The Armies of Memory

by John Barnes

  Office doors counted up—444, 445, and we came to 446, a flat black door like all the others in the corridor. Raimbaut closed up behind me, and with him covering the view from most angles, I touched the release on my wrist bindings; they fell into my palms and I tucked them into my belt so they would not drop into plain sight on the floor.

  I reached into my back pockets, my right hand grabbing a maser and my left hand grabbing one of four claphammers. Whip the claphammer forward onto the door lock, step back, let it blow the door open, and go in—that was my intent.

  The door slid open in front of us. I dropped the claphammer back into my pocket, and kept my hands back there for the benefit of any cameras that might be watching. We walked through.

  As might be expected, since the robots had just finished setting up the office, everything was in perfect order—which is why I recognized just which everything it was, the instant that I passed through the doorway. The overall atmosphere of precision and placement the kind of mind that matches places to things with cool, practical precision, neither obsessively nor compulsively but because that is the path of maximum effect and minimum effort—was recognizable at a glance, even as I noticed all the individual touches.

  I had seen those vus of the Gap Bow that appeared every noon in the Gouge, the great canyon above Utilitopia, in Caledony—seen them in temporary offices in a dozen cultures, on three different planets, besides in the OSP main headquarters in Nuevo Buenos Aires. I knew that Bieris Real landscape of Terraust, centered on the terrified aurocs-de-mer dying in a range fire—had been there when Bieris herself had seen it—knew it was the original, not a copy, and had once been a wedding present. And I knew that the vu frame on the desk, facing away from me at the moment, contained a picture of me singing “Never Again Till the Next Time,” my lips endlessly forming the first two words, fingers forever repeating the same four positions on the lute.

  This was Margaret’s office. She had Reilis’s psypyx in here somewhere.

  And just that thought, all by itself, told me everything else I needed to think of at that moment: this place was not a lab, not a copying facility, and probably had no reading or contact facilities of any kind. Margaret had pulled Reilis’s psypyx out of the Hall of Memories for entirely personal reasons.

  • Every really successful agent, and every good spymaster, always knows it’s always personal, • Shan observed. • Try not to hate her. •

  • How can I? It’s Margaret, and I know her feelings better than anyone in the universe—well enough to know that she sometimes does things she’s ashamed of. And of course what I’m about to do is personal, too. •

  I thought. Margaret normally kept things like the copy of her diary, her favorite combat knife, and the jewelry that her mother had sent from her grandmother’s estate at the back of the middle drawer in the right-hand bank of drawers. I walked around the desk and tried the middle drawer on the right just in case it had been left unlocked. No doubt that set off the alarm right then, though nothing sounded in the hallway yet. I slapped a claphammer onto the front of the drawer.

  A moment later the claphammer banged, flying back against the wall and zinging overhead so that Raimbaut and I ducked and covered our heads. Now there were alarms, in the corridors and in this office.

  I pulled out the remaining pieces of the front of the desk drawer to see if I’d been lucky and the claphammer itself had destroyed the psypyx. No such luck—the psypyx was in its safety case, and those cases are supposed to be good to a thousand gees. I opened the case and took the little black-and-gray cut-cube out, letting it rest lightly in the palm of my hand like a very delicate orchid or butterfly.

  Psypyxes are delicate—no durable material for them has yet been found—and because they record information right down at the molecular level, one good crack means that they can never be read. That’s why that hard black shell lined with foam goes around them when they are implanted; a tiny skull on the back of the host’s skull.

  Reilis’s psypyx was naked and defenseless, but cushioned as it had been in its hard, supportive little case, it was still fine as far as I could tell.

  Without a connection to a brain or a computer, it was inert, and there was no Reilis there to feel or know anything. At that moment the psypyx was as dead as you might wish, only potentially a person.

  It would have made no difference at all if I had simply smashed it with Margaret’s desk dictionary, or vaporized it with my pocket maser. The means didn’t matter, just as long as I destroyed it.

  Yet I hesitated. It was Reilis, or could be.

  • Fool, • Shan thought at me. • Be sentimental later. •

  He was right. If they recaptured this psypyx before I destroyed it, an indefinite number of copies of her would have the endlessly repeated experience of live, unanesthetized brain dissection.

  “Please tell me that this situation is not causing you to compose ridiculous sentimental background music,” Raimbaut said.

  “Too late,” Shan said. “He already is.”

  “Raimbaut,” I said, “I am afraid Shan’s right.”

  Still, we are creatures of ceremony. I kissed that psypyx before I carefully placed it on the floor and crushed it beneath my boot, stamping until it was just a black-and-gray powder.

  Raimbaut watched me the way you watch a friend at the graveside of a spouse; with complete attention but no idea what to say or do.

  We were spared any need to decide our next move, because at that moment Margaret walked in. She took in the situation at a glance. I said, “You realize that I had Raimbaut covered with a weapon the whole time; he was not in on this, and you’ve just liberated him from my holding him as a hostage.”

  “Yes,” she said, “that is what we will have to say, isn’t it?”

  3

  Once it all began in earnest—the things that have gotten so much attention in the past stanyear, which are matters of public record, and which I am not greatly concerned to record here—I suppose I was forced to ask myself, often, whether I might have done things differently if I had known what was going on in the bigger world. Union Intelligence still had, for a few critical hours, the immense advantage that they had always had—that they knew all about the OSP, and most of the OSP didn’t even know that they existed.

  So Union Intelligence sprang their last great surprise. They went public. Substantially accurate accounts of the main facts in the case—the existence of many more aintellects’ conspiracies, of a mixed human-cyber civilization beyond what had been assumed to be the limit of human space, and of the Invaders—was dumped out to news media all over the Thousand Cultures, as well as back on Earth itself. The Council and the OSP might be able to decide on any number of courses of action, but they could not decide to ignore the situation, or to hide it from the public.

  The first reaction was highly predictable. Many of the people who were already mostly in the box, particularly on Earth and the other Solar worlds, but throughout the Inner Sphere, went fully Solipsist and decided that the aintellects who created all of reality were again doing a bad job for the consumers, and flooded the nets with demands that better programming be provided. The more deviant and eccentric of the Thousand Cultures—the ones that had been located on planets with fewer than ten other cultures—threw various kinds of tantrums. And the public terror of aintellects out of control—never absent since the Rising and reactivated by the aintellects’ coup attempt fifteen stanyears before—surged to the forefront. There were serious demands to shut down all aintellects, despite their absolute necessity for doing such things as making psypyx copies and operating springers (no unaided human being could do the requisite calculations within one human lifetime). An estimated nine million robots were destroyed in rioting in a period of weeks.

  The connection to the Ixists came out, and that meant more rioting, and suppression of that faith on eleven of the thirty-one inhabited planets. On Roosevelt, the schisms between those who favored more-extreme and less-extreme plan
s for suppressing the Ixists quickly became violent and then terrorist, on both sides (as any schism on Roosevelt will tend to do), and the ninety-two cultures that crowded the shores of Roosevelt’s narrow seas and swarmed about her mild poles were once again on the brink of mutual butchery. Somebody blew up the Fareman Hall where I had given so many concerts, including the one on my fiftieth birthday, and I mourned as if it had been a personal friend.

  The debates in the Council were enlivened by the recall of many traditional, hereditary representatives and their replacement with people actually elected by their home cultures, who finally cared enough to hold elections.

  The new representatives favored action, action, and more action—some of it marvelous and overdue (e.g. expanding the digs on Hammarskjöld, funding more Predecessor studies generally, and also stepping up the pace of basic research), some of it regrettably necessary (e.g. starting the design of a war fleet, authorizing the conversion and drastic expansion of some of the CSP into the Army of Humanity, and greatly increased funding for anti-Solipsist propaganda and treatment), and some of it appalling, however understandable (more repression of aintellects, Ixists, and robots).

  In the midst of upheaval, there is nothing so comforting to a politician as a good, solid scandal. And here was one: the most public OSP agent of all, who had been decorated for his heroism in foiling the aintellects’ coup, and who had been a personal friend of Ix … had assisted three thousand Union chimeras in escaping from Council forces.

  It was absolutely true, and it was absolutely public. And that public divided roughly into three equal-sized groups: those who wanted me executed, those who wanted me completely exonerated, and those who were trying to decide what they wanted. Unfortunately, the pro-execution side had the law on their side, and the time was not at all ripe for a change of law.

  Charges against Raimbaut were dismissed the first day; the judge did a great job of pretending to buy the story that Margaret and I had concocted. It took them a year to establish what the law plainly said: I was a traitor of the most serious kind the law recognized, and the Council of Humanity had enacted the death penalty for traitors like me. Theoretically I could be saved by a change in the law—but the Council was not of a mind to make the law less draconian. Theoretically I could be saved by simply allowing very long stays of execution until the public mood changed enough to tolerate clemency—but the public was not in the mood for stays. Theoretically my usefulness to Shan as a host might have netted me a couple more years, but for excellent reasons Shan had been transferred early on to Margaret.

  Finally it came down to this: there would be as many appeals and arguments as possible and necessary, and then, unless something very surprising happened, they would kill me.

  Not a permanent death, of course. They always make a psypyx recording anyway, in case the executed person should be later found innocent, or needed as a witness. And there would be many stanyears of court cases to be tried about whether or not they could do a destructive deconstruction of any copies of my psypyx, and for a long time it was fair to assume that very few people, other than my closer friends and family, would want me back anyway.

  So, a version of “me” would be awaking in Raimbaut’s head someday. But this particular me was going to die.

  Oh, they fought it out brilliantly. That was part of the strategy that Margaret, Shan, and I had evolved. The haters and the stiffnecks, the people who wanted to formalize aintellects into slaves, the genociders and the crazy bombers and all the rest of them, after a stanyear of trial and another stanyear of appeals, were united around killing me. Kill me and they would be happy. If I were not killed, it would mean there was no law and no justice. I had to be sprung into progressively more secure courtrooms, until the final arguments in my case were heard in deep military shelters, the sort of place intended to take a near miss from a nuclear weapon. Then the heads of the Council, and their cabinets, swayed back and forth longer and longer about setting an execution date, and the kill-Giraut faction grew noisier, and more passionate—

  And smaller. Which was the whole idea. More and more of the head-in-the-sand, human-supremacy-types lost elections. More and more, they were seen as nuts and cranks by their neighbors. In the long run, most people prefer to be allied with the more humane side, given a real choice. Very few people wish to look crazy and fixated to their neighbors.

  Right on schedule, the appeals ran out and an execution date was set.

  Now, one thing you can say for the death penalty, whatever effect it has or doesn’t have on crime, whatever its implications for justice might be—it is great theatre. With the date set, I invoked my rights to have a public function carried out in public; a few hundred serial killers, cannibals, child slaughterers, discommodists, and hobby terrorists had been executed over the last fifty stanyears, all under wraps by their own choice to spare their families. I not only refused a private execution; I demanded full media access. They would have to kill me in front of crowds and cameras.

  I also chose my means of execution—I could choose to be shot as a reserve CSP officer, anesthetized as a Council citizen, or sprung into a star as an OSP renegade (it was a way of making renegades non-people with no identifiable remains ever).

  Or I could opt for execution according to my cultural tradition. Nou Occitan had not executed anyone since its founding, but its cultural Charter specified doing things as much as possible like Old Occitan on Earth—so I insisted that I be beheaded with a sword.

  By the day of my execution, nine-tenths of the population didn’t want to see it happen, and though many billions would watch on media, they had all loudly affirmed they wouldn’t, and particularly they thought it was repellent that this would be done in a broadcast that children might see. They didn’t want a text-and-picture media jammed with images of a robot striking my head off; they didn’t want to be offered recordings that would give them the chance to experience standing in the crowd close enough to hear the sword go into my neck like a whip slashing a side of beef. They especially did not want this because so many of them now knew my songs, and even a great deal of my life story (since my three hitherto-private personal chronicles had been cleared through security and published, and Margaret’s little publicity outfit had been twisting a lot of promoter arms. Another good thing I am forced to admit about the death penalty, it really sells recordings and keeps your backlist hot).

  Ninety percent didn’t want to see me killed; and the ten percent that did were rapidly becoming an embarrassment to their cause. As Shan had put it, when I had talked with him that morning, “Sometimes what really binds a culture together is the things they have done wrong. We will need to execute you to prepare the way for the backlash. In another stanyear even most of our bigoted opponents will be blaming those rock-throwers and machine-haters for causing this awful miscarriage of justice, and vowing that nothing like your execution must ever happen again, and we can start to push through some liberalization for aintellects.”

  It was so strange that he was using Margaret’s voice; and she barely spoke at all, too bothered, I think, by the fact of what was about to happen to me. Shan and Margaret both repeated their promises to get a clone grown for me, just as soon as possible. But there wasn’t much to say after that; a man with a single day to live does not want to talk public policy, and neither Shan nor Margaret ever wanted to talk much else. I shook their hand and sat down and wrote a few more pages of this fourth chronicle; this last page will complete the story of me (or at least of the original me), and here I am, finishing the writing on the afternoon before my execution.

  The other visit was harder. “I never did learn to get my work done early,” I said, showing my parents what I had written that morning. “But at least it will draw more attention to the ugliness of the execution itself. From being the voice of the people, the other side is gradually diminishing into those idiots who beheaded that poet in the funny clothes. They’re killing me but I’ll be the end of them.”

 
Dad sat very quietly next to Mother, an apparent ten-year-old with his apparent great-grandmother, holding her hand. “I wish you were a bit less objective, Giraut.”

  “Well, I don’t,” I said. “Being objective beats weeping and moaning, which is about the only realistic alternative now. I only regret that I let them take that psypyx copy this morning; ideally it should have been just before I took the long walk to the block. Because one thing my copy isn’t getting half of is how much I have gotten to appreciate every moment of being alive.”

  “Is all of this really necessary?” Mother asked.

  “By itself, no, but it’s part of what we need to do, and it’s the most effective thing I can do right now. The more we discredit the human supremacists, and the solipsists, and the just plain loudmouthed aggressors, by helping them to do brutal things in public—after the public has long since thought better—the more we open the door. Just this morning Dunant repealed their anti-Ixist laws, in time for me to send them a recorded speech thanking them. And on Nansen, both Caledony and St. Michael refused to pass aintellect-control measures this past week. The tide has turned—which means that now, when the pigheads win, they look pigheaded. Just what we want.”

  Mother was still wiping her eyes. “But you’re going to die.”

  “Mother,” I said, “you know that nightmare everyone has about waking up and finding out that you are the original? Well, that’s just what happened to me this morning, when I woke up after the last psypyx recording. This Giraut will be killed by order of the Council of Humanity, tomorrow. The copy lives on. And I have to say, of course, that I envy him, and that I’m glad for him that he’s not going to feel or remember my terror or pain. Putting my neck down on that block is going to be pretty bad and I’m really afraid I’ll funk it, and even if I don’t, I’m destined for some bad seconds that he’ll never have in his memory. I envy him getting a new healthy body, too. But all that said … I find that I’m the original, and therefore I am the one who dies … and it’s not anywhere near so big or so frightening as I thought. It’s just my job.”