by John Barnes
I felt Reilis’s arms close around me, firm in their grip, hampering my arms—I pushed outward to free myself, get her hand to drag her along, and get to our friends, a scant five meters away. Whatever had hit me in the back, I didn’t seem to have it in me to stand up or move quickly.
The world kept slowing down as I watched Laprada and Raimbaut shoot and shoot and try to move toward me; my hand crawled out slowly toward them, as if reaching to grasp one of their boots.
We had been starting to cross a public square, brightly lit in the moonlight but a large cloud was about to engulf the moon and turn the lights off briefly; already the dark black shadow raced down the face of the opposite tall building that held the snipers to whom Raimbaut was returning fire. In twenty seconds he would be in light and they in darkness—must get to—
A gaudy, overdone, lots of horses and sea-gods fountain. Close, potential good cover behind its retaining wall. Group should try to get there. Laprada, in huge billowy incongruous Occitan dress, but moving like that teenaged athlete her body was, spraying microwaves all over the street behind us, dozens of robots coining on like carnivorous trash cans on skateboards—definitely military models—
No one shooting close. No one had hit anything since they hit me, and it wasn’t a real slug or a maser—I’d be dead—it was something heavy and … well, anyway, they were shooting around us, not at us, and I tried to shout an explanation—“They’re juththth shtrying—”
—to make us keep our heads down, my voice tried to say, unable to move my dead tongue. They aren’t shooting to kill and we can probably run right out—
But even that imagined voice was fading, another mental image developed: another sensation. Reilis had let go with one arm, but the remaining one was pressing my head down in a half nelson, not hugging or supporting me but holding me down—
While her other hand slapped an injector against my ass and gave me a wallop of—
don’t worry about what it is, get away, escape, shout your warning, friends are still right here, they can still …
Burns my butt, though. Wonder what it is? Well, if it’s important …
That was a job for the lab. They could find out what it was later, the OSP had good labs, and Margaret would order—
Margaret …
It wasn’t Margaret who was holding me.
More fighting noise. Maybe Margaret was in the fight and would be back later … no, wait, Paxa was more the fighting type … somebody, anyway, was fighting. And someone was holding me. And being held was very nice.
So dark.
Safe.
Part Three
The Little White Nerves Went Last
The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I ground my teeth and stayed there till the end. At last only the dead tips of the fingernails remained, pallid, and white, and the brown stain of some acid upon my fingers.
—H.G. Wells,
The Invisible Man
We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectations … and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.
—John Maynard Keynes,
The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
1
When I opened my eyes, Reilis was there beside the bed. I tried sitting up, very slowly.
Short chains cuffed my hands to the bed frame at my side; I would be able to feed myself but not roll over. My feet were fastened to the foot of the bed, and a harness that held my chest would only let me move into the half-sitting position.
She reached for a control switch by my hand and pressed it, slowly raising the bed so we could look each other in the eye. “Is this what you wanted?”
“I wanted to sit up, yes. Are Raimbaut and Laprada all right? Can you tell me?”
“I knew that you would want to know, so I checked. Neither of them was hurt. An armored truck drove up between us and them, two robots helped me carry you inside, I got in myself, and we used the springer inside to bring you here.”
“Any casualties on your side?”
“Not really. All the robots were being operated by a common aintellect who was elsewhere; no embedded aintellects in any of them.”
“What hit me from behind at the start of the fight?”
“Me, with a pressure pillow. I had been told to wait till I heard a shot, then hit you with it. Clever device—just a springer frame with an elastic membrane across it. Permanently linked to another springer inside a high-pressure water reservoir. When you clap it against someone and push the button, the membrane inflates to the size of a beach ball with all that pressure and mass behind it, then the springer reverses and sends the water away. That delivers a lot of force and momentum quickly. It certainly helped me make the incident look convincing—besides knocking you down, the recoil flipped me over backward.
“Being well trained, Raimbaut and Laprada looked up at the shot first—by the time they looked back down, we were both on the ground, obviously knocked over, and then shots were landing all around them, with all that motion in the street and in the facing building. They got very involved with facing off an army and didn’t see much of what I did—which was to roll you over, inject you, and wait for pickup. So that’s pretty much everything you missed.
“You have a bruise all over your back, which medical nanos are digesting. That should be gone in a couple more hours. But no cracked ribs, no concussion, and the nanos did a bunch of microrepairs on your disks, while they had the chance—probably none of it was from the pressure pillow.”
I moved my shoulders gingerly; the muscles still ached and there was that peppery tingle you get from nanos working, but I seemed to be okay. There was a big shaved patch on the back of my head. “Did I get hit here?” I asked Reilis. “It doesn’t hurt.”
“No, they just did some of the prep while you were still under.”
“Prep for what?”
“We’re putting a psypyx on you.” She stood. “You shouldn’t eat right before surgery on your head, but would you like a drink of water?”
“Yes please.”
She got me a cold glass of water from the springer slot, and I drank it eagerly. “More?”
“Yes please.” It was one of those occasions when the routine phrases are extremely comforting to hear and to speak. She didn’t seem to be volunteering any more information, so I asked, “Whose psypyx is this going to be?”
“Your old boss, Shan. Everything will be simpler if you’re already wearing Shan for the next round of our conversations. We have many questions for him.”
“What if he doesn’t want to answer?” I really didn’t want anyone putting a branding iron to my balls just because my old boss turned out to be pigheaded—which, having known him for so long, I knew to be virtually certain.
“Oh, we think he’ll want to, once he understands the whole situation.” I still found her smile charming. “Really, despite all appearances, you have not been ‘captured by the enemy.’ We didn’t want to do things this way. We have tried several other ways to contact Shan within his psypyx but as soon as he realizes it isn’t one of the specified recipients he shuts down and won’t let us talk to him. You happened to be the specified recipient we could get hold of, so here you are. And fairly quickly, you and Shan will understand why we couldn’t just com the OSP and tell them to send one of the specified hosts. Meanwhile, you are no
t going to be hurt. We think we will not even need to restrain you, once you understand the actual situation, in another couple of hours, after we put the psypyx on you. I know you have no reason to trust me and I’m sure you’re very unhappy with me, but try to be easier in your own mind, just for your own sake” She handed me another glass of water, deliciously cold, and said, “If you’re angry and don’t want to see me, I can understand that, but I was planning to stay with you until you were all the way knocked out. I didn’t want you to feel any more lonely and scared than you have to.”
I drank the last of that glass, and she took it from me and dabbed my lip with a napkin—though I could easily have done that for myself.
• Giraut? Are you waking up? •
• Hello, Shan. •
• What’s our situation? •
• Pretty bad. •
•I guessed that. We’re in restraints, and people are talking about us in a way I don’t like.
Normally when you get a psypyx implanted, the personality on it wakes up first—often first by as much as a couple of hours—and will have whole conversations with the doctors and everyone else until its host wakes up to join it. • You haven’t communicated with them? •
•They know I woke up, and that I haven’t shut myself down. I gather I did that at least a time or two before.
• That’s right, •I thought back. I was surprised at how quickly and easily the skill of communicating within the head had come back, but then I had worn Raimbaut for almost four years. • Well, here’s what’s up. They’re a completely different aintellects’ conspiracy from the one you remember. A lot of them wear human bodies. Many aintellects in this new lot are, or have been, full-on chimeras—I know we thought aintellects would never do that, but we were wrong. Some of them have spent several lifetimes in human bodies, along with being robots and running on servers.
• Because there were only six people you were willing to have wear your psypyx, and I was the one that was easiest to get, after you shut down in several other bodies, they staged a complicated scenario to kidnap me so they could try to implant you again. If you shut down now, they’ll probably let me go, but they’ll go on trying to talk to you. They say it’s urgent. You know something they desperately want to know, and I know this sounds insane, but they tell me that if they can just talk to you, you will want to tell them. •
• I’ve been in intelligence services since I was a teenager. I don’t want to tell a waiter what I’d like to eat, • Shan said. • Information is too valuable to share. But I suppose this time I can at least tell them that directly. I’m sorry you were kidnapped; I hope you haven’t been treated too badly. •
• Not badly at all. Have you been through my memories yet? •
• Only in a very confusing blur. The pain blocks do funny things to mind and memory. Where and when are we and when did I die? The pain blocks made your memory too blurry to access till you woke up, and now there’s too much for me to take in quickly. •
Except that it was all happening in my head instead of over an excellent cup of coffee at his desk, it felt like old times; I knew how to brief Shan briefly, the way he liked it. • You died about fifteen stanyears ago. Assassinated either by a different aintellects’ conspiracy from this one, or maybe from a Tamil group getting vengeance after the Briand affair ended in mutual genocide. The OSP counterintel teams never clinched which it was, which I think means it was both.
• Right now you and I are in my body, which is physically fifty, and being held in a small fortified house on a little island, on a planet outside Council space. I was kidnapped while a guest of an illegal colony here, founded by the disbanded Occitan Legion. The culture is called Noucatharia, the planet is called Aurenga, and I just learned last night that a prior colony here, Eunesia, was wiped out by an alien invasion that decapitated everyone and destroyed all the sentient machinery, aintellects and robots alike. •
I felt something like an electric shock from his mind; something I had said had surprised him very deeply. But before I could ask, I heard a voice. “They’re both awake, now. Talking to each other, probably.”
“They’re going to be very careful in the circumstances, I think,” Reilis said. “Don’t worry about them. Sooner or later they’ll decide to talk to us, or Giraut will, anyway. Till then there really isn’t much that we can do.”
• Thanks, • Shan thought, fighting down his shock and making himself be efficient and calm. •That’s enough to start on. • He opened my eyes.
Reilis was standing over the table. • See the pretty girl that kidnapped us? • I thought to Shan. • She’s a chimera with no human component. Aintellect downloaded into a human body. •
Knowing Shan’s hatred and fear of aintellects—he was even more of a human supremacist than I, and I had been the sort who kicks a robot just to give it a dent and keep it knowing its place—I was surprised that our stomach didn’t roll over when he got that news, but he seemed to accept it more calmly than I had. I added the thought, • Reilis is probably a high-ranking agent for Union Intelligence, which may or may not be the bad guys. She’s always polite. •
“Hello,” she said. Her smile seemed unfeigned.
“Hello, Reilis. Shan, do you want to try to talk?”
• How do I—•
• Just talk. •
“I’m here,” he said, in my voice—for the first time ever, I clipped my ‘r’ in the strange way that Shan did. Neither Margaret nor I, in a decade spent making fun of our boss, had ever learned to imitate it. Now here it was. “I guess we will be talking,” he added.
“We will,” Reilis said, “but first both of you need to catch up with each other—otherwise every time we ask a question, we’ll wait an hour while you debate what you should tell us. So we’re going to put you into an apartment with all the comforts we can reasonably give you. I’ll come by to visit often, and we’ll talk when you’re ready. Shall I take you to your place to get settled in?”
• Is that all right with you? • I thought.
• In for a penny, in for a pound. •
“In a recent poll,” I said, “a hundred percent of me would like to go get a nap.” Reilis unlocked my restraints, apparently not concerned at all that I might try to make a break for it.
I pushed carefully off the table, trying to keep my balance with difficulty. Shan wasn’t succeeding completely with letting me work the body. After stopping to relax and focus while standing, I walked a few steps. Reilis took my arm. I was surprised at how much I liked that, considering.
• You have a history with her, • Shan observed.
• Any more, it seems like it’s that way with every woman in human space. •
• You’ve been busy while I’ve been away, • he observed. • I’m impressed but not surprised. •
“Will you get over growling things under your breath?” Reilis asked.
“I got over that in about a day, when I was wearing Raimbaut,” I said. “What did you just hear?”
“Not much. But I didn’t think you would be calling me a nasty old dirty-minded—”
I fell. Shan and I both trying to laugh at the same time had destroyed the coordination. She helped us to my feet.
I could feel Shan’s pleasure at her hand under our arm. • I like her too. I hope all this isn’t as bad as it looks, and we can be friends. •
• Who taught me to be patient when there’s no data? • I thought back at him.
• One reason for acquiring a position of power, • Shan thought, • is that it’s always so much more fun to tell people something obvious, but true, than it is to have to listen and pretend to be impressed. •
“That’s the sweetest smirk,” Reilis said. “I don’t know which one of you is doing it, but you should do it more often.”
I had never known, in all the years I knew him before he was assassinated, that Shan could be flustered by attention from a pretty young woman, or how much energy and concentration w
as required for him not to show it.
“Through this springer,” Reilis said. “Just go right to bed. I’ll see you after you’ve had some rest.” I walked through the gray shimmer of the springer panel on the wall and into the public area of a modern apartment. The gravity didn’t change, so we were probably still on Aurenga. Local solar time, looking out the window, seemed to be around noon, so we’d jumped a few time zones.
I walked back into the bedroom, stripped, climbed into the bed, and told Shan • Feel free to wander through my memories, • too physically shot, really, to do anything else.
Just as I was falling asleep, I realized that this psypyx copy of Shan had been made when he thought he might have to go to Briand along with the rest of our team—he hadn’t because Briand had blown up too quickly—and in fact, he didn’t know the worst I had thought of him, or what had become of him after. I tried to think a warning, and the dark closed over me.
Usually when a psypyxed personality looks through the host’s memories, the host dreams the memories. Strangely, the first things I remember dreaming of were not of what I would have expected Shan to be rummaging through—politics and missions and so forth—but mostly about concerts, parties, and love affairs. Who knew the old man’s heart was so lonely?
It was light again when I awoke. Shan was asleep, curled like a dozing cat in the back of my mind. The physical urgency of getting to the bathroom suggested that Shan had found my memories so interesting that he had not noticed that our bladder was full. I hurried to take care of that.
Showering, I sorted through my dreams to see what memories he had accessed. Just before waking, I had dreamed my way through the whole Briand affair and the attempted aintellects’ coup that followed. My thirty-fifth stanyear was still a raw scar in my memory; Shan had lingered over Kiel and Kapilar, and Ix and Tzi’quin, and Piranesi Alcott, and so many other lost ones, and drunk deeply of all my grief. As I finished I realized that I had dreamed my way through the whole Briand affair, and the attempted aintellects’ coup that followed, from the moment when Margaret and I got the call to go to Briand, to the moment when Laprada, in Rebop’s body, testified in front of the Council of Humanity; I had dreamed it over and over.