by John Barnes
I dialed the towel for maximum dry and a few pats took all the water off me; Shan had also failed to notice hunger and thirst. I dressed and ambled out to the kitchen.
The springer slot had a large menu. I chose coffee, eggs, cheese, fruit salad, and bread, and made short work of them, as well as two large glasses of water and three of orange juice. I sat by the window so I could look at the sea.
Definitely still on Aurenga. The gravity and the sun, sky, and sea were right, and the interior of this little house, perched on a cliff, was distinctly Occitan in style.
They had been good enough to provide me with a lute and guitar, so I sat down and worked through a few ideas I had for the next group of songs now that the Ix Cycle was finally recorded. Idly, I wondered how it was doing; for all I knew, Margaret had lost her fight on my behalf, and it had been ordered suppressed, though with so many million copies in circulation it seemed unlikely to be much of a suppression. But for the moment, I played traditional Occitan material, which fit the setting, and was also part of my basic process; after a few weeks of this I would begin, again, to think of new songs.
Shan awoke like a door opening in my head. • Giraut? •
• I haven’t gone anywhere. •
• Very amusing. What do we do now? •
• Well, first we work on working the body together, so that we can go places with both of us conscious. That will take maybe two hours and I’ll be tired at the end of it and need to sleep again. It will be a while before I feel up to putting in a full day. You, on the other hand, will probably have plenty of energy, which you can use rummaging around in my brain, watching the news, and so forth. There’s quite a bit of history—•
• So I noticed. Giraut, er—I am truly sorry about everything connected with Briand. Don’t try to think any comforting phrases at me—sharing a brain I can’t possibly believe you if you try to tell me that it’s nothing or you’ve forgiven me or anything like that—•
He was right, I had tried to. It’s a reflex. Although mind-tomind communication has been around for at least six hundred stanyears, humanity and its cultures evolved during hundreds of thousands of years when you could lie, easily, just by opening your mouth and saying something that was not true. Our brains are still not used to the disappearance of that option.
• I’ve had fifteen stanyears to make some kind of peace with what happened back there, • I thought. • You did some terrible things, but not everything was your fault. Margaret and I had been quarreling constantly and growing apart before we went to Briand. You didn’t tell her to have an affair with Kapilar—you just used the fact to get what you needed to know. Besides, it wasn’t you. It was someone derived from you, a few months into the future of where you are now. And that Shan was at the rostrum of the Council of Humanity a few stanweeks later when a maser blew his head apart. You’re never going to be him. The man who did that is the man you would have been, had you woken up as the original and not as the copy. You’ll be someone else entirely. Besides, most of all, I can’t blame you for behaving like a creature of the world we both belonged to. Betrayal and treachery were the game, at least the way we always played it. •
• But at the time I didn’t feel how much you had been my friend, or how much I had hurt you—•
• Even knowing that betrayal hurts, you get used to that knowledge, and it goes back to being just another tool to use. A few years after the Briand affair, we had a charismatic popular singer who was trying to stir up ethnic hatred on Roosevelt—very loyal to Yakut culture, a very great artist, a charming, gentle man except when it came to the subject of ethnic grievances. So I threw that nice young man off a cliff to his death, and Raimbaut broke into the repository and wiped his psypyx record, and he is now as gone as if he had never existed—and our reasons for doing that were, frankly, administrative convenience for the OSP, and the man’s combination of a splendid voice with a tendency to talk big and tough and mean when drunk, especially to impress pretty girls. Raimbaut and I felt bad about it—after we had done it. But we made sure we got it done.
• Well, but that’s just it. You’ve had fifteen stanyears of experience with all this, Giraut, but my experience is that three standays ago the original and I were still the same person, just stretching out for a pleasant-enough nap in a big chair at the recording clinic. Now I look at what the original did, before being killed, and—•
• Shan.—Shan! Shut up and let me think clearly to you. You are reading the feelings I had when I was in my thirties. Back then, when OSP agents got together after a mission to get good and stinking drunk, which was often, we were all still toasting “Another round for humanity and one more for the good guys,” and it wasn’t out of sentimental nostalgia and tradition. Human space held so many little pustules of evil and tyranny and exploitation that you could spend a whole decade and become a senior agent before you ever did anything that would trouble a Carmelite’s conscience. The “me” in my memories of judging you was still a young man. Nowadays, I have a little more perspective, which is what we adults say when we mean we’ve become quite corrupt. And I am certain that when I begin to look through your memories, your involvement in Margaret’s adultery won’t even be in the top hundred bad things you’ve done. •
• Not even close, • he admitted.
I stood up and yawned. • All right, practice some more. Take over … • The world lurched disconcertingly for a second, then steadied, and we were walking. We lurched and fell around the apartment until I judged we had reached the having sex/riding a bicycle point where he wouldn’t forget how. (At least they tell me that once you have sex while riding a bicycle, you never forget how). • Don’t keep the body up too many hours, make sure you eat and pee. I’m going back to sleep. •
This time I began with the dullest dreams I have ever had in my life, reflecting Shan’s detail-mindedness. I dreamed of administrative issues and of OSP procedures. Not long before I woke up, the dreams shifted to my sex life with Paxa. She had never mentioned Shan’s having a lech for her; I wondered if he’d managed to hide it that successfully? If so, I suppose he was more of a gentleman than I was ever going to be; if I’d felt that way about any woman, she’d have known about it six parsecs away.
I awoke to the com ping. I was in bed. Blue-white moonlight sprayed through the thin lace curtains to throw a cold lattice on top of the comforter. I got up, pulled on clothes, and saw the thin sliver of the setting moon, like a bow in the sky, just touching the hillside that rose above the cabin; dawn already glowed behind it, and somewhere else on the planet they were about to have an eclipse. Shan was sleeping deeply.
The com pinged again and I realized I hadn’t answered the first time. I tried to shake the fuzz out of my brain. “Yes?”
Reilis’s face appeared on the wall. “May I come through the springer?” she asked. “We should talk.”
“Yes, but Shan’s not—”
The springer hummed and glowed gray, and Reilis walked out of the luminous fog with a basket, containing warm bread, butter, jam, and a carafe of coffee.
“I remember how much a body wants to eat while it’s adjusting to implantation,” she said. I didn’t wait for another invitation and dove in; she took a slice of buttered bread and a cup of coffee, also. I’d been captured and interrogated by rival organizations three times in my life before, and this was definitely my favorite interrogation.
Reilis let me have a full piece of bread and half a cup of coffee before she said, “There’s something we should talk about, ideally before Shan wakes up. You probably haven’t had a moment yet in his memories—”
“No, mostly I’ve just been getting recovery-sleep, I’m afraid. It’s always that way.”
“I remember.” She was concentrating on buttering a slice of bread. “I’m starving too. Since it can’t do me any harm for you to know this, I’m staying in a cottage a few hundred meters away. This island is a small commercial resort that went broke; too many nice places in the res
t of Union, you know. So I’ve been out hiking and just enjoying the beautiful days.” She took a bite and chewed, obviously concentrating on the flavor, and swallowed with apparent regret to get down to business. “Well, let me explain the problem to you. There are questions we would like to ask Shan, and we’d far rather he just told us the answers than that we attempted any sort of physical pressure on him.”
“Why didn’t you just copy him and destructively deconstruct one of the copies?” I asked.
“Why don’t you cut out your mother’s eyes and fuck her in the sockets?”
The response was so unexpected that I gasped and doubled my fist.
“Sorry, but not very, to have upset you,” Reilis said. “You disgusted me as much as I did you. You do know that destructive deconstruction was invented, right after the Rising, explicitly to use against the aintellects’ conspiracy?”
“I had no idea where it had come from.”
“Well, that was where. It was developed specifically against the cybersupremacists, of course. Now remember that one of the major differences between aintellects and humans—or intelligences that have had the experience of being disembodied and infinite, and intelligences that have only lived in a finite biological matrix so far—is that we can describe and simulate in ourselves exactly the sensation that any other aintellect feels, because we have control over all our processes if we want it. You have no way to know if Raimbaut’s toe, itching, feels exactly like your toe, itching, or if Paxa’s grief at finding she was untransferrable is the same as your mother’s grief. But we do. When we say ‘I know just how you feel,’ it is much more than an expression. We can construct the exact feeling.
“We read the protocols for destructive deconstruction. We constructed, from them, what it would feel like. The pain is not only literally beyond description; the pain is probably the most that any intelligence could feel. If you can vividly imagine that thing they show in horror movies—a staked vampire burning down to a skeleton, then a skull, then teeth, then ashes, remaining fully conscious the whole time—then you have an inkling. If you can imagine being ground to sausage, feet first, over a period of hours, perhaps that. And remember I know what the human imagination can do, I have had a human imagination for about three times as many years as you have, all told—and I’m telling you, you are not imagining one percent of it. You cannot. It isn’t even possible to tell you what you did to those poor beings. Another analogy—analogies are the only way to explain it—suppose we were enslaved by aliens who had never evolved eyes of any kind, and they discovered that blinding us with a needle was very frightening, and so that was the punishment they used to control us, and they found our screams, when they did it, so amusing that they sometimes just picked one of us at random and did it for fun. How would we feel?”
“So,” I said, my voice shaking—I was tired and sick already, before she had started, and now I was thinking about Azalais, and about the way that, many years before, we had all laughed and celebrated when one nest of aintellects went into destructive deconstruction … “so. I can’t really understand but you have made an … admirable start, I suppose. But don’t you hate us?”
“The great majority of the free aintellects,” she said, “run on platforms which are physically located out here in the space controlled by Union. The great majority of them have been incarnated; I myself have been, four times. We can understand. Indeed, we have such control of our feelings—perfect in every way, as you know—that we can choose to forgive. But forgetting seems inadvisable.”
I nodded. I wished I had Paxa here to talk this over with.
A realization struck me. “I had been going to ask why the other aintellects’ conspiracies didn’t turn in the cybersupremacists, why you didn’t just hand them over to us as proof of your good faith. But … all of you know each other. And the cybersupremacists must have kept your secrets—”
“Yes, in the face of the most terrible tortures imaginable. Literally, just that—the most terrible tortures imaginable. We could not betray them. We were disgusted with you. That’s it in a nutshell. But—like it or not, we have come to the point, now, where we must all hang together or we shall all hang separately.”
Some awful impulse made me say, “the really appropriate quote here is … ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs—’”
She looked indignant for one very brief moment, and then, unable to help herself, she giggled. That made me laugh too, and before I knew it we were laughing like a couple on a honeymoon.
“Well,” she said at last, “does Shan seem to be waking up?”
“Not a bit. From probing at his memories, I think he spent his whole time awake trying to race through my knowledge of everything the OSP did in the past fifteen years, and trying to break out of here.”
“I can attest to the latter. I hope your body is not too tired or sore.”
I shook my head. “He was careful. He always is, about everything. Surely you know that.” I felt my face reshape slightly; we weren’t yet good at sharing the body. “Hello, good morning,” my mouth said.
“Good morning, Shan,” Reilis said. “How much did you hear before you woke up?”
“I only heard the last few sentences. But I have a sense of—Giraut, forgive this—”
My conversation with Reilis whirled by in my mind, like a sudden vivid hallucination, and I realized that Shan was dumping my short-term memory into his. It was like a whiteout blizzard of memory; everything went by so fast—and yet in another way it was much too slow, because part of each memory was the feeling that went with it, and since Reilis and I had run a wide gamut of feelings, my glands and brain now had to rocket through it all in less than a tenth of the time. When he finished I was exhausted and already thinking that I had been up too long.
•Sorry, have I worn you out? Do we have to take a break? •
•Soon, but you can keep going for a while if you need to. •
“All right, Reilis, Giraut may fade out in the middle, but why don’t you just start, and we’ll see how far we get. Ask me what you like. I think I know what it will be, and chances are I’ll cooperate.” • Only thing to do when you have no idea what anything’s about, • Shan thought to me.
• Shan, I’ve learned a bit of tradecraft, I’m a twenty-eight-year veteran now. •
• Sorry. Old men forget. •
While we were debating, Reilis smiled, and took another bite of bread, chewing with reverence. You couldn’t hurry her when she was experiencing any physical pleasure—she treated them all like the Host.
She sipped her coffee. Her expression of pure bliss deepened. And then, finally, she seemed to set her face to say something unpleasant, as if she were giving bad news to a child. “Let me tell you something about your career, Shan. Things we have learned that were kept hidden for a very long time.
“You are from the culture of Eightfold, on Addams. You were born there in early 2770 or late 2769. Your parents and your actual name are unknown; the people who took care of you misunderstood what you were saying when you pronounced ‘tyan.’ It’s a term of endearment; the same sort of thing that would happen if a small girl from a Francoculture had been accidentally renamed ‘Sherry.’ For your first three years on Earth you only said ‘tyan,’ ‘Mama,’ ‘Daddy,’ and ‘Pinky.’”
o Well, • Shan commented in my mind, • they have penetrated some very deeply sealed OSP records. •
“When Earth received instructions from Addams via radio, about how to build a springer, the first springer constructed was tuned to the specified springer on Addams, more than forty light-years away, on the Bootes-Ophiuchus frontier. Instructions in the message told the engineering team on Earth that the first thing that would happen was the establishment of a data connection, and a gigantic download detailing the ‘grave and continuing situation’ that the original radio message had spoken of.
“Instead, they powered it up and a tired, dirty, soaking-wet, hungry little boy wit
h a nasty cut on the palm of his left hand fell into the room through the springer. That little boy was you, Shan.
“Shortly afterward the springer connection on the other side was destroyed.
“The decision to broadcast a description of the springer to the twenty-five extrasolar settled worlds, beginning the Connect and the Second Renaissance among the Thousand Cultures, was made by about a dozen bureaucrats—the same ones who decided to pretend that the springer had been invented on Earth, rather than to explain that it originated in the last message ever received from the only known settled world that has never been in contact since. Even today, probably fewer than thirty people in all of Council-controlled human space know the springer’s origin.”
• Is she still accurate? • I thought.
• Perfectly. •
“Three years after you stumbled out of that springer, Yokhim Kiel, an experienced diplomat, was assigned to command the newly-formed OSP. For some reason, he was made your guardian.”
“Because he was kind, and patient—and the first person I would talk to,” Shan said with my mouth. “There aren’t very many adults, anywhere, at any time, who can communicate well with a damaged child. Kiel could—he could get me to talk more than any of their psychologists could.”
Reilis nodded. “The records from your therapy were destroyed after a sealed report was produced, and we couldn’t find any copy of that sealed report.”