The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  “Men,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Do you remember his friend Ebles Ribaterra?”

  “I don’t think I ever met him.”

  “Well, Ebles and I are dear old friends—he was my entendendor for a couple of years—and he’s been traveling for a long time, but he’s back in the city now, and he was wondering if he might drop in. I asked him to stay to dinner but he said he can’t, but he did want to drop by just to say hello.”

  “Oh, well, certainly, midons, any old friend, and especially an old entendendor, you know how nobody ever forgets an entendendor or entendendora, and since he seems to be important to you—” I thought I was doing a splendid job of dithering.

  “He is important to me.”

  We went on getting a light supper together, in the pale pink evening light that flooded her top-floor apartment, which had a fine view of the market on one side of the building and a gorgeous view of the harbor from the other.

  Footsteps on the stair, a knock at the door, Azalais opened it, and a tall thin man of about fifty stepped in, swept her up in his arms, kissed her briefly but enthusiastically, and stepped back to hold her at arm’s length, beaming down at her. He was about my age, one of those men who is avian all over—aquiline nose, receding chin, thatchy hair that seems feathery, like a fastidious vulture.

  “You must be Ebles Ribaterra,” I said.

  “And I know that you are Giraut Leones. I have all your recordings and I’m barely restraining myself from babbling madly about how I love them all.”

  Well, even a convicted war criminal can have some good points. We shook hands.

  We talked about Marcabru without discussing my infamous duel with him, or Azalais’s time at court. Ribaterra managed not to allude to the fact that we had been on Nansen at the same time. I found ways not to refer to my part in the breakup of the Traditional movement. Anyone watching us might have thought that all the tension we weren’t talking about was over Azalais.

  I did have a moment of empathy for him. When he left, he walked across the street to the nearest public springer, and I could see the way his whole back relaxed, and his gait became smoother, as soon as he was sure that he wasn’t going to be arrested on his way across the street. I’d been in similar spots, and I knew that feeling.

  “Giraut,” Margaret said, “this is not an answer, this is a vague offer to tell me the answer if you ever happen to think of an answer that you like.”

  It was very annoying how quickly she’d caught on.

  She glared down at me from my living room wall. “I’ve asked you for one simple statement repeatedly, and I finally get it, and it’s this. I am your friend, and I can’t see how to use this to defend you, so you can imagine what would happen if I put it in front of your enemies on the Board.”

  “Margaret,” I said, “do you think there’s anything wrong with the Ix Cycle?”

  “How would I—”

  “Margaret, if you get to bulldoze over any polite pretenses, so do I. If we must have this conversation, cut the crap.”

  She shrugged; she was so used to controlling the truth, and then having to adjust it, that I don’t think my pointing out that she had to be lying had even fazed her. “Yes, I’ve taken the liberty of spying on the work in progress. And I know it’s the best thing you’ve ever done. I don’t think you’ve ever played better or composed anything more interesting. You could probably publish the lyrics as poetry, and that’s an amazing achievement, fully on par with the original trobadori. Plus it brings back Briand vividly enough to give me nightmares, and you captured what was remarkable about Ix well enough to put me in tears. It’s thoroughly artistically justified.” She gazed at me sadly. “And if it were only a matter of artistic achievement and your contribution to the human heritage, the work itself would be your argument, and it would win. But … I have to go in front of the Board and talk politics. You may have noticed that the OSP is not an arts foundation.”

  “At the moment, I could hardly fail to notice.”

  “You and I both know what’s going on, Giraut, I’m sorry I tried to put it over on you. I love and care about art, too. You know that. But they trust me to take care of artistic matters for the OSP, and right now when they ask me what kind of care I’m taking on this issue, I just don’t have anything good I can say except that I’m trusting my ex-husband’s instincts. The standard arguments won’t work with them this time. Besides”—she grinned puckishly—“two of the current Board members have teenaged daughters, so it’s a very unpropitious time for your favorite clincher argument.”

  I laughed too. Not being suicidal, I would never have used the argument to which Margaret was referring anywhere near our senior command. I had only honed and perfected that argument for use on our own jock-agents.

  It is the distinguishing mark of an anything-jock to believe that only the “anything” is really important. A finance-jock thinks you can do everything with money. A military-jock thinks you can do it all with guns. A commerce-jock thinks that increased trade alone can give us peace and prosperity under an enlightened business-oriented regime.

  There is one thing that all jocks agree on, however: artistic and cultural operations are a waste of resources, or counterproductive, or both.

  So I had evolved my stock response for those moments at cocktail parties and diplomatic receptions when businesspeople, scientists, or military officers would sternly tell me that what I did was all very nice but cash, tech, or guns were what counted:

  Suppose I want to have sex with your daughter. Would you be more nervous knowing I was alone with her and had a large pile of money, or that I was alone with her and had a gun, or that I was alone with her and had my lute? Let me give you a hint … I have never hired a prostitute, though I am wealthy, and I have never raped anyone, though I carry a sidearm, but …

  “It would be a better world if we could just say that to them, wouldn’t it?” she said. “And it would certainly be more fun to serve on a Board that would take that argument. Alas for both, eh?”

  “All right, Margaret, I’ll spend the evening on it, and I’ll have something for you tomorrow morning, my best guess at what will make the Ix Cycle palatable to the Board. I really am sorry to take so long about something you need.”

  She sighed. “Not half as sorry as I am to need it from you. All right, go make art.”

  After all my delay and fuss, I enjoyed my evening spent talking to machines so that they could help me explain my art to people. I really should not have been surprised. These aintellects were specialists in complex, ambiguous, emotional communications, so it wasn’t as if I were trying to explain counterpoint to my oven. I had requisitioned copies of five experienced semioticians and three musicians; all eight aintellects were properly deferential, and allowed me plenty of time to reach my conclusions in my way, rather than racing ahead and spewing out answers that I wasn’t ready for, which I always detested in aintellects who had gotten above themselves.

  We decided on a strategy of stressing that as an artist, I could hardly resist the challenge of portraying what I had seen of one of the most significant personalities of our era. Summing up, I said. “If Ix becomes the property of Ixists, he will be no more than another isolating god who locks people into their little boxes, just like Murukan and Tohil that he was trying to subvert, or like the Jesus or Baha‘ullah with which he will be competing. But if he is a public personality who belongs to everyone, then he can influence people far outside of Ixism, and keep the Ixists engaged in the general dialogue with everyone. I suggest we use this analogy: if Baha’ullah had been a close friend of Mendelssohn, or spent a year visiting with Dickens; if Seneca or Ovid had known Jesus—”

  “This is the place where one of us would be saying ‘Objection’ if you hadn’t asked us not to do it,” Deedah, the seniormost of the semiotician aintellects said. “So we should probably warn you?”

  “Yes, you should, that’s what you’re here for,” I said. “What’s the problem?”


  “Well, parts of this may come across as intolerably arrogant.”

  I laughed. “Well, I suppose things will be all right as long as enough potential customers find me tolerably arrogant. Don’t be delicate. Just tell me.”

  “You are comparing yourself to Mendelssohn, Dickens, Ovid, and Seneca. Of your possible audience, I estimate that more than ninety percent will think the comparison to Mendelssohn is an overclaim and an excessive display of ego. For Dickens, between seventy and eighty percent of the comparison group will have that reaction, for Ovid between eighty and ninety, and for Seneca between twenty and thirty.”

  “This is terrible,” I said. “Seneca deserves a better reputation than that.”

  “Our assessment is that once this is published, as we assess it likely to be, a small portion of your public will dislike you mildly because of the overclaim. Margaret Leones will probably be no more annoyed with you than she usually is, and most of the Board, who are of course the primary audience, will not understand the comparison.”

  “Not enough resistance to worry about, then,” I said. “Is that correct?”

  “Well, the problem is not so much with public reception as with your predicted reaction to public reception,” Deeda said, sounding for all the world as if it were a human trying to be diplomatic. “Four characters are involved: your public persona, our construction of your private behavior, Ix’s public persona, and your portrayal of Ix in your Ix Cycle. And when we put all of those into an infinitely recursive loop we find that at the limit, if you assume the posture of the great artist who was friend to the prophet, your public persona drifts away from your private self. We know from past events that when that happens you are unhappy.”

  They were right. That might have bothered me, but I consoled myself that if I was to be understood by a machine, that would at least mean I was being understood by someone. We went fairly late into the evening, and when we were done I thought the statement we had drafted was at least not demonstrably false. Parts of it seemed to express my feelings rather well.

  I had just decided to go to bed when the com chimed. “Identify?” I asked the house aintellect.

  “Azalais de Mont-Belh. She sent it on low priority but her personal service aintellect says it’s about something fun.”

  “Put her up, thanks.”

  I liked her grin, but then being likable was her job. “I went to a very dull party tonight, and left early,” she said, “and now I’m in your neighborhood.” Over her shoulder, I could see the shuttered front of a seafood restaurant, a few blocks away. “I am bored and not sleepy. And we start late tomorrow anyway because Sanha Malhea has to be late. If you’d like to be spontaneous and romantic and so forth, you and I could take a long night walk with good food in the middle of it. So … do you want to go to this place up above town that I’ve always loved? Quiet little place with reasonably priced wine, a pleasant owner, and good bar food? It’s called Pertz’s.”

  The other side was apparently investigating my ability to keep a straight face. “Sure,” I said, “I’d like that.”

  Pertz himself was at the bar, and naturally enough, recognizing both of us, and remembering that we had once been in finamor, he raised a hand in greeting and shouted both our names. We stopped and had a pleasant, gossipy conversation with him, for a few minutes, and since it would have been awkward to continue the pretense that I had not recognized her, we didn’t.

  Pertz gave me one of his bear-pawed squeezes on the arm and told me to be back more often. As we went to a booth, Azalais said, “Well, gratz’deu, we can stop carrying on that act.”

  “My orders were to maintain it till you dropped it.”

  “Mine too. All right, now—there he is.”

  Ebles Ribaterra was sitting by himself in a booth. I followed Azalais there; she gestured for me to slide into the seat opposite Ebles, then said, “I’ll be back in a minute,” not really trying to make it convincing.

  Ebles shrugged, looked at me, saw something that told him we didn’t need to play anymore.

  I nodded. “Well, then. Ebles Ribaterra. Corporal in the Leghio Occitan on the day it was disbanded and mustered out. Member, Occitan Purification Society. Member, Old Trads Society. You never touch your support account from the culture government. Pattern of expenditures shows that you are on Wilson less than eight percent of the time. We think your permanent residence is in Noucatharia, whose location you are probably ordered to keep from me or any other Council agent at all costs.”

  “Not at all costs. We won’t kill bystanders to preserve the secret. Our squeamishness on that point is why our most prominent dissident faction has been trying to kill you; they are afraid the Council will learn the whereabouts of Noucatharia and they hope that by killing our contact they can prevent that.”

  There were plenty of contacts besides me available, they didn’t need any personal connection, and there was no obvious urgency, so that was a pretty obvious lie. But the game is the game, so I nodded as if he were unraveling a mystery for me.

  “I am here,” he said, “to discuss beginning the process of bringing Noucatharia under the Council of Humanity and regularizing its status. By a large majority in a recent plebiscite, we have decided to abandon independence—we’re too small a colony for the problems we have. Most of us are sick of rhetoric and more interested in comfort. On the other hand we don’t really want to be invaded and occupied, so we’re trying to ensure that you would rather have a peaceable, orderly annexation, and a smooth, easy Connect, rather than a war and an occupation.”

  It might have been more plausible if he hadn’t started with that first lie, but I doubted he had chosen what to say. “Well,” I said, “tell me what you want me to know.”

  Ebles nodded. “Let me buy wine for the table—it will be a longish story. Aintellect, Hedon Gore please?”

  The springer slot opened and a jug of wine and two glasses rolled out on a little cart. I put on my toxicology glove and dipped a finger in the wine. He put his on, did the same, poured and said, “I believe that your OSP traditional toast is, ‘Another round for humanity’?”

  “‘And one more for the good guys.’ That’s the one.” We clinked glasses.

  I didn’t really expect ever to see Azalais again—a pity, because she was a fine cellist and producer, and I liked her.

  10

  It was my turn to propose a toast, so I simply said, “the profession,” meaning being spies, and he nodded.

  “Good choice. I know you’re a Seniormost Field Agent. I’m a station chief in my much smaller outfit,” he said.

  “Union Intelligence?”

  He shook his head. “Where Council space is a federation, Union’s more of a loose alliance. People who think they are wits call it Disunion. So although I work all the time with the Union Intelligence Interchange, and with several other agencies of different Union colonies, I’m with Noucathar Intelligence—which is about the size of a small-town police department.”

  “And Azalais is one of your agents?”

  “A stringer. She knows where I’m from and what I do, we were lovers long ago, and she’s one of my best friends here. She does some small things for me. But the few times she visited Noucatharia, she didn’t like it. She’s happier here—for that matter, I’m happier here.” He shrugged. “If I had it to do over again I’d have just lived down the shame and stayed home.”

  I was glad that I always went wired, because the next ten minutes would have been a lot to remember.

  Almost the whole population of Noucatharia, which was the name of both the human settlement and the island on which it stood, was in the town of Masselha, which held only about three thousand people, half of them children.

  “And Union? Where do they fit in?”

  “We are the only colony with which you will be negotiating. There are no hidden partners and no strings pulled elsewhere in the process, and that is what I intend to tell you. Union, its nature if any, its existence or nonexistence, is all i
rrelevant. Except, of course, that now that I’ve told you what I’m supposed to tell you, since it’s my negotiation, I’m going to fill in the rest. This is all about the future of Union, but Noucatharia is a test case to see how things go.” He held up his glass of wine, as if studying the color, but mainly to give himself somewhere to focus his eyes where I couldn’t see them. “Many of the extraterritorial colonies are in terrible trouble. Noucatharia more than most.”

  “Trouble of what kind?”

  “Of a kind not easily understood without your coming and seeing it. But you may rely on this—we would not be approaching you if we did not need the rest of the human race. And if this works out for Noucatharia, several other Union colonies will ask you for the same deal, and quite possibly Union itself will dissolve and its member colonies will join the Council.”

  “There is something bitter in the way you tell me these things.”

  “There is. It is true that Noucatharia is conducting the negotiations all by itself. But the reason is not just our terrible problems but because the rest of Union decided that we are perfect for a test case, and I resent that. If the Council will show us the same courtesy it has shown to other low-population worlds, like this one, or Nansen, or Briand, you will find we are eager to be your friends; our old friends seem to have sold us down the river, because, as I keep saying because they keep saying it, we are a perfect test case.”

  “And what makes you perfect?”

  “We are the only colony on Aurenga. We are tiny, the problem I am purposely not naming is severe, our solar system is quite isolated and as long as we are careful not to leave springer codes lying about, if you do seize Aurenga, you won’t find it’s a bridgehead to anywhere else. So my little world has been selected for a test case, to see if we can trust the Council and if the Council will help us. I sound bitter because logical as it was for us to be the ones being sold out by the rest of Union, much as Union is compelled to do this, I cannot bring myself to like it.”