going to be Miskitos and Samoans, Ainu and !Kung, again. Not that they’ll be the culture that was recorded, but there will be something of them. And even though the Office of Human Expansion knows my condition, they don’t care, they want my advice.” Her eyes sparkled. “Of course they would be getting it whether they liked it or not.
My mother was one of the most distinguished scholars on the Archived Cultures, her reputation well established in the nearer star systems (which had had time to hear of her early work, via radio) even before the springers opened the doors to rapid exchange. In certain academic circles, I would always be “Aletzanda Leones’s son—didn’t he have some sort of career, too?”
I often thought that they were the ones who had things right, but had stopped saying so around Paxa, because she always agreed so quickly.
The Archived Cultures had once been the epitome of useless study for study’s sake. During the last desperate years of the colonization era, the ethnic groups that had not yet bought an extrasolar space were ordered to record, then assimilate. The legacy of that decision was the archiving of about over three hundred ethnic groups.