The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  I didn’t care; I was just glad to have her there.

  “Well,” she said, “to begin with, this has all been quite a surprise.” She permitted herself a small smile, which I really had to return. I remembered that back when we had been partners on any number of missions—back when Shan was sending us on them—no matter what trouble I got into, Margaret simply got me out with efficiency and dispatch. Getting into trouble (and thereby provoking the other side into tipping its hand) was my job; getting me out (and looking at the other side’s cards) was hers, and she accepted that division of labor with only that small, sweet smile, and sometimes the fun of turning it into a dinner table story.

  I suddenly wondered where it had all gone.

  • And there’s always more that’s gone when you look around, • Shan thought. • The more attention you pay, the more you appreciate, the more you know it when it goes. •

  “Well,” Margaret said, “the idea of a planet of chimeras and robotized people makes me want to throw up, and that’s what we appear to have here. Apparently they installed aintellects in children as soon as the children were verbal, putting them in as a psypyx implant, so there’s probably no one here over the age of two who isn’t a chimera—which means no one whose existence is legal under Council law.

  “On the other hand, no matter how distasteful I find their existence, in the first place, Union contains at least half a billion of them, and in the second place, even three thousand starts to look like genocide to me. Especially since whatever I may think of it, there is obviously something unique here, and probably something that more open-minded people than I can learn from, so I should probably preserve it and give them the chance. You stayed here for a long time, compared to my couple of hours so far, anyway. What did you think?”

  I didn’t really think before answering, “I like them. They’re interesting. They aren’t headed into the box, and they’re going somewhere.”

  “Do you worry about them replacing humans?”

  I thought about that, which made me hesitate. “Er—Shan, this time. No. They are human. Not as we’ve been, but then we aren’t much like hunter-gatherers or peasants or Industrial-Age workers, either, are we? It’s another kind of consciousness, but no more alien than Achilles or St. Augustine or Madame Bovary would be to us. And—Margaret, may I add one very strong plea? I understand that you may not feel the way I do, and you aren’t bound by my feelings, but it’s a bit of advice I feel urgently compelled to give.”

  “Certainly. I won’t feel bound by it but I think I’d be a fool not to listen to you.”

  “Whatever you decide, don’t use destructive deconstruction on the captured aintellects and psypyxed personalities. You have no idea what horror these people feel for it, or how much they loathe the idea, and anyone who does it.”

  “I have some clue from what they did to our laboratory. They destroyed the experience base of more than fifty extremely advanced aintellects—”

  “With about the same spirit that you or I would dispose of a group of torturers, slavers, or cannibals,” I said. “Back when we used to believe it, when we said, ‘Another round for humanity and one more for the good guys.’”

  “I miss those days too. I take your point. I’m not sure whether I’ll take your advice, but I do take your point,” she said. “Now, Giraut, would you like to explain to me why you not only had sex with an enemy agent—I expect that, knowing you—but then cooperated with her even after she had kidnapped you?”

  “I don’t think you can be certain that Reilis is the enemy,” I pointed out.

  “Still, you do seem to be very involved,” she said, “and the question remains … what the hell were you thinking?”

  “I was learning what I could from an important contact,” I said, biting back the phrase and by the way, we are not married anymore. “As I was sent here to do. I think that most or all of what she is saying is the truth. And that this is a great opportunity, and nothing to be feared.”

  “Giraut, how thoroughly have you been brainwashed?”

  “Er,” Shan said, reshaping my mouth into his odd, inimitable accent. “Er. Being, er, in here with Giraut, I would have to say that he is most definitely not brainwashed—”

  “Shan, I am no more convinced that you are capable of being objective about a young, pretty woman, than that Giraut is. Your are not exactly the ideal character witness in this matter.”

  I felt Shan’s embarrassment, and the way his memory raced through an inventory of things Margaret might know about or remember, and realized just how much he had been right that his lechery was only invisible to males. In other circumstances I suppose I might have teased the old reprobate about it.

  “Whether or not you trust us,” Shan said, “I suggest your investigation not include destructive deconstructions. That is only common sense and prudence.”

  “It is,” Margaret said. “It is so much a matter of common sense that we had already agreed on it, and your reminding me of it in this way seems oddly patronizing and very unpleasant. And I can tell that neither of us is going to be easy to get along with for a little while, so I am going to leave you here while I consider what to tell the rest of the OSP, and do enough investigating of my own to have at least some idea what to recommend to them.” She stood up and walked toward the springer, which began to glow gray at once—clearly the house aintellects had already been reprogrammed to anticipate her wishes.

  At the portal she turned back and said, “And Giraut, before you become too committed to the advice of this old man, will you please try to remember that he’s also the one who chose to destroy our marriage, back on Briand, and worked constantly to undercut Ix, who was trying to save it? Just keep that in mind.”

  She disappeared into the gray fog; the instant that she did, the gray fog disappeared, leaving just the black metal plate.

  • For someone from a culture that has no theatrical tradition, • I thought, • she really has a knack for a curtain line. •

  I felt Shan try to make himself chuckle, and then he said, • Giraut, you know, it’s stupid of me, but because I had apologized to you, and reconciled with you, I forgot that I owed Margaret an apology. •

  • You’re not the Shan-you-were-to-be; you aren’t the copy anymore. For every practical purpose, you’re now the original. •

  • And being the original is everyone’s nightmare, ne? •

  • Oc, ja, ver tropa vera, • I agreed.

  It is, of course. And he was right to remind me why he was afraid. Thanks to the psypyx, the copy always lives on, and the original is the one that does the dying. So you lie down on the table to be copied, and in about three hours you get up, feeling the same as ever; you’re the original. Eventually, one day after your last copy, you die. Meanwhile, or otherwhile, or in someone else’s while, you lie down on the table, and when you wake up, you’re in someone else’s head, stanyears or decades in the future, somewhere else entirely; you’re the copy and you’re going to live.

  Hence the moment you know for certain that you are going to die is the moment you know that you are the original; every child starts to grasp that at about the age of ten or twelve, and from then on, about as often as people dream of being naked in public, or of falling, or of having to take a test they haven’t studied for, we all dream of being suddenly informed that we are the original.

  We stripped out of the sandy, damp day clothes, finally, and got into a hot shower; that was followed by a little soup and bread, and curling up in the bed, trying not to think too much about whether Reilis was all right. It had been a long day and there was a lot to absorb, and I fell asleep quickly.

  Naturally I had just that nightmare: I dreamed that I awoke as the original, and was about to die. It got mixed together with Shan’s memories of the massacre of Addams, and after a while it was Reilis who was in the pink plastic case at my belt— except when I was running and holding her hand—and when I ran toward the springer, the gray pseudosurface vanished, an
d I knew that I was the original just as the metal tentacles wrenched Reilis from my hand, and the jaws closed over my head. I am not sure how many times that dream passed through my mind that night; enough to lose count, anyway.

  A gray glow was oozing beyond the bedroom door as my eyes opened; against it, a dark figure, slim, female, moving fast, silhouetted and vanished into a roll through the dark shadows. I snapped awake but had barely started to roll away when a muscular little hand covered my mouth, and another stronger-thanit-seemed hand pushed my head back onto the pillow. Soft hair brushed my face, and lips touched my ear. “Friend. Quiet please?”

  I nodded, once.

  The hands came off my mouth and forehead. I drew a breath to whisper a question, but then my mouth was full of—

  Paxa’s tongue.

  There’s a reason why they call that “Hedon kissing.” Somebody had to perfect it.

  I half thought this might be a different dream from all the nightmares, and decided I definitely preferred it; as I woke more fully, and Shan joined me, I relaxed into the kiss, touching the familiar hair and neck, happier than I could have imagined. As I touched and stroked, I realized she was in full fighting rig, the skintight weightless black suit that fits like a unitard but hardens into armor an instant before anything hits it, and passes most EMR around the body to disperse on the opposite side. It wasn’t quite invulnerability—it could be shattered by a big-enough shell or overloaded by concentrated maser fire, or if you were thrown hard enough the internal accelerations could kill you, and of course her head was not protected without the hood. Nor was it quite the same thing as being naked; the touch relays were imprecise except at the fingertips, and it felt rather like being coated with thick petroleum jelly. And backlit, or in bright light against a light background, it was as visible as anything else.

  But at night on a skilled user, that fighting suit was a good first-order approximation to being naked, invulnerable, and invisible, and fabricating them took so much information, literally weaving them at the molecular level onto a specific body, that even the OSP only issued them to critical personnel on veryhigh-risk missions.

  In a way, the presence of that suit was more puzzling than finding Paxa kissing me in the middle of the night.

  When we had quite finished, Paxa took my hand, leaned forward, and breathed into my ear, “There will be clothes there.” She pulled on my hand, and I rose and followed her into the living room.

  • What are we doing? • Shan thought

  • Finding out. •

  • All right, what are we finding out? •

  • What we’re doing. Don’t fret about it. Remember this is the fun part of the job. •

  Just as we got to the springer, the gray-glowing pseudosurface formed, and Paxa and I stepped through, holding hands, as we had done so many times before.

  The room was basically a walk-in closet and there was a regular combat suit (nothing like that expensive masterpiece that Paxa was wearing) along with underwear, boots, helmet, and so on, all waiting for me. Not knowing how much time or privacy we had, I didn’t speak; I just got dressed. “One more spring for now,” Paxa said, softly, but not just breathing it in my ear as she had before. The black plate glowed, I took Paxa’s hand, and we walked into the thin sheet of fog again.

  2

  Whenever I think of Aurenga, the words that spring to mind are blue and sunny And in that sense, we sprang to the most Aurengan of all the places I saw in my time there. I had to look around for a moment before I realized, finally, that we were in a subsea habitat with many big, high windows, probably just offshore or on the floor of a lagoon somewhere. “One of many holdout bases against the Invaders,” Paxa said, her voice odd. “Part of an elaborate fallback plan so that we’d always have somewhere to hide people and somewhere from which to start counterattacks; when they destroyed Trantia, they had fifteen stanyears to do whatever they wanted here before we could even find out what had happened. We don’t want to give them that much time again.”

  I was still taking in the glow, sapphire from the lower parts of the windows, turquoise from above, and noting that the space was huge, and that corridors led off in several directions behind me. This place would probably hold a small army—a fully appropriate thing for it to do—but it had also been designed to be beautiful; something about that appealed to me very much.

  The part of my mind that had been trying to think what was odd with Paxa’s voice realized that she had an Occitan accent, something she had never had before. I asked, “Are you wearing a psypyx,?”

  “Well, yes, Giraut, and you know both of us.”

  “Azalais!” All it had taken was a hint.

  “Yes,” one of them said, and I was hugged again.

  • I do hope we’ll be visiting your entire collection, • Shan thought.

  • Quiet, old lech, I’m happy. • I hugged her back for a long, long breath.

  “And how did—”

  “Well,” Paxa said, “the obvious things happened. My opinions about the treatment of aintellects and of robots were well-known, and I was retiring early, as a very senior OSP field agent. Union had a very senior field agent who had just been psypyxed, and furthermore Union has much more advanced psypyx tech than the Council does—not surprisingly, since they never really went through the Inward Turn. So they turned up with an offer; everything I knew about the OSP in exchange for eternal life.”

  “You did take an oath of loyalty to the OSP,” Shan said, a little stiffly.

  Paxa shrugged and smiled. “I’m a Hedon. We think keeping your word is a good thing to do, but not the only good thing to do. And I was in the OSP because I liked the danger and excitement, and I liked feeling that I was working for the good guys. Well, the danger and excitement decreased in value a lot when I found out that dead is dead, for me—and it went back up in value when I found out that if I were working for the Union, dead wasn’t dead. And aside from that—who would you say is the good guys at the moment?”

  • She’s good, Giraut. She could always get the better of me in an argument. • “Er, well, put that way—”

  She smiled again, and pointed up at the windows. A dozen tuna the size of trakcars flashed by, followed by an equally swift black-and-white shape.

  “Orca,” I said.

  “Who’s defending this world? Who even made sure there would be a world like this? Which civilization has a major problem with people going into the box, and uses its best minds for routine maintenance? And which civilization has been pushing out a frontier for centuries? Who had an Inward Turn?”

  • How did the OSP ever let somebody like this stay out in the field? • Shan thought.

  • One, you try putting her anyplace she doesn’t want to be—and the place she least wants to be is behind a desk. Two, Paxa is pretty and was involved with me. That’s a combination my ex never really forgives—and worse yet, Margaret won’t admit that to herself, so, Three, whatever Paxa did was always wrong. •

  • It sounds like Margaret was just as capable of folly as I was, or Kiel. Seems to be a tradition of fools in that job. •

  • Or humans, • I thought back at him. • Of course if we put in an unrestrained aintellect, that might improve things; it could commit a thousand times the folly in one one-millionth of the time. By the way, we’ve been standing here in this beautiful room in front of the pretty lady for at least a full minute with our mouth hanging open, so if looking like a fool bothers you—•

  Shan’s laughter was roaring through my brain as I finally said, “Well, you’ve given him plenty to think about, Paxa, and Azalais. Suppose you tell me—us, rather—what you’ve got in mind.”

  Paxa smiled. “While you’ve been comparing notes, so have we, of course. I remember you used to get just that slack-jawed expression of utter idiocy now and then when you were wearing Raimbaut. I always thought it was very nice of me not to photograph it. Well, then, here’s what we propose. In that house we just took you from, a couple of our r
obots slipped in and left a warm jelly body of about the right weight lying in the bed. In about twenty-five minutes, a pocket antimatter bomb will go off there. A prep crew has already been into the house and has left half a dozen cadavers lying around, which will be mostly destroyed but will leave just enough human tissue here and there, with DNA that doesn’t match yours, to confuse matters further.

  “Our estimate is that the unexpected explosion and chaos will take the OSP about ten minutes to sort out, and that once they realize it was a diversion, it will take them at least another ten minutes to figure out what we’re doing. During those twenty minutes, we can evacuate the whole Noucathar population of Aurenga—after all, that’s only three thousand people, and they’re all in one big building. So we want to seize that fieldhouse, and silence its guards, less than five minutes before the distraction bomb goes off. We’re going to spring everyone to the Cathar Argo, a ship orbiting about a light-month away, deep in the Oort Cloud, and from there they’ll be sprung to wherever in Union they have relatives or friends, or wherever they like. We’ve had that ship sitting there for decades against a need for evacuation, though this isn’t quite the one we planned. Simultaneously all the psypyxes and aintellects will be uploading copies of themselves through a specialized net we have in place. Once everyone in flesh is on board Cathar Argo, and everyone else is copied, we blow up the Noucathar Hall of Memories—where all the psypyxes are—and wipe most of the aintellects on the planetary net, leaving the OSP with almost nothing to deconstruct or interrogate.

  “With luck, since we’ve hurt no one, the Council will be in a mood to talk at some time afterward. Well, I really can’t think of anyone I’d rather have with me for a neat little finessed raid like that—if we pull it off properly, we’ll have nobody even hurt.”