Kiln People

by David Brin

  Poor gray. Left there to simmer and worry and scheme in vain. At least I had the distraction of an opponent.

  “How did you manage to put all this together in secret?” I asked, gesturing around. The sheer amount of material — not to mention the expensive gizmos — would have been difficult to transport to this hidden underground lair (wherever it is) even in the old days of CIA plots and bad movieds about alien autopsies. To find it done today by a single person, somehow evading the all-seeing and all-shared public Eye of Accountability, showed that I was in the hands of a true genius. As if I didn’t know it already.

  A genius who clearly resented me for some reason! Not only was he physically callous toward this body I wore, he kept oscillating between taciturn silence and bouts of sudden talkativeness, as if driven by some inner need to impress me. I recognized clear signs of a Smersh-Foxleitner inferiority complex … and wondered what possible good the diagnosis was going to do me.

  Mostly, I kept looking for possible ways to escape, knowing that each of my earlier prisoner-incarnations must have done the very same thing. But all they accomplished with their efforts had been to turn Maharal hypercautious — so that now he only imprints experimental copies of me that are too weak to punch their way out of paper manacles.

  Fettering me to a chair beneath a machine resembling a giant microscope, he aimed the huge lens at my little reddish-orange head.

  “I have access to ample resources, quite near here,” Maharal said, answering my question — though unhelpfully. Fiddling with dials and muttering into a computerized votroller, he looked more focused on the task at hand than on me personally. But I knew better by now.

  The man worried about me — a disquiet that ran deep. Anything I said could vex him.

  “All right, so we ruled out teleportation and telepathy. Even so, you’ve made impressive breakthroughs, Doctor. Your process to extend a ditto’s pseudolifespan, for instance. Wow. Imagine if all golems could replenish their élan a week or two … it could really hurt the value of Universal Kilns stock, I bet. Is that why you had a falling out with Aeneas Kaolin?”

  My remark drew a sharp look. Gray lips pressed together in a line, silent.

  “Come on, Doc. Admit it. I could feel tension between you two, under all the feigned affection back at Kaolin Manor, when you showed up as a ghost to view your own corpse. The Vic seemed anxious to get his hands on that artificial brain of yours, and dice it to bits. Why? In order to learn more about all this?” I gestured at the big lab with its mysterious stolen equipment. “Or was he trying to hush you?”

  Maharal’s grimace told me I hit home.

  “Is that it? Did Aeneas Kaolin murder your real self?”

  The police hadn’t found any signs of foul play at the desert crash site where realYosil Maharal had died. But in searching for clues, they only considered today’s technology. Aeneas Kaolin possessed tomorrow’s.

  “As usual, you are thinking small, Mr. Morris. Like poor Aeneas.”

  “Yeah? Then try explaining, Professor. Starting with why I’m here. All right, so I make great copies. How does that help you solve those great mysteries of soulistics?”

  His eyes rolled upward and shoulders shrugged — an expression of fatigued contempt, exactly according to the Smersh-Foxleitner pattern. Maharal doesn’t just envy my ability. He actually fears me! So he must exaggerate the intellectual gulf between us and minimize my humanity.

  Did my other selves notice this? They must have!

  “You would not understand,” he muttered, returning to his preparations. I heard the crackle of high-power equipment, warming up with me sitting at the focus.

  “I’m sure you said that to the other Alberts you captured. But tell me this, did you ever, even once, try to explain? Maybe offer me collaboration, instead of unwilling experimental torment? Science isn’t meant to be a lonely business, after all. Whatever your reasons for working in isolation—”

  “—are my reasons. And they are more than sufficient to justify these means.” Maharal turned to regard me tiredly. “Now you’ll spout moral arguments, about how wrong it is to treat another thinking entity this way. Even though you showed no such regard for your own dittos! Never even bothering to investigate why so many went missing over the years.”

  “But … I’m a private eye. That involves sending myselves into dangerous situations. Taking risks. I came to think of them—”

  “—as disposable selves. Their loss to be regretted no more than our grandparents would lament the waste of an irritating day. Well, that’s your privilege. But then, don’t call me a monster if I take advantage.”

  That gave me pause. “Have I called you a monster?”

  Stone-faced. “Several times.”

  I pondered this a moment.

  “Well, then, I have to guess that your … procedure is gonna hurt. A lot.”

  “Rather, I’m afraid. Sorry. But there is good news! I have reason to hope things will go much smoother this time.”

  “Because you’ve improved your method?”

  “In part. And because circumstances have changed. I expect your Standing Wave will be more malleable … more mobile … now that it’s no longer anchored to organic reality.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  “What do you mean, no longer anchored?”

  Maharal frowned, but I could tell the expression masked a layer of pleasure. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware how much he enjoyed telling me the news.

  “I mean that you’re dead, Mr. Morris. Your original body was vaporized late Tuesday night, in a missile attack that destroyed your home.”

  “A … what?”

  “Yes, my poor fellow artifact. Like me, you are now — as they say — a ghost.”

  29

  Imitation of a Counterfeit Life

  … Gumby and Pal, poking around …

  The interior of the Rainbow Lounge lay eerily empty.

  Some holoflashers had been left on, illuminating the dance floor and the Grudge Pit with twisted images, like multidimensional Dalí landscapes roamed by erotic figures possessing far too many limbs. But without the intense background beat of CeramoPunk music, the flickering shapes were rather pathetic. This place demanded crowding — a hot press of several hundred brightly colored bodies, hyped to wear their standing waves exposed, ultrasensitive, like the prickly emotions of teenagers.

  “I wonder who’s gonna take over the Rainbow,” Palloid mused. “Do you think Irene had heirs or left a will? Does it all go up for auction?”

  “Why? Thinking of becoming a tavernkeeper?”

  “It’s tempting.” He leaped from my shoulder onto the bar, a broad expanse of heavily lacquered teakwood. “But maybe I don’t have the personality for it.”

  “You mean the patience, concentration, or tact,” I commented while poking around. The bar featured a dazzling array of tubes, faucets, bottles, and dispensers of intoxicants, euphorics, stimulants, levelers, speeders, slowers, uppers, downers, horizoners, myopics, stigmatics, zealotropics, hystericogens -

  “Touché, Albert. Though Irene’s idea of tact was rather specialized. The kind used by pimps, bouncers, and cops. Screw ’em all.”

  “Nihilist,” I muttered while scanning labels for a dizzying array of concoctions. My search wasn’t going to be easy. The varieties of abuse that you can put a clay body through never cease to amaze me, and almost certainly astonished the inventors of dittotech, back when people started fiddling with home modification kits. You can fine-tune a golem so it will react spectacularly to alcohol or acetone, electric or magnetic fields, sonic or radar stimulation, images or aromatics … not to mention a thousand specially designed pseudoparasites. In other words, you can pound, pluck, or molest the Standing Wave in countless ways that would be lethal to your real body, and transfer home vivid memories when the busy day is done.

  No wonder there are experience addicts. By comparison, the opiate-alkaloid cocktails that sad folks used to inject in Grandpa’s day
were like a dose of vitamins.

  “Nihilist? You dare call me that? Who’s standing here, using up lifespan helping you, friend?”

  “You call it help to squat up there, kibitzing? How about some assistance down here, behind the bar?”

  He replied with a desultory snarl, but did leap to ground at the far end, sniffing as he scanned labels, grumbling audibly that I owed him for this. I wasn’t buying any of his act, of course. My friend’s personal addiction was to poke away at the world’s weirdness. After events of the last hour, he never seemed happier.

  I hope he gets to inload all this, I thought, recalling the real Pal, imprisoned in his life-sustaining chair. He’d get a kick out of remembering old Horus, toppling onto his butt from the Final Options van. Pal might also help distract Clara from her grief by describing how we spent these haunted hours …

  No, I shied away from thinking about her. Anyway, Clara would remember Albert with fondness. That beat most kinds of immortality that I’d heard of. A lot more immortality than this particular green frankie was going to get.

  Anyway, who wants to live forever?

  I kept marveling at the variety of substances stored behind the bar. Irene must’ve had real political clout, to get an environmental variance. There are more toxic brews here than in the late state of Delaware.

  “Got it!” Palloid announced, punctuating his triumph with a smug somersault. I hurried over to his end of the bar where a series of large wooden pull levers stood — like those used to serve draft beer in a real people tavern. One of them bore a designation that said: Ketone Kocktail.

  “Hm, could be. If she had said, ‘ketone tap.’ ”

  “Are you sure she said ‘cap’?”

  “Pretty sure.” I jiggled the pull lever, not eager to dispense any of the pressurized contents. My cheap green body — even renewed under artificial dyes of orange and gray — couldn’t endure most of the exotic mixtures offered for sale here.

  “The cap—” Palloid began.

  “I know. I’m checking it now.” The lever had a large decorative tip, like a tapered brass tube covering the end. I twisted one way, then the other. It gave a little, then no more. Even when I wrenched hard.

  I was about to give up, then thought, Maybe it works in several successive directions, like a Chinese puzzle box.

  I tried combinations of twists, pulls, and shoves, and began making some progress with the cap, confirming my guess. Gradually it worked outward along a complicated, grooved sleeve. A physical storage device, then, like the piezomechanical recorders that Albert always installed in his grays. More secure than anything electronic. Irene clearly grasped that the world of digital data is far too flighty to entrust with any real secrets. Safety-through-encryption is a bad joke. If you must keep something away from prying eyes, put it in hardwriting. Then hide the only copy in a box.

  I hope this thing doesn’t require any sort of ID check, or involve disarming a self-destruct. When Irene told me about this cache with her final words, I assumed it was an act of deathbed contrition — or perhaps a little karmic insurance. But another explanation was possible. A trap. A petty act of vengeance for interfering with her last red ditto.

  If I could sweat, I would have started right about then.

  “Better step back, Pal,” I urged.

  “Already done it, chum,” I heard him call from beyond the farthest end of the bar, over a dozen meters removed. “Other than that, I’m with you all the way.”

  His wry expression of support almost made me chuckle. Almost.

  I didn’t breathe through the last several twists and turns, operating on storage cells until …

  … the brass cylinder came off at last, revealing a hollow interior with something crammed inside. Exhaling with relief, I tapped it on the bar.

  A slim tube of plastic rolled out. Beta, said a paper tag, attached to the film with a clip.

  “Cool!” Palloid yelped, leaping onto the bar again, using agile paw-hands to pry at other decorative caps. “I bet she had all kinds of stuff hidden away. Maybe Irene had a sideline, blackmailing politicians! She was in the business of catering to perversions and there’s still lots of depravities that can cost you votes, if people find out about ’em!”

  “Right. Dream on.” As if Pallie cared about politics. “Just be careful,” I urged. It was my turn to retreat cautiously while he fiddled with one poison dispenser after another. Further warnings would be futile, so I left him there, happily risking his brief existence on a whim.

  “I’ll be in Irene’s office,” I said.

  We had passed it along the way, a sophisticated-looking data center offering surveillance views into every corner of the establishment. (I chuckled when I saw Palloid barely dodge a spray of some fuming liquid as he kept poking around, looking for more secret hiding places.) There were also some of those hookups the luckless grayAlbert mentioned in his recital-diary — plug-in units designed to let a ditto link directly (well, sort of) to computers. From everything I’ve read, the advantages are dubious. I’d much rather wear a chador.

  Luckily, the office held some regular net-access consoles, too. Irene had left several turned on, indicating rushed departure. I might not have to mess with passwords and such. Hacking is such a retro and tedious chore.

  Anyway, my first stop was a simple analog strip reader. The film tube fit perfectly. Are there any clues here to explain why someone arranged for that vicious attack against Universal Kilns? Or the much worse felony of real-killing Albert Morris?

  As soon as I activated the strip reader, the first holofoto spilled into midair before me. So that’s what “Vic Collins” looked like. Tuesday’s hapless gray was right about this character. Plaid clothes over plaid skin … ouch!

  Yet it made devilish sense. Some people hide their appearance by looking nondescript. Forgettable. But you can accomplish much the same thing by making it too painful and disgusting to look at you. Still, it was hard to see how this portrait could help answer any of the big questions.

  Was Irene right about Vic Collins being a front persona of Beta, the notorious ditnapper?

  I recalled that last encounter with one of Beta’s rapidly dissolving yellows, stuck in a disposal tube next to the Teller Building, slobbering cryptic remarks about betrayal and somebody called “Emmett.” Albert was already tired and distracted by then. And wary toward yet another of Beta’s notorious head games.

  Sitting in Irene’s office, I saw little similarity between that yellowdit and the holo visage in front of me, a squarish face, rather snide, and cross-hatched with a blinding array of intersecting stripes. There were several dozen pictures in Irene’s secret archive, date-stamped, every time the conspirators rendezvoused in back of a limousine at some remote location — occasionally with a third party who looked like a cheap ivory of Gineen Wammaker. According to a notation, Collins used a static-disruptor to block sophisticated photo-optical recording devices. These snapshots on old-fashioned chemical emulsion were the best Irene could do as she kept a wary eye on her allies.

  Not wary enough, though. Did Irene ever try tracking Collins through the publicam network? I wondered. The first step — following his trail back to the limo rental agency — seemed obvious.

  Oh, Albert would have loved the challenge! Starting with these time-and-place fixes, he’d concentrate with all the intensity of a Vingean focus trance, backtracing the plaid Collins-dittos, eager to see what tricks they used to cover their trail, pouncing on any slipup.

  I suppose I could have tried to do that, sitting there in Irene’s deserted office. But did I want to? Just because I inherit Albert’s memories, and some skills, that doesn’t mean I’m him! Anyway, that missile wrecked more than Al’s house. Nell contained all those specialized programs to help Morris follow people and dittos across the vast cityscape.

  There are times I wish the citizens of PEZ were less laid back and freedom-loving. Elsewhere, folks put up with higher levels of regulation and supervision. Every golem
made in Europe carries a real transponder, not a pathetic little pellet tag. Factory-registered to its owner, trackable by satellite from activation to dissolution. There are still ways to cheat, but a detective knows where to start.

  On the other hand, I live here for a reason. Tyranny may have only taken a holiday. It could return, first in one corner of the world, then another. And democracy is no absolute guarantee. But in PEZ, the word “authority” has always been so suspect. They’d have to kill everybody first, then start over from scratch.

  Turning the film cylinder, I flipped from one holo to the next as Irene and her collaborators met to discuss a stratagem for quasi-legal industrial espionage, or so she thought. But her allies had other plans — manipulating Irene for her resources and Albert Morris for his skills. And the fanatics, Gadarene and Lum, setting them up to take initial blame.

  Having met those two, I knew that any first-rate investigator would soon grow suspicious. They just weren’t competent enough to sabotage Universal Kilns. And though Gadarene might have a motive to destroy UK, Lum wanted to “liberate slaves,” not destroy them. A smart cop would see them as patsies, framed to take the fault. Beta set up Irene to take the heat when that first level failed.

  She realized all this when the news broke last night. A knock on the door could come within hours. Oh, she could have stayed and helped investigators peel away more layers. But Beta knew her too well. Revenge wouldn’t matter, only arranging with Final Options for a last stab at “immortality.”

  So, I’m the one left to clean up after her … and after Albert, for that matter. And …

  It seems I’m spending all my lifespan scrubbing toilets after all.

  Actually, Irene did a good job getting close-ups of Beta with her little microcam — if it really was him. Perhaps my frankie brain viewed things differently, but I was more interested in examining the face than trying to track it from one publicam to another.