The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  “Absolutely delighted,” I agreed. We went down a different trail from the one we had come up; this one plunged quickly down toward the shore, and then looped and switchbacked around till it found a precarious descent to a wide, golden beach beside the sapphire lagoon that nestled between this island and its little flock of islets. “It’s only about two kilometers across,” Reilis said, pointing it out when we first came around the side of a ridge, and stopped to admire it, “but unfortunately none of those little outcrops has anywhere much good to swim ashore; it tends to be rocks and cliffs all over. So, since we’re both in good shape, we could easily swim to them but there’s not much of anywhere to rest, and not much way up onto the other islands. Just in case you were about to suggest that.”

  “I wasn’t, but Shan was,” I said. “He’s still finding it a novelty to have a fifty-year-old body again.”

  • Wait till I’ve got a teenager’s, • Shan thought smugly.

  I’d teased him about being a living cliché. The Thousand Cultures were filling up with exultant, joyful athletes, former seventy-year-olds making the most of being physically nineteen. I almost envied him how soon he would be trying it out.

  On the way down the steep, winding trail, as it followed the crest of a saddle between two spires of pine-studded red stone, Shan took control of the body, caught Reilis’s hand, and said, “There is one other thing I’m curious about. I don’t really believe there were ever multiple factions here on Aurenga, or that the Noucathars had a radical faction that was trying to kill Giraut for not being Occitan enough, or for encouraging Ix, or whatever it was supposed to be. I notice the immense cleverness of those assassins at getting to him, the utter ineptitude once they got there, and the peculiarly elaborate suicides, and I think something else was at work. And then I notice that over time the assassinations first made Giraut and his team, and of course Margaret, very alert, and then steered them to particular events and places, and seem, finally, to have brought Giraut here and put him within your power. So … were all the assassination attempts yours? And am I right that you had no intent to harm Giraut?”

  “They had been ours,” she said, “but we lost control of them. You might say Giraut was being attacked by a virus. Years ago we planted an opportunity out in the demimonde of free, dissident, and criminal aintellects. We started a little selfduplicating program that would put together a pile of money and funds for creating an assassin to send after Giraut, specifying that the assassin it produced had to have a Lost Legion genetic connection and be fairly inept.

  “The idea was just to put some significant pressure on the OSP and get Giraut headed into situations where we could kidnap him; basically to break things up and keep things moving. At any rate, viruses and worms mutate, and aintellects have to mutate to function—as we all know since it explains my existence—and this one got out of our control, which if anything was to our advantage. We thought that might provide an incentive for you to get serious about the investigation, and it seems it did.”

  “Well, it certainly incentivized me,” I agreed. “So I was being pursued by deadly spam?”

  “The one that sent that fellow after you in the hotel room had lost some of its fail-safing and sent a rather deadlier one than it should, which is why you had more trouble with that assassin than you had had with the previous ones; it had apparently lost many of its precautions about being careful with the life of one of our agents, which is how poor Azalais got blown up. That last one that sent Maracabru after you was a really bad situation—it was a centuries-old defrauder virus that had mugged one of our assassin-viruses for the rewards code, and was trying to collect by completely uncontracted methods—luckily for you, the copy it mugged had amped up the ineptitude. If it had pirated code from the more deadly one, you might have been in real trouble.”

  “Not that someone trying to kill me, however inept, is exactly not being in trouble,” I pointed out. “Being almost killed is plenty real enough for me.”

  “Well, yes, but you’re highly skilled and you dealt with it just fine.”

  “Oh, I just want some attention paid to the possibility of my getting dead. Call it vanity.”

  She smiled and took both of my hands in hers, drawing me close, I suppose to give me the full effect of the sea-gray eyes and the scent of her sweaty naked body. “We’ve all three of us been at the game for a large part of our lives. I do hope you can understand that it was truly nothing personal?”

  “No hard feelings,” I said. • Shan, that pun was old a thousand years ago. Stick with your reserve and dignity, you do it better. •

  • I continue to learn. •

  The last descent to the beach was steep enough so that we did not so much hold hands as assist each other over the little outcrops and rocks. But the beach itself was worth every second of the effort; the lagoon was barely rippled and crystal-clear, the sand warm but not hot and just right for texture—soft enough to lie in but not fine enough to be itchy. We kicked off our shoes beside our clothes and ran down into the warm water.

  For a couple of hours that afternoon, we just splashed, played, and laughed. There is an expression in Ocdtan poetry, one that is so clichéd that the merest mention of it brings showers of beer and peanuts in any reading club. It got to be clichéd because it’s an experience everyone has—to be with a lover and to feel que primis amadris d’ilh mondo—“like the first lovers in the world.” That afternoon was like that.

  At last we flopped out on the beach to sunbathe and dry. She rolled into my arms, laughing. I think, perhaps, it was only then that I was entirely sure that I believed her about the pleasures of being embodied. I defy anyone seeing Reilis’s radiant, trusting, sweet face—and especially those eyes, bright with the shared knowledge that had passed between us and dark with the sadness of our certain parting, to think “warm zombie” at her and back away. But I am getting ahead of myself here; it was months later before that ugly expression began to float around in the media.

  A kiss led to a longer kiss, and then since we were all alone on a streak of soft sand by a perfect lagoon, “like the first lovers in the world;” and since no matter what, it would all be different later; we made love the way you do when you think you may never see each other again and every second could be the last.

  Shan was enjoying it so much (it had been so much longer for him) that I retreated to let him take over.

  Reilis pressed back, arching her back and grinding our hips together, and winked. “Taking over, Shan?”

  I’m not sure which of the three of us was laughing harder. It’s an interesting sensation in that situation.

  “How did you know?” Shan asked, his accent unmistakable.

  “Giraut has better technique but you’re less jaded.”

  Later, during a long, pleasant second round, as Reilis bent over my body and bore down with her pelvis, she asked Shan, “Am I a machine and a tool? Are you using me? Is that what you’re thinking?”

  “I’m not thinking at all,” he said. Her back was astonishingly soft, and lovely.

  “He’s telling the truth,” I added. “Me either.”

  She turned around and bent slowly to kiss me. “That’s the point.” She snuggled up under my arm. “I was right.”

  “Right about what? I asked, bewildered.

  “Right about you and your songs. Giraut, we just thought … the man who wrote”Don’t Forget I Live Here Too,” the man who is still wrestling after all these years with his encounter with Ix, can’t be that big a hypocrite. We made a bet that your big, sloppy, generous, loving heart would get the better of you.” She sighed contentedly, and planted a light kiss on my neck. “And we were right.”

  She snuggled in closer; the sun was warm and with no risk of sunburn, I fell asleep; sometime shortly after, I suppose, so did she. Shan lay awake, holding her, probing at my memories, and somewhere in the warm afternoon, came to some understanding with himself, and with the child that we all are deep inside. He thought later that
it was probably the moment that he admitted that it wasn’t anybody’s fault that Pinky got left behind either. Eventually the warmth and comfort caught up with him, and he joined us in sleep.

  At the roar of the impellers, we leapt to our feet. An invasion Abarge is a four-story-tall squashed pyramid of metal, its sides sloped and curved to deflect projectiles upward and mirrored against masers and lasers. This particular invasion barge was rushing straight across the lagoon at us, kicking up a huge plume of water underneath it. Usually they come in buttoned up, looking like one big lumpy mirror, but this one had all of its ports open, beam and projectile weapons protruding like quills on a porcupine. We both dove for our clothes and dressed as quickly as we could.

  The purpose of an invasion barge is to get a springer close to a battlefield, and provide cover for the troops emerging from the springer to get organized. The springer is at the center, on one side of the forming-up deck. Once a CSP platoon is assembled, they emerge from the invasion barge through passageways between multiple armored baffles.

  Normally those baffles are so reflective that they vanish into the mirrored surface. But as the pyramid set down on the beach, I caught fun-house-mirror glimpses of several different Raimbauts running head-on into each other, splitting apart into two Raimbauts at the back, and then re-merging headfirst, as he dashed around and between the reflecting baffles. He came out with fifteen CSPs behind him, shouting “Both of you, hands up! And keep them up!”

  Reilis hadn’t quite had time to fasten her top, and it fell open when she complied with Raimbaut’s order, leaving her exposed in front of Raimbaut and the dozens of CSPs who followed him out of the invasion barge. In the bright summer sunlight of the beach, I could clearly see that she was blushing; somewhere in that weird part of the brain that is always analyzing and never shuts down, I wondered whether she had had to learn to do that.

  Looking somewhere about three feet over her head, Raimbaut walked forward and covered her. He muttered, “Sorry.” Two CSPs stepped forward and scanned her with weapons detectors, and very carefully and respectfully patted her down.

  “Giraut,” he said, “I hate this part even more. I have to place you under arrest. You’ve been held here long enough, and apparently unrestrained—”

  And Reilis, bless her brave heart, laughed. “He’s been very unrestrained,” she said, “and so has Shan.”

  “Hello, Raimbaut.”

  No mistaking that accent, even in two words; Raimbaut jumped. Then he looked into my eyes, as if he could see both Shan and me looking back, and looked at the back of my head to where the psypyx sat, and shrugged. “Gratz’deu, I’m not an administrator. I don’t want to handcuff either—er, any—of you; please come along peaceably. We’re all longtime, experienced agents here; surely we can manage a quiet, professional, fussfree arrest.”

  Part Four

  Vast and Cool and Unsympathetic

  Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.

  —H.G. Wells,

  The War of the Worlds

  The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are ideas which are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify, for those brought up as most of us have been, into every corner of our minds.

  —John Maynard Keynes,

  The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money

  1

  As we walked down the beach into the invasion barge, Reilis reached for my hand, and Raimbaut coughed. “I am really truly sorry,” he said, “but I cannot let you touch each other. Those are orders. I don’t like them.”

  “We understand,” Reilis said.

  The mirrored, armored baffles of the invasion barge were like a fun house; at the other end, we walked through a millimeter-thick light-suppression field, perfectly black, onto the well-lit forming-up deck, the size of a basketball court.

  It was only much later that I found out how it had been done. Raimbaut had been carrying a set of to-all-appearances ordinary immune nanos in his bloodstream, the standard anti-skin-cancer ones that all the pale peoples of the Thousand Cultures carry all the time, which normally reproduce in the bloodstream and send most of their “offspring” out onto the skin, where they live rather like the native mites that are normally there, except that they constantly look for carcinoma cells and convene to zap them whenever one is found. Given the tar deposited on our skins as kids, from all that soot on Wilson, and the fact that our natural color is fish-belly white, most of us Occitans have the nanos put in before we’re twenty.

  The breeder nanos in Raimbaut’s bloodstream had an extra tweak, one thought up by the labs at the OSP. They really did make plain old anti-skin-cancer nanos and put them out on his skin, just like any other breeder nanos, but they had another feature: when he ate the right combination of foods to trigger them, they would make a different set of nanos that came out in his urine. If he then dropped a few pieces of metal into an aluminum pot of that urine, and put the urine on the stove on low (to supply energy), the “secret weapon” nanos would form a tiny springer, half the size of a walnut, with an aperture just big enough for a communications laser back to Margaret, and for a bunch of nanos to come back through once contact was established.

  It wasn’t at all unusual for junior agents to have missions and capabilities unknown to the senior agent in charge of the team; the thinking was that it made OSP teams more resilient (not to mention more unpredictably dangerous to the other side).

  Raimbaut had pretended to be disconsolate at my “loss” (and to believe that I had really been kidnapped along with Reilis), quarreled publicly with Laprada, and gone on a long walk on the beach with the microspringer, throwing stones into the sea in apparent fury and frustration. One of the stones he threw, of course, was the microspringer, which in turn had brought through a cluster of nanos that had built a basketball-sized device (with a bigger springer inside) that made its way to an uninhabited island, found a suitable cave, and sprang yet more nanos from OSP base into it. In about five standays there was a full-fledged facility ready to go, and at the cue from base, a huge springer frame had popped up on the island’s surface, and twenty invasion barges had crashed through to deliver fully half of all the active-duty Council Special Police onto Aurenga, just as a pack of aintellect viruses and worms had jumped the communications and control systems for the planet. The government of Noucatharia found out that they were invaded about four minutes before CSPs occupied all the government office buildings, just as all the submersibles, airships, and satellites were switched over to the Council’s side.

  At the time, of course, we knew none of this, but CSPs on Aurenga, and no shooting, was enough information to extrapolate most of the important parts, if not the details.

  As we approached the springers, Raimbaut said, “I don’t want either of you to be afraid. Reilis, you’re going to the fieldhouse at the old, closed-down University of Trantia; you’ll be with everyone else. As far as I know all three thousand Noucathars are to be held there until some reasonably decent system of house arrest can be set up for all of you, and then there will be a long period of processing while the Council figures out what to do and talks to everyone. I’ve been around the Council bureaucracy far too much to make you any promises about how that will go, or how long it will take. But you aren’t going to anywhere where you’ll be hurt or abused—or if you are, the OSP will have some heads for it.”

  “Thank you.” Her smile was tentative, just a twitch at the corner of the mouth, but I had already gotten to know her well enough to think that it was sincere, and she really had been afraid. “And Giraut?”

  “We’re putting him where you were keeping him,” Raimbaut said, with a sideways glance at me. “At least we know he’s not likely to get out. We need to sort out
loyalties and so forth.” He sighed. “This was not my choice of how to handle all this.”

  “We understand that you’re just doing what you’re supposed to,” I said, “and you don’t need to apologize further. Reilis, I hope we’ll see each other again, soon.”

  “Me too,” she said. “I’m glad we didn’t waste time. I hate wasting time.”

  We both said goodbye several times as Raimbaut steered her into the springer, and then he nodded to me and I walked back through the springer into the little house that Reilis and I had left, just that morning, for a picnic and a conversation. The place was curiously cold and dead in a way it hadn’t been.

  • Well, at least we know our way around. Even what’s in the refrigerator, • I thought.

  • Good time to invoke the oldest rule of being an agent, • Shan thought, meaning, when in doubt, take a good dump, eat something, and get some sleep, since you never know when time for those might get short.

  As we were getting a snack from the refrigerator, the screen of the springer swirled into a gray glow, and Margaret walked through. “Now I know I’m a prisoner,” I said. “You didn’t knock.”

  “Well, possibly a prisoner. You’re at least an ex-spouse and how many people are ever polite to them?” She looked around the room and said, “At least they kept you somewhere comfortable. May I sit? As you might guess, we have things to talk about. And I understand I am now talking to Shan, as well?”

  “You are.”

  “Welcome back. I think you’ll be happy to see what I’ve done with your organization.”

  I felt his amusement. “It’s yours, now. Though I will probably think of it as Yokhim Kiel’s, forever.”

  She nodded and smiled, and we sat. As ever, I was struck by how much Margaret got to me; sometime in my impressionable first days around her, or because we had both been at that time in our lives, or perhaps it was just hardwired into my DNA—there was no woman I found more attractive. She had aged well, going from the awkward heaviness of her youth to a certain presence and dignity, but even so, you couldn’t call her “handsome” and I suppose most people would just call her “matronly,” politely avoiding call her “plain.”