The Eternity Brigade

by Goldin, Stephen

  Time became elastic, stretching out before him like a rubber band, only to snap back painfully in an instant. Sometimes the actions of the people around him seemed like a speeded-up movie, and he wanted to laugh at the comical antics, while at other times everything around him came to a dead stop and he wanted to shout to get them moving again.

  The ceiling, with its changing patterns of light and darkness, became the most fascinating object in the universe. He devoted his entire attention to it. He realized that things were happening to his body, but they never fully penetrated. He could tell he had an erection, and the tension built to a monstrous orgasm, an ejaculation that went on endlessly through time and space. But those were distractions, and he wished they would go away so he could concentrate more fully on the ceiling. That was really important.

  It was not long after that when shadows crept up over the horizon of his peripheral vision and engulfed him in a merciful darkness of sleep.

  ***

  His tongue was fuzzy and his eyeballs ached. Those were the first sensations to hit him as he drew out of the pit into which Amassa’s strange drug had cast him. His nose was stuffy; he had to breathe through his mouth. His body was naked but cool, and he felt as though he were floating in a swimming pool. Another body was pressed tightly against his—a female body, soft and smooth and delicate, her slender arms encircling him.

  “How did you get your wings?” he heard his own voice ask, as though he’d been in the middle of a conversation.

  “I had them bio-adapted when I was nineteen. Aren’t they magnificent?”

  Hawker finally opened his eyes despite the throbbing that caused. He was staring directly into Amassa’s face, and she was gazing at him with a beatific smile. The two of them were floating in the air in the middle of her bubble; she was holding both of them aloft, with her beautiful feathered angel wings spread wide apart for his inspection.

  “I’ve never seen anything quite like them.”

  Her eyes narrowed and she looked at him critically. “It’s worn off, hasn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “The outgo.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Would you like some more?”

  “No!”

  Her expression told him instantly his reply was much too vehement, and he tried to soften its impact. “That is, I… not right now. I’m not used to it, I need time to recover. Maybe later.”

  Amassa smiled and ruffled his hair. “I must remember, my darling primitive, that your body is not as adaptive as ours.”

  “I’m afraid not.” He hesitated. “How long was I… under?”

  Amassa pouted; time meant little to her, and she hated having to think about it. “Oh, about three days, I think. Does it matter?”

  Three days! Who knew what could have happened in all that time? Would the army still be searching for him, or had Singh’s ruse put them off the trail? “Where are my friends?” he asked.

  “The twisted one is still with me—he wasn’t much fun, and no one else wanted him. As for the others….” She shrugged. “They’re off somewhere. I’m not sure precisely where.”

  “Will I have a chance to see them again?”

  “Perhaps.” Amassa’s tone made it plain she was annoyed at the direction the conversation was going. “Right now, though, they’re no concern of yours. You should be more interested in pleasing me.”

  To emphasize her point, Amassa rubbed her body suggestively against his. Her smooth bare skin pressing tightly to his own had the desired effect; Hawker came quickly erect, and Amassa moved her hips slightly to allow him to slip easily inside her. She threw her entire being into a grinding motion that left Hawker gasping with raw desire.

  They spun rhythmically through the empty air, and a sudden wave of vertigo almost made Hawker lose his erection. Sensing this, Amassa redoubled her efforts and restored him to full potency. Hawker pushed from his mind the fact that they were floating in midair, refused to think about the spins and somersaults Amassa was putting them through. Amassa was right; he had to please her if he wanted to escape from this glorious, frightening prison. Hawker concentrated all his feeling into the sexual passion of their union, letting the pressure build until it exploded in a climax so intense it was painful.

  His body went limp, and Amassa lowered them both the ground, to which she gave a soft, spongy consistency. Hawker lay panting on his back while she traced the muscles of his arm with one long, delicate finger. “Would you mind if I asked you a question?” he said when he’d regained his breath.

  He could feel her fingers pause over his skin, fingernails ready to pierce him if he displeased her. “Is it about your friends?” she asked coldly.

  “Not exactly. I was just wondering whether the army was still looking for us. Technically we’re deserters, and the army doesn’t like to let deserters off too easily. Also, we stole Green away from them before they were finished studying him, and I don’t think they were very happy about that.”

  Amassa relaxed once more. “There’ve been some bulletins about fugitives, but very vague. Something about your being armed and dangerous.” She smiled, as though at a private joke. “But we know better, don’t we?”

  She was so smug, so superior, and yet Hawker knew there was nothing he could do. She had too much control. “Are you going to turn us in?”

  “Maybe, someday. Not for a while, though.” She grinned greedily. “You’re much too… entertaining.”

  “I thought you were involved with Consakannis.”

  “Oh, sometimes,” she dismissed casually. “Right now he’s over with Nya’s group, involved in something or other. He’ll wander back into my life, eventually.”

  Hawker lapsed into silence again, resting in the afterglow of the fantastic lovemaking. His body was coated with sweat, and he felt too weak to do anything. The exertion, following such a long period under the influence of the outgo, had worn him down. Right now, he couldn’t force himself to care what his future might be.

  After a while, Amassa asked, “Why did you do it? Why did you and the others desert?”

  Hawker paused and took a few deep breaths while he tried to sort the story out in his mind. “Friendship,” he said. “I didn’t like what they were doing to my friend.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Slowly and carefully, Hawker told Amassa the full story, from Green’s malformed dubbing through the decision to free him from the laboratory to the actual escape and flight, ending with their “rendezvous” with Amassa and her friends. He was hoping to win her sympathy, thinking that if he told the story well enough he might actually touch her heart and gain her support. But even as he spoke, he could see it wouldn’t work. Amassa had no soul, no pity. The very word “friendship” was not the same for her, and the concept of self-sacrifice to help another was alien to her culture.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen to him now,” Hawker concluded sadly. “We got him away from the army, which is what he wanted, but this isn’t exactly what we had in mind for him, either.”

  He shook his head. “Maybe it would be kinder to kill him and put him out of his misery. But I just can’t do that. He’s been my friend forever, it seems. I owe it to him to try everything possible to save him.”

  “And it wouldn’t do any good, even if you did kill him,” Amassa said. “The army would just dub him again, and start the whole process over.”

  “At least that’s one thing they can’t do.”

  “Everyone and everything can be dubbed,” Amassa said firmly.

  “You don’t understand. Philaskut told us Green’s crystal shattered right after they dubbed him. That’s the whole problem—they can’t re-create his pattern.”

  “You;re the one who doesn’t understand. Maybe his original pattern was destroyed, but they can still make a copy of him the way he is now.”

  Hawker tensed. “What?”

  “I looked at him closely while you were under outgo. He’s got a transmitter in his ne
ck, the same as I do.” She stretched out her throat to show him the tiny button implanted just below the skin surface.

  Looking at the device, Hawker remembered Philaskut saying everyone on Cellina had one. Self-consciously he put a hand on his own neck, but felt nothing. “What exactly is that?” he asked, trying to sound much more casual than he felt.

  “It’s a transmitter. It makes readings of my molecular pattern and sends them to Rez Central, where my file is continuously updated. If I die, Rez Central will rez me exactly the way I was the instant before my death. Or, say, if I had my leg cut off, they could go back in the files to my pattern at the moment before my leg was cut off and rez me whole again.”

  Hawker buried his face in his hands and gritted his teeth in frustration. All of this had been for nothing! They may have saved this particular edition of Green—but the army could dub him as he was before he was kidnapped, and poor Dave would have to go through that hell all over again. All this running, all this hiding—it was just a study in futility! He wanted to scream at his own stupidity.

  Instead, he laughed. The hysteria burst out in gales of laughter that had tears pouring from his eyes and his nose running like a faucet. His whole body shook, and he turned over on his side away from Amassa.

  “What’s funny?” his captor asked.

  It took a few seconds for Hawker to bring himself back under control. “It’s ridiculous,” he said, wiping at the tears with the back of his forearm. “Here I am, worried about the army tracking us down, and they probably don’t even care. They’ve got Dave in their lab again, conducting the same old tests.”

  “I don’t think so,” Amassa said. “In the bulletins, they definitely mentioned they wanted this one back if possible.”

  “Why? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “I didn’t pay much attention. Something about minute differences between the original and the dub. All I know is they wanted to make sure they couldn’t get the original before they made a dub. It sounded silly to me, too, but that’s what they said.”

  Her fingers began kneading Hawker’s muscles in a sensual pattern, starting at his shoulder blades and working slowly down his body, distracting him from further thoughts.

  Some time later, when Amassa went out to visit some friends, Hawker was left alone in the bubble with Green. At first the twisted man was in his unfortunate state of semiconsciousness, but after a while it cleared. He looked at Hawker and smiled. “Hi,” he said. “Down from your trip yet?”

  “You know about that?”

  “I was conscious a few times and saw you. It looked horrible.”

  Hawker shuddered. “I don’t ever want to go through that again. Maybe they think it’s fun, but I can’t take it. You were right about them—they’re all heartless bastards.” He went into detail about the conversation he’d had with Amassa.

  Green was very thoughtful after Hawker finished. Hawker, not knowing what else to say, ended with the apology, “I’m sorry, Dave, I tried to help, really I did. I guess I kinda fucked up again, huh?”

  “It’s not all lost yet,” Green murmured

  “Huh? What do you mean? Whether they capture us or kill us, they can still make more dubs of you.”

  “But the dub isn’t as good as the original. It’s like a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy, it gets slightly fainter each time. The difference might not mean much in everyday terms. But in my case, they want to study the pattern as it was originally created, and minute differences could be very significant. That’s why they haven’t dubbed me yet—they want to make sure the original version is unavailable before they work on a copy.”

  “Big deal. They won’t wait forever. If they haven’t found you in a couple of weeks, they’ll probably take their chances with a dub anyway.”

  “But if a pattern can be destroyed once, it can be destroyed twice.”

  Hawker blinked. “What’s that mean?”

  “They can’t dub from my original pattern, because that broke. If we could get to this Rez Central, wherever it is, and destroy the file they’ve got on me there, they couldn’t use that pattern, either.”

  “But how can we get in there? If that’s where they store the records of everyone on Cellina, it must be a very important place. They’ll have thousands of guards all the time.”

  “Not necessarily.” Green smiled, a particularly grotesque expression on his twisted face. “It might even be one of the least guarded places on the whole planet.”

  “I don’t believe that. They’d take good care of it. Just think what would happen if anything went wrong.”

  “Oh, I’m sure they’ve kept it safe from enemy attack—probably buried underground or something, with lots of shielding. But as for intruders, why bother keeping guard? Everyone on Cellina is in the same boat—damaging the records might damage themselves. I don’t think anyone in the world—or at least in this world—would jeopardize his own immortality like that. The way you’ve described it, this culture is based on an implicit faith in the inevitability of resurrection. Nobody would attack Rez Central. Getting in there might not be the problem; finding out which records are mine and destroying them may be a bit tougher.”

  His voice trailed off, and a glazed look came over his eyes, indicating he’d slipped from reality once more. Hawker sighed and moved away again, going to a chair to await Amassa’s return.

  ***

  Over the next two days, Hawker managed to elicit more information about Rez Central out of Amassa. Although she’d never actually died herself, she had been there on five previous occasions to restore her body after several “accidents” had removed one or more vital parts. Hawker had to be careful to phrase his questions so she didn’t suspect he had more than a casual interest in the subject, but he learned enough to draw up tentative plans.

  Rez Central was an enormous complex several hundred kilometers away. Its job was so vast—monitoring and recording the patterns of every person on Cellina—that it took an entire mountain to house it. The mountain’s core had been hollowed out and filled with ever-increasing data servers and resurrection chambers. The complex was entirely automated; no humans worked there. Amassa had seen no guards or defenses of any kind when she was there—but then, she was not a trained soldier, and hadn’t been planning any attacks on the facility.

  Hawker talked the situation over with Green when the two men were alone and Green was coherent. The cripple digested the information and made some tentative plans, and also formulated a hypothesis for why the army was not using this process on the soldiers.

  “They seem to need a whole mountain to receive and store the signals from these little transmitters. I can think of two drawbacks: it’s not very mobile, and it’s vulnerable to enemy attack. They can probably store all our old patterns in something the size of a briefcase, which is easier to carry around and harder for the enemy to find and destroy. What they sacrifice in our continued memory, they make up in flexibility.”

  Finally there was another party for all the people in this bubble city, and Hawker persuaded Amassa to take him along when she connected her bubble to the others. She was rather jealous of him, but he argued that unless he had a chance at some variety he might go stale. Actually, variety of the sort this group could offer was the last thing he needed—but he did have to contact Belilo and/or Symington again if he was going to continue helping Green.

  As he’d feared, he was greeted by swarms of people to whom everything new was an adventure. He was pinched and poked and petted and prodded by men and women who insisted most vigorously that Amassa must allow them to dub this fine primitive. Amassa, knowing full well she possessed an original in a world of copies, remained noncommittal.

  After two hours of encounters, sexual and otherwise, with a strange assortment of people, Hawker finally found Symington and managed to pry him away from his own circle of admirers. The two men found a quiet corner to talk in, and related to one another their experiences over the past few days.

  “It’s scar
y being a slave,” Symington admitted, “but I have to hand it to them; they can do things I wouldn’t even have dreamed of. Tesaak—she’s the woman who has me most of the time—she thinks of some of the kinkiest things to do. She dubs a copy of herself before she lost her virginity and watches while I deflower her—and then she joins in, and we both fuck her younger self. Then she dubs a second copy of me, and we—”

  “A second copy?” Hawker tensed suddenly. “How do I know I’m talking to the real you, then?”

  “What difference does it make?” Symington smiled. “I haven’t been the real me for centuries.”

  Hawker relaxed again. “You’re right. This whole thing is so crazy.”

  “You want to hear crazy. Because I’m a primitive, they keep wanting me to kill them over and over again. They think I’m some kind of fucking gladiator. They conjure up arenas and stage battles. They want me to kill them with spears and knives and even my bare hands. It gets tiring after a while.”

  “Do you know what’s happened to Belilo?”

  Symington paused, a cloud passing across his face. “No, I, uh, haven’t heard anything since Nya took her off.”

  “Shit.” Hawker had been hoping to rescue her, too; her help would certainly be useful in the attack on Rez Central. But if they couldn’t locate her quickly and easily, they’d just have to abandon her and let her fend for herself. The longer they delayed, the more chance the army might dub Green again, and then all their efforts would be lost.

  “Listen, let’s speak in English for a while,” Hawker continued, shunting over to his native language—a language they’d hardly spoken in hundreds of years.

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Because these people have all sorts of monitors, and we can never be sure they aren’t listening in. Nobody from this time speaks English, though.”

  “You’ve got a plan, then?”

  Hawker told Symington what he’d learned about Rez Central, and about his discussions with Green. When he described their tentative plans, Symington grew contemplative.

  “Those are pretty wild assumptions you’re using,” he said.