Kiln People

by David Brin

  “Do you have a particular destination in mind?”

  Keeping the mini-gun trained on me, he climbed into the skycycle. “I found two sets of footprints, heading south. I have a pretty good notion where they’re going now. You’d just slow me down.”

  “So you won’t explain about Maharal and Kaolin?”

  “If I told you more I’d have to shoot you, against the slim chance that someone might come by and rescue you. As things stand, you’re clueless as usual. I’ll leave you to dissolve in peace.”

  “Big of you. I owe you one.”

  Beta’s grin showed that he knew how I meant it. “If it matters any, I’m not the one who tried to kill your rig, Morris. I doubt it was Kaolin, either. In fact, I hope the real you survives what’s about to happen.”

  What’s about to happen. He expressed it that way deliberately, to frustrate me. But I kept silent, not giving him any satisfaction. Only action would accomplish anything now.

  “Good-bye, Morris,” ditBeta said, closing the glass bubble, revving the engine to a rising pitch. I stepped back, thinking furiously.

  What are my choices?

  I still had the cautious option — wait a bit, burn the Volvo’s fuel and hope to attract attention before I melt.

  But no. I’d lose his scent. My reason for living.

  The skycycle drove dust-billows down the narrow canyon defiles. ditBeta offered a jaunty wave, then turned his corkscrew head back to the job of taking off.

  It was my cue. In that split second, as the Harley swung about and began climbing atop three pillars of superheated thrust, I ran forward and leaped.

  There was pain, of course. I knew there would be pain.

  46

  All Fired Up

  … as realAlbert gets earthy …

  There wasn’t much choice except to follow. Back to the storage room. Back to the dark opening where I had seen a small army of clay soldier-figures go plunging into a tunnel of death.

  Ritu was still shivering in my arms, recovering her composure from the violation that my enemy inflicted on her — by forcing her onto an imprinting machine against her will. I wanted to ask Ritu about that. To find out how and why Beta (if it really had been a copy of the infamous ditnapper) grabbed her in the deep underground sanctuary of a supposedly secure military base.

  Before I could begin, a series of loud tones reverberated around us from rank after rank of nearby rapid-bake kilns, announcing the emergence of yet more battle-dittos, sliding forth red and glowing with freshly sparked enzyme catalysis — special models that had been stored here at taxpayer expense, blank but ready to be imprinted with the souls of reserve warriors like Clara, only now hijacked by an infamous criminal for some reason I couldn’t fathom.

  If there had been just one or two of them, I could handle the situation quickly. Even a war-golem is helpless during those first moments after sliding from the activation oven. But a glance down the aisle of towering machines showed there were too many — dozens — already beginning to stand on trembling legs … legs like tree trunks … and stretching arms that could crush a small car. In moments their eyes would focus on Ritu and me. Eyes fired up with some purpose that I didn’t want any part of.

  And there were more bell-like tones, from tall ovens even farther away, ringing their birth announcements till they merged like some rippling call of destiny. Do not ask for whom the kiln tolls, commented a wry little voice within.

  Time to get out.

  “Let’s go,” I urged Ritu, and she nodded, as eager as I was to leave that place.

  Together we fled in the only direction available, back toward the storeroom where that huge, silent mystery golem grabbed me less than half an hour ago and saved my life — though I didn’t know its motive at the time. Departing, I glanced at the dissolving corpse of my benefactor, wondering who he was and how he knew that I needed help at that particular moment.

  Then we were running past dark, fearsome-looking figures, molded and augmented for war. Terracotta forms that turned to glare at us, clumsily reaching out, but slowed by uneven peptide activation. Thank heavens. Fleeing their ranks, I led Ritu back down the corridor of shelves, looking for some weapon big enough to make a difference against their numbers. I’d settle for a simple phone to call up Base Security!

  But nothing useful lay in sight — just tons of freeze-dried gourmet foods, stacked here against some doomsday scenario, meant to feed a governmental elite whose tax-paid job it is to stave off all varieties of doomsday.

  There didn’t seem to be any good hiding places, either. Not as a platoon of counterfeit warriors began entering the storage room after us, grunting and shuffling as they came. Quick-imprinted, I diagnosed. Beta doesn’t need quality, but speed and large numbers.

  A nagging sense of doubt yammered at me, screaming that none of it made sense. The golem that rescued me. Beta’s sudden appearance here. The two waves of war-dittos that he created for some unexplained reason. The grabbing and force-imprinting of Ritu. It all had to mean something!

  But there wasn’t time to sort it out, only a series of rapid decisions. Like where to flee. Inexorably, we had but one choice.

  Ritu balked at the tunnel entrance. “Where does it go?” she demanded.

  “I think it leads under Urraca Mesa, to your father’s cabin.”

  Her eyes widened and her feet planted hard, refusing to budge. I glanced beyond her shoulder to see those shuffling pseudosoldiers approach, still fifty meters away but closing.

  “Ritu—” Despite rising anxiety, I restrained myself from tugging at her arm. She had already been subjected to more force today than anyone should endure.

  At last her eyes cleared, coming around to focus on mine. With a grim tightening of the jaw, she nodded.

  “All right, Albert. I’m ready.”

  Ritu took my offered hand. Together we plunged into the tunnel’s stony-cold womb.

  47

  Vasic Instinct

  … as gray and red expand by acclaymation …

  Like a capacious, ever-expanding jar — this soul contains many.

  It feels bottomless, able to absorb a gathering, a plenitude, a forum of standing waves, uniting in a resonant chorus of superposed frequencies, combining toward some culmination of ultimate power.

  It isn’t just the two of us anymore — the Albert Morris gray who was ditnapped from Kaolin Manor, plus the little red copy-of-a-copy who visited the Maharal’s private museum for a memory test. Gray and red are linked, serving as mirrors in a mad scientist’s wondrously terrifying “glazier” machine. And now there is more, much more.

  No longer confined to a single skull — or even a pair of them — we/i expand into the vacant space between, filling its sterile void with a compellingly intricate melody … an ever-growing song of me

  A song heading for its crescendo.

  Oh, some kind of amplification is happening, all right, as Yosil’s demented ghost predicted. A multiplication of soul-rhythms on a scale I never imagined, though cults and mystics have chattered about such a possibility ever since the Golem Age began. It could be an egomaniac’s sublime nirvana state — the self, exponentiated by countless virtual duplicates that reflect and resonate in perfect harmony, preparing to burst through, en masse, to a splendid new level of spiritual reification.

  I always dismissed the notion as metaphysical nonsense, just another version of the age-old romantic-transcendentalist fantasy — like stone circles, UFO hallucinations, and “singularity” mirages were to other generations who kept yearning for a way to rise above this gritty plain. For a doorway to some realm beyond.

  Only now it seems that one of the founders of this era, the legendary Professor Maharal, found a way … though something about his method drove him mad with fear.

  Is that why ditYosil needs the soul of Albert Morris, to use as raw material? Because nothing about golemtech frightens me? Self-duplication always felt natural to Albert, like picking something comfortable to wear from t
he closet. Hell, I’m not even bothered much anymore by all the pain inflicted by this brutal machinery — some clever modification of the standard tetragramatron. Creative machinery that will soon nudge a zillion overlapping copies of my Standing Wave to unite in perfect unison, as light rays do in a laser, joining as collusive bosons rather than independent/bickering fermions …

  Whatever that means. I can already feel the process working. In fact, there’s a strong temptation to stop thinking and just let go … wallow in the simplicity … in the glorious me-ness of it all. Memory and reason feel like impediments, sullying the purity of a Standing Wave that multiplies on and on, filling an ever-expanding vessel.

  I, amphorum …

  Fortunately, there come respites when fierce, machine-driven energies aren’t pummeling and stretching me/us according to plan, when cogent thought remains possible … even enhanced with a peculiar kind of focus. For example, right now I can perceive ditYosil bustling about nearby, sensing his presence in ways that go beyond mere sound or vision. The intensity of his desire. His growing excitement and confidence as a lifelong goal draws near.

  Above all, I feel ditYosil’s burning concentration, enhanced by the genius that so often accompanies Smersh-Foxleitner syndrome … a concentration so fixed, he can ignore a rain of dust that falls from the cave’s ceiling each time the stone walls shudder from some distant, booming explosion, as war-golems claw their way closer, ever closer to this buried lair.

  They’re still too far away for me to decipher much about their soul-harmonies. Could they even be me? It’s tempting to imagine realAlbert, accompanied by an army of himselves … and maybe a whole bunch of Pal’s wonderful/nasty specialty dittos … fighting their way up that tunnel, coming to the rescue.

  But no. I forgot. I’m dead. ditYosil says he killed me. The real, organic Albert Morris had to die, so he wouldn’t “anchor” my quantum-soul observer state to the material world — whatever that means.

  Still puttering and preparing, Maharal’s ghost fine-tunes a large pendulum that sways slowly back and forth between my red and gray cranium-mirrors, raising soul-ripples with each passage. Ripples that thrum to the lowest sound you ever heard — like the voice heard by Moses on Sinai …

  I lack the proper technical vocabulary, but it’s easy to imagine what’ll happen when ditYosil steps aboard that rocking platform. Those ripples will take over. He plans to use my purified-amplified presence as a carrier wave, to boost his own essence higher. I’m to be spent, the same way that an expendable rocket is splurged, drained, and discarded in order to hurl an expensive probe toward the black abyss of space. Only the cargo I’m assigned to carry will be Maharal’s soul-pattern … launching it toward something like godhood.

  Everything makes sense, in a perverse way, except for one puzzling thing.

  Wasn’t I supposed to be losing my sense of identity by now? ditYosil predicted that my ego would be overwhelmed by the sheer ecstasy of amplification, removing all of Albert Morris’s personal hang-ups and desires, leaving just Albert’s talent for duplication, distilled, expanded, exponentiated. The purest of all booster rockets.

  Is that happening? Ego Reduction? It … doesn’t feel that way. Yes, I can sense the glazier machinery trying to achieve that. But my footing isn’t loose. Albert’s memories feel intact!

  Moreover, what about all these echoes that i/we keep picking up? Musically resonant echoes that feel like they come from outside? Yosil never mentioned anything about that … and I don’t plan on bringing it up.

  For one thing, he’s dismissed me as a cipher, a beast of burden, talented at copying but unworthy of respect.

  But there’s another reason.

  I … we … are … am starting to enjoy this.

  48

  Mortar Enemies

  … as Tuesday’s frankie takes a turn as baked goods …

  They say that golemtech arrived in Japan with much less upheaval than in the West, almost as if they expected it. The Japanese had no trouble with the idea of duplicating souls, in much the same way that Americans embraced the Internet, seeing it as a fundamental expression of their national will to talk. According to legend, all you had to do was give something eyes — a boat, a house, a robot, or even the fluffy AnpanMan who hawked pastry in cute TV commercials.

  When it came to investing an object with soul, eyes mattered above all.

  I thought about that while clinging to the bottom of Beta’s skycycle, sheltering my face from a terrible wind that kept alternating between fire and ice. Protect the eyes, I told myself, desperately clutching a pair of slim handholds while my feet pressed hard against the landing skids. Protect the eyes and brain. And never regret that you chose this way to die.

  During level flight my chief problem was wind chill, sucking warmth out of every exposed catalysis cell. But that was a picnic compared to the agony whenever the Harley banked or turned. Without warning, one or another of the thrust nozzles would swivel, grazing me with jets of collimated flame. All I could do then was swing my head to the other side of the narrow fuselage and try to squirm out of the way, reminding myself over and over why I had put myself in this fix … because it seemed like a pretty good idea at the time.

  The alternative — to stay behind at the wrecked Volvo and make some kind of signal, then wait around for help — might have made sense if I were real, without a ticking expiration clock that could lapse any time in the next hour or so. But my logic had to be ditto logic. When Beta took off, I felt just one imperative more urgent than what little remained of my life.

  Don’t lose the scent.

  I now realized Beta was key to understanding all that had happened during this bizarre week, starting from the moment I slinked into the basement of the Teller Building to uncover his pirate copying facility, with its stolen Wammaker template. That operation had already been hijacked by some enemy, presumably Aeneas Kaolin. Or so Beta claimed; Aeneas told a different story, portraying himself as the victim of perverted conspiracies. Then there were the dark, paranoid musings that Yosil Maharal had muttered on Tuesday morning, after he was already dead.

  Who told the truth? All I knew for certain was that three brilliant and unscrupulous men — all of them much smarter than poor Albert Morris — were engaged in some kind of desperate, secretive, triangular struggle. And the secretive part was what impressed me most.

  Nowadays, it takes power, money, and genuine cleverness to keep anything out of the public glare — a scrutinizing glare that was supposed to have banished all those awful, dark, twentieth-century clichés, like conniving moguls, mad scientists, and elite master criminals. Yet here were all three of those archetypes, battling each other while colluding to keep their conflict hidden from media, government, and the public. No wonder poor Albert was out of his league!

  No wonder I had no choice but to follow the trail, whatever the cost. As Beta’s skycycle sped through the night, just forty meters or so above the desert floor, I knew that one cost was going to be this body of mine, which kept getting baked each time those narrow torch-jets shifted to adjust course. Especially the portion of me that stuck out the most, my hapless clay ass. I could feel colloidal/pseudo-organic constituents react to the heat by fizzing and popping, sometimes loud enough to hear above the wind’s tumult, gradually transforming supple lifeclay to the hard consistency of porcelain dinnerware.

  Let me add, as a cheap utility greenie with an unbuffered Standing Wave, that it also hurt like hell! So much for the advantages of soulistic verisimilitude. I tried to find distraction by imagining our destination — presumably the goal that realAlbert and Ritu Maharal had been heading toward when the Volvo got ambushed. Some cryptic desert hideaway, where her father lurked during the weeks he went missing from Universal Kilns? Beta apparently knew where to go — which made me wonder.

  He’s trying to follow Ritu. But why, if not to reveal Yosil’s hiding place? What other use could Beta have for her?

  I tried to concentrate, but it’s har
d to do when your butt keeps getting singed every minute or two by sonocollimated heat. I found myself returning over and over to the image of poor little Palloid, my ferret-ditto companion, who got smashed before unhappy Pal could harvest memories of our long day together. That was my sole chance to be remembered, I thought glumly. At this rate, all that’ll be left of me is a pile of shattered statuary when Beta lands.

  For solace, I tried conjuring up an image of Clara’s face — but that only increased the pain. Her war must be approaching its big climax by now, I thought, picturing how close we were to the Jesse Helms Combat Range. Beta would turn aside before then, of course. Still, I wondered about the coincidence … and hoped that Clara wouldn’t get in too much trouble for going AWOL when Albert’s house was destroyed. We had assigned each other survivor benefits, so maybe the army would understand.

  If Albert truly is still alive, they may still have a chance to be happy together …

  Anyway, something else was happening as the Harley sped through a night where even the stars seemed out of joint. My soul-wave kept doing unsettling things, jittering wildly … up-down, in-out … and through some of those weird directions that nobody has ever named properly — self-contained dimensions of spirit that Leow and others only began mapping a generation ago, exploring the newest terra incognita or final frontier. At first, the disturbances were almost too brief to notice. But those periodic tumults grew progressively stronger as the awful flight went on. Spikes of egotistical self-importance alternated with troughs of utter abnegation when I felt less than dust grain. Later, the effect was one of brief but intensely focused awe. When it passed, I wondered -

  What next? Zen-like detachment?

  Feelings of unity with the universe?

  Or will I hear the booming voice of God?