The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  The study of those archives had been discouraged on Earth, but out in the Thousand Cultures it had eventually flourished. Now it was becoming vital, for the decision had been made that the first few colonized worlds would hold the revived Archived Cultures, and Mother had gone from prominence in an obscure field to an important consulting role to the Council of Humanity.

  It is hard for anyone of our generation to imagine how little anyone cared about the Archived Cultures at the time of the Great Assimilation and the dawn of the Inward Turn; as hard to imagine as the state of mind that logged off so much of Earth’s forests and destroyed so many estuaries that the oceans nearly ran out of fish, as hard to imagine as the consciousness of slavers during the millennia when that was common practice. But perhaps we can understand why our ancestors took the Inward Turn, shipped the Thousand Cultures out, and archived everyone else who was different, if we remember that they remembered the Slaughter:

  Over fifteen billion people had lived on the Earth, the Moon, and the cislunar habitats at the moment that the Southern Hemisphere League rejected the petition of the Second Japanese Empire and ordered them to execute the Imperial Family and raze the four temples in dispute within twenty-four hours. The moment of that declaration was usually taken as T=0 hour, 0 minute, 0 second.

  The Second Japanese Empire refused formally at T=23 hour, 17 minute, 54 second. There were still fifteen billion people at that moment.

  The first antimatter cloud poured across Honshu like molten iron onto a flowerbed at T=26 hour, 02 minute, 29 second.

  At T=52 hour, 10 minute, 18 second—the moment when the last antimatter cloud ceased reaction, and what had been Jamaica began to cool—there were just under eleven billion people left in the solar system.

  The Japanese had gone the way of the Carthaginians, the Cathars, the Caribs, and the Old Americans. The home territories of the Southern Hemisphere League had held seven of humanity’s twenty transpoli, each with more than a hundred million people stacked a kilometer deep under a common roof; all seven were vaporized, and the liquefied bedrock where they had been was still glowing blue-hot. Hundreds of smaller antimatter clouds had peppered the territories of the two powers and their allies, colonies, and protectorates. Countless space habitats had been slashed into centimeter-across scrap by gamma-ray lasers.

  The few survivors from League territory were rounded up and concentrated in the hastily reopened Luna City, and did not even take up half the available space in that ghost town.

  The Diaspora had been one immediate response to the Slaughter, but not for the reasons that people had thought. It was not an attempt to scatter everybody who wanted to be different out to the stars, to let distance reduce enmity. There wasn’t enough distance available; with only a double-dozen solar systems available, and thousands of applicants, many planets would have as many, or more, cultures than Industrial-Age Earth had had nations. And after all only ninety-six people and a million frozen embryos went to each culture space, with the rest, like it or not, staying home to be assimilated.

  Nor was there much interest in preservation. About a third of the cultures were literary creations or utopias, not groups of people that had actually existed on Earth at the time of the colonization.

  Poor battered Roosevelt had paid the price of what everyone now conceded was the biggest and most common mistake: culture spaces were auctioned, and many ethnic cultures were located on planets with their traditional enemies. On Roosevelt, by pure bad accident of the draw, traditional allies had been partially clustered, so that natural alliances sprang up with hostile borders between them; it could have happened on any of the other high-density planets.

  The Diaspora was not “peace by dispersion” in either intent or execution. The Thousand Cultures were established because they were cheap; because the program was self-limiting since there were only a small number of available spaces, no matter how much success it had; and for propaganda purposes. The existence of diversity far away justified stamping it out near at hand. If humanity needed to have Texaustralians, Serbs, Yoruba, Keralans, or Navajos, then let such people exist—far away. They could be mythical creatures, like unicorns, cowboys, or trobadors. It was not unlike the rationale that it is all right to destroy a species’ habitat as long as you have a few of them in a zoo across the ocean somewhere; not normally persuasive, but since genocide-by-assimilation was a wildly popular idea in those centuries, the argument was convincing in context.

  Rationally, the final Great Assimilation made no more sense than a witch-hunt or any other kind of mass hysteria. During the three generations of Diaspora, there had been more real peace on Earth than ever before, and the peoples left to be assimilated were small populations of poor people, mostly without local enemies—the Hutterites and the Kikuyu were surely no threat to anyone. Everyone with numbers or money had already claimed an allotted culture space.

  But now that there were no more culture spaces on the extrasolar planets, and no way to reach farther from home for at least a few hundred years, this was not a matter for reason. The blackglass scars on Earth and the Moon were still fresh. Though only a few very old people still remembered the Slaughter, nearly everyone then alive had grown up surrounded by sad, absentminded adults who would sometimes stare into space at inexplicable times. Everyone had felt the battered, hapless sickness of the home world struggling through the motions. “Do you want another Slaughter?” was as clinching an argument for closing colonization as it had once been for opening it.

  To every plea that the remaining cultures were tiny and harmless, the response had only been “the Slaughter happened because people were too selfish to stop being different. Do you want another Slaughter?”

  At that time, though the antimatter clouds had cooled out of existence almost a hundred years before, you could stand at the site of Ciudad de Pittsburgh with nothing but black glass between you and the Atlantic. Migrating birds avoided the Home Islands because they would starve before finding food. The great memorial at the site of Paris was still just fifty stanyears old, and a billion visitors had seen it. “Do you want another Slaughter?” did not feel like such an unfair question.

  The archives lay untouched for centuries; interest in them was severely discouraged. Eventually full copies of them went via radio and starship to all the Thousand Cultures, and, free of the disparagement and discouragement of the home system, scholarly work arose around those records.

  Centuries later, my mother became known throughout human space for her work on the Archived Cultures. Each of us, finally, is one cell on the tip of the little fingernail on an arm that began to swing in the Paleolithic.

  “This hasn’t made it to the news yet,” Mother said, “but you will hear of it soon enough. We discovered that nine Baluchis infiltrated the first big beta test group for the very first psypyxes. We have actual, probably recoverable psypyx recordings of them! Real Baluchis for when we set about growing New Baluchistan!”

  “But I thought the psypyx didn’t come along until well after the Great Assimilation,” Paxa said.

  “Oh, it’s a great story. At the time of the Great Assimilation these Baluchis were all boys, none over the age of twelve. They were supposed to be scattered for re-education, but bureaucracy messed up (as bureaucracy will, for good or ill) and they were all sent to the same boarding school in Methane City, on Titan. They were clever enough not to reveal that they knew each other; they stayed in touch, hid their communications from anyone around them, grew up, and covertly tracked down Baluchi women to marry. Some of them started businesses and others of them went to work in the businesses; they shuffled aliases and locations as needed. They contrived to stay near each other for almost eighty stanyears, and no one knew. They were all still alive to volunteer as test subjects for the first psypyx project.

  “That’s what I have unraveled using seven very clever aintellects. And sure enough, all the psypyxes are still there in storage, four hundred sixty stanyears later! Now all we have to do is fin
d the right volunteer hosts, and we can talk to someone from a pre-Assimilation culture—nine someones from the same pre-Assimilation culture—can you imagine? We can download them onto new bodies and send them off to start New Baluchistan. It’s the biggest discovery since they found those three Mixtec children in suspended animation in Luna City, almost a hundred stanyears ago. Gratz’deu I’m healthy and I’ll get to see the project begin.

  “So when there finally is a New Baluchistan, Giraut, promise me you’ll visit there and soak up all the experience you can, so that whenever they find a way to extricate me from my last psypyx, you can tell me how the place was before it started to change. It would be such a horrible joke on me if, by the time I got a body of my own to go see it with, New Baluchistan had already grown, flourished, become more and more connected, and finally assimilated, so that there was nothing left but a few interesting buildings and some museum collections. That’s just the sort of prank that the gods play on a scholar, you know.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “Mother,” I said, “have some faith in Chandreseki and Ramirez. They’re working on it. You’ll be there on Founding Day in New Baluchistan, when they unveil the statue of you in the central plaza of their city.”

  “Their version of Islam does not allow representational images. Well, I hope you’re right, Giraut, of course. But I’m learning to let go of those sorts of hopes, and just concentrate on what’s possible. Too often we get too attached to what is supposed to happen soon, and forget to love what is here now.” She rose. “This city gets damp and chill at night, at least for bones this old. Shall we have a little fire before you go?”

  Mother’s fireplace always merged evenings in that tiny, crowded apartment into all the campfires on beaches and in forests long ago. My family had camped and packed often, and I had always been encouraged to bring friends. Almost, I could feel Bieris and Aimeric beside me round the fire, sitting as quietly as Mother and Dad and I. Almost, I felt the urge to throttle Marcabru, who was never good at being quiet and just sitting and enjoying. I was feeling so nostalgic I almost wished Marcabru were there to not throttle (or maybe to throttle just this once).

  “Fifty years,” Mother said. “I’m glad I’ve known you that long.”

  We sat by the fire silently for a long time, just enjoying being together. As the fire burned low and we poured the last of the wine, Mother said, “In a way, being UT fits with my sense of irony. All my life has been dedicated to interpreting difficult, ancient records, and whenever I finally die, I’m going to be a difficult, ancient record myself. I have faith that someone will find it interesting enough to retrieve me. And even if not … well, I leave my chemicals to the environment, my ideas to the noosphere, and my genes to the species.”

  “Your ideas are going to live a very long time,” Paxa said, “They’re a big part of how we understand the Archived Cultures. I heard the name Leones at university, years before I associated it with a balding satyr’s beautiful voice.” She patted my leg affectionately and leaned her head on my shoulder. “You did all right with where you put your genes, too.”

  “Ooh,” Mother said, laughing, “I’ve just gotten the biggest opportunity in history to ask my son when I’m going to have grandchildren, and didn’t. I hope there’s room on some wall for a Perfect Mother Award.”

  Walking home, Paxa and I held hands and said nothing for a long while. “She didn’t mention Dad at all,” I said. “I noticed too. Why not?”

  “That’s what I’m wondering. It’s not like her. I had a letter from her just the day before the concert (can you believe it, less than a week ago?) and she was still obsessed with Dad then. But it wasn’t like she was avoiding the topic, either. So something is up, and Mother isn’t telling me what.” Another thought came to mind, and I held her hand just a little more firmly, and spoke very softly. “Paxa, either or both of us might be killed anytime that the bad guys try again. How do you feel about getting a new body?”

  “Morbid, my darling.”

  “You feel—”

  “Your question was morbid.”

  “I’m sorry, midons,” I said. “I was noticing how graceful you are with your present body, and thinking how completely I can count on you when we go into action, and then thinking how unhappy you’ll be inside that grotesque obese creature we both keep imagining you trapped inside …”

  She laughed out loud, and we began to exchange our private joke, passing it back and forth between us till we could hardly tell who was telling and who was hearing the familiar, horrible idea. “Waking up in the brain of somebody who’s gone completely into the box—”

  “—every night she eats herself sick—

  “—with ice cream while plugged into VR porn—”

  “—the only psypyxed memories of mine she ever accesses are the sex and the violence—”

  “—so for two years all your dreams are about killing—”

  “—and fucking—”

  “—she weighs two hundred kilos—”

  “—hates everyone—”

  “—throws hysterical fits at the thought of exercise—”

  We both laughed, but there was something of gallows humor to it. We were both scared of the whole idea of getting a new body. We had gotten too much mail from old friends and colleagues, and we weren’t much exaggerating.

  The paid-host program had solved the problem of getting all the psypyxed people back from storage. To be brought out of a psypyx and implanted in a clone body, the personality had to be worn by a host for at least a few months, and more typically two full stanyears or more. People who had been archived for centuries had no living friends or close relatives, so there was no one to wear them, and they had been stuck in the psypyx—unaware of it, of course, just as a copy of Hamlet doesn’t really become Hamlet until someone reads it—but nonetheless, potential real people who had died hoping to live again, and who could, if only someone could be found to wear them.

  It had finally occurred to a clever bureaucratic aintellect in the Council of Humanity’s Office of Humanistic Development that there was a simple way to obtain as many hosts as needed. People on Earth and the other Sol system worlds had to work for seven years to qualify for their subsidy. Most of them dreaded that service before, hated it during, and resented it after; few people liked being away from the compliant robots and comfortable possessions in their apartments for several hours a day, and those who had already gone into the box before their service were being forced to spend that time in a world not of their choosing.

  Furthermore, robots and aintellects did any actual work better; working was supposed to give people a taste of a life outside the box and a sense of usefulness, but they only learned that they didn’t like it outside the box. “Veterans” (of seven years pushing a broom or filling out forms) became surly and demanding because of the value they imagined their contribution must have had. Useless people are not improved by giving them the impression that they are useful.

  It would have made sense to abolish it, but the seven years’ work requirement persisted because, like hazing, school, combat, religion, or natural childbirth, the people who had already suffered from it wanted the next generation to suffer too—a reason strong enough and human enough to make it last forever.

  The paid-host program made a straightforward offer: host two psypyxes and your seven years were covered, even though hosting would usually only take around four stanyears in total. You could do it without leaving your apartment or your box. All you had to do was let someone else be in your head, and use your body while you were asleep.

  There were now plenty of hosts, and the archives were rapidly emptying; the only problem, as our killed-and-revived friends could tell us, was that you generally found yourself “in the head of a forty-year-old virgin who never went past her front door since she left school at ten, and whose hobbies include eating, masturbating, and masturbating while eating, all while plugged into VR,” as the very unhappy Dji had put it, writing to us while
his host was asleep. Dji had been a section chief for the OSP since about the time Shan had been; till the day of his fatal heart attack he had been constantly on the go. Nowadays he lived for the moments when his host fell asleep, so that he could write to his friends, or jog her body up and down the stairs (which she allowed provided that he took a shower when he was done, and had her clean and dry before it was time for her to be awake and eating again).

  “Midons,” I said, “am I allowed to admit that the idea of ending up like Dji makes me so nervous that I am hardly willing to be killed at all?”

  She swung my hand playfully, letting her steps turn almost into skips. “Oh, but on the other side—Giraut, just imagine hitting puberty again—”

  “Can we wait to discuss such terrifying ideas till we’re in bright light?”

  “Everyone says that, and I’m sure it’s no fun to have your body going chemically berserk and your mind being dragged along on waves of hormones,” she said, “but you know, going through puberty a second time, with an adult mind in the body, knowing that this isn’t going to go on forever, with your trust fund intact, adult patience, an adult grasp of consequences—I plan to go from eleven to nineteen, all my growth years, working out like crazy, getting my muscles, CV system, fine motor control and all into the sweetest perfect tune—and not fretting about how late my breasts grow in, or the pimples on my forehead. Because I’ll know I’m going to come out of the process extremely good-looking.” She did a little lindy-turn under my arm and struck a pose beneath a streetlight. “That was ironic posturing, you know, pretending to be extremely conceited.”

  “I know.” I took her other hand, and we stood face-to-face. “And you are. Extremely.”