Kiln People

by David Brin

  That one was yelling its head off.

  Those were some of the features my eyes saw. More interesting were things that eyes weren’t meant to see.

  First, was I already dying of some awful fever? I had felt better crossing into the lab’s bright light and cooler air after that bloody tunnel. Only now, nausea waves skewered my viscera, like those gut-churning sensations that astronauts used to report, back when realfolk actually risked their lives in space. Bowels clenched, nearly as hard as my teeth, which barely let escape a reedy moan.

  This is it, I thought. Some fast-acting super-virus. Death in minutes.

  Too bad. I came so close to finding out what was going on here.

  Should I have stayed home instead, and get blown up? At least it would have been quick. I never achieved my real goal, setting out on Tuesday night.

  Clara, I’m sorry. I really tried -

  More symptoms teemed, clouding the senses. I could swear the space between the captive golems, which had seemed as clear as air moments ago, now rippled and fluttered like some dense fluid! The undulations had a dreamlike quality, impossible to pin down, like a smoke-sculptor’s interpretation of manic mood swings.

  I had a brief impression that battalions of identical ghostly entities occupied the confined zone, thronging in limitless multitudes, yet somehow uncrowded, with plenty of room in their well-ordered ranks for more. Except when the pendulum passed through. Then brusque waves roiled, transforming many of the marching figures, giving them a face.

  Floating before me, I pictured the visage of Yosil Maharal.

  “Albert, are you all right?” Ritu murmured, but I shook her hand away. Let her take it as anger for getting me into this fix. I just didn’t want to infect her.

  I didn’t want anybody infected. So, despite stomach convulsions, apparitions, and disorientation, I forced myself to look away from shenanigans in the center of the lab, aiming instead at the support machinery lining the grotto walls, seeking any clue about those germ agents. They were all that mattered.

  There.

  Bleary-eyed, I spotted a computer. One of those expensive AI-XIX models. Damn smart for silicon. One of Maharal’s chief tools, surely, maybe even a master process controller. And just the sort of thing that a fellow like me could smash to bits, without having to know specifics of how or why.

  Can I make it all the way down there and do it quickly?

  At least it was a goal.

  A nearby Beta — perhaps the very same war-dit who spoke to us in the tunnel — grabbed the balcony rail and shouted in a voice whose suddenly plaintive tone surprised me. I never heard the like from Beta before.

  “Yosil! Father, stop … we had a deal!”

  60

  Mixed Glazes

  … grinding glazier beams …

  Damn this compulsion to recite, built into one of the golembodies that serve as mirrors to enclose the growing waveform.

  A new kind of Standing Wave surges between the glazier poles. Soon it will escape confinement, bursting through these porcelain dolls with enough power to endure for weeks over a dying city, feeding on death manna from millions of extinguishing spirit flames — a meal sufficient to complete the transition from created to Creator.

  While that countdown ticks, a desperate struggle rages. What imprint will the glazier-made god carry? Whose core personality? Right now the waveform oscillates between two possible states — two discordant definitions of I am.

  Yosil is with me now, our borders overlapping in unhappy swirls, like immiscible fluids. We both howl against this unnatural merging! It’s like trying to inload someone else’s ditto, a calamity that no one attempts twice. How can you share without agreeing on dimensions like left-right? Up-down? In-out? It’s all subjective on the soulistic plane. My versions dart away at angles that have nothing in common with his.

  Communion will come, when I finally arc over this landscape as an all-transforming deity. I’ll establish fair metrics that are simple, universal, then invite all to join me in a vast new cosmos! Using raw material more basic than vacuum, together we’ll make stars, planets, whole new Earths.

  But first, to win control.

  I was here first, growing immeasurably during the last few hours. But my adversary knows more theory. He also has the advantage of position. With each rhythmic pass, the pendulum cuts like a blade, slicing through the glazier’s soft center, the most energetic and impressionable spot.

  Worse, I feel yanked by the presence of realAlbert, so close that his image enters me now through a set of eyes. The red ditto can actually see him, leaning on a bannister rail as he descends from a western parapet. realAlbert looks like hell. Sweaty and pale. Shaking. A mess.

  With each footstep nigh, the glazier shudders!

  He’s my archetype … the reason I survived erasure to reach this point.

  Now he’s getting in the way.

  Poor Albert may have to go.

  61

  Extremities

  … as Greenie goes out on a limb …

  Ever try to rip your own leg off? You need motivation.

  It helps if you’re already falling apart.

  Even so, pulling hard with my one good hand and arm, I made little progress while the nearby missile launcher ticked through its final check sequence.

  Let me offer a suggestion.

  Nag that it was, the voice had steered me right so far. Soon I felt a touch along my crusted skin, and within.

  The appendage is no longer part of you.

  Envision that.

  Draw yourself back from it.

  Trigger these enzymes as you go.

  Like this …

  My knowledge of chemistry was rudimentary, at best. Yet somehow the instructions made sense, like recalling a lost skill. Naturally, that’s how to do it, I thought, ignoring for now that the instructions came from an imaginary friend. Simple. I must remember this.

  All pain and fatigue fled from the leg. Amid that growing numbness, every dram of leftover energy spent itself, not melting but hardening as if in a quick oven.

  My next hard tug was rewarded by a brittle cracking. Again I pulled, and the limb snapped off below the hip, trailing gooey bits of shredded soul-fabric that sparked and glittered.

  In my hand now — a near-perfect replica of a human limb in baked terracotta, bent at the knee. I hefted the thing. It was handsome, but hardly aerodynamic.

  TARGET LOCKED, announced the launch-controller screen. Missile number one slid into place with its dire crimson warhead.

  ARMED. PREPARING TO FIRE.

  As the machine’s hum rose in pitch, I knew I had one chance.

  62

  The Clay’s the Thing …

  … an ensemble in twenty seconds …

  Descending from the parapet, my feet were like blunt clubs at the end of mushy noodles. Waves of nausea whelmed over me as I clutched the bannister from one sweaty grip to the next. Dry-retching, I’d vomit if my stomach had been fed more than a few protein bars during the last few days. Hunger and exhaustion were factors, of course, but such a fierce decline must come from something else — surely a rapid war plague that some arrogant Dodecs stashed at the bottom of an armored hole for safe-keeping. A tool of genocide, banned by solemn treaty. But who ever throws a weapon away?

  Was my agony a taste of things to come, for millions? I had no clue what was happening in the center of the lab with all those antennas and humming tubes and pendulums swinging between crucified dittos, like some nightmare painting by Hieronymus Bosch. But I do know it involves germs, so it’s gotta be evil.

  That made things simple. I’ve got to interfere.

  Only how?

  My old friend Pal had a philosophy: “When you lack understanding, or subtlety, you can still get your argument across with a monkey wrench.”

  A simplistic, often foolish credo, but right now rather compelling. If I disrupt things enough, Clara and her friends may have time to find out about this place. They’ll come
do the rest … sort it all out. So, whatever the hell is going on, just find a way to interfere.

  Even a futile resolve is something to cling to. As nausea worsened with each downward step, I pictured the AI-XIX computer … and a metal folding chair that stood nearby. Just the thing, in lieu of a monkey wrench. Assuming I could still lift furniture when I got there.

  Which seemed doubtful as my symptoms worsened. Halfway down those rickety stairs I felt surrounded by nasty invisible creatures with stingers and claws, leaving flesh quivering after each phantom slash. Figments, I diagnosed. Your brain is making up stories to explain unpleasant signals from a dying body, Keep moving.

  Fine. But two steps later the imaginary pests were joined by unsettling bursts of vivid recollection — sensory waves that made me stagger on the stairs.

  The unmistakable floral aroma of Chavez Avenue Park.

  Spears and shields displayed above a dead man’s open coffin.

  Ritu in tears, consoled by a figure with skin like luminous tin.

  Sneaking past a trio of boys tormenting each other in a yard -

  — then turning to see a gun in the hand of grinning ghost …

  These unsorted memories didn’t rise from personal experience, or any ditto I recall inloading. They had to be delusions. Yet their déjà vu familiarity was hurtfully intense, like the first time I ever rolled my Standing Wave in clay, or witnessed a scene from several points of view, or looked directly into my own eyes without a camera or mirror.

  Awakening trapped in a liquid-filled vessel.

  Viewing cuneiform tablets and Venus figurines -

  — and pain liked I never imagined, machine-generated, amplifying my soul-undertone, while rubbing to erase everything else about me -

  Stumbling under this barrage of frenzied images, I could also hear people yelling across the room. Beta and Ritu for sure, and maybe others, all of them sounding so-slow as time seemed to creep more gradually with each passing second. Few of their frantic words were clear. Anyway, their passions seemed immaterial as I paused on the bottommost stair, a foot wavering above the laboratory floor.

  Somehow I knew that one more step would make things even worse. Glancing left, I saw that I was almost lined up with the gray and red golems — spreadeagled across from each other while the pendulum crisscrossed slowly between them. The nearest ditto — dark gray — turned its head quarter-profile toward me, looking almost familiar to my bleary eyes.

  Then, unexpected and unbeckoned, quavering words entered my head.

  realAlbert looks like hell. Sweaty and pale. Shaking. A mess.

  What was that? Another symptom?

  No distractions, I vowed. Got to keep my rendezvous with a folding chair, just meters away.

  Taking another step dropped me down those final inches to the floor -

  — completing the alignment.

  And suddenly the sky seemed to crash on me! The intruding voice went basso profundo, filling my head with urgent-compulsive commentary in present tense:

  Is realAlbert Dying?

  Will He Perish Soon? What If My Organic “Anchor” Suddenly Lets Go During These Final Moments Before the Glazier Peaks?

  Estimating …

  It Seems the Death Whiplash Could Give My Waveform a Boost Against Yosil. It Might Even Hurl His Obnoxious Specter out of Here!

  What the hell? Stabbing pain shot through my parietal lobes. I swayed from the bizarre thoughts pouring through me. It felt like ditto-inloading, only far more intense and alien.

  My Foe’s Attacks Grow More Desperate with Each Pendulum Swing. No Compromise. If He Can’t Have the Prize No One Will!

  Yosil and I May Annihilate Each Other, Spewing the Glazier Forth Unguided, Rampaging on a Plane of Reality That Society’s Defenses Aren’t Even Equipped to Detect. All Those Doomed People in the City, About to Suffer Writhing Deaths … I Can’t Let Them Be Sacrificed in Vain.

  Daunted by the sheer size of this entity, by its booming thoughts, I wondered, How could it have anything to do with me?

  Then again, how could it not? You don’t read the minds of other people. Only different versions of yourself.

  realAlbert Begins to Understand! I’ll Help Him, Before the Pendulum Swings Back.

  He’s Dying Anyway. When He Sees What’s at Stake, He’ll Do the Right Thing.

  How Fitting If My Creator Joins Me the Very Moment When It Will Do the Most Good!

  That thundering narration, like foam on a tidal wave, was only the surface layer of a mammoth inloading. I cried out, clutching my head as events of several days flooded my battered brain across a link that was unbuffered, unprotected. Coalescing from the raucous clamor were key data -

  — what became of my graydit that went missing at Kaolin Manor, back on Tuesday. Enhanced and multiplied a million-fold, it now stood as part of a great machine whose terrifying purpose was starting to dawn on me -

  — and who torched my house and garden, a rogue ditto who murdered its own rig. The very one now riding that pendulum, screaming its head off. In a fraction of a second, I grasped why … and what it means to be an “anchor” -

  — and what I was being offered …

  — and the cost.

  Our Patterns Mesh. Despite a Befuddled Brain, realAl Partakes of My New Vision. With Growing Awe, He Perceives the Soulscape in Its Fallow Beauty, Barely Touched by Some Algae Flecks Along the Shore.

  Look Deeper, Albert. See How the Soulscape Emerged from the Limitless Inherent Potentialities of the Dirac Sea. Dormant for Ten Billion Years, It Awaits an Entity Who Can Observe. Someone Able to Collapse All the Quantum Probabilities with a Finesse Never Imagined by Theorists …

  Stop!

  All That Technobabble Comes from ditYosil! While His Specter Slices Through the Standing Wave, He Keeps Trying to Impose His Viewpoint on the Divine.

  How Many More Cycles Before Our Conflict Shatters Everything?

  Resolution Depends on realAlbert.

  Decide! I Tell the Small Organic Man That I Once Was. Decide Now!

  Our thoughts weren’t in synch. Time operated differently for that altered and amplified version of “me,” its voice surging and then muting in waves. I needed several intense seconds of instruction before my slower organic mind grasped the outlines — the elegant discovery made by Ritu’s genius father. And his plan to fulfill the life arc of a species.

  How many times have I scorned those fringe mystics who took the word “soulistics” literally? Beyond our banal power to live parallel lives, they saw implicit hope — or tacit dread — that humanity had crossed a line, embarking on a new destiny. And here I was, being offered a key role in the greatest thing since the Big Bang!

  To earn it, all I must do was die.

  Isn’t That Happening Anyway? Just Hasten It by a Few Minutes, I felt urged.

  Grab Any Tool. A Bludgeon Will Do.

  Wavering on my feet, I spotted a sharp pencil on a nearby console.

  Before even willing it — and maybe I didn’t — the slender thing was in my hand, the tip approaching my right eye.

  One hard shove and a new age would be born.

  “Oh God,” I groaned.

  And my own voice came right back, emerging from my mouth with a reply.

  “Yes. I Am Here. And Be Assured, This Will Serve Me Well.”

  63

  Catch the Conscience …

  … five fateful seconds …

  Lying on a cold stone floor as chilly dawn broke through an open window, I hefted my sole weapon — the bent and baked leg that I wrenched from my own body.

  I’d have one chance to hurl it right.

  Clickety went the missile launcher while a screen glowed READY.

  The meddlesome voice that had guided me here was gone. I kind of missed having an audience for my effort.

  Here goes, I thought. My one functioning limb — a hand and arm — throbbed with all its might as I threw …

  64

  …of the King

  … and
another twenty …

  The pencil tip approached my eye. Groaning an oath, I felt quick encouragement from the nearby god-machine. One good shove and a new age would be born, fulfilling a myriad forlorn dreams.

  Anyway, I’ve slain myself many times, ever since I turned sixteen, right?

  But those were dittos.

  My org-body protested against the plan. It bawled to survive!

  The same clash with instinct repelled realMaharal from his own project a week ago, fleeing recklessly across the desert night.

  “But You’re Made of Sterner Stuff,” my own mouth answered. “Unite with Me. It Will Be Just Like Inloading.”

  A day is enough for a ditto, when it knows it will rejoin a larger self. Wasn’t this the same sort of thing? Saints walked into ovens with less assurance than I was being offered.

  Okay, I thought, as determination flowed into my arm.

  The pencil tip trembled -

  Suddenly a flare of amber warning lights erupted nearby, drawing my reflex gaze.

  WARNING! WARNING!

  MISSILE LAUNCHER MALFUNCTION

  FIRING SEQUENCE INTERRUPTED

  Holo diagnostics zoomed toward an awkward-looking foreign object, obstructing a tilted ramp. News of this sabotage provoked sharp resonance between the gray, the red, and all their virtual copies.

  Why Aren’t the Rockets Flying?

  Ah, Here’s the Cause — Another Me!