The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  Raimbaut was nodding. “Well, no, it isn’t the Lost Legion, and that’s a relief to me as well. And at least this whole business of whoever it is using fast-clone chimeras makes more sense than what we were looking for before—Occitan fanatics who were somehow attracting teenaged suicide-mission volunteers out of cancer wards. It never really made any sense for anyone to sign on for it—brain bombs aren’t easy, and the surgery hurts. And no sensible organization would waste valuable fanatics on such stupid amateurish operational failures.”

  All of us were nodding vigorously; we must have looked like a collection of bobbing-head dolls. I said, “This doesn’t look like they are trying to kill me. It looks like they are trying to convince me that they are trying to kill me. That makes me nervous. I feel like I’m one step from the trigger of an expertly baited trap. These people are ruthless beyond anything we’ve ever seen, and we’ve all seen plenty. I don’t want the Ix Cycle infected with fear, and I really don’t want to worry that a good violinist or audio engineer might be murdered for some stupid reason of power politics. I know, I know, I know all the good reasons why we should go forward. I can talk myself into it. But should I?”

  Margaret had that hard little set to her jaw, forward like a bulldog’s, that she got when she was about to fight with me. She opened her mouth to speak.

  Raimbaut leaned back and said, “Well, then, Giraut … since you put it that way … yes you should go on with the Ix Cycle.”

  I gazed into Raimbaut’s perfectly serious, perfectly calm gray-blue eyes. He might be wearing a teenaged body but he had been my friend since we were both nine.

  “All right,” I said. “I will. Maybe you could tell me why?”

  My old friend shrugged and said, “Well, Margaret’s right. Something about it really pisses them off. And it’s at the center of whatever’s going on, no question. The assassination attempts started right after Ixists began to show up en masse and in robes for your concerts. And to me, the precautions they are taking look like this: they can’t trust the assassin with any knowledge or training. That’s why they get the assassin very close to you and very close to the time, and then do that difficult, complex coverup and blow up the brain, so we can’t force-copy for interrogation. It looks to me like they can’t afford for us to learn whatever the big secret might be, as if they think that if we get our hands on one little thread, the whole thing unravels. Supposing that they’re right, if you keep recording, and provoke them into trying again, sooner or later they’ll screw up, and suddenly whatever is going on will be obvious.”

  “On the other hand, Giraut,” Laprada pointed out, “it’s clear that killing you is an acceptable outcome. They might have at almost any time during all seven attempts. So it might not be their most preferred outcome, and they seem to want to just scare the hell out of you, but apparently it would be all right if you were killed. All right with their side, I mean.”

  “Well, then,” Margaret said, “your decision, Giraut. I think your team is making a better case than I could.”

  I sat perfectly still; they must have thought I was considering the question, but really, it was already decided. “All right,” I said, “it’s not like I haven’t made brilliant art before while trying to keep from getting killed.”

  “That’s my ancient monster of ego,” Laprada said, grinning.

  Margaret looked for nods from Dad and Raimbaut, then sat back. “All right, you’re making sense to me, and your team is with you. Literally, now—because I want them to stay in your spare bedrooms for the rest of your time here.” They all nodded emphatically so I knew there was no point in arguing about that. “Any other thoughts?”

  “Lots, none relevant.” What I was really thinking was a mixture of I miss Paxa and I’m proud of my team and I have a great idea for what the horns can do in three of the songs. They were right; we were playing chicken with the other side, in the dark. If we held our nerve, and they screwed up, we won; if I got killed on the way there, well, Raimbaut could find out what it was like to wear my psypyx, as I had once worn his. It was worth the gamble. “I’ll try to get a fresh psypyx recording made every other day or so,” I said. “Since I’m going to be a target, and they might get lucky, and it’ll help to preserve continuity if I get interrupted while I’m working on the Ix Cycle.”

  “You’ll have to forgive us for thinking that keeping you alive is more important than your finishing a song cycle,” Laprada said.

  “That’s why I’m the artist,” I said, “to keep the priorities straight.”

  “Can we skip the part where you call each other names, just this one time?” Margaret asked.

  Dad and Raimbaut applauded, and Laprada said, “I guess we need to work up some new material.”

  It was still early after Margaret sprang back to Earth, and Dad to Villa Guilhemi, where he was meeting with his committee about his dissertation; “an economist taking up classics,” he said, “is apt to hear the joke about the dog that walks on its hind legs, often, and so I need to practice walking on my hind legs whenever I get the chance.”

  Laprada and Raimbaut walked with me back down to my rented house by the waterfront. At least until things had clearly calmed down, they would be staying in the second bedroom for a few days.

  “That was quite a fight you had with your attacker,” Raimbaut said, “one for the textbooks.”

  “Completely brilliant,” Laprada agreed. “I think your ego deserves a few extra strokes.”

  “My ego needs extra strokes the way fat people need extra bacon,” I said. “Now tell me about a party the two of you went to, or a romantic night on a beach, or a delightful little brasserie you found, and no more business till we have to talk business.”

  To help our big lunch digest, we took a slow, pleasant stroll through the winding streets of Noupeitau’s Quartier-Vielh, the partially-walled dense tangle of streets that the rest of the city curled around, to give the city a proper late-medieval topology. Although it had been built at the same time as anywhere else in the city, the Quartier-Vielh had faux-Romanesque architecture, narrow winding streets, partial walls, many streets that descended onto staircases, and everything that impedes foot traffic, all of it made of stone that had been heavily stained, erosion-blasted, and otherwise distressed to an appearance of great age.

  Two people of around forty stanyears’ experience each can really enjoy surfing, mountain climbing, dancing and all the rest in bodies that are physically teenaged, and that was what they had been doing. Both of them were both fine storytellers, so there was plenty of entertainment on the walk, with no need for me to say anything. Everything they had been up to sounded grand, like a perfect second honeymoon, to me.

  Raimbaut and I looked for places we remembered from many years before, to show them to Laprada, and mostly couldn’t find them. “You know,” I said, “most people must think that you two are a teenaged couple, and I’m one of your fathers, instead of three old colleagues, because they’re still used to being able to judge age from appearance, and an older man with a young couple means he’s a relative of one of them, usually. But with psypyxes really working for almost everyone, in another fifty stanyears, seeing people of different apparent ages together will have no meaning at all. Do you think that people will gossip more, or less, about people they see together?”

  “Oh, I’m sure there will be much more gossip, and better yet, much more interesting gossip, completely.” Laprada stopped to look at her reflection in a shop window, comb her blonde hair, pose with her shoulders thrown back, and hypnotize Raimbaut. “Those two sweet young kids holding hands … are they actually both ninety-five years old, meeting in young bodies for the first time?”

  “Or a creepy hundred-year-old man fresh out of the psypyx, with a forty-year-old prostitute who transitioned to a new body early to raise prices?” I asked.

  “You have a nasty mind, old man,” Raimbaut said.

  “And you’re secretly an old man, punk. That’s the point. The social imp
lications—”

  “Aren’t nearly as much fun as the gossip,” Laprada said. “See across the square, there, that couple? The way they walk with each other, I’d bet they aren’t a child and a grandmother—”

  I looKed, tagged my friends’ elbows, and led them down an alley and around a corner.

  “Do we need to com for backup?” Raimbaut asked, his voice low. I saw that Laprada already had her pocket maser at the safe-ready position, held low and pointed at the sky, and was scanning for threats.

  “Oh, no, no—I’m so sorry—not at all—there was no threat,” I said, “but we did need to get out of there. I didn’t want to take the chance of their seeing us seeing them. That little boy was Dad. The old woman with him was Mother. I don’t think they want me to know that they’re seeing each other, at least not yet.”

  My letter hadn’t been out to the musicians for twenty minutes when I had a com call from Azalais, the cellist and most passionate Ixist in the group. I had almost not hired her because of it, but she was a superb cellist and her voice was a very welcome strong alto in the backing vocals, and she had turned out to be one of the best musicians I had hired.

  And she had thick iron-gray hair that I judged had once been reddish honey blonde. Traditionally we Occitans wear our age, a custom that gets us stared at through most of the Thousand Cultures—I had met many people who had never met a gray-haired, balding man before. I had been away long enough to find her gray hair exotic and interesting; she had a fine strong body that she’d kept in shape, as well. It didn’t make her a better cellist but it did rather influence me.

  She had only needed to send a text response, but she chose to com on full visual, from the beach to judge by the view from the shoulders up. “Count me in,” she said. “And I think I can help you find musicians trained in the old way, since you said you needed some.”

  “Are they all Ixist?”

  “Would that be a problem?”

  “Not if they all play like you.”

  She glanced down and came up with a very warm smile under slightly disordered hair. “How long does a toszet have to be away before he loses the habit of flattery?”

  “Well, longer than I’ve been, obviously.” I considered asking her how long before she lost that nice trick with the hair and smile, but it wasn’t quite time for that sort of flirtation, yet.

  “Obviously.”

  “Well, then … so will they all be Ixist?”

  “Yes. As artists and as Ixists, we will all want this recording to be good, and to be what you intend.”

  “Azalais, remind me who is doing whom the favor? And do you suppose we could have lunch together sometime soon?”

  As it happened Azalais and I had lunch together every day for the rest of the week. She was charming company, though her only two subjects of conversation were music and Ix. I enjoyed the music conversations, and I didn’t mind talking with her about Ix, too much. I even kind of enjoyed correcting her, as a way of needling her, in that most entertaining form of flirtation.

  Besides, at this stage of my work, it helped me recall and focus—and to avoid accidentally encouraging the Ixists too much. Now that he had been dead for a while, he was being interpreted into unrecognizability, and I wanted to make sure that he was at least recognizable, at least to me, in my work. This was complicated. Little things that had happened, Ix’s most trivial sayings, small details of what it was like to be around him, had become “the heart of his message” or “what he was really trying to tell us.”

  Azalais could not see how “you of all people, who so clearly listened to him, and with such attention, seem so determined to dismiss it.”

  “I am giving part of my life and talents to trying to describe the whole experience. I certainly know it was meaningful. I am just not as certain as you are about what meaning it was full of.”

  We were looking from a café terrace out over Platzbori, the broad beach that stretched for seven kilometers north of Noupeitau, on this last afternoon before resuming recording, celebrating my promotion of Azalais to producer (she hadn’t mentioned her many producing credits; other musicians had).

  So we had come to the warm red beach that sloped down from the space-black rocks, where it was said that half of the love affairs in Noupeitau started. Behind us, the mountains to the north and east blurred like an impressionist painting in the eternal haze. South of us, the newer suburbs of Noupeitau curled around the bay like a sleepy cat on its favorite cushion. High-peaked tile roofs; white walls spattered gray by sooty rain and thickly strewn with apses, niches, and windows; low round towers and spires fretted with corroding gray-white gingerbread; I couldn’t really see all of that in such detail at the distance, of course, especially not across the mists of the sea in Wilson’s always-dirty air, but I knew what I was looking at even if I couldn’t see it, and it pleased me to feel that it was there. Mighty Totzmare rolled big slow waves at us from the west.

  The beach was covered with naked and almost-naked bodies, which we both appreciated a great deal.

  “When I was a child, they’d all have had to be in suits,” I said, “with those silly little ruffles for the girls, and those silly open legs for the boys. It’s strange how, for such a pleasure-oriented culture, we were so puritan.”

  Azalais shrugged; I admired the way her thick, full iron-gray hair, spattered with bits of rich yellow the color of old wellvarnished wicker, slid up and down over her bare shoulders in a wave. “Occitan culture was oriented toward male pleasure. Which meant controlling access to women, and access to women’s pleasure, and women’s access—”

  A crowd of mostly-naked young men and women rushed by, kicking a ball and calling to each other, continuing the several-kilometers-long improvisational soccer game which we had seen go by twice before. “When we were young,” I said, “boys and girls never played any game together after age eight or so. Men and women could do things like camp or hike together, but not any real sport.”

  She looked away to where the blue-black sea met the pink sky. “Do you ever miss the old ways, before the springer?”

  I took a sip of the wine, a little too chilly, and adjusted the set point on the glass, taking time about it as if I had a lot to think about.

  When I looked up, a big slow wave rolled in, far out to sea, and I saw a few skimmers climb onto it. “In that world I’d have been a drunken brawler and a silly show-off. I might have died the same miserable, foolish death my companhon Marcabru did. Going out and finding the bigger world, and letting it change me, was the best thing that could have happened to me.”

  “And yet you’ve resisted Ix’s impact on your life for fifteen stanyears.”

  “Azalais, I’m creating one of my major works around it. That’s not exactly ignoring it.”

  She shook her head impatiently. “But to have walked on Briand, as he did … to have known his companions, and to have sat and listened to the Beloved Auvaiyar—”

  “I spent more time with Tzi’quin than I did with Ix or any of his disciples.”

  She winced at the name of the onetime disciple who killed both Auvaiyar and Ix. I pressed the point: “Certainly Auvaiyar was not ‘Beloved’ by any of his other disciples. They thought she was a presumptuous, pushy slut. She thought they were blind, silly prigs. All of them were right, too, but now that they’re all dead, I suppose we can change the story to make them all charming, gracious, intelligent—and true friends of each other, while we’re at it. But I’d rather remember who they were; I miss them. And I liked Tzi’quin, a lot more than I liked Auvaiyar, and he was certainly more of a friend of mine than Ix was. I don’t approve of what he did—it was horrible—but I liked him right up until he cracked under the strain and did those terrible things. The day before he did them he was still my good friend.”

  “Still—you knew Ix—”

  “He was extraordinary. I have never had any other experience like knowing him. But if you pay adequate attention to any friend, they are irreplaceable in your li
fe. If you think people are interchangeable, it’s because your focus is on your categories rather than your perceptions—a point Ix made often, by the way.”

  Azalais seemed to seek a message in the tablecloth. She played with her hands on the table in front of her, rolling them over each other. Long ago, I had had some friend or lover with just that gesture. I faintly recalled that the gesture had embarrassed me in front of my companho. “It would be easier if you just denied him.”

  “I don’t deny Ix,” I said. “Far from it. To deny him I’d have to believe in him first, and I have never thought of him as anything other than a reasonably good human being trying to say the things that needed saying, to the Mayans so that they’d extend a hand in friendship to the Tamils, and to the Tamils so that they’d take it. Good ideas, but not deep or difficult or profound. None of what he taught was.”

  “But you admit you had a profound experience—”

  “My experience was profound, not his ideas. I was living through a miserable year—divorce, betrayal by my best friend and mentor, failed mission, a long wretched list. When your whole life blows to shit, you go looking for wisdom. But ask any drunk who ever stopped drinking … it wasn’t the brilliance of the idea of quitting that overwhelmed him.”

  “You can’t mean,” she said, meaning that she knew I meant it and she didn’t approve, “that a message that has inspired—”

  “Prophets never say anything new. There’s nothing in Ix’s teachings that you won’t find in Buddha or Moses. We always already know: Treat other people kindly because kindness matters even when it is not returned. Courage matters even if you lose. Don’t dwell on the pleasures of things that you feel it is wrong to do. Try to live your days as if you were grateful for them. Love your neighbor, and keep your definition of ‘neighbor’ broad.

  “Everything the human race knows about living well and living together fits onto a few sheets of paper in big type. One prophet after another tells us the same thing. The hard part isn’t to think of it, which has already been done, or to understand it, which any child can do, but to do it.”