Kiln People

by David Brin

  It’s kind of hard to move about when half of you has fallen off or broken down.

  Crushed and burned, shrunken and diminished, I had only partial function in one leg to help me haul myself upward along the fuselage of the skycycle, perching next to its cockpit, leaning in to fumble at whatever buttons I could reach. I was trying for the radio, to transmit a general distress call. But after a few encouraging bloops and beeps and instrument flashes, what I somehow triggered was the autopilot!

  “Emergency escape procedure activated,” a voice announced, loud enough to make out through seared and blasted ears. My torso felt a rumble as the engine reignited. “Closing canopy. Prepare for lift.”

  I was still dazed and muddled from the nightmare ride that brought me here, so it took a couple of seconds to realize — or notice the glass bubble swinging down. I managed to pull my head back in time, but not my left arm, which got pinned in that moment of indecision.

  Damn! I was used to pain by then, but this crushing sensation was ghastly as the transparent canopy tried to squeeze shut. For some reason it didn’t sense my arm was in the way. A malfunction? Or did Beta program the unit not to care about trivial clay limbs when a quick getaway was at stake? All I could do — while the lift ducts sandblasted grit into the air — was send commands for my trapped left hand to keep stabbing buttons, hoping to shut it off.

  Instead, my efforts gave the Harley conniptions! It bucked and jittered, with each jerk tearing agonizingly at my arm as the glass bubble tried to close. Why couldn’t the idiot machine sense that no one was aboard! Perhaps it also served Beta as a pilotless courier, conveying small objects, like severed heads.

  What little feeling I had in my left leg sensed the ground’s queasy departure. I was flying again!

  More buttons and switches fell before my chopping hand, which kept swinging long after an organic arm would have nerves and circulation pinched off. All the clay version needed was some residual connection for me to order a splurge of all its remaining élan. The limb flung wildly, seeking things to twist and pull, until the canopy’s steady guillotine pressure finally tore through.

  The weight of my body did the rest. I looked down -

  — about fifteen or twenty meters, almost straight down to the roof of Maharal’s cabin.

  Frantically twisting during my plummet, I managed to strike the shingles first with my useless right leg.

  Did you ever have that feeling of viewing life through the wrong end of a telescope? Everything from the moment of impact seemed to happen in a fog of dulled senses — the noise and jarring force were distant things, happening to someone else. Even time felt softened as another of those eerie otherness waves came over me. I could swear the substance of that termite-eaten roof dissolved as I passed right through, floating toward the floor amid cottony clouds of splinters, dust, insects, and other debris.

  Landing on my back, I heard an awful thud. But other senses disagreed. To touch, it felt like rebounding off the surface tension of a soap bubble, hardly jarring at all. An illusion, of course, for I could tell that more chunks of me had broken off.

  Bottomed out at last, I stared up at a ragged circle of sky — rimmed by still-crumbling rafters. Soon the dust haze cleared enough to glimpse Beta’s poor skyscooter almost directly overhead, brighter but more frantic than the surrounding stars. Flaming extravagantly, the damaged machine fought to right itself, then turned laboriously to head off. Westward, I guessed from a glimpse of Sagittarius, and from the orientation of the cabin walls. A good choice, if you’re trying to get help … or to be destroyed.

  Speaking of destruction, I saw little option but to write off this particular branching of the multilimbed life tree of one Albert Morris. Tiredness didn’t begin to describe how I felt. What little of me could feel anything at all.

  There was no “salmon urge” anymore. Just the siren song of slurry … the beckoning of the recycling bin, calling me to rejoin the great clay circle, in confident hope that my physical substance may yet find some better use, in a luckier ditto.

  But not one who’s seen or done more with its life, I thought, finding consolation. It had been interesting, the last few days. I had few regrets.

  Except that Clara will never hear the whole story …

  Yeah. That was too bad, I agreed.

  … and now the bad guys will win.

  Aw, man. Whatever nagging inner voice had to put in that last bit? What guilt-tripping nag? If I could, I’d tear it out! Just shut up and let me die, I groused.

  You gonna just lie there and let ’em get away with it?

  Crap. I didn’t have to take this from some obsessive soul corner of a cheap-model golem who was misborn a frankie … became a ghost … and any moment was about to graduate to melting corpse.

  Who’s a corpse? Speak for yourself.

  Stunning wit, that triple irony. Speak for myself, indeed. And though I tried hard to ignore the little voice, something surprising happened. My right hand and arm moved, lifting slowly till five trembling fingers came within sight of my good eye. Then my left leg twitched. Without conscious command, but reacting to imprinted habits a million years old, they started cooperating with each other, fumbling to shift my weight, then pushing to turn me over.

  Oh well. Might as well help.

  As I’ve said, Albert was always pigheaded, obstinate, persistent — and I guess that endearing trait came through on Tuesday morning when he made me, rolling his soul into this inert doll and willing it to move … with much the same sanguine hopefulness as ancient Sumerian scribes who long ago held that each clay impression manifested something sacred and magical. A brief but potent shove back against the surrounding darkness.

  So I crawled, using one arm and a half-usable leg to haul what was left of me past broken furniture and tattered western-motif rugs, through an open door with a shattered lock and then over fresh footprints that led down a long, dusty hallway — a corridor that seemed to push right into the mountain. Following Beta.

  What else could I do, since it seemed quite clear that I was too stubborn to die?

  52

  Prototypes

  … as realAl peels away layers …

  There had been clues. Too subtle for the likes of me, but somebody smarter might have caught on ages ago.

  Beta — the name implied “number two” or a second version. Ritu’s middle name was Lizabetha. And in mythology, Maharal — the name her father chose to adopt before she was born — had been a title given to the greatest late medieval maker of golems … while another reverent appellation for one with that skill was Betalel or Betzalel.

  And so it went, on and on. The sort of childish puzzle-hints that made you groan, both over your own stupidity and the comic book immaturity of it all.

  Another reason I never caught on? Maybe because I’m old-fashioned at heart. The gender difference between lovely-reserved Ritu and the prodigally flamboyant Beta shouldn’t have fooled a worldly fellow like me, who’s seen plenty of ostentatious cross-roxing in his time. The fact that it did trick me proves what a conservative old fart I really am, dammit. Unwarranted assumptions are the bane of any private eye.

  I still had trouble absorbing this, trying desperately to recall what I’ve learned over the years about Multiple Personality Disorder, or MPD.

  It’s not an either-or thing. Most people experience the fluid overlap of amorphous subselves from time to time, debating or contesting internally when awkward decisions have to be made — imagining inner dialogues till the conflict is resolved. They do this without engendering any lasting fracture or disturbing the illusion of a single, unified identity. At the opposite extreme are those with mental schisms that are rigid, adamant, and even self-hateful, erecting permanent personas who hold opposing values, voices, and names, battling each other over control.

  You seldom ran across truly blatant examples back in pre-kilning days, outside of a few famous case studies and some movie exaggerations, because one body and brain don’t
offer enough room! Confined to a single cranium, one dominant character-facade usually held fierce command. If others lurked — products of trauma perhaps, or neural injury — they’d be reduced to waging guerrilla wars of spite or life sabotage from below.

  Dittoing changed all that. Though MPD is still rare, I’ve seen imprinting unleash the unexpected from time to time. Some peculiarity that lay dormant or suppressed in the original would burst forth in a duplicate, unleashed to manifest in ditto form.

  But never anything as extreme as this Ritu/Beta flipflop! One in which the original person — a seemingly competent professional — somehow remained unaware of the very existence of her alter ego, even though it hijacked nearly every ditto that she made.

  As a mere criminalist, I’m no expert psych-diagnostician. Guessing, I pondered a possible link to Yang-Pimintel disease. Possibly a variant of Smersh-Foxleitner, or a rare and dangerous variety of Moral Orthogonality syndrome. Frightening stuff! Especially since a few of these disorders show significant association with the worst kind of genius. The persuasively self-deceptive kind, fashioning brilliantly amoral rationalizations for any crime.

  History shows that some of these psychopathologies have been heritable, passing from one generation to the next. It could explain why I’ve been outclassed from the very start.

  Much of this raced through my mind a few seconds after Ritu obliquely revealed the truth through her parable of the chrysalis. I wanted to stand and stare, to blink in a fugue of dismayed realization, stammering incoherent questions — in other words, all the time-honored ways that folks react to extreme surprise. But there wasn’t time to do any of that, only to resume our hurried march. What choice did we have, with one platoon of Betas in front of us, fighting their ahead way through the tunnel, and a contingent of reinforcements pressing close behind?

  I finally understood why the two groups of Beta-drones had left us alone so far, allowing the gap around us to remain intact. Ritu — their archie and reproducer — was now safely pinned right where they wanted, available in case more dittos had to be made. Till then, they had no reason to harass her any further. Indeed, they would be fiercely devoted to protecting her physical welfare.

  I tried frantically to make sense of this.

  Ritu always had the power to destroy Beta, by staying off copying machines! If the butterfly refused to lay any more eggs, there’d soon be no more chomping caterpillars.

  To protect against that, paranoid Beta would have stashed extra frozen copies all over town. I met one of them behind the Teller Building, after Tuesday’s raid, when it spoke about someone “taking over my operations …” Did one of those backup copies follow us here to force Ritu onto an imprinter?

  Why, in all the time since we set out on Tuesday night, did Ritu never warn me about this!

  All right, at one point she mentioned that her dittos were “unreliable,” that most of them went missing, unaccountably. Even the fraction who loyally performed their assigned chores only brought home partial memories, because — I now knew — the missing experiences were seized and stored away by the proto-Beta personality, hiding in her brain. From Ritu’s point of view, dittoing must have seemed a horribly inefficient and unsatisfying process, even before she learned the truth about Beta.

  In that case, I wondered, why do it at all?

  Rationalizations. People are talented at coming up with reasons to keep doing stupid things. Perhaps she worried about the modern bigotry toward those who cannot ditto — the unkind implication that such folks are barren, with no soul to copy.

  Or she might have kept imprinting because an official of Universal Kilns has to send out duplicates, even if it takes four tries to make one that goes where it’s told. Certainly she could afford the cost.

  Maybe she needed desperately to pretend she was like everybody else.

  I guessed one more reason. A compulsion from below. Inner pressure that could only be satisfied by laying between the soul-probes, feeling them palp and massage, pressing her Standing Wave sensually into wet clay. Something like an addiction, along with the denial blindness to addiction that has always plagued junkies, of every kind.

  No wonder it took years for her to admit her problem aloud.

  I had been wondering how Beta managed to track us across open desert, then follow us past every security screen into a buried national security redoubt. The answer hit me. He did nothing of the sort! Beta simply lay quiescent inside Ritu, building pressure within her till the strain grew intolerable. At which point she slipped away from me and Corporal Chen, rushing to one of the giant military autokilns we had seen. Loathing herself, like any addict giving in to a foul habit, she laid herself down, seeking relief between the floating tetragramatron tendrils, surrendering to her insistent, stronger half — a master thief and desperate character, the sort of devil-may-care who dared all and defied every authority of the lawful outer world.

  No wonder I was never able to connect Beta to a real person! Oh, the endless hours I spent in ebony form, laboriously noting and encoding fragments of Beta’s speech and other personality quirks, sieving the Net in search of someone who used similar patterns of phrasing, syntax, and emphasis — the sort of arduous slog that lets a plodding detective track down even the shrewdest arch criminal, given enough time.

  Only all that work was wasted in this case. Because the villain had a perfect hiding place, and Ritu spoke with a voice-manner that was nothing at all like Beta’s.

  At last, here was my nemesis, my Moriarty, walking beside me in the dark corridor, shivering with both dread and shame in her dark eyes. How long did this secret personality alternation go on before Ritu finally grew suspicious, then fully aware of her gangster other half?

  Was that why she first decided to hire me? In order to have Beta’s expert adversary on retainer? Finding her missing father probably had little to do with it, at first. Not till Yosil Maharal was found dead on the highway.

  And yet, there had to be more of a connection than that.

  Shaking my head, I found it hard to concentrate because of sheer emotion. Because by this point I was positively boiling with anger!

  Ritu had known what was going on — the potential for extreme danger — by the time we set out together Tuesday evening. So why didn’t she warn me? All those hours and days in the desert, then underground, and never once did she mention the pressure that must have been building up inside her. The clutch of demon’s eggs that she carried, ready to hatch as soon as there was an opportunity.

  Damn her selfish, self-centered -

  Something in my attitude may have crossed the short space between us. Or maybe the fierce reality of our situation tore away Ritu’s last illusions. For whatever reason, after minutes of silent walking my companion spoke at last.

  “I’m … so sorry, Albert,” she whispered.

  Glancing at her face I could see what tormented courage it took to form that simple apology. Yet I was in no mood to let her off the hook so easy. Because we both knew what Beta would do — what he had to do — in order to survive.

  If Ritu got away now, she might finally acknowledge the gravity of her condition and seek cloistered refuge at a hospital resort while Beta’s supply of secretly cached ditsicles slowly expired, their memories growing ever more useless and obsolete. Under expert therapy, her secondary personality would be summoned forth, challenged, forced to justify itself or else face drastic treatment.

  Even if denial set in again and Ritu avoided getting help, I’d surely report the situation to both her employer and her personal physician. Anyway, with or without therapy, Beta would be washed up as a criminal mastermind. Because notoriety would subject Ritu Lisabetha Maharal to ongoing scrutiny by the World Eye … by free networks of amateurs who’d never let her dittos out of sight. Not for years to come. Underworld figures hate that sort of illumination. They find it hampering, as we learned in the years following the Big Heist.

  To avoid that, Beta couldn’t let either of us go free.
He must find a way to keep Ritu prisoner, a slave to this weird reproduction cycle forever — a kind of self-rape that would have given me utter willies, if I weren’t even more worried about myself.

  Because my old foe Beta had no reason to keep me alive at all.

  Trying to fit the pieces, I thought, Beta must’ve been the one who tried to kill me with that missile strike on my home. Did he realize I was hot on the trail of …

  … but that makes no sense! Wasn’t a copy of Aeneas Kaolin nosing around the Maharal house, late on Tuesday? He was skulking about, looking for stuff while eager to avoid being caught in the act by Ritu’s gray.

  And it was Kaolin who shot at Ritu and me, as were drove through the desert.

  He must have grown wise to the link between Ritu and Beta, maybe even earlier than she did.

  Was he the one “taking over” Beta’s operations?

  I remembered my first meeting with Ritu and her boss in that fabulous Yugo limousine. They had both seemed united and sincere about hiring me to help find the missing Professor Maharal. Under the surface, each of them must have also been thinking about using my expertise to help control the Beta persona … and maybe to exploit it …

  But all that changed by Tuesday evening. Something spooked Aeneas. Was it the prion attack at Universal Kilns? Or maybe something else, having to do with Ritu’s father.

  That could explain why he sent one of his platinums to attack us on the highway. Ritu and I were both disguised as grays. Kaolin might have thought that I was making an alliance with Beta, and we were both on our way to rendezvous with -

  My mind was thrashing about, grabbing threads from all directions. But before these floundering thoughts could coalesce into a new picture, I abruptly noticed something far more pressing. Something offering a ray of hope that our luck had changed.

  On the left appeared a branching passageway. A possible way out.

  This smaller tunnel cut backward at a sharp angle, close to the one we had been following till now. My impression — it seemed aimed toward another part of the nearby military base we had just departed. Professor Maharal must have had more than one target when he delved for hidden treasure down here, helping himself to a nation’s hoard of secret, high-tech marvels.