Kiln People

by David Brin

  “We’re almost there,” Palloid urged. “Third brownstone on the left. Then head upstairs.”

  I followed his directions, taking the front steps of a run-down brick apartment building two at a time. The realistic lobby featured water dripping into a bucket and peeling, old-fashioned wallpaper. I’m sure I would have smelled urine, had I been equipped with full senses.

  No one was out and about as I climbed three flights. But I heard noises behind closed doors — angry, eager, passionate, or violent sounds — even the yelling of children. Most of it is probably computer-generated, for realism, I thought. In order to make the place appear crowded to customers. Still, why would anyone want to experience such a life, even on a whim?

  My companion pointed down a dingy hallway. “I rented one of these little flats a few months ago, to serve as a safehouse for special meetings. Best to have our rendezvous here, instead of my real home. Anyway, it’s closer.”

  He aimed me to a door with the number 2-B spelled in flaking decals. I knocked.

  “Enter!” a familiar voice shouted.

  The knob turned under my hand — expensively machined metal parts, lavishly rusted to give a satisfying squeak. So did the hinges, as I pushed into a room decorated in Early Bachelor Shabby.

  Several people stood when I entered, except of course the one I’d come to see. Pal’s life-support chair whirred as it rolled forward and lifted to two wheels, a modern techno-anomaly amid all this ersatz poverty.

  “Gumby! I gave up on you — till I got that report of yours an hour ago. What an adventure! Fighting your way into Universal Kilns! A prion attack! Did you really see a Morris gray climb up the ass of a forklift?” He guffawed. “Then a face-off with Aeneas Kaolin. And I can’t wait to inload all that fun stuff at Irene’s!”

  Pal’s burly hands reached for the ferretlike ditto, but Palloid suddenly went shy, backing around my neck to the other shoulder. “That can wait,” the littler version of my friend snapped. “First, why is Gadarene here, and who are these other guys?”

  I had also recognized the golem-hating fundamentalist. His presence in dittotown was like the Pope coming to Gehenna. The poor fellow must be desperate and it showed on his real face.

  A green stood opposite Gadarene and I figured it could only be Lum, the emancipation fanatic. This cheap clay visage bore only a passing resemblance to his wide-cheeked original, but it nodded with polite familiarity.

  “So you made it out of UK, ditMorris! I was skeptical when Mr. Montmorillin urged us to hurry down here for a meeting. Naturally, I’d love to know how you got your extended lifespan. This could be a real boon to the oppressed!”

  “Nice to see you, too,” I answered. “And explanations will come in due time. First, who is he?”

  I pointed to Pal’s third guest. A golem dyed in mauve shades, with a risqué tan stripe spiraling around from the top of his head all the way down. The ditto’s chosen face was unfamiliar, but the smile gave me a sudden sense of worrisome familiarity.

  “So we meet again, Morris,” the spiraled copy said, in a speech rhythm that scraped raw memories. “If our paths keep crossing, I’ll start to think you’re following me.”

  “Yeah, right. And greetings to you too, Beta.” Much as I hated this guy, I sure needed to ask him some questions.

  “I think it’s time we talk about Aeneas Kaolin.”

  37

  Ditrayal

  … realAlbert hurts a digit …

  I finally gave up trying to subvocalize in realtime. It was too exhausting, using that little jaw-powered recorder. My real body isn’t designed for it! Anyway, things got way too busy, right after Ritu abandoned us in that vast underground base, disappearing amid a great army of silent defender dolls.

  At first, Corporal Chen and I could only stare in amazement. Where did she go? Why on earth would she leave us, especially in that spooky cavern of all places?

  Chen was torn. He wanted to drag me out of there, now that he had seen auditors sniffing around, perhaps investigating who stole the missile that had “killed” me. On the other hand, the ditto-corporal couldn’t just abandon Ritu Maharal, letting a civilian — a real one — roam around the hidden base unescorted.

  “Do you have any gear that can track residual body heat?” I asked in a low whisper, gesturing at the suits of battle armor hanging in neat rows that stretched forever. “Or something that’ll pick up metabolic byproducts?”

  My apelike companion glowered.

  “If I admit that, you could have a whistle to blow.”

  “I might? Oh, yeah.” The golem army is supposed to shield us against other golem armies. It might be harder to justify stockpiling stuff that can hunt down real people. Only the police are supposed to have things like that, under lock and key.

  I shrugged. “I guess we’ll just let Ritu wander around, then. If she gets lost, she can use one of those big machines to wake some soldier and ask directions. Did I mention she works for Universal Kilns?”

  Chen growled. “Dammit! Okay. Follow me.”

  He swiveled around and hurried, striding bowlegged toward one end of the vast dressing room.

  Most of the helm-and-coverall suits were measured for outsized bodies like those we’d seen in the Hall of Guardians. How did this particular Corporal Chen hoped to fit in one? I soon got my answer. The last few dozen rows held an assortment of garments, in all sizes, featuring wildly varying numbers of limbs and appendages. Apparently, there were specialized combat-dittos we never saw on TV, even in major league wars.

  “The suits with green and amber stripes are scout models,” he explained. “They have adaptive camouflage and full sensoria … including some that might serve our needs in tracking down … um … in finding and helping Miss Maharal.”

  Chen was clearly nervous about this. His eyes darted and I could guess what he was thinking. It might have been simpler if Ritu kept her disguise on, as I did. But the makeup made her skin itch and she’d wiped it off.

  “Could a real person use one of these?” I asked, fingering the sleeve of one armored uniform, hanging nearby.

  “Could a — oh, I get you. If Ritu climbed into a suit and sealed up properly, she wouldn’t leave an organic residuals trail after that. Yeah. First thing I should check is whether she came this way.”

  Chen grabbed a scout ensemble — much shorter than average, to roughly fit his simian dittobody — and began working the zippers. I stood behind, reaching out, as if to help …

  … and seized him round the shoulders with my left arm, grabbing his head tightly with my right, bearing down hard.

  I had a couple of things going in my favor — strong realhuman muscles and the element of surprise. But how many fractions of a second before his soldier training kicked in, erasing the advantage?

  “Wha — ?” He dropped the garment and grabbed at my arms, crying out, trying to whirl, clutching for a hold.

  Chen might be a pro, but I knew a thing or two about betrayal and murder. And his tax collector body wasn’t top-of-the-line. The neck snapped, just in time, as he yanked hard on my thumb, causing an incendiary eruption of pain.

  “Ow!” I yelped, letting go and shaking the offended digit.

  The golem slipped out of my arms and fell to the floor. Supine and paralyzed, he was still able to watch me curse and dance and suck my thumb.

  I saw realization fill his eyes.

  Chen knows I’m real. And that he hurt me.

  Even as the light of consciousness began to fade, the ditto’s mouth moved, forming a single word, without air to give it voice.

  “Sorry,” he mouthed.

  Then the active Standing Wave went flat. I could see it … almost feel it go away.

  My next move was obvious. I still needed that secure web port Chen first promised, and he had just shown me how to get there safely, by wearing one of those “scout” ensembles. Its sensor array should help me detect and avoid those Dodecahedron auditors we spotted. And perhaps catch Ritu’s trail, if
I was lucky.

  Frankly, her disappearance wasn’t my biggest concern. As soon as I got properly zip-sealed and was sure of air, I bent over to pick up the clay figure at my feet. Poor ditChen. I’d like to say my aim was to get him to a freezer, and save the day’s mortal memories. But I just needed a place to stash the decaying clay out of sight, preferably an anonymous recycling bin.

  Anyway, the real Corporal Chen wouldn’t benefit by downloading what had happened here today. The best favor I could do for him was erase his involvement.

  All right, maybe that was rationalization. I had cut him down for one reason, above all. As soon as he donned a scout suit, he would have begun scanning for a real human … and would’ve found one standing right next to him. Damn inconvenient for me. I couldn’t allow it.

  I think he understood, at the end.

  There was no recycling bin nearby, so I pried out his dogtag pellet and stuffed the rest of him into a refuse can.

  I’ll make it up to Chen, if I ever get out of this mess. Someday I’ll insist on buying him dinner. Though he’ll never have any idea why.

  It took only a few minutes to get a feel for the scout gear and adjust the camouflage settings to background light levels. Like a squid or octopus, the light-sensitive skin rippled to match whatever lay on the other side of me. A blurry rendition, to be sure. Not true invisibility, but a much better version than you can buy nowadays at the Hobby Store. Good enough to fool most edge-and-movement pattern recognition systems — digital, organic, or clay.

  Yup. Even after the Big Deregulation, the guvvies still manage to spend our tax dollars developing cool things.

  With the sensors of my scout uniform set to maximum wariness, I set out for the site where Chen had spotted those auditors. Maybe I’d try to eavesdrop for a while and find out why they suspected that stolen military hardware was used in my assassination. Even more important, that secure net-access port must lie somewhere beyond the weapons hall.

  I also hoped to find a snack machine. Surely real people came down here sometimes! Being organic is nice, but it has disadvantages. By that point, I was so hungry that even self-hypnosis couldn’t drive away the pangs anymore.

  It made me thankful the scout uniform had sound dampers. My growling stomach seemed loud enough to wake the sleeping army next door!

  Here’s to high technology.

  38

  I, Amphorum

  … red, gray, and other encounters across space and time …

  Like a container — or several — spilling over at the rim, I fill up.

  My only desire? To empty all these vessels that I am!

  The urge to reunite … to recombine … to rejoin, overwhelms me.

  But which me?

  What me?

  Why, when, and where me?

  All the famed journalistic double-U questions, turning around to bite the reporter.

  Double-U. Double-yous. Identical, yet different. For one of me knows things the other doesn’t.

  One has seen clay jars from shipwrecks two thousand years old. Mother- or whore-goddess figures that were molded out of river mud twenty millennia ago. Wedgelike symbols, pressed by hand, way back when hands first learned to scribble thoughts …

  One has seen all those things. The other me writhes, wondering where all these images are coming from. Not memories, but fresh, immanent, experience in the raw and actual.

  I know what Maharal is doing. How could I not know?

  Yet the aim of all this torment remains obscure. Has he gone mad? Do all dittos face the same fate when they become ghosts, cast adrift without the anchor of a soul-home?

  Or is he exploring a new way for the Standing Wave to vibrate? Multifariously.

  I do feel less like an individual actor. More like an entire cast. An arena.

  I am a forum.

  Ack! This isn’t at all like the familiar sensation of inloading we all know — passively absorbing memories as a soul-wave replica flows back to combine with the original. Instead, two waves seem to stand in parallel, gray and red but equal in status, both interfering and reinforcing, jostling toward mutual coherence …

  And droning in the background, like a bad tour guide or a hated lecturer, the voice of ditYosil tells me, over and over again, that observers make the universe. Oh, he teases and taunts with every rising throb of the salmon reflex, urging me to “go home” to a self-base that longer exist.

  “Answer me a riddle, Morris,” my tormentor asks.

  “How can you be in two places at once, when you’re not anywhere at all?”

  PART III

  With earth’s first clay they did the last man knead,

  There of the last harvest sowed the seed,

  And what the first morning of creation wrote,

  The last dawn of reckoning shall read.

  —Edward Fitzgerald,

  Rubáiyat of Omar Khayyám

  39

  Only Some Lads

  … as Greenie has an escapade …

  The golem with the tan spiral offered some personal recollections to prove he was Beta … things only he and Albert Morris should know from past encounters between two adversaries. Actions, deceptions, insults, and secret details from times when I barely escaped his clutches — or he mine.

  “It sounds like you two have been engaged in an ongoing role-claying game,” remarked Lum.

  “A childish one,” commented the soul-conservative, Gadarene.

  “Perhaps,” Beta’s ditto answered. “But a game with serious money at stake. One reason I had to expand my business was in order to set aside enough cash to pay off the accumulating fines. In case Albert here finally caught the real me.”

  “Don’t blame Albert for your career as a ditnapping thief,” I grumbled. “Anyway, I’d wager everything I own that you’ve got bigger troubles now. A whole lot worse than civil liens for copyright violation. You’ve attracted new enemies, haven’t you? More dangerous than any local private eye.”

  Beta conceded the point with a nod. “For months, I felt a hot breath on my neck. One by one, my operations were meticulously targeted by someone who would break in suddenly, using prion bombs to slaughter my copies — and the templates I’d stolen — or else he’d take over the operation for a few days, before burning it all to cover the evidence.”

  “Huh. That explains something that happened at the Teller Building,” I commented. “On Monday, you temporarily captured my green scout. At least I thought it was you. But my captors seemed more vicious, even kind of frantic. They actually tried using torture—”

  “That wasn’t me,” Beta assured grimly.

  “Hm, well, I escaped, barely. And on Tuesday morning I returned with Inspector Blane and some LSA enforcers to raid the joint. That went well. But later, around back of the building, I ran into a decaying yellow who claimed to be you, muttering something about how a competitor was ‘taking over.’

  “Do you have any idea who’s been doing all this?”

  “At first I suspected you, Morris. Then I realized it had to be someone really competent—” Beta glanced at me, but I refused the bait, keeping a poker face. So the sardonic ditto resumed. “Someone who was able to track down my clandestine copying centers, one by one, despite every precaution. As a desperate measure, I used my best evasion methods to stash emergency backups in secret portakilns, programmed to thaw after some delay.”

  “You are one of those pre-imprinted copies?” Lum asked. “How old are your memories? When were you made?”

  Beta’s ditto grimaced. “More than two weeks ago! I might have stayed dormant in that tiny niche forever, if Albert’s news hadn’t arrived, triggering reanimation. At that point, I contacted Mr. Montmorillin here, who kindly invited me to this meeting.” The spiral golem indicated Pal.

  I sat up. “You say, ‘Albert’s news—’ ”

  The other realperson present, James Gadarene, stomped a foot. “Whoa! First let’s establish something, this Beta person, a notorious underworld figure
, really was engaged in a plot with ‘Queen’ Irene and Gineen Wammaker—”

  “We haven’t yet determined if the maestra herself—”

  Gadarene shot me a glare. Remembering my place, I grunted apologetically and shut up.

  “So,” he resumed. “We’re expected to believe that Beta and Irene and Wammaker really were planning to invade UK in a semi-innocent effort to uncover hoarded technologies. Even if that’s true, I doubt they had the public’s benefit in mind. More likely extortion! A scheme to blackmail Aeneas Kaolin into buying their silence.”

  Beta conceded with a shrug. “Cash is nice. We also wanted the new ditto-extension technique. Irene was running out of organic memory and needed to slow her inloads. Wammaker and I saw commercial benefits to extending the duration of our copies — her legal ones and my pirated rip-offs.” Beta laughed. “Our alliance was one of temporary convenience.”

  “Never mind that.” Gadarene leaned forward. “In order to carry out your espionage mission, you planned to hire your ongoing nemesis, Ditective Albert Morris. Wasn’t that risky?”

  Beta nodded. “It’s why I pretended to be that Vic Collins character. Anyway, why not hire Albert? The job suited his abilities.”

  “Only some enemy hunted you down first. He replaced you, then changed the aim of the mission. Is that what we’re expected to believe?”

  A high-pitched version of Pal’s voice called from a table nearby. The little ferret-golem — Palloid — manipulated a holo viewer. “I’ve got that film roll we found at Irene’s. Ready to show ’em what you discovered, Gumby?”