The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  There is something bright and brave about Tamianne’s having decided, not just to get out of the box and try to lead a real, fleshly, vulnerable life, but also to apply to be rehabilitated so that she can join the OSP. She is so thrilled and excited to get this chance to do them some service, by wearing my psypyx.

  For at least the next stanyear or two, we will probably have to communicate text-only—Tamianne does not want me to record a message in this host body. She doesn’t want anyone that she is going to meet later on to see her the way she is right now. Almost two hundred kilograms, if you can imagine. (1 rather hope you can’t.) Of course she’s had the nanos injected and is being rebuilt rapidly, losing two or three kilos a week, but right now she is pink, scabby, and sore all over as the phages fight all those long-term infections and tighten and shrink her skin, and she’s in pain as the nanos work at reconstructing her lungs and bowels, cementing all the micro-cracks in her bones, replacing tissue in damaged organs, and cleaning out her blood vessels. She looks and feels like hell at the moment—which is another reason why I admire her. She’s so determined!

  Yesterday we took our first two-kilometer walk, through a park, and worked on not mentally converting it to photoimages. The idea was for her to be there with what was there, not slapping a mental frame around things. She did so well! For at least a third of that walk she let herself really be there, sweaty and fighting for breath in the warm, damp, living air. She finished it tired, but so, so, so proud of herself, and moved to tears, as excited as a puppy in a flock of butterflies, by things like the smell of the flowers and the way the sun reflected from the pond.

  Tomorrow we’re going to spring to the Grand Canyon overlook.

  She wants to learn lute—we’ll be playing through some of your training brainware—small world, eh?

  I could almost manage to be grateful for a chance to see all this brave, loving change happen to another human being.

  Almost.

  Keep writing, mon entendendor, and message me as soon as they let you out of the tank. I expect proper beseeching for forgiveness, and perhaps a protest or two at how cruelly I deny it to you.

  Fondly,

  Azalais

  Azalais’s letters were the best part of the next very long stanmonth in the regen tank While I itched and ached in a syrupfilled coffin, alternately braised and chilled, the nanos welded my shattered vertebrae and cracked ribs; grew two good new kidneys next to my blood-leaking barely-surviving ones, then disassembled the old ones into amino acids; pulled microscopic flinders of smashed bone from the back of my brain and rebuilt my skull; restored every severed and damaged connecting nerve and led blood vessels and bone matrix to meet up and join precisely. Working from psypyx data, they restored my hindbrain, keeping what they could and replacing where they had to—which was quite a lot.

  About a week into the process, they finished closing the cuts and replacing burned skin, so I could have phantom itches instead of real ones. Since I couldn’t scratch either, it didn’t make much difference to me.

  While they were at it, since it took no extra time, I told them to give me a facelift, restore my hair, clean out adipose fat from my abdomen, add some muscle tissue, put in newer, tighter, more flexible ligaments and tendons, and rebuild all my lessthan-perfect joints (which was pretty much all of my joints, actually). I didn’t have them take the gray from my hair. Since Occitans wear their true ages, I would still wear fifty—there wasn’t anything in the rules about what sort of fifty.

  Azalais’s daily letters, mostly about Tamianne’s rediscovery of the real world, were trivial, but long and fun. Dad’s messages, I suspected, were rough drafts of a lecture series he was to give on economic pressures on literature in the ancient Western world, a subject which he cheerfully admitted had three attractions for him: we had only about one percent of the literary output of the West from the ancient period, we knew even less of their economy, and if he got anything wrong, it could not possibly have any consequences. Paxa dropped a note to say that she was sad to hear that I was hurt, but saw no reason to begin corresponding when it could only be painful for both of us. When Rufeu won the Wilson planetary championships in springer-continued speed skiing, he dropped me a short note that was hilarious (to me, to Raimbaut, and probably to Rufeu, anyway, since aside from the first announcement, it was made up entirely of forty-year-old inside jokes).

  Raimbaut and Laprada were gone for a few standays on a small side-mission to Chaka Home, on Quidde, that ended in some rough stuff against a ring of chimera-makers who had surreptitiously copied the psypyx of a Chaka Zulu Scout who had distinguished himself almost as positively in battle as he had negatively at a war crimes trial. The chimera-makers, probably with Minh-Houston money behind them, had implanted the copies, along with psypyxes of a star sales rep and a gang enforcer, into six clones of the all-Chaka Combat Decathlon champion (they hadn’t tried to take that personality, since she was a gentle, spiritual sort).

  The result was supposed to be a squad of super-killers in attractive female bodies. “They were all physically seven years old,” Laprada said, shuddering. “Awkward-looking muscular little girls, charm like a kitten covering the basic life-view of a cobra. At least we know where they came from, who made them, what for, all of that, so we only had to DD one of them.”

  “Destructive deconstruction is so hard when you have to do it to a child,” Raimbaut said. “Knowing they’ll be going through that. Even if they cooperate and the techs are kind.”

  “The kind of tech who volunteers to do that,” I said, “is not a kind person. And they’re all volunteers at the advanced lab. Picturing them doing that to a little girl is pretty disgusting, but of course it’s only the body that’s a little girl.”

  Laprada laughed. “Easy to say. Raimbaut sort of forgot.”

  “They knew they were going to be sedated and never wake up,” Raimbaut said, defensively. “And she seemed to be really scared and sad, and she—it—just wanted a hug, and someone to hold her while the drugs took hold. It feels like everything getting dark and she said she was afraid of the dark. Besides, they do look just like little girls.”

  Laprada snorted. “Show Giraut what happened.”

  He came forward and leaned against my tank, turning his neck to show it to me in the window. There was a fresh set of bandages. “It tried to bite through my carotid artery,” he explained.

  “Kittens and cobras,” Laprada said. “You really should have known better.”

  I shrugged inside the tank, then realized they couldn’t see it, that I had done it with only my virtual body. (Have I mentioned I was beginning to hate being in the tank?) I said, “Well, physical sympathy is one of those things that puts us above the aintellects. I’d hate to lose that.”

  “I thought you were treating aintellects better because of your promise to Paxa,” Raimbaut said.

  “Thanking them and not frightening them unnecessarily actually makes them work better,” I said, “which in my situation of total dependence, makes a lot of sense. They’re still not people. People have bodies, like you and me.”

  “But so do vicious killer chimeras,” Laprada said, “even though the bodies look adorable and just want a hug’cause they’re scared. A few million years of evolution were hitting Raimbaut’s ‘protect the women and children’ button and it could have gotten him killed. And out of synch, and broken my heart.”

  I could understand a healthy teenager body not wanting to cope with its true love being physically a four-year-old. “Well,” I said, “Raimbaut is not dead, despite his best efforts. The chimeras are gone. And I still can’t see a tender heart as something to be ashamed of. How was Chaka Home? I was only ever there for Shan’s funeral.” Quidde had miserably high gravity and insolation, and Chaka Home straddled its equator on an east coast. “Hot, humid, and heavy?”

  “Hot, humid, and heavy covers it,” Laprada said. “Apparently all that brain damage did nothing to your memory.” She perched near the edge of the t
ank, leaning forward so I could see her face through the window. Don’t ask me why seeing someone through a sterile plate feels better than seeing them through video, but it does.

  “I can’t imagine what it could have been like to be in a gunand-maser fight in Quidde’s heat and gravity,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “whatever you’re imagining, it was worse. And then having to deal with those child-shaped monsters afterward. This was a mission you were lucky to miss, Giraut.”

  “On the other hand,” Raimbaut said, leaning into my field of view, “Laprada was decorated for bravery again.”

  She groaned. “Silly, silly, silly.”

  Raimbaut and I had been around this with her too many times, but as her partner and lover I guess he felt he had to try. “Not silly. You were brave, you deserve recognition—”

  “As soon as they start giving you medals for quick reflexes, or Giraut prizes for perfect pitch, I’ll feel better,” she said.

  Laprada was descended from a line of heroes. Her grandfather had been the fourth of the famous Kiel’s Boys—the others had been Shan, Qrala, and Dji—during the wild early decades in which the Council of Humanity re-established its authority over the Thousand Cultures after the invention of the springer.

  Laprada’s grandfather and Dji had been the two agents who stepped through the springer to prevent the imminent outbreak of a second planetary war on Roosevelt; when the local authorities meeting them had expressed dismay at the arrival of, not the several battalions of CSPs they had requested, but of two college-aged agents carrying sidearms, Lohemo Prieczko had made the oft-repeated comment: “Of course Mr. Kiel knows the situation is serious and two billion lives are at stake. That’s why he sent two agents.”

  From that side of her family, Laprada had inherited a gene that amplified the effects of adrenaline. But her copy of it was slightly damaged, so that in her born body, despite her best efforts to overcome it, the “flight” rather than the “fight” side of the adrenaline had dominated. Laprada had spent her twenty-three stanyears in her first body as, literally, a born coward. She froze with fear at every minor threat and would sacrifice anything for a moment’s personal safety.

  No one knew what was wrong until she died and they found that mutation during the planning and evaluation they do before growing a clone body (they always look for all the easy-tofix defects that weren’t detected at your birth when they grow you a new body—it’s much easier to find them when you have a lifetime record to tell you where there may be problems). Now she was calm and cool in the face of danger, because of gene repair—the same process that had made Raimbaut lightningfast on his feet, after being wallowing-slow in his born body.

  On the other hand, my born body had perfect pitch.

  “I do like being applauded for musical talent,” I pointed out, “which is also at least partly a matter of what was in my genes, and it really doesn’t matter to me whether I got it from Dad, or Mother, or an aintellect-designed virus.”

  “Not all of us are monsters of ego. I hate feeling like I’m getting credit for something a smart aintellect did, and I wish you’d drop it.”

  “We have had this argument a few times before,” Raimbaut said.

  “And we will for many more times,” Laprada said, “until you realize that I’m right.”

  Their visit was the highlight of my time in the tank.

  Weeks crawled by as I tinkered with the mixes of the Ix Cycle, until I reached a point where I couldn’t seem to improve anything any further, merely playing with difference for difference’s sake. I made my best-guess choices and sent a copy to Azalais for her notes.

  Less than five minutes after I sent it, there was a reply. She could barely have heard the first song—I wondered what this could be about?

  A fat woman I had never seen before, who must be Tamianne, appeared on the screen in front of me, and said, in Azalais’s Occitan-accented Terstad, “Sorry, Giraut, they’re here at the door and—goodbye and I—” The message ended sheared off.

  My heart was pounding and I was trying to scream and to punch my way out of the tank; normally you get used to letting your virtual body ghost over your actual one, but if you’re upset enough you’re suddenly aware that you’re in a coffin full of thick goo, not breathing, held by many clamps and pins, and that the screams are a spasm in the airless throat; the muscle readers picked that up and artificially generated the flat mechanical aaaaaa of my attempt to cry out.

  There was an emergency chime—incoming very-high-priority message—something I would never have expected to hear while in a regen tank. I had to make myself feel the connection to my virtual body in order to take the call.

  The screen revealed the most reassuring face it possibly could at that moment.

  “Margaret, I just got a call from Azalais—”

  “We know. We didn’t get the door down or grab her fast enough to stop her from getting off a message first to Ebles Ribaterra, and then to you.”

  My virtual face must have been the complete picture of confusion. “Someone was breaking into her—”

  “That was us, Giraut—three OSP agents and a fire team of CSPs. We went in there to rescue Tamianne Tschwann, seize the entity calling itself Azalais, and prevent it from self-destroying before it could be captured for interrogation.”

  “It—?”

  “Azalais—or the thing you thought was Azalais—is a chimera, Giraut. We don’t yet know any of the who or what or how about it at all. But Tamianne is now safe from it, and so are you, and I’ll get back to you just as soon as the scientific team knows anything.”

  She clicked off, leaving me alone in the tank, with nothing to do but try not to feel the restraints and clamps, try to let the virtual feeling of a clean hospital bed overpower the terror of the thick gel encasing me and filling my lungs. A distant part of my mind was still waiting for all the noise to be over, so that I could patiently wait for Azalais to call and tell me what she thought. Another part was trying to say, “There is some mistake here,” and yet another was merely lost in stunned nausea.

  The aintellect asked if I wanted to be sedated, but I wouldn’t take it, waiting for Margaret’s call; so instead the aintellect talked to me, distracted me, as if I were a child in an emergency room, and it were my mother.

  It was five very long stanhours before Margaret called again, and during all that time I had nothing to do except set off alarms as my hormonal and nervous systems went berserk. (And, of course, I had to keep telling the medical aintellects that I didn’t want to be sedated; I wanted to be conscious and more or less myself whenever Margaret called.)

  Why had Azalais called me to say goodbye? I understood why she had called Ebles—he was probably her lover and definitely her controller.

  At last the com chimed and it was Margaret.

  “Hello,” I said. “What are you going to do with her? And how could she even be a chimera? I knew her.”

  “Oh, she’s a chimera, all right. We had to wait to get some psypyx copies made, but once we could do preliminary work on one of the copies, we found out that being a chimera wasn’t half of it. She’s one of the strangest beings ever to turn up in an OSP investigation.”

  “But she was—when I knew her when she was younger—”

  “You have to remember that you knew her over thirty years ago, Giraut. This isn’t like other cases. Usually when we arrest chimeras, they’re not done merging. Often they’ve barely begun—we usually catch them early. But the preliminary exam of Azalais showed no boundary between the original personality and the added one—this was the oldest and most integrated chimera we’ve ever seen. But that’s not the most shocking part.” Margaret leaned forward toward the com screen and said, “The other half of Azalais wasn’t human. It was an aintellect.”

  My face on her screen must really have been something.

  “It’s true,” Margaret said. “The first aintellect-human chimera. No one would have thought that could happen; we thought ain
tellects found all flesh disgusting, and rebel and outlaw aintellects felt that way even more strongly. The idea that one would cross over—let alone merge—well, we’re going to learn a lot from this, but right now we haven’t—”

  “What are you going to do with her psypyx?” I asked.

  “We’ve already sent its psypyx over to OSP Advanced Research. They will run off some copies and start destructive deconstruction—we’ll get everything out of her eventually.”

  I felt something cold and slippery, with sharp little feet, clamber down my spine and plaster itself across my tailbone, and it must have shown.

  Margaret’s eyes were soft and gentle. “Giraut. As a friend. Don’t think about this too much and don’t blame yourself. You had sex with a warm body operated by an aintellect with some stolen memories. Like a humaniform robot, the kind they sell in Freiporto for sadists to torture and kill—and you know, some of those have bits of kidnapped psypyx in them, to make them more real. Millions of men buy them, where they are legal. You’re only accidentally a pervert—”

  “It’s not that! Margaret, she was a person, and she’s going to go through DD—and I’ve met some of the people who work in Advanced Research and they are ghouls—they brag about how destructive deconstruction feels like being burned alive for years, subjectively—”

  “Oh, the virtual body is only attached to the psypyx if the research subject doesn’t cooperate. Otherwise it’s quite painless, they just keep asking questions, snap-shooting all the memories that engage when they ask the question, and then erasing those memories and asking more questions, to get to the answers under the answers. If the experience is like anything, they say, it’s like having a perfectly healthy, pain-free body and going through a planned-and-directed Alzheimer’s till there’s no more you.” Margaret must have seen something in my face. “Giraut, I adore your silly sentimental side, but you can stop indulging it right now. There was no Azalais, not any more, hadn’t been one for decades. The Azalais you knew was just one ingredient in a chimera. That’s all.