Analog SFF, November 2005

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Margaret was very quiet for the space, perhaps, of three breaths.

  “Does everyone know about the DNA workups?” Laprada asked, brightly, as if she were suggesting charades at a dull party.

  Margaret started as if Laprada had suddenly begun to eat imaginary bugs. Laprada chattered on happily. “I'm sure not everyone has heard. We got the detailed lab work back. DNA of the two corpses is a clear match for three Occitan families known to have members in Noucatharia. They were young, like always—about ages sixteen and fourteen—and riddled with carcinomas."

  Raimbaut leaped in. “Actually, if you were profiling whoever is trying to kill Giraut, it's teenagers with Occitan ancestry, whole-body cancer, and brain-bombs."

  Dad said, “Of course it's easy to overlook something unsurprising; they're exactly like all their predecessors."

  Margaret folded her hands and sat back, in a gesture that reminded me very much of Shan. “Excellent. You were right, we did need to cover that. Any other information we should have covered and haven't? Good. Giraut, Paxa, we have one more thing. The rest of you can go."

  When the door had closed behind them, she said, “Giraut, the Board of the OSP spent its morning meeting discussing the third set of your concert. Do you even realize why?"

  “Well, of course I know why. I'm one of very few actual witnesses to the teachings of Ix, so the Ix Cycle cansos will become an Ixist sacred text. Some idiots will take it that I've gone Ixist, or even that the OSP has. Plus I welded the traditions of genocided peoples onto the traditions of genocidal peoples, something we discourage, according to guidelines I wrote. Does that cover it?"

  “That does,” Margaret said. “Now, for the love of God, why? Donz de mon cor, if it were just me, I'd shrug, and say make and sing whatever songs you like. But the Board has to come up with a policy about your performing and recording the Ix Cycle. I would like that policy to be ‘leave Giraut alone.’ I need to be able to say that you told me something that will cause that to be the policy."

  It was such a good act, I felt like applauding.

  She was hiding behind the rest of the Board. They didn't have a tenth of Margaret's knowledge of artistic matters, so they might grumble and ask a lot of questions, but they would do what she told them.

  “Well,” Paxa said, very tentatively, “of course you're making the usual arguments about an artist only being effective if he appears to have his independence, and that sort of thing?""

  Margaret made a face. “I'm stalling with all the standard tricks. Sooner or later I'll need a real answer."

  After some time, Paxa prompted, “Giraut?"

  “Still thinking,” I said. “I guess the songs needed to get out into public discourse—"

  “Oh, they're that, all right,” Margaret said. “Plenty of news coverage. Your fastest takeoff ever; pre-orders are rocketing.” She sighed. “Giraut, I need a reason that people who don't give a dry turd about music will understand."

  A pause.

  Paxa coughed and said, “Giraut, you know the two of us don't usually agree about much of anything. But we're agreeing now."

  “Well,” I said, and began again, “Well.” What I wanted to say was "Well, I don't feel the need to answer further," but clearly that would not be the right answer. “Well,” I said finally. “You know those conversations we've always had over wine, about how the OSP is always somewhere in the middle about diversity and unity? You and I used to have them, Margaret, and now Paxa and I have them, oh, and Raimbaut and Laprada and Dad too, you know, I think we all do. If humanity is too unified we'll stagnate but if we're too diverse we'll fight and how the OSP is always promoting diversity where people want to just relax in to sameness, and pulling things back to the center—"

  “Chapter Two of the basic training manual,” Margaret pointed out. “Which you wrote much of, from Dji and Qrala's notes. So you're doing something to add diversity, is that what you're trying to say?"

  “Margaret, sometimes when you cut to the chase, you miss the whole movie,” I said. “Diversity within boundaries isn't really diversity, it's unity. Even if not very often, diversity has to violate boundaries. Someone needed to violate some of those boundaries. And I did it in a work centering on Ix, who might just be the most unifying figure we've got available this century, so ... I promoted unity by violating the boundaries that control diversity ... that's ... that's ... it adds up to..."

  “Incomprehensibility?” Paxa suggested.

  “I think I see what he's getting at,” Margaret said, “and that worries me."

  “You ask me for an answer, which I'm not ready to give, and then you make fun of it."

  “We'll shut up,” Paxa said.

  Margaret nodded.

  “Oh, freedom and differentness and stimulation. Everything that makes the real world wild and the virtual world tame, no matter how dull the real gets or how much running and shooting and screwing there is in the virtual. Energy you get from difference, all of that. If a free society or real art finds a line it can't cross, sooner or later it has to try. Or else all the diversity is just a fake.

  “Now, Ix and his religion are expanding into the Thousand Cultures like yeast in bread dough, shaking up all the places that were still reeling from Connect a generation or more ago. But also pulling all of us together.

  “And transgressing rules like not combining music from some traditions kicks things over. Spills them out and creates more wild differences. Keeps us out of the box. And gets Ix's message of peace between people out to more people because it's lively and interesting and even people who don't agree will have to react to the art. And all sorts of good things.

  “It was just time for this. Sometimes the cure for hardening lines of conflict is more freedom of thought, I think, if everyone is saying ‘It's either yes or no’ someone has to say ‘Why can't it be green?’”

  “Diversity begins in your own skull,” Paxa said quietly.

  “Right,” I said. “I agree, whatever that means."

  “The Board meets again in three standays,” Margaret said. “Giraut, I believe you did something you think is important and good and right. I even sort of understood some of your reasons. Now all we need is a way to make the Ix Cycle look all right to the Board. If I have that, I'll carry the argument in there and shout it into their teeth and make them listen and like it, but you have to help me. Can you come up with a simple, articulate version of those thoughts?"

  “If I could, I would have."

  Paxa raised her eyebrow, and one finger. “Only if you could have already. Maybe tomorrow you'll be able to?"

  “I'll do my best.” That would get me a few days’ reprieve.

  Margaret's satisfied look was a compliment I'd rather not have received. “You always do, Giraut. When do you start recording?"

  “First rehearsal tomorrow morning."

  “Enjoy the trip—love to your mother—Paxa, I don't envy you putting up with him while he's recording."

  “I don't envy me either,” Paxa said.

  “I just like to get things right."

  “Exactly.” They said it in unison, and, despite themselves, shared a laugh.

  * * *

  “Well,” I said, an hour later, back at our temporary apartment on Roosevelt, “Margaret was exceptionally strange and unpleasant today."

  Paxa exhaled through her nose, her jaw clamped. “I wish I understood what she's so angry at me about. You and I didn't get involved till years afterward."

  “She's not jealous because you're with me, she's jealous because she thinks I'd rather have been with you all along. Jealousy isn't rational."

  “I'll say.” Paxa's Hedon heart would always feel that jealousy was not as serious a failing as pedophilia, but definitely worse than compulsive nose-picking. “You have that soft, patient look in your eyes,” she said. “Just give me a backrub."

  “Stretch out on the bed then.” I worked the knots on her back; she warmed and relaxed under my hands.

  After a
time, she said, “Now hold me,” and I lay down and she snuggled under my arm.

  “Good job,” she said.

  “Good job at what?"

  “Something that doesn't come naturally to you. Just consoling and being there. I know that you want to be my big strong Occitan man and leap up onto your white charger and rescue the princess and slay the dragon with your mighty penis."

  “Ouch."

  “I didn't mean to sound harsh—"

  “Just the image. Dragons are supposed to breathe fire."

  We lay there and watched the household robots work, until they ran out of things we trusted them to do by themselves.

  Our newest robot, the chamberlain, rolled into the springer, its upper bar hung with all my shirts.

  Seconds later, it rolled back through the gray mist of the springer, from the house we were renting in Noupeitau, forty-six light years away, into the closet, and emerged with most of my pants. It had the previous four chamberlains’ memories, but I was still training it in applying them. “Chamberlain, clean, press, hang; dupe anything with holes, faded dyes, or frayed seams."

  “As you wish, sir,” the robot said.

  “Why do you do that?” Paxa asked.

  “Do what?"

  “Order all your robots to say things like ‘yes sir’ and ‘as you wish’ and so forth. Giraut, do you enjoy making the machines obey you?"

  I shrugged. “They're robots. They do whatever I tell them."

  “Would you enjoy it more if they were people?"

  “People have feelings!"

  “So do robots."

  “To function around people. They're robots."

  “Robot, are you equipped with pain and fear modules?"

  “Yes, ma'am,” it said.

  “This is silly,” I said. “Of course it has pain and fear. How could we train it if it didn't? Robot, do you have pride or dignity?"

  “Currently I do not have those modules, sir. They are not recommended for a robot with my duties, sir, but if you wish I can order them, sir."

  Paxa stuck her tongue out at me, so I suppose the argument was still friendly. “No, you're fine as you are,” she said to the robot. “We are very pleased with you. Do you have a module to feel pleasure when I tell you that?"

  “Yes, ma'am,” it said.

  “Then we are very pleased with you. You may return to your regular duties."

  “Thank you, ma'am.” It rolled through the springer, back to our rented house in Noupeitau.

  “Now what was all that about?” I asked.

  “I'm just appalled that a man I love can treat a thinking, feeling being the way you do. I wonder if maybe you'll treat me like that some time."

  “It's a rolling armoire, Paxa, it just feels and thinks for our convenience. It has fear so that if the house is on fire it will flee outside and not waste the money we spent on it, loyalty so it will grab as much of our stuff as it can, pain so it won't take it through the fire. Pleasure so if we like something it does for us, it will remember to do it for us next time. It has the feelings we need it to have. That's nothing like relations to another human being. The robot is just a complex of things it knows how to do, experiences it remembers, and a sense of when to do them."

  “And what is a human being in a psypyx?” she asked.

  “A human being. The OSP expended a lot of blood and money to establish that."

  “But a psypyx is just a piece of black plastic the size of a thimble. And it doesn't even talk or move the way the robots do, or think and dream like the aintellects—"

  “Paxa, what is this about?” I didn't want to become angry. She might be picking a fight, but she did that very rarely.

  “Remember that time you got frustrated with the chamberlain that couldn't get right how you like your shoes shined? Three before this one, remember?"

  I shrugged. “I had a tantrum, I'll admit."

  “You ordered it to upload and store its memory, and you made it order a replacement for itself, and then instead of selling it used—"

  “It's not nice to sell a defective robot—"

  “You sent it into the regenner to be disassembled and recycled into raw materials. You didn't even turn it off first."

  “Paxa, I am not going to do that to a human being. And it isn't the same thing anyway. And I don't know what's going on. Did you become a robots'-rightser overnight?"

  “No.” She looked down at her feet. “I want to tell you something important, something I think is wonderful, and I'm afraid to say it, so I'm thinking about everything about you that has ever bothered me, and the way you're callous toward robots matters more, now."

  “Now what? What's changed?"

  “Don't be angry."

  I took a deep breath and said, “Paxa, I can't promise not to react, but if I lose my temper I'll go in the next room and kick the furniture—the non-sentient furniture. Okay?"

  “Okay.” She sighed. “There's just this thing I never told you.” She sat on the bed, holding herself in her wrapped arms, looking at her feet. “For a long time after Piranesi was killed, with no psypyx left behind—for me, it was the end of the world. That's why I didn't accept the accelerated grief treatments, and mourned him for more than two stanyears. I think I was expecting to pine away and die; I thought just before I did I'd have my psypyx wiped too, go off to the void with Piranesi. You know how much I care for you, but you also know..."

  “That I will never be Piranesi Alcott.” I said it quietly, I think without bitterness. It was just true. Part, maybe most, of Paxa's heart was buried beside him, overlooking the Western Ocean from a hilltop in Hedonia.

  “Yes, thank you for saying it. So for all these stanyears that you and I have been together—while I recovered with you as my friend, while we became lovers and partners and then a comfortable old couple—this is the hard part to tell you—every time the OSP requires me to get psypyx recordings, I have been wiping them as soon as they were made."

  She looked for a reaction; I must have looked blank. She shrugged. “I just punch the erase as soon as I wake up. Never even gave them time to do a brain-body type on me. I don't even know what my type is.

  “I was doing that so my affair with you will be gone from my memory whenever I finally die and come back."

  At least this was a piece small enough to understand. “Someone would tell you, or you'd read about it in a document—"

  “Oh, I'd know about it, of course, but I wouldn't feel it. When I came back I wanted to be as if I had just left Piranesi that morning. And if that recording I made a few days before his death was the oldest recording of me, that's who I'd be. I had special instructions in my will not to use any newer copy if one got made or saved by mistake. You see? That's what I chose to do, every three weeks when the OSP made us record a psypyx again. That was my choice."

  “It's always been your choice, Paxa. I thought at first you were having an affair with me to recover before finding someone else to be serious about. Eventually I realized you didn't want to be serious about anyone, ever, again, and that was why you stayed."

  “It was. It's different, now.” She clutched herself more tightly than before. “Giraut, I don't want to lose our times together. I'm going to have a current psypyx made, and keep it, and change my will."

  “I'm honored,” I said. I was, and I didn't know what else to say. Part of me wondered, what if she had died on a mission before now? I would only have found out when they went to revive her. But what I didn't know hadn't hurt me then, and now it never would. Rather than try to say more, I just kissed her.

  Some time later, I said, “So what did this have to do with ‘robot abuse'?” (I said the phrase as a joke but she seemed not to notice it).

  “There are things that are acceptable in a friend-and-lover that I'm not sure about in a life-companion,” she said. “These last few weeks I've been looking at everything about you. I've noticed the way you stand up to Margaret for me, every time, even though you're still in love with her. I
've noticed that even though you sometimes behave very badly, you do apologize and try to make amends and rarely try to defend it. And so on. Watching and thinking. And then I was just about to tell you, and you were harsh to that robot—did you know it's very, very afraid of you? It knows what you did, once, to another chamberlain. Do you read their emotion logs at all?"

  “Never,” I admitted. “If I did, I doubt that I would care."

  “Well, and so ... Giraut, cruelty to machines isn't something that makes me say never, never, never, but it is still cruelty, and it did stop me, just then. And I had to remind myself to go through with it. Can you try to be kinder?"

  “I can try. I've done harder things for you many times, gladly. And really, I would never treat you or any other real person like that. Really."

  “I know you believe that."

  I kissed her again, afraid of more discussion. I wasn't entirely sure I would pass whatever test this was.

  We had found a window that matched Trois-Orléans local solar time to Noupeitau local solar time closely enough to avoid spring lag, though it would still feel a little odd, crossing over at noon, to have had fourteen hours from midnight to noon, and then have less than ten hours from noon to midnight. The robots finished in plenty of time and went off to take care of unpacking and laying our things out where they belonged.

  We took a last glance around to make sure everything was in place, then stepped through the springer in one wall of the hotel room, forty-six light years in one single step onto a crowded, busy street between the spires and arches of Noupeitau.

  Paxa coughed with mild springer sickness, the daylight went from golden straw to medium amber, and the slight increase in gravity felt as if we were on an elevator that had started with a lurch.

  “Bull's-eye noon,” I said.

  Arcturus, dead overhead, was a tiny dot, barely more than an extraordinarily brilliant star, surrounded by a tight circle of gold, a broader ring of blue, and a most-of-the sky circle of mauve, and the horizon was rimmed in crimson. Bull's-eye noons usually happen the day after a big thunderstorm clears the air of Wilson's endemic natural pollution. “It's going to be a really nice afternoon.” I took Paxa's hand.