Wilson was almost exactly between Darks, the every-six-stanyear continental fires that dimmed the skies of my homeworld. The fine black soot never fully cleared from the atmosphere, so that Arcturus's already ruddy light was exaggerated into almost blood-red at dawn and dusk, but today the veil of fine carbon particles in the atmosphere was much thinner than usual. Colors became garish. Increased visual acuity revealed the shadowing on buildings as carbon smears. Robots were scrubbing the sidewalks.
“How often do people here need treatment for lung cancer,” Paxa asked, “with all the horrible stuff you breathe?"
I shrugged. “All of us have a few spare lungs grown and waiting in cryo. My mother has had two replacements so far, and Dad had one before he moved into his clone body. How much skin work does a Hedon need?"
She laughed. “Fair enough.” Hedonia was a culture of pale-skinned nudists on an equatorial desert coast. “Still, I'd rather need a skin graft than a lung replacement."
We descended a wide staircase into Palace Square, where, at tables under dozens of thick-boled oaks, Noupeitauans came to sit, eat, drink, argue, do nothing, and watch people.
The jovent costumes of my youth (flowing tapi, clinging tunic, billowing breeches, and elegant boots) were long gone, and so were the full dresses and skirts (and, alas for my tastes, the plunging necklines and waist-length hair) of the donzelhas. Still, Occitan men wore their fashionable jackets, tunics, and slim straight-leg trousers tucked into lower, square-cut boots in a way that recalled the bravoes of the past, and the fuller pants and occasional slim skirts on women had a grace and a certain nonsaique that still marked them as Occitan.
“You're having thoughts,” Paxa said.
“I often do. But, yes, I'm a little sad. Thinking ... if you had died in one of the fights a couple of nights ago, I would have just found out you had kept your psypyx out of date, and that you wouldn't be coming back with our shared memories. And this square would be the loneliest place in human space."
“Oh.” Paxa shrugged. “But we're here. And human space is covered with good places to be, and this is one of them. And tomorrow I will go in and get my psypyx made and not wipe it. Even find out what my type is; do you think, if she's compatible, Laprada would agree to wear me while they grow my clone body?"
“I don't know, midons, but I've just managed to make my morbidness contagious—now you're talking about dying."
“You're right,” she said, and made a face at me as if I had done it on purpose. “With all this safety and love and laughter around you, why are you mentally living in some universe where you're crying?"
“An unfortunate tendency in artists, I admit.” We took a table and commed an order to a café we could see across the square, for a light, spicy seafood soup and orange-slice-and-spinach salad to split, with a large carafe of Caledon apple wine.
The café's aintellect said, “The robot will arrive with your food and wine within an estimated fifteen minutes, Donz Leones. Are there children at the table, donz?"
“No need for any balloons, but there are sentimental people here. Is the red harlequin available today?"
“He should be, donz, and I will try to get him for you. Welcome back to Noupeitau, Donz Leones. We are always glad to see you again."
“Thank you."
My very first time in Noupeitau, with Dad and Mother when I was six, we had gotten steamed-sausage-with-peppers, fried dumplings, and ice cream, brought to our tables by the red harlequin robot, who was at least a hundred stanyears old even then. I had requested that same robot the first time I had brought Margaret here, shortly before we were married.
The stanyears had wheeled around, the marriage and much of my hair had gone, and the red harlequin (by then a springer-carrier rather than a food-carrier) had delivered a round of drinks to celebrate Raimbaut's getting a new body—and my being able to drink again, now that his psypyx was off me. I remembered that warm red twilit evening: Raimbaut, blissfully drinking his Hedon Gore in his brand-new four-year-old body, feet dangling from his adult-sized chair; Rebop, my dear Earth friend, grimly drinking seltzer water because she was still wearing Laprada's psypyx; and Paxa, laughing and smiling almost for the first time after Piranesi's death. “Remember the first time we were here together?"
“Oh, yes. Now Raimbaut and Laprada are in their own bodies (and into each other's),” Paxa said. “And poor Rebop—she wasn't really cut out for the physical life, was she?"
I sighed. “I hate to think of her having gone into the box.” Physically she stayed eternally in her once-charming apartment, now stale and dusty, on the beach of one of the Floridas. Psychically Rebop lived in a virtual Regency Bath, pursued by handsome young beaux; her last few letters had been about nothing but intrigues and romances in Bath, circa 1815. “Remember how she laughed when she first saw the red harlequin? She only went into the box after the evening that Caravaggio goon tried to shoot us."
“She wasn't hit."
“It was scary to a civilian. And she didn't like seeing me break his neck. Rebop really did try, Paxa, that's all I'm saying."
“I didn't mean to criticize your friend."
“I know, I know, I'm sorry. I'm very edgy. She'd be out here with us, still, if the outside world were a better place."
“And yet we love it. Giraut, let me ask you this—we're nearly immortal, we just keep living from physical age four to physical age whatever, over and over. Are we completely insane that we want to do that in a world that really is so violent and where things get broken so badly? Did Rebop maybe have the right idea, just move to someplace where you can enjoy life till you die?"
“There's no variety where she is."
“There could be at one request from her to her aintellects; she could wake up in a new world every morning forever if she wanted to. Maybe she's sane and we're crazy."
“Morbidness is definitely contagious,” I said. “You and I like that the world around us wasn't made for us and isn't there to please us."
The red harlequin robot's obscene grin, eye-dazzling diamond pattern, and ancient line of patter were exactly the same as always when it rolled up, opened the springer on its chest, and set out our food and the sweating pitcher of wine. We said nothing for a while, busy enjoying the thin, fiercely-peppered soup, picking at the chilled fruits and vegetables, and drinking the icy Caledon wine.
Something moved in the corner of my vision.
I rolled low out of my chair and came to my feet crouched and with all senses forward toward—a robot delivering food, sightless inane sweet smile on a bobbing head, a big bunch of silver balloons tied to one of its long bunny ears. Boy about seven, girl about five, older man (grandfather?) at the table.
As I watched, it presented a balloon to each child. They insisted that the older man take a balloon too. Grinning, he tied it onto his jacket's pocket flap.
“Put that away, Giraut,” Paxa said, and I looked down to see that my maser was in my hand, safety already clicked off, though at least I still had it pointed up at the sky. Decades of training ensured I succumbed only to safe madness.
“Deu,” I said. I set the safety, reholstered, took a deep breath, looked around again.
Perfectly safe tables and people under the oaks in Palace Square.
I felt my quads and hamstrings tightening, and boing-marched back to my chair in an awkward, puppet-jerked-on-a-string way. When only half your muscles are flexing, and the rest are locked, the whole world fights you.
Paxa poured me the rest of the wine and ordered more; she slid her chair around behind me. Hedons rub the human body the way Occitans sing, Thorburgers fight, or Trois-Orléanians cook—automatically, easily, the most natural thing in the world. “Deep breaths, deep breaths. We've done this before, Giraut. The thing that amazes me the most,” Paxa said, digging hard with her thumbs into the hinge muscles just above my tailbone, “is that it always takes you by surprise."
“It surprises you too."
“I meant generic, any-old-body
you, Giraut. No particular slur on you. Or me, for that matter. You were a target twice within five hours. Not low-stress, non be? This is how you react to stress after the stress is over. I've seen this before. I know what to do.” She paused in her rubbing to stand up and hug me around my chest, her hands squeezing my pectoral muscles, chin digging into my shoulder muscles. “If I minded doing this I'd long ago have left. Now get nice and drunk and let me rub your back."
It was still a beautiful day, and after all, I was home, immersed in the blessed balm of a thousand small pleasures: the way one couple walked together. An old melody from a street musician far away. Sooty-red sunlight on the golden West Dome of the Palace. The crisp-and-sweet taste of the Caledon wine, so reminiscent of the sugary apples of that cold planet Nansen. Paxa's hands.
At half past fifteen o'clock, I swallowed the scrubber. “There's time to walk, midons, instead of spring."
“Would it please you?"
“Time with you always does."
“Any Occitan male always talks like that, I know, but I like the way you always mean it."
We climbed the steps out of Palace Square. Just at the top, the daylight around us went out as if someone had thrown a switch. Wilson turns fast, and Arcturus is just a dot in its sky, so the direct light cuts off like that. Hazy red stars burst in a spatter across the sky between the towers in front of us.
“Usually in the past,” Paxa said, “When we've come here, you've gotten together with your mother in the first hour."
I didn't answer, trying to think of what to say.
After a few more steps, Paxa asked, “Is it anything awful?"
“It involves love. Of course it's awful.” I put an arm around her, resting my hand lightly on her shoulder. “Lately Mother's letters contain no gossip about friends, no news of Noupeitau, and although she's publishing papers as fast as ever, nothing about her work. Lately she writes about just one subject: how much she misses Dad."
“Oh, no.” Paxa looked slightly sick.
“She went so far as to be retested."
“I take it she's still UT?"
“They never make mistakes like that, especially not twice. She's UT. She's going to grow old and die, and it could be a decade, or a century, or never, before they have a way to get her off a psypyx. He's physically eight and he'll be able to recopy forever."
“Oh, Giraut, that's terrible."
“They decided to divorce and not write, but deciding is one thing and accepting is another."
Mother had a fine mind and a healthy brain, but they were the wrong type—actually UT wasn't a type, the U was not a Chandreseki Protocol Group and the T was not a Ramirez Microstructural Number. UT stood for Untransferrable—untransferrable because no mind-body type worked with yours, and the necessary process of growing Chandreseki bonds to a host mind, before you could rebond to your own cloned body, was impossible. It was like “being a flathead screw in a Phillips world,” as the macabre joke went—everything was the same except nothing would fit your head.
If you plugged a UT mind, like Mother's, into a host brain, they adapted normally at first but within a couple of weeks were unable to contact their own geeblok and emblok, thus unable to have emotions or short-term memories of their own. Such isolated minds shortly vanished into raving, terrified solipsism.
When Dad had died, Mother had thought she would psypyx transfer to a new body so that she and my father could emerge at about the same physical age. The first exam was when she found out she was UT.
They would keep making psypyxes until her mind began to go, but until the UT problem was solved, she was stuck, first in her body, then in inert storage.
Paxa asked, “Does it ever bother you that no one human has ever checked Chandreseki's work, or Ramirez's?"
“They're aintellects, Paxa, no human being can check their work; nobody can hold that much information in the mind all at once. And actually, I'm glad that they are aintellects."
“Really? But you have such a horror of aintellects.” She reached up to rest a finger lightly on my mouth, her hand moving as delicately and precisely as it did with a knife or garrote. “Yes, your culture never tolerated humaniformed robots and hid its aintellects as much as possible. And after the things that happened during the attempted coup, you have more reason to hate and fear them. But, you know, the same things happened to me, and I lost Piranesi, permanently. All right, so you irrationally loathe any mind that doesn't run in meat. Now, why are you glad that psypyx technology, on which we all depend, is completely developed and controlled by millions of copies of Chandreseki Corporation Aintellect Number Eighty-Four and Ramirez University Laboratories Aintellect Pi Gamma Sixteen?"
“Mother doesn't just get care from doctors who studied with Chandreseki and Ramirez, she gets it from Chandreseki and Ramirez, who have worked in every clinic in every city in human space, accumulating millions of stanyears of experience every stanyear, because within six hours, what one copy knows they all know. I also want aintellects and robots to fly any spaceship I ride on, and I prefer that if there's a dirty, dangerous job to be done, a robot go there to do it. I like everything human and physical, except when it's uncomfortable or inconvenient."
“After all these years, I'm finally turning you into a Hedon.” She pulled my face down to hers. We kissed for a long time there in the street. I wish I could say I was lost in the wordless wonder of it all, but actually I was thinking that someone could have taken a marvelous monochrome flat photo of us backlit by streetlights, perhaps for the cover of a career retrospective recording.
Mother had chosen to move into an apartment in Noupeitau. She said she had had about all the quiet country nights she could stand, on the outskirts of Elinorien, the small town up the coast where I had grown up. She had kept enough mementos to fill two large cases in the front entryway, and enough photos and vus to cover the walls everywhere else, a small fraction of what had been around when I was growing up.
My mother was one of the most distinguished scholars on the Archived Cultures, her reputation well-established in the nearer star systems (which had had time to hear of her early work, via radio) even before the springers opened the doors to rapid exchange. In certain academic circles, I would always be “Aletzanda Leones's son—didn't he have some sort of career, too?"
The Archived Cultures had once been the epitome of useless study for study's sake. During the last desperate years of the colonization era, the ethnic groups that had not yet bought an extrasolar space were ordered to record, then assimilate. They had protested, but no one was of a mind to listen. 1,228 cultures already sown among the stars was enough diversity for the human race; no one wanted to risk another Slaughter, that fourth and final world war whose memory was burned and melted into the human mental fabric as surely as the black glass that covered Central America, Honshu, Europe, eastern North America, and hundreds of smaller areas.
The accepted explanation for how such an atrocity had happened was that finally humans had just been too different from each other; if there was going to be difference, let it be in the stars, and not on Earth. The legacy of that decision was the scattering of the Thousand Cultures onto twenty-six planets (eleven of which now had ongoing violent ethnic conflict, and Briand had died of it), and the archiving of over three hundred ethnic groups.
The study of those archives had been discouraged on Earth, but out in the Thousand Cultures it had eventually flourished. Now it was becoming vital, for the decision had been made that the first few colonized worlds would hold the revived Archived Cultures, and Mother had gone from prominence in an obscure field to an important consulting role to the Council of Humanity.
Wherever you looked in Mother's apartment, endless photos and vus showed her standing next to other scholars, accepting medals, cups, and various other objects of congratulation.
I stroked the solid brass assegai that she had gotten at Chaka Home, above which Mother displayed a vu that showed her frantically trying to hang onto that heavy,
slippery object after it was handed to her. She wrestled it to the ground and sprang back up, inadvertently handing it back to the tall, elderly presenter, dressed in the traditional fatigues and beret of Chaka Home, who recoiled and handed it back to her, so that she almost dropped it a second time.
“Isn't that about half a minute before—” Paxa began.
“Oh, less than that,” I said. “Probably five seconds?"
“Before what?” Mother said, bringing out a tray of canapés.
“Before the vu that Giraut keeps on our wall."
Mother shrugged. “The pleasures of parenthood. You go from the person who does everything perfectly to painfully embarrassing, and eventually your child thinks your most embarrassing moments are the really endearing ones."
“It's lovely that Occitans are so attached to your parents,” Paxa said. “I was crèche-raised, barely knew my mother, and couldn't pick my father out of a police lineup, though I understand that might be the right place to look for him."
We went out on Mother's balcony, up above light-level, to look at the sky. “Geometry is a wonderful thing,” Mother said. “Take a sphere, and surround it with another sphere that's twice the radius of the inner one. The outer sphere will have eight times the volume of the inner. So whenever you double the size of a sphere, you get seven more spheres worth of space. The exploration springships have reached hundreds of terraformable planets, which means tens of thousands of colony spaces. And it's easier to get there.
“There are going to be Miskitos and Samoans, Ainu and !Kung, again. Not that they'll be the culture that was recorded, but there will be something of them. And even though the Office of Human Expansion knows my condition, they don't care, they want my advice.” Her eyes sparkled. “Of course they would be getting it whether they liked it or not.
“This hasn't made it to the news yet. We discovered that nine Baluchis infiltrated the first big beta test group for the very first psypyxes. We have actual recoverable psypyx recordings of them! Real Baluchis for when we set about growing New Baluchistan!"
Analog SFF, November 2005 Page 13