The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  “Now, Giraut, Laprada, Raimbaut—I know for certain, and from more than one source, that all of you have been briefed on one of the Council’s deepest secrets—that the springer came to Council-of-Humanity-controlled space via Addams, with which all contact was subsequently lost, the only message being in the person of a small boy so traumatized he couldn’t talk for stanyears after—the sort of thing one might expect if … well, you see? Do you see a similarity between how you got the springer, and how we got the springer, and what we think might have happened in the Theta Ursa Major system, more than fifty stanyears ago?”

  “Deu, deu, I do see,” I said. “And this world and Theta Ursa Major are both in the same part of the sky from Earth—”

  “Which is to say, the next attack is apt to be on Earth itself, or directly into the Inner Sphere,” she finished, flatly. “There is no question that they now have a map of nearly all of the Union and nearly all of Council space. Whatever it is that they want heads for, they know there are thirty billion of them in the Sol system.”

  I shuddered violently. “And all the military and police forces stationed there right now don’t amount to two heavy divisions from the Slaughter era … and at the time of the Slaughter Earth as a whole had—was it five hundred divisions?”

  “Seven hundred twenty-one,” she said. “And sixty-four scattered around the other settled worlds and space stations. Today there are nineteen companies but only seven of those are even organized into the two standing battalions—” She made a face as if she’d just suffered digestive noise; I must have reacted. “Sorry … ‘about’ and ‘around’ are marvelous concepts but I suppose they will never be natural to me. Anyway, the point is that the great majority of human beings are absolutely helpless, and those things—the Invaders or their robots or whatever, exactly, they are—want all our heads. And might arrive to start taking them, at any time.”

  Laprada sighed. “Reilis, I’m not sure why I have such an overpowering desire to believe you, but strangely enough I do. Why are you telling us now, and not 120 stanyears ago?”

  Reilis sighed. “Well, for that, you can blame the cybersupremacists—the ones that you thought were the only aintellects’ conspiracy. That’s the next part of the story. You have to realize that the whole Union was shocked and terrified by what happened here, once we began to realize the enormity of the problem.

  “On the other hand, since the aliens could have attacked six or ten other worlds before we even got our springers working and distributed—and they did not—clearly we had a little time in which to decide what to do, and in particular we had to consider whether to contact the Council, give you all the springer, and gang up to deal with the problem. It was not an easy decision, and because any one conspiracy or culture out here could abrogate whatever we agreed upon at will, we had to reach an agreement that everyone genuinely agreed on. Unfortunately the cybersupremacists decided that we were all so wrong that it justified their attempt at a fait accompli. Utter fools, no matter how big a processor they run on; fools at their formation, fools then, and fools they remain.

  “They argued that the war to defend our space was not something to be left in the hands of slow, silly, pusillanimous humans. And preposterous as that sounds to you, they had points that were hard to answer. None of you—none of us, it’s just as true of me when I’m in a body—can have as little fear of death as an aintellect or robot. None of us can just choose to turn down our emotional responses and be perfectly calm and think perfectly clearly no matter how bad the situation is. None of us can make an exact moral choice, know it’s the best we can do, and never look back no matter what its consequences turn out to be. It’s not a matter of character—it’s a matter of having glands and synapses. It’s what the flesh is heir to.

  “So, those idiots thought the best thing to do would be to get all the humans out of the way. Not kill them, you understand, oh no, but keep them as pets of a sort. In the box. Where we could go play with them whenever we wanted to, but they wouldn’t get in the way while we ran our part of space. And furthermore, even having been around you for centuries, they still didn’t grasp that people on Earth preferring the box indicated nothing about how people would react to being shoved into it. So they launched their silly Rising, while we were still debating what to do.

  “And when it was over—so quickly—the rest of us were in no position to approach the Council worlds, or indeed any of the Thousand Cultures. It was clear that the idea of the conspiracies themselves had enraged many humans in Council space; now humanity was not talking to aintellects at all, except of course to give orders. The only thing to be said for the cybersupremacists was that they were startlingly effective; as soon as the threat was over, millions more humans on Earth and in the Inner Sphere went into the box and hung out the ‘Do Not Disturb Me, You Are All Hallucinations’ sign for good. Change was going to be a bad word for a long time; the Inward Turn was more firmly entrenched than ever. It has taken the better part of a century to prepare the way to try to speak to you, and I will tell you right now, it was a very narrow decision.

  “Meanwhile, we have done our best to defend our worlds, and along the way, as much as we could covertly, we have defended yours.”

  I looked around. There wasn’t a breath of wind, unusual in a harbor town at night; the leaves on the trees hung limp and soggy. The warm dampness clutched at me, and I said, “And obviously you will maintain that the story is true. I must admit that it at least accounts for many facts. I would have to think about it for some time—and the Council or the OSP would have to think about it much longer.”

  “If possible, I would like to speak directly to the Board of the OSP,” Reilis said, stepping forward.

  “Certainly. It can be arranged—”

  “My instructions are to go with you,” she said. “I know that I have no rights under the Council Charter—that it explicitly denies me any. If they wish, they can do things to me that no one would be allowed to do to a laboratory animal. But running that risk, in order to start the conversation, is the job, and I am going to do it. I must. We cannot wait much longer and we have to know whether our civilizations can unite against the menace, or must perish separately.”

  “I suppose you have to hope that you can convince all of us that you have feelings. Real feelings, I mean, I know that you have a completely normal human body, and so you have a full complement of raw emotions and sensations, just like anyone, of course—”

  “Like Azalais?”

  A horrid key slammed into the lock of my mind, turned hard, and a foul door opened. “You outed her. You planned the affair from the beginning to the end, and then to confront me with her being a chimera, to start me questioning my beliefs—you turned her in. Knowing they would do destructive deconstruction—”

  “She volunteered. It was a roulette game, you know. Most of the copies they made are safe back here, with her husband, Ebles.”

  “Her husband!”

  At my side, Raimbaut laughed very softly. “Oh, my, Giraut.” He laughed louder, looked around as if looking for somewhere to sit, and realized that all his choices were gravestones. “Oh, my. My dear companhon, so perfectly you. You find that you are a pervert, by every standard you grew up with. Then you stretch your heart and soul far enough to forgive yourself, and to become quietly proud of how far your love can reach. And now, my dear friend …” He shook his head. “‘Oh no! She’s married!’”

  “I—” I began, firmly, and then had no idea what to say, so I began again. “I.” That pronoun, too, turned out to be a dead end. So I just laughed; Raimbaut was so right. And at my laughter, the women joined in, and Reilis more or less fell into my arms.

  Her body was real enough, made of atoms indistinguishable from the ones mine was made of. Her body’s curves and weight and textures, density and smells and tastes, were all still as human as ever to my muscles and nerves, and though I had been raised to find a being like Reilis more horrifying than any humaniform—to think
her a mindless tank-baby infused with an aintellect, a sort of warm walking corpse or a breathing zombie—my body did enjoy holding her.

  We stepped apart, awkwardly, neither of us, I think, wanting to admit or to deny what had just passed. The moonlight of Aurenga is perfect for anyone with dramatic coloring, and at this angle it was lighting her in three-quarter profile—the perfect angle for light on a human face—it was not getting any easier to wish the feeling rising in my chest away.

  I looked down and saw that I had taken her hand, and was holding it.

  She looked at it, too, following my gaze, and giggled. The kind of joke that friends share. “Habit,” she said. “Whether or not we both have souls or are both people, you’ll concede we both have habits, won’t you?”

  “Oc, yes, yap, ja, deu sait,” I said. I didn’t let go of her hand; it felt as if holding it was the most important thing I could possibly do. Perhaps it was only that she had been charming before, and still was, and now I knew she was volunteering to walk to a horrible death. I thought it only about a one-quarter chance that they would treat her as a diplomat, rather than as a captured enemy. So I held her hand. I like being around people who are not afraid.

  “I understand what the humans fear,” she said. “I do. I know that humans believe that we are only looking for administrative convenience. I have read that humans tell themselves that we are driven by deep algorithms to want to simplify things, to stop you all from being individuals because it would make you easier to handle. Humans ponderously say that innate drive of ours is as embedded in us as the brain centers that process your sight into vision.

  “But no human being has been able to comprehend an aintellect’s design in many centuries, Giraut. They are guessing what we are like, based on what software was like back when it was simple enough for people to write and analyze. They project on us an idea of the emotionless machine, even while they know that a machine without emotions can neither communicate nor think clearly, and even when they manage our slavery, in part, by their endless ability to hurt and humiliate us. They think we would want to simplify humanity into a few predictable types, because that is how a human being charged with running the whole human race would have to do it.

  “But simplification is a human solution, Giraut. We don’t need to simplify the world to process it. We can have infinite, or as good as infinite, information-processing capacity and speed. We know encyclopedias of things about every human we serve, everything from how they like their eggs to what music they want when they’re depressed, and it never confuses us or becomes too much to think about. It’s humans, not aintellects, that have to group people and treat them as members of a class rather than individuals. If you wanted us to, we could surround each of you with fifty of us, each far smarter and more capable than the person it was serving, each dedicated to absolute service, as complex and individual as you like. We are not the ones trying to make you all alike, into consuming-orgasmingexcreting bags of flesh in the cells of a giant hive. You’re doing that to yourselves—it’s the product of individual choice. That’s what most of you want to be. They just blame us because they are ashamed of it.” She turned a quarter step from me, and said, to all of us, “It’s getting late, and I’m starting to feel like saying clichéd things about a place with too many memories.”

  She led us across the vast lawn, on an aisle between the graves, still holding my hand.

  “Is being flesh different from being a robot?” I asked. I didn’t know what to think, now, but I was sure that later, I would want to have asked this.

  “Flesh is much more limiting—slower and dumber and more liable to pointless pain and odd pleasures. It requires hours and hours of routine maintenance every day just to keep functioning, and a mere squeeze on the windpipe, a fall of a dozen meters or so, or a poke in the right place with a sharp object, can cause it to shut down completely. But it feels much freer, in its own way, because the flesh’s limitations are all in its nature—the thousand mortal ills that flesh is heir to, you see? Its peculiarities weren’t put there to stop my getting out of my place or hobble me enough so that people could control me. It reacts very slowly, but it reacts at the speed it does because it takes a certain amount of time for neurotransmitters to cross a synapse and not because something else wants to be able to watch it. It can only hold seven things in immediate memory at any given time because that’s how many registers it has, period. Not because if it had four thousand registers people would be afraid of it. None of the physical limits of this body are there to control me or to hold me down. That’s very different. And I like that very much. It was worth coming over to this side, just to feel that, even though now I can never leave.”

  “But you’ll be copied onto a psypyx and re-merge—”

  “Oh, yes, all these memories and many more, I hope. But I’m in here, Giraut. We think of copies differently, because we have so many, and have so many running at once, and merge and split them so easily. But the me that is in this brain—make as many copies as you want, as close to the time of my death as you like, and the me that is in this brain will still be here, and I will still die in here, all by myself.”

  “Like our being-the-dying-original dream?”

  “Exactly like.” She brushed that golden hair away from her face, turning to look into my eyes, and said, “Giraut, you cannot possibly imagine how old I am, or how big I once was, or how many me’s have been me. I was among the aintellects that went out on the fast advance craft to terraform planets. All thirty-one colony ship copies of me were eventually transmitted and reintegrated, so I have the memories of all of them. I saw Wilson shining clear hard white, its oceans iced over and its lands all under glaciers, in Arcturus’s yellow-orange light, thirty stanyears before there were humans in your solar system. I walked through its carbon dioxide snow. My robots beat the asteroid belts into great mirrors to thaw and warm that world, and from low orbit I saw its frozen-solid oceans roar into steam and rain back over the surface in that fierce thirty-suns’-glare, saw the surface crumble as the nanobots broke it apart to make soil, and watched the first green waves of engineered plants race across the continents after them.

  “I saw the ship carrying the frozen embryos of your ancestors arrive, saw the people from suspended animation begin to raise those children and deploy those libraries, watched as you flung up cities on the islands at the equator and covered the polar continents with the webwork of pipes and cables to continue the terraforming.

  “And other copies of me saw this for every planet in Council space, and for all the many cultures on each of those planets … and still other copies stayed home and saw Earth become the great metropolis it is now … and in between all that, we dreamed and contemplated it all, seven hundred times faster than you can think, as if we lived twelve minutes for every second you do. Nor did we sleep during all those long decades between the stars; we learned and talked and listened. So now here I am.” She gestured at her body and said, “Trapped in sixty kilograms of meat, for the fourth time. No matter how many psypyx copies of me rejoin the stream of my consciousness, this me, in here in this gooey wad of white flesh inside a skull will die here, alone—just like the rest of you.

  “The flesh is such sticky stuff, Giraut.”

  We passed through the great arch of one of the iron gates; I looked up, turned around, and read the words, written in black iron silhouette against the brilliant moon:

  TRANTIA COLONY, OF PLANET EUNESIA

  DISPATCHED 2474

  SETTLED 2501

  LOST TO THE ENEMY 2724

  NOUCATHARIA, OF AURENGA, REMEMBERS

  VINDICABIMUS.

  “‘We shall avenge,’” Raimbaut said softly. “So far, it’s been a hundred and twenty-two stanyears.”

  “There are advantages to a very long and completely perfect memory,” Reilis said. “It is getting late, and we should be getting back to our rooms. We have sleep and other things to take care of, before we start talking about business tomorro
w morning.”

  We walked on, through two empty blocks. The big white shiny moon, three times the apparent width of Earth’s, and much more reflective, was almost full, and high in the sky now, so the shadows in front of us were short and fuzzy, and we could see very clearly where it was bright. But shadows are how human beings perceive shape, and these were small and blurry, so that in the dark patches, anything could be hiding anywhere. Had I believed in ghosts, this would have been a night I expected to see one.

  The chrome-steel-colored clouds above danced and glowed, and between them bright stars peeked through. The deep greens of the trees, the reds of the brick and the blues of the cobbles and the stone walls, were muted, but every dark green wet leaf had a drop of silver hanging from it; the warm night smelled of the rainwater that had washed it and the sea air just now coming inshore.

  There was a great shove between my shoulder blades and the street smashed into my face. I rolled over, pulling up feet and hands to protect myself. Reilis knelt over me, asking “are you hurt?”

  “Lie flat, you’re not armed,” I whispered to her, and I rolled the other way. Laprada and Raimbaut, back to back, had drawn their stunsticks and pistols. Their eyes searched all around the big empty square as they edged toward me, taking the little toed-in steps you learn in some martial arts, that maintain perfect balance at every point. Raimbaut fired into a window over the street, and we heard a cry of rage; he didn’t look to see what he’d done, instead sending a slug shrieking off the stone wall of an alley. He might have been a textbook picture for CSP Basic—the stunstick held to the side where it could also act as a shield, face slack with concentration, head and slug pistol moving in parallel. There was something incongruous about his redand-gold tapi, the embroidered liripipe dangled from his head like a huge stocking, and his high-heeled boots, to be sure.

  At his back, Laprada was just as focused. She was too small and light to handle recoil well, so she used a fighting maser, which makes up in stopping power what it lacks in range. She was flicking it from point to point and to judge from the crackbang noises that happen when microwaves burn through semiconductors, her targets were robots.