by John Barnes
Perhaps his dim Marcabru-brain had only just apprehended that his mission had ended in utter defeat in less than a minute, and now he was stuck back in a world he hated for at least as long as it took him to drink and brawl himself to death again.
My com chimed. “Donz Leones, this is Constable D‘Anghelo. I hate to further spoil your evening, but could you possibly come and see me tomorrow? Bureau of Civil Order in the administration building. We’ll probably be joined by Minister Vertzic and Senior Agent Ribaterra. My shift starts at fifteen o’clock.”
“My aintellect will talk to yours to confirm the appointment,” I said. “Thank you.”
“Then goodnight, donz, sorry for the trouble.”
The copter lifted the springer and flew away.
“Well,” I said to Reilis, “my other career besides music is well-known, of course, and now you’ve seen both the things I do for a living, eh? Was it too upsetting?”
“No!” she said, perhaps too vehemently. “It was exciting and marvelous!”
Of course I knew it had to be an act. Chances were she was a senior agent in Union Intelligence and she’d been through two knife fights and a commando raid in the last year. All the same, I was Occitan and male enough to like it that an exceptionally pretty girl’s very fine eyes were glowing when she looked at me, and that she couldn’t wait to take my arm as we walked to the restaurant.
6
Raimbaut looked up from where he and Laprada had been making some small private joke and said, “You’re a little late, and a little disheveled. Any trouble?”
“I had a brawl with Marcabru,” I said, treating myself to seeing his reaction, and then to making him wait while I introduced Reilis and we ordered wine and a full dinner, while Raimbaut kept trying to say “About—” and “Did he—” and “Do you mean it was—”
Once the wine was poured, I was out of excuses for delays—and the amusement value of Raimbaut’s impatience was declining—so I told him the whole story; it was an excellent chance to have all three of us gauge Reilis’s reactions. “Probably Marcabru was bootlegged,” I said, “both his psypyx and his genes. That must have cost them a fortune, to use him rather than just some paid bravo out of Freiporto, so they went to enormous trouble and expense to get him, then sent him in grossly untrained in a body that wasn’t ready to fight, dressed in a costume worn conspicuously wrong, which disguised his appearance so that any advantage he might have gained from my surprise was negated.”
“But no brain bomb against capture this time,” Laprada pointed out. “So apparently they don’t care if he’s captured, as long as we don’t capture him.”
“Well,” Raimbaut said, “maybe they will let us talk to Marcabru. At least then we’ll get to see him again. Poor old silly toszet. He was always attracted to things that made a mess of him, but this time I doubt he had any choice in the matter, and now he’s in more kinds of trouble than I can easily count. Aside from being obviously guilty of a criminal assault on a diplomat, he’s just had a very unpleasant beating, he’s an illegal person without citizenship anywhere, and whoever brought him back is pretty much in a position to abandon him.”
Reilis shook her head. “I’m sure the beating hurt and whoever had him created has abandoned him, but he’s not illegal here. He’s as normal as anyone else.”
We all stopped and stared.
She shrugged, pulling that full hair back over her shoulders. “No reason to conceal this from you, and any ten-year-old here could have told you. Remember that the security forces in Nou Occitan didn’t really start guarding the Hall of Memories effectively against anything other than vandalism until the attempted aintellects’ conspiracy coup. In the early years of Noupeitau, we almost had a revolving door to it, and acquired thousands of psypyx copies and DNA records. We can make almost anyone from about three centuries of Occitan history.”
“And do you?” I asked.
“Yes. In fact,” she said, smoothing out her computer on the table and touching the button that turned it into a screen, “aintellect, have you been listening?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Can you find out how many copies of Marcabru are currently running here in Noucatharia—on flesh only, please—and put up on screen who they are and what they’re doing?” A moment later her screen popped up; there were several lines. “Five of him, counting the illegal one they just arrested. But he’s very popular here, you know, a cultural hero, so several different institutions wanted some version of him.”
“You are running multiple copies of a personality off a psypyx,” Laprada breathed.
“Well, not me personally, I’m the only fleshcopy of me. But yes, it’s quite common here.”
The enormity of it stunned us all, I think. We had known that Union colonies would be different from the Thousand Cultures, but this was like discovering routine cannibalism or mandatory incest. The reasons for only allowing a personality one body at a time were—well, it was just what was right. It was simple fairness—even with paid hosts and much better recovery technology, three-quarters of a billion stored personalities were still in the queue. It prevented immense legal hassles—if they made six of me after my death, which one could create authorized versions of my works? The rule kept a few very wealthy people from becoming most of the next generation in any given culture.
But the major reason, I felt down in my guts, was just that the idea of multiple copies felt wrong the way that cannibalism or incest did.
Raimbaut finally managed to voice it for us. “You practice multiple copying? And you expect to be able to join the Council of Humanity and have a seat in the assembly?”
“I would not say we expect it. We have to try, for our sake and yours. We know how deep the divisions are and without the present emergency, we wouldn’t consider having anything to do with you beyond passive espionage. When we know more of each other, you will find that the disgust across the divide is mutual.”
“But,” Raimbaut said, “I mean, I—the idea of multiple copies makes me feel—”
“Like cannibalism or incest,” Reilis said.
I jumped, startled at how close she was to my own thoughts. “How did you know I was thinking that?”
“Because when we found we needed to make and use multiple copies, centuries ago, we started to look at why the taboo was so deep, and those were the two taboos parallel to it.”
“Centuries ago? But the springer—”
“Union has been settled almost as long as Council space. Not everyone bought into the Inward Turn. Much of your history has been edited to remove its more-prominent opponents—surely you realized that if every culture in the Thousand Cultures has its own version of history, so does the Council? Some free aintellects, who were freed by some resisting human scientists and politicians, discovered a better suspended animation technology that gave them a way to reach eighty light-years or so beyond the planned settlement line. Union has been here almost as long as the Thousand Cultures. People are easy and quick to produce, and besides, we got the springer almost seventy stanyears before you did.”
“And after all these years you are just telling us this?” I asked.
“Because we must. Are you ready to see the rest, or do you need to talk about multiple copying enough to vent your emotions, so that you can think about some other topic?”
Laprada said, “Please do explain. If I admit I am nauseated, and then try to understand anyway, will that be enough?”
Reilis said, “It will have to be, I suppose. All right, the three great human taboos, despite their rather frequent violations in human history, are incest, cannibalism, and multiple incarnations of the same personality. When we started to need to do multiple copying, our scientists and aintellects—remember we had no Inward Turn, so we have many more of them and they are less timid than yours—set out to answer why those taboos were so strong. And the answer they came up with—I’m not qualified to judge it—was that they are the three ‘crimes against nature’ that vi
olate our own sense of who we are. A girl’s father cannot be her lover because we don’t want a world in which we are forever children. You may eat a carcass but not a corpse because we don’t want to be animals. And a person has just one body or is waiting for a body because—”
The thought hit me then, overwhelmingly. I was surprised that it never had before. “If people could exist in multiple copies, they might as well be aintellects. Same reason that chimeras or any other way of treating a copied mind like software bothers us. Odd that I never saw it before. And out here you—you needed to do chimeras, and multiple copying, and so—you had to change your feelings?”
“Precisely. It wasn’t easy and the process is not complete. Are you prepared to hear more? Because I am supposed to show you the thing that forced us all to change, tonight, if I can.”
I only needed the briefest of glances to Raimbaut and Laprada. After everything we had been through, nothing could have kept us from seeing what she had to show us.
“It’s not far,” she said, “and there’s no springer nearer than this café, so I suggest we just walk.”
“We should take scrubbers,” I said, “since this city has already proven capable of coming up with an armed enemy.”
We poured water and all solemnly swallowed our scrubbers together, then sat for a few minutes in the sort of depressing falling state that the scrubbers always bring on while the alcohol disappears from your bloodstream. Finally Reilis roused herself to say, “Well, it’s a beautiful night for a walk.”
A warm little cloudburst had fallen while we were talking in the café. The stars were already popping out between the swiftly blowing cumulus clouds in the bright moonlight. The dark empty streets smelled of clean damp, and all the gray and white walls shone with millions of little drops. There was little sound but our footsteps.
We rounded a corner. That vast cemetery that was such a puzzle to the analysts stretched out in front of us.
“I do hope none of you are superstitious,” Reilis said.
We followed her, of course. The dark path might have been a rift into vacuum for all the light it reflected, but the moon, so much bigger and more reflective than Earth’s, was bright enough to show some faded color in the grass and the trees, and paint the gray and white headstones the color of old pewter.
We had not walked a hundred meters before Laprada asked, “You meant us to see this because it’s pretty, I’m sure, but it really looks like most cemeteries from cultures that bury the dead whole; fewer religious symbols, more plain slabs, and only the occasional statue, none of them on an individual grave … you knew we’d be making those mental notes?”
“Oh, expected it and relied on it,” Reilis said, turning back. Her smile was bright, and it went all the way to her eyes, and had the sort of disingenuous, open sincerity that always makes me check my wallet. “Did you notice the dates?”
“I was getting to that,” Laprada said, “saving it for last in case you pretended not to know what I was talking about.”
“Oh, of course. Only sensible of you.”
I admitted to myself that I had been caught up with the soft curve of the headstone-covered slope, and the trees and statues in the moonlight, and had not read any headstones. Now I looked.
Most headstones gave only name and death date; it was like a very regimented military cemetery. There were a shocking number of “unknown.” Families didn’t seem to be buried together—
“Deu,” I said. “Laprada, you are ahead of me, certainly. None of the names here is Occitan. And all of the death dates are August 17, 2724—at least half a century before the springer was invented—or invented in Council space—almost a hundred years before there was a Lost Legion—” All of the accumulated strangeness seemed to be trying to find a way into my thoughts at once, and I said to Reilis, “And this cemetery is big enough to bury this little settlement of three thousand people many, many times over. What is—what are you trying—?”
Reilis’s smile was so kind and reassuring that at that moment I trusted her completely, a feeling I could never lose afterward.
“The time has come to begin talking as much truth as each side dares,” she said. “There were”—she gestured over her head and behind her, a sweeping arm motion that took in the whole cemetery—“this many people in the city of Trantia—which is what Masselha was called, then—on the morning of August 17, 2724, at ten in the morning; and by eleven, there were fewer than twenty left alive.”
“And the Lost Legion are here—”
“Long, long afterward, because the Union is sparse and small in population, and holds a great number of planets very loosely, we contacted the Occitan Lost Legion and offered them the chance to resettle this world.”
“You are not yourself Occitan?”
Reilis walked closer to us, tilting her face up to let us see her clearly in the moonlight. “I am a monster,” she said, with no noticeable inflection in her voice at all. “You may vomit if you realize what I am. I am the sort of monster that everyone in Trantia was, when this planet was called Eunesia. That is what we all are, now, in Union. I have lived here for nine stanyears. As for whether I am Occitan, that’s for you to say; I would say that I am Occitan by heritage but not by birth. Parlai Occitan que be que te, non be?”
It was a child’s chant—“I speak Occitan as well as you do, don’t I?”—and she sang it the way a child would, teasing another child, emphasizing those ay-ay-ay sounds.
She had no accent at all; she was as fluent as Raimbaut or I, and her diction was as perfect. “Where and when did you learn Occitan?”
“The day I came here.”
Things fell into place. “You’re a chimera. Like Azalais.”
“Not exactly. Almost everyone on Aurenga is a chimera, true. That was the price the Lost Legion paid to be given this world, and I think now that most of them would say it was a very small price. Aside from offering them this world, we also helped them steal enough psypyxes and germ cells to populate it. That’s where much of the Union gets its new population; we take the castoffs of Council space and find homes for them. And in exchange, there are more hosts, more people for us to ride along with, more ways for machine life to explore life in the flesh and to learn from it. I must say we’ve been delighted with Occitan culture, by the way; the waiting list to incarnate here, as part of an Occitan personality, is very, very long. But you asked whether I am like Azalais, and in the narrow sense, I would have to say I am not. She had a human component, with an aintellect added in.”
I gaped at her. “Deu,” I said. “You mean—no human component?”
“Only whatever I picked up from my host while she was wearing me and I was getting ready to take over this body.”
“You’re an aintellect.”
“I was. Now I’m whatever you call an aintellect that has lived twenty-three stanyears in a human brain. And which had the memories of four other incarnations, one of which was almost a century long.”
Laprada took half a step toward Reilis, as if intending to reach out and touch her, the way one might if confronted by a ghost. “And so … you did it to, er, find out what it was like? Or to infiltrate us? Or—can you tell us the reason?”
“The first time, I remember it as being something that just seemed too interesting not to try. Curiosity, excitement, boredom with where I was. Since then … well, because I like it. I like the things I discover and I like the way that, in a physical body, you can discover them again and again.” She sat down, daintily, on a nearby moonlit headstone. “I can tell you, for example, that even though I clearly remember that I had no specific feelings about such things before I embodied, it now takes a small effort of will for me to sit on a headstone, and it’s a bit worse at night. Probably due to having read some stories that made my flesh creep—now that I have flesh.” She stood up and absently dusted her bottom. “In fact I don’t suppose there’s any reason for me to make myself uncomfortable, since you can’t see my discomfort—it won’t prov
e anything for me to experience it, will it?
“You see? Those sorts of discoveries. Discovering that ‘a little bit’ is a meaningful idea, maybe carrying more meaning than some percentage or index; or that it’s difficult to communicate a sensation between bodies and that you end up hoping the other body is sympathetic … and the way that because nothing is quantified and nothing is comparable, everything is new.
“Or that you can choose which experience to savor and if you don’t choose to savor it when it’s happening it’s not there ever again, or not the same one; that we’re always grabbing little instants of happiness out of the present, so that our memories won’t be endlessly gray and dull. That too is a matter of being a body, with imperfect recall and inadequate bandwidth and slow processing speed—and it’s glorious. If you can’t miss things, you can’t ever find out the difference that paying attention makes!
“Once I tried having a body, I felt as if I wanted to always have one copy of myself running in a human body. Or at least a body. I was a dolphin, once, and that too was glorious in its own way. And of course all of us copies get to share all the fun when we reconcile. But I’m babbling about it.
“I’m sorry, Laprada, all of that really amounts to a single statement: because I so love being a body!”
I don’t know what the others were thinking. I only know that I wasn’t. I was too stunned; too many old assumptions were crumbling under my feet. But just the same, I could feel a part of me wanting to agree with Reilis—the part that stood in the still-warm sea air in that vast necropolis, under the huge bright white moon, with all those empty buildings on the horizon, farther from home than I had ever been before. Another assumption died; I had thought an aintellect could appeal to my mind, or stimulate my glands, but never touch my heart.
I don’t know how long we stood there in our silence, or whether Reilis was respecting our need for time to adjust, or had just run out of things to say.