by John Barnes
“And there isn’t any real pain—by definition that thing won’t remember anything afterward. The only reason the OSP emphasizes the pain of destructive deconstruction is to keep our own working aintellects afraid of it. She—there, see, I did it too—it won’t be in any pain if it cooperates. And we’ll just take apart the one copy; the rest will be kept on file in case we need her testimony in Secret Court, or for any further research or experiments they want to do at Advanced Research, but as long as the chimera just answers questions—”
“That one copy is a person!”
“Azalais was no more a person than a psypyx sitting on a rack waiting to be implanted—”
“Margaret, you and I went on a bloody raid and plotted a coup and nearly plunged human space into war to assert that an unimplanted psypyx on a rack is a person. Shan died for that. Azalais lived and loved and made art—”
“Because it had the memories of a real human to guide it, and it was living in a body you could interact with. Not because it was a person. It could easily pass the Turing Test, of course. But then so could billions of aintellects going back the last five centuries. It is not a person. No court would find that it was, and no human philosopher would think so.”
“May I have some time alone before we go on?” I squeaked out.
“Giraut, I’m sorry that I upset you.”
“I’m sorry, too, I don’t know why I’m so upset,” I said, lying, and clicked off.
Of course I knew. I had liked Azalais.
I tried to tell myself that I had liked my memories of her as a young girl, before she had merged into a chimera. That was foolish. An entendendor and an entendendora worship each other, but they don’t know each other. If I had never seen her again, she would have been like an unusually pretty face in pornography or a sweet voice on a recording you encountered long ago—a memory of desire, not of someone I had known.
No, this was not about my vague, hazy images of a pretty girl on a long-ago beach, or her light hand resting on my teenaged arm while I drank and bragged and looked around for a fight in Pertz’s.
I felt exactly what I had felt every time I lost a good friend to real, permanent death: that same wrenching awareness of folding up a part of your heart to put in the drawer, with the other keepsakes, because that part is for the living, and you won’t be needing it ever again; the moment when you look at that piece of your heart, now soft, sad, dark, and empty, one last time before the drawer thuds shut.
And I felt that for Azalais, not for my decades-old memories of the girl that she had been.
She had been an enemy spy.
She had been a preposterous monster.
She had been beautiful and tender and talented and had liked me and wanted to be with me.
Now they would take her apart.
For some reason we didn’t know yet, the other side had thought it worthwhile to risk using a chimera in the operation, and when she had been accidentally killed, she had awakened in the mind of a candidate OSP agent. Such sheer cool nerve—her very thoughts bare to her deadliest enemies, trapped in an all-but-immobile body with an enemy agent, and boldly trying to bluff her way through two years.
That she had managed for a single month was quite an accomplishment. I was proud of her.
Though I knew the crime should disgust me, I could feel no disgust about Azalais, no burning desire to be avenged on her; only terrible grief. I would miss her so.
No matter what Margaret said, it had been Azalais—a person named Azalais—who had written me a long letter about Tamianne’s first walk on the beach at sunrise, a letter I had received just that morning.
I wished I could com Tamianne, and we could talk about Azalais together.
After a while, knowing full well that the monitors would spot this and flag it for Margaret’s notice, I called up a recording Azalais had made, before I knew her, but long after she had been made a chimera. It was her performance of the Nakachi-Jones Two Cellos and Voice suite; she had recorded both cellos and the voice, purely as a show-off piece. That piece had always seemed a bit bathetic to me, and I had admired the way Azalais gave it a restraint it didn’t naturally have.
Now, it just didn’t seem sad enough.
When at last Margaret called again, she got right down to business, as if giving a report and skipping all the addresses and dates. She rambled through all of it; the aintellect was not any known Council make and had some very odd code in it; the fused chimera personality kept shutting itself down as soon as it knew what was going on, a feature apparently built in for just such occasions. I listened half-heartedly; it was nothing to do with me, anymore, and I didn’t want to think about any of this.
A few days later they let me out of the tank and I could finally scratch all over, take a shower, and experiment with breathing real air and tasting real food. You come out of regen with better muscle tone and skin and so forth than you went in with, so you’re actually healthier, but it takes a little time for the nervous system to get reacquainted with non-phantom input, and to understand that it is running the show again. They told me to take a few days and sort my feelings out.
I went back to Noupeitau. My stuff hadn’t been moved from the rented house, and besides, all my friends were there—that is, a few old school acquaintances, and my team.
Nobody would be asking about Azalais. When someone’s disappearance is OSP-connected, they just don’t.
When had people gotten to be afraid of the OSP? When I was young it was one of those things like the Red Cross that people knew might not be very effective but had its heart in the right place. Now everyone knew that it was bad luck to mention it, and conversations died around me, especially since people knew I worked for the OSP.
I badly needed to talk with someone.
For a good symbolic place for a transition in your life, go to a beach. The sea meets the land, and generally you can also see the sky meeting the sea on one side and the sky meeting the land on the other. So there you are among all those boundaries, right at the place where life climbed out of the sea. It has lots of distance for staring off into. For me, beaches always swarmed with past loves and past moments, vivid memories surfacing from the water and storming inland like movie Vikings in their horned helmets and scuba gear, waving their battle-axes and tommy guns.
(Well, all right, that’s a scene from Admiral Nelson on Iwo Jima, but every former fourteen-year-old boy knows that after two centuries that’s still the best Viking movie ever made).
And much as it is for movie Vikings, the beach is a place where the memories can storm around, make a great deal of noise, look threatening with a lot of style, and do little actual harm—a free range for metaphors.
Also a beach is one of the hardest places to bug. There’s a huge white-noise generator always running, dunes to wander behind, and few good places to hide a microphone, and you can stay in constant motion.
Raimbaut, Laprada, and I were taking a slow walk south along Platzbori, back toward the city. The blood red dot of Arcturus had set, but the sky was still bright pink. A handful of the very brightest stars were visible through the soot.
Raimbaut perched on a rock and got out the big flask of red wine from his pack. Laprada and I accepted glasses. I held mine up. “Another round for humanity—”
“And one more for the good guys,” they chorused, and by common consent we drank off that toast, complete, and refilled the glasses. Platzbori was softer in the mist. Noupeitau, far off to our left, glowed like foggy magic with just the tallest towers and spires sticking out. It was a good, warm, secure place to be.
Raimbaut and Laprada had their arms around each other, and I hoped they appreciated how lovely that must be. I sat down with my back to the rock, facing toward the sea, so that my friends’ feet were dangling just above my head. And then, without really having thought of it beforehand, I just blurted out, “I don’t seem to be able to attain any objectivity about Azalais, no matter how much I think about what she was.”
When I finished talking, Raimbaut leaned far down to speak almost into my ear and said, “Hold up your glass, companhon, that’s right, over your head. It’s empty.”
His hand grasped my wrist—I couldn’t help noticing how young and strong his grip felt on me—and I felt the gurgle of wine through the stem of the glass. “There you are,” he said.
I brought the glass carefully down to my head level and sipped.
“Giraut, it must have been dreadful,” Laprada said. “Like waking up and finding yourself having sex with your mother, or the dog. You’ve got to stop thinking about it.”
There was a very awkward silence, and then Raimbaut sighed. “Laprada,” he said, very softly, “I don’t think that’s what the matter is with Giraut.”
“I was trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. All right, so Giraut feels bad about that chimera because he misses the nice body that it stole from his old girlfriend, along with her memories and mannerisms and so on. Some old philosopher said that a lot of men fall in love with a pair of shoes and marry the whole woman to get them. This is the same thing with fancier shoes. And being able to fall in love with something like that, just because it held your hand and laughed at your jokes and played the cello and was all cuddly, is not a compliment to women.”
After a bit, we found a public springer about two hundred meters from those rocks and sprang through to the one just across the street from Pertz’s, so that we more or less walked straight off the beach, across a cobblestoned street, and into the old tavern.
I paused at the door, all the same, as if there were a great crowd in the doorway in front of me. If Azalais hadn’t made the completely amateur mistake of liking me—
I noticed Raimbaut had also stopped. I raised an eyebrow.
He shrugged. “Just thinking about all the changes that came and went through that door. Pertz’s is a place for nostalgia, and we’re about to get drenched in it. Time for another round for humanity and a dozen more for the good guys.”
Pertz’s eyes didn’t meet mine. He knew I had something to do with Azalais’s disappearance. When had the good guys started frightening honest, kind old tavern keepers?
But I pretended not to notice, since there was nothing else to do, and we ordered a Pertz’s Starving Artist Special to share— big bowls for the table of chili, chapattis, and pickled herring, with a pitcher of sweet clear Caledon apple wine to wash it down, and took a table in the back.
Raimbaut looked up from his chili to say, “Hel-lo! So Pertz finally found a vu of Marcabru.”
Our old companhon glowered at us from the Wall of Honor; from the puffy face and the look of stupid rage we knew the vu had been shot after Marcabru’s term as Prince Consort.
“He’s not like I remember him,” I said.
“Nor I,” Raimbaut said. “Not like I’d choose to. It’s really being a Pertz’s night, isn’t it? Old friends sharing old jokes and remember-whens, and wondering why the world keeps changing so fast.”
“Now all we have to do is wait for the King to walk in, or someone to draw an epée, or—”
The com chimed. “Who?” I asked the aintellect, my eyes still locked on Raimbaut’s.
“Margaret Leones, official business, very urgent.”
“What are you all laughing about?” she demanded, when I answered the com a moment later, and told her where we were and who was with me.
I explained and she gave me a grim little smile, the expression of someone who is expecting an argument. “Well,” she said, “I suppose this will fit the pattern. We need something urgently from you, Giraut, and I could order you to help, but knowing how you are apt to feel about it, I hate the idea.”
“But you will if you have to?”
“I will. The first three DDs of the Azalais psypyx didn’t work out. It will help the team in Advanced Research, when they start the next destructive deconstruction, to have acquaintances of the subject present. We thought that perhaps you and Tamianne Tschwann—”
“Margaret, don’t make me do this.”
“—would be able to assist, and chances are, I admit, it will make no difference, but this is one of the biggest, strangest cases we’ve ever had—”
“Margaret, can’t you just respect my feelings this time?”
“—and I’d be neglecting my duty if I didn’t at least try any method that has been known to work in the past.”
She kept rolling; I kept protesting. Margaret doesn’t usually ignore the other side of a conversation. When she does, it’s because the conversation is not a conversation, but a set of orders wrapped in polite fiction.
I was about half-undressed for bed when Raimbaut tapped at the door. “Giraut?”
“Ja, mon companhon.”
“All that wine is causing headaches. Laprada is taking her headache to bath and bed, I was going to take mine down to the end of the pier to breathe some sea air. I wouldn’t mind company.”
“Well, I’d rather take a bath with Laprada—”
“I heard that,” she said, loudly. “Some of us have other preferences.”
I was already re-dressing, actually. “I’ll be out in just a minute,” I told Raimbaut.
With modern scrubbers, there’s no such thing as an alcohol headache; two pills and two big glasses of water to cope with the dehydration, and in about ten minutes you pee like a horse and you’re sober and comfortable. So it sounded to me like Raimbaut thought we had some things to talk about.
When I emerged, he handed me my rain-tapi, and he already had his on. “Light spitting rain out there,” he said.
Actually it had crossed the boundary between a spitting rain and a pissing rain. Perfect; another white-noise source to blur the sounds.
The edges of the pier glowed a soft safety yellow. We walked all the way to the T-shaped end, almost a kilometer, swept our tapis under us so that we could sit on them in the rain, and sat and looked at the dim, blurry harbor lights for a while before Raimbaut finally said, “I know you, mon companhon. Your heart is breaking. And when I think of Azalais as a person, I understand why.”
“Do you think of her as a person?”
“I find it hard to think of her as a chimera.”
“Well,” I said, “when a thing is a person only when it’s convenient for it to be … something’ s wrong, someplace. We want to find and rescue Shan’s illegal psypyx because we don’t want Shan to be DDed, helpless and in horrible pain that lasts effectively forever, but we are doing the same thing to Azalais, and she will have to do the same dying and suffering. But Margaret is already referring to Azalais as ‘it.’
“I liked her, Raimbaut. I suppose at heart I’m one of those people that our philosophy teacher, back at St. Bawdy’s, used to tear into. What was his name?”
“Puebuscin. Mihel Puebuscin. The one who wrote the moral denunciations of your early compositions.”
“I’d forgotten that. Serious bastard, wasn’t he? And tin-eared besides. Remember how he used to shout at us that most of the trouble in the world was caused by people who couldn’t tell the difference between ‘my team’ and ‘the good guys’?”
“Normally, Giraut, I’m one of those people he was yelling about. Normally I just trust all my friends to be on the right side. But … well, I really liked Azalais, too, you know. And I don’t see why she has to die in horrible torture, either. The whole idea of a human-aintellect chimera is weird and feels terribly wrong to me, but Azalais was not an idea.” He threw a little chip of something off the dock out into the bay; it splashed but the water was too churned by the rain to show ripples. “Remember how Aimeric always said you were a bright-enough toszet where women weren’t involved? Laprada and I had a bet down, after Paxa left, about how soon you would fall in love again.”
“Who won?”
“Laprada. She guessed too long by two weeks, I guessed too long by five.”
Gratz’deu, I laughed. Then we talked about the strangeness of life, and many, many days and friends gone by, unt
il finally, stumbling from sleeplessness, we made our way back up the pier and I slept until midmorning.
When I awoke, I was still miserable, but I was at least able to say I would face a clear duty; I commed Margaret and agreed to go with Tamianne to Advanced Research and talk to Azalais’s psypyx, four standays from now.
For today, there were long streets to walk with my friends, notes to make for future sad songs, and time to sit by the sea and just think. That evening, as I walked through the market, a busty red-haired woman smiled and said hello, and I wondered what bets Laprada and Raimbaut had down, now.
Tamianne was quiet and looked tired; the robot showing us through the Advanced Research facility asked if she was all right. She grunted with the effort and said, “It’s just been a long day and a long walk for me. In another few months this wouldn’t even be noticeable.”
“I’ve admired your courage for a while,” I said.
“I know Azalais wrote about it. I think she was overrating it. It’s the courage of a cornered rat. I was bored beyond all measure in cyberspace, and the only thing I did when I wasn’t in cyberspace was eat, and once you start to realize that you’ve given yourself a life sentence that’s like death but more boring … well, here I am. Every time I think about how much I don’t like being Tamianne Tschwann, all I have to do is think about spending another decade being Princess Belle, Layla the Elf Queen, Pirate Nell, or Dale Evans, in rotation. You haven’t been bored till you’ve led a boarding party in bad chop and noticed that everyone in both crews is yawning while the cutlasses clang, or been gang-raped by ten rustlers who would all rather be getting a beer and a nap, and not felt like it was worth the bother of pulling the knife out of the boot to gut the biggest one.”
“What’s a rustler?”
“A bad guy in the Dale Evans world. Which was put together from some Old American film. Though I bet in the original her horse Buttermilk didn’t talk or fly.”