by John Barnes
“That’s not a favor, it’s a pleasure,” he says, smiling grimly. His lips move in some sequence of words she doesn’t catch, and the sound is dead on the phone for a moment; whatever he just told his home phone system, it breaks up the call instantly. Probably scrambles anything trying to trace it, too.
Berlina has a little extra time, and not only is it doubtful that anyone traced that call, it’s also improbable that they would have an agent in place way out here. So she decides to opaque her windows, tie a kerchief around her hair, slip into her gruds, and go for some plain old diner food, the stuff she likes best in the world.
It’s a nice day; this high in the mountains bright summer days are usually not too hot, and the view around the town is spectacular. People nod and smile at her a lot, and this triggers a funny thought; used to be that Utah was a bad place to be black, and rural Utah was worse. Not anymore… the Europeans saw to that. When they expelled “non-natives” and “cleaned” their miserable little continent….
Be honest with yourself, Berlina, you loved living there, it was your home, this is sour grapes—since they won’t let you back in you’re pouting. But if they’d re-open you’d go back in a minute.
She hates giving herself good advice, and besides that wasn’t the point. What made all the difference in Utah, and for that matter in Mississippi and Detroit and everywhere, was the Little Cold War, the three-way tensions between the USA, Japan, and Europe over trade, influence, seabed and space resources, and access to Third World markets. As the Japanese and Europeans became “the guys we’ll have to fight” and identified as racist, racism became more and more “un-American.” Half of these smiling and waving people would probably throw up at the idea of letting her use their shower, but being friendly costs them nothing and reminds them that they aren’t European. She’s heard stories that back in the old days there were refugees from Russia who lived for years on the largess of anti-communists; she suspects that her tendency to wear the green-red-black tricolor of Europe, color reversed, on her shirts and especially on the seats of her pants, is giving away her status.
She wonders if they’re as polite to plain old born-here black people as they are to Afropeans.
Well, no matter—it’s a beautiful day. Moreover, the diner she finds is in the real classic style, with checkerboard linoleum, a steel-and-formica counter, and nice old-style rotating Naugahyde bar stools. She follows her personal rule and orders the thing on the menu with the corniest (and therefore, to her, most American) name—the “Chili Dog Over Mac,” which turns out to be a hot dog with sloppy joe sauce on a bed of macaroni and cheese.
The place is not at all crowded; there’s a young family in there, one of those that seems to have a number of kids just beyond counting, all spaced about a year apart, mostly quiet and mostly behaving, but the statistical population is so large that there is always some noise and some misbehavior going on; it rises and dwindles but never falls to zero.
The father, a dark-haired young man in a white shirt, and the mother, who is alarmingly well-made-up, slim, and pretty for someone who has presumably had all those kids, are both reasonably attentive to the kids and on top of the chaos, but it’s clearly a battle, and Berlina finds it fun to watch them. She stops watching the street for a while and concentrates on her own dish of strawberry ice cream and the logistics of two parents, each with a cone in one hand, managing to eat their own ice cream while constantly wiping young chins.
Once all the cones are at the point where accidents are unlikely, the family departs in a cloud of young chatter, and Berlina looks back toward the front of the restaurant only to be startled by a young woman who has sat down, quietly, at her table.
“Hi,” the girl says. “Sorry to disturb you, but you’re not from around here, are you?”
“Just passing through,” Berlina says. It is just a tiny bit unnerving to be paid attention to in a place where she is trying not to be conspicuous.
The girl doesn’t look like anything other than an ordinary college girl; she’s not wearing makeup, and her dress doesn’t type her as part of any campus group, except that it’s fairly form-fitting and could have been in fashion any time in the last forty years. If it suggests anything, it’s just a slight conservatism. The girl smiles. “No connections here?”
“None really. Are you always this inquisitive?”
“God, no, but I need a ride out of town and I’d rather not be traced. I’m not a criminal or anything. It’s just that there’s this guy I’ve been staying with, and, well… he’s nice, but he’s older, and he’s kind of serious and I’m really not—”
Berlina asks the obvious question. “Is he dangerous?”
“Only if you consider getting a lot of mail and phone calls a danger. I suppose I will eventually, anyway, because he’ll put out tracer letters, and who can live without logging on, these days? I just got one the other day from an old boyfriend who’s still down in Mexico and rode out Clem Two there.” The girl takes a sip of the soda she’s holding and then says, “Listen to me chattering. This is ridiculous. It’s taken me half the day to get up the nerve to ask someone for a ride. I’m no good at asking for favors.”
Berlina grins at her. “Me either. If I told you I have a secret or two of my own, and I don’t really want to advertise which way I passed, can you be discreet?”
“I don’t sound like it, do I? But I can, really.” She brushes her long brown hair away from her face, up off the front of the stretchy white dress, and Berlina sees why an older guy with money might take an interest in this girl; she’s got a figure to envy, and besides the clear, bright eyes, there’s an attractive set of cheekbones and full lips. “I only have three suitcases of stuff—I got here with two, god, the guy’s been so generous but… well, if you’re curious I guess I can tell you on the ride, that is if you’re willing to give me a ride—”
“Anything for a lurid story,” Berlina says, grinning.
“Hope it won’t be a disappointment. My name’s Naomi Cascade, by the way.” She sticks her hand out like a man, and Berlina solemnly shakes it.
“I’ll tell you mine in a bit—it’s really necessary to keep it secret for a while. You haven’t even asked which direction I’m going.”
“Oh, there’s something romantic about going ‘anywhere but here,’ don’t you think?” Naomi says. “Besides, to go anywhere from here you take 70, and that means either over to the Co or down into the Az. Either one will suit my purposes just fine.”
Berlina nods, and the deal is done. They get Naomi’s three suitcases, and climb into Berlina’s car. Naomi takes a seat in the back, since Berlina will be climbing back herself as soon as they are on a guidestrip, and they’re off and running.
Originally Berlina had figured on backtracking at first to Denver, then heading north to take 80 over to the Ca, thus making it less likely that (if anyone managed to trace the origin of the call) the call to Harris Diem will be connected to her. But the slight compromising of her cover is enough to decide her on another course—she’s going to go right down through the Az, into Sonora State, and re-enter the States through Tijuana.
Once they’re rolling, she casually says to Naomi, “So, have you ever watched Sniffings?” and takes off her kerchief. The girl’s eyes get huge, and Berlina doesn’t think she’s ever seen a human being look quite so impressed before. Certainly not with Berlina.
In two hours they’re not just friends, but on their way to being good friends, and it’s starting to occur to Berlina that she might just want to hire a personal assistant. Naomi has some stuff she left with her friends at the U of the Az, so it’s sort of a logical thing to do.
Besides, this gives her a chance to duck down Utah 24, past Goblin Valley, and weave around through some desert and national forest, confusing her track further. The two of them sit back to share a couple of large lemonades, watch the land roll by, and work on becoming better friends.
On the twenty-ninth of July, Louie Tynan gets a sixteen-te
rabyte message from Carla; it’s her summary of what happened in Dhaka when the ongoing fighting in the aftermath of Global Riot Two was overtaken by the Bay of Bengal storm surge. He finds that he literally can’t get it out of his mind; as he catches package after package shot from the moon (they are coming faster now, and with less space between, and the train has grown to seventy-eight packages, with Good Luck still at the rear) he keeps finding that the images of a quarter of a billion corpses washed into the ocean… and of the hideous things that happened before… and yet, again, of the courage and faith of so many….
He finds it pulls him apart; when he checks his body, he discovers that it is retching and sick with the feeling.
There will be more Bay of Bengals. The great storm surges will hit, here and there. And though the loss of Bangladesh, much of Burma, and West Bengal, surely produced about as big a loss of human life as can be managed in a single blow, Louie knows—better than anyone, because he can experience more than anyone—what the loss of even one life is. And his imagination is equally good for very large numbers.
The horror of it will not leave him.
He hates being in his body more than ever, when he finally must. There is so much to do, and here he is spending his time being too slow and stupid to be of any use to anyone. He does pullups and pedals a stationary bicycle, so that he can have muscle tissue, but his collectors and reactors are supplying the energy of a small atom bomb every second or so. He plays one-man racquetball to maintain his eye-hand coordination when his reaction time as a human being is three million times what it is as a spaceship. He crams organic material through his guts to oxidize it for energy when his solar cells, He-3 fusion plants, and fast fission reactors provide him many billions of times the energy. Hell, even the direct physical sensation of yanking his dong pales beside the physical sensations Carla sends to him and he adds to, in which they both experience sex with both complete minds and bodies.
In his virtual self, if he wishes, he can sit down to a fine meal in front of a warm fireplace, comfortably naked on a chair that fits him perfectly, served by spectacularly beautiful, eager, willing women. Out here, alone in his body, he can open a pouch of banana pellets or dried meat in this little metal can he lives in, where the smell of machine oil, leftover Louie, and the toilet compete with each other, on a flat seat that is comfortable only because he weighs less than a pound on it.
He is aware of what all the Freudians, Tantrics, hedonists, and sensei would tell him about hating his body. But he doesn’t hate physical experience. He hates limited physical experience, he hates being a cripple, he hates knowing how much more he could be by just plugging back in….
And, damn it, this bag of meat and guts is the weak link, anyway.
The thought seems to make him dizzy because it is so stunningly obvious.
He has been steadily shoring up and strengthening the ship for the last several days; robots crawling all along the immense coils from unit to unit have been fixing the occasional structure that gives way under the strain of the huge momentum changes, or sometimes replacing a small piece that drops off entirely.
But for about the last eighteen hours he hasn’t repaired or shored up anything; there’s no point. He got done. Nothing more is going to break. Everything else is able to resist ten times—a whole order of magnitude—the jerk that his body can endure, and since jerk must be held well under that level, there has been no reinforcing to do.
This body in which he sits is the weak link.
Another thought occurs to him; there must be some reason why he didn’t think of this sooner.
But there is an answer. His “other self,” the “real self” he merges with again whenever he puts on the scalpnet, goggles, and muffs, is much bigger than he is, and it can choose what to download and what not… undoubtedly that other, bigger Louie that he just wants to merge back into right now would be perfectly capable of thinking of this—but not of suggesting it. And that’s got to be a pretty good indicator.
He sits down and laboriously types a letter to himself; it’s short and to the point. There’s no benefit in the body anymore; if Louie-the-ship cranks up the power on the catching coils, he can get a lot more momentum out of every shot coming through and his acceleration will be higher now, while he needs it most. He can get to 2026RU months ahead of schedule.
There is one Louie-the-body and he doesn’t even like being Louie-the-body. There are nine billion people on Earth right now, and at least twothirds of them live where superstorms can get them.
Sacrifice me, he writes. Be honest. I am just a small, ineffective processor that runs on too fragile a platform. Throw me away and go save humanity. I know you won’t feel good about it, Louie, but buddy, we both know it’s the thing you have to do.
The keyboard on which he is typing is “local”—it doesn’t communicate with any system bigger than itself—and that way he can send the message all at once before Louie can argue with him.
He thinks for a moment, and feeling silly—who else could this be coming from? but letters should be signed—he adds: Louie Tynan. Then he thinks for a moment and realizes that the only way to make sure Louie-the-ship does it is to order him, and adds,
That’s an order.
Regards,
Col. Louis Tynan, Expedition Commander.
He reads through it once more to think about how Louie-the-ship is apt to take this, tries to imagine himself in that situation, and feels like a complete fool, but changes “Regards” to “My love always.” It feels better, so he hits the key to send it before he can get cold feet.
He’s riding on his exercise bike and thinking about getting a cold drink of water when his own voice says, “Louie?”
“Yeah?”
“We have to talk about it, you know.”
“Naw. We don’t. Look, you’re figuring that I won’t plug back in on schedule, and you’re right. There’s no reason to include the physical pain I’m going to experience, or the sensation of committing suicide, into your personality, you know. It’s the kind of thing nobody wants to remember, and this way you won’t have to. What I’m going to do is get good and drunk just before the next package arrives—we’ve got about a fifth left from Dr. Esaun’s old private store—and then climb up to the top of the main passageway. Anything up there that’s unsecured will get thrown all the way to the bottom, muy pronto. There’s a nice heavy steel bulkhead, and though I can’t figure it quite so exactly as you can, if you go for a ninety percent instead of a twenty percent momentum capture, I figure I’ll hit it at about two hundred miles an hour, headfirst. The pain is going to be momentary.”
“With the much larger mental capacity in here, the pain can be erased entirely. And besides, you know, the memory of pain is nothing; no one can make himself even slightly uncomfortable with even the most excruciating memories.”
He pushes the bicycle harder and says, “It just seems sort of fair to this body. I mean, this body has been me for so long, and now that the ship and the moon complex and all are me… well, I guess I just feel like a part is entitled to die conscious.”
“But you’re planning to drug yourself—”
“Maybe barely conscious. If I don’t want you to have the pain, imagine how I feel about it.”
The mechanical voice, so like his own that even Louie can’t tell the difference, laughs. “There’s one little problem. You made that decision to die for the whole human race. That’s something I’d like to have in my memories. Could you put on the scalpnet and jack for another moment, just long enough for me to copy the new memories? Leave the goggles and muffs off if you don’t trust me—that way, if you have to, you can just focus on the information coming in through your senses and pull out enough concentration to take off the scalpnet.”
It’s a reasonable request; Louie admits, on reflection, that something has indeed changed inside him with his decision to sacrifice himself for the sake of the mission. “Okay,” he says, and feels silly since by the time
he spoke, Louie-the-ship probably knew from the direction he turned, or some little indicator invisible to Louie-the-body.
The funny thing is, he realizes as he reaches for the scalpnet, that he really feels like he is “Louie himself” even though he knows how much more capability and how much remembered experience Louie-the-ship has. He wonders if that is how Louie-the-ship, or for that matter Louie-on-the-moon or the wiseguys feel… or do they feel he is the one who is more real? He’ll have to ask while he’s connected—
He pulls on the scalpnet and snugs it down, its microfibers sliding around his hair to get firm contact with his skin, inducers targeting so that their millions of tiny pulses from all quarters of his brain every second can find the right axons to create the fake pulses in. Then he inserts the jack that will allow his mind and memories to be read by the machine.
His eyelids slam shut, so hard that his cheek muscles scream with pain.
There is a moment of hard motion, something in his muscles he doesn’t quite identify, and then his arms swinging with their full force bring his cupped hands up to burst his eardrums.
The pain and shock are incredible, and he reaches for the pain to give himself something to cling to, something that doesn’t come out of the machine, so that he can find the will and motor control to tear the scalpnet off—
The pain stops, abruptly, cut off like a light switch. His arms hang limp. He feels his memories going out through the jack and he rages against Louie-the-ship, furious at the betrayal, furious that he will have to die all the same (for he can’t believe Louie will let billions die to save this one old carcass) but robbed of all dignity and not trusted to do it well-He screams in frustration, and the sensation in his throat helps him again, but before he can even reach for control of his arms, his windpipe shuts all the way. The blood thunders in his veins, he reaches for that, for his pulse and the sense of pressure, anything to free him from—