by Tom Holt
When you realised that, you weren’t happy. In fact, you were just a little bit upset, which probably goes some way to explain what you did next. Screw the both of them, you exclaimed, and may they be very happy together; you scampered off to the next village down the valley, found another girl of the right age, and tried again.
Well, this time you did slightly better. The girl that resulted from this escapade was in love with you, but there was significant personality drift in other areas:
Philippa Levens 1.3 was short-tempered, sarcastic and inclined to be unreasonably miserable, which disappointed you rather. Amazing how stupid young men can be: you actually tried to persuade her to be more cheerful, less of a pain in the bum; and while you were engaged in this utterly idiotic project, somehow or other she figured out what had happened, what you’d done.
Fireworks? Imagine November the Fifth if Guy Fawkes had actually succeeded. Cut a long story short:
she told you exactly what she thought of you and stormed off, expressing the wish that she never set eyes on you again, on this or any other planet.
Here the story bifurcates, like a split end. Let’s follow up her story first. Having pranced off in a huff, she walked into our village. Bad move, since they’d just finished burning her at the stake. However, they were nothing if not persevering, those black hats. If at first you don’t succeed, they told themselves, try, try again. Rough on the girl, of course. Why do humans barbecue each other to death in this peculiar manner? Never could figure it out, and I’ve been on this planet longer than Homo sapiens has existed.
Enough about her: exit your second char grilled baby, back to you. The second girl’s parents found out what you’d done, or at least part of it: someone had seen you put the first stage of the hex on her and make her vanish, anyhow. Off they hurtled to get the back hats, who grabbed you before you knew what’d hit you (probably the flat of a shovel, but I wasn’t able to get reliable data on that point), tied you up real good, and slung you in jail pending trial and incineration.
Now this brings me to what I’ve always thought was a flaw in the whole witch-catching business; namely, if someone was really a witch or a wizard, and a bunch of ordinary guys managed to catch this person — well, think about it: the witch or wizard isn’t going to hang meekly about while they heap up the firewood. Screw that. Said person’d turn the guards into frogs and run like hell, and if they can’t do a simple thing like that, stands to reason they can’t do magic, period, and they’re not guilty, by definition. Anyhow; you raniformed a couple of warders and hopped away. All fine as far as it went, but there you still were, hunted man with price on head; talk about your dead-end jobs.
Then, purely by coincidence, you stumbled on a little secret. To be precise, my stolen interstellar elevator, which I thought I’d hidden so carefully that nobody would ever find it again. Well, I thought under a church was pretty neat. I’ve been wrong quite often, over the years.
Needless to say, you were thrilled to bits. Hop on the elevator, you thought, and off you go to Homeworld; not only do you escape the black hats and their lynch mob, you wind up on a planet where love doesn’t exist, and where they can cure you of being in love with the late Philippas before you end up hexing every female on Planet Earth. Ideal, yes?
Except for one drawback: you couldn’t get the perishing thing to start. All systems were perfectly functional — I’d been very careful about servicing and maintenance over the years — but the central data processing unit was missing, or so you thought. Actually, all you had to do was walk down the churchyard as far as the village pond, carrying a jam jar, and you could’ve scooped up enough computing power in five minutes to get you to Andromeda. But, of course, you weren’t to know that.
You’re giving me that totally blank expression again. All right, it’s like this. On Homeworld we’d experimented with silicon-based information technology back in our Dark Ages, and given it up as a bad job. Too unpredictable, couldn’t be relied on. The plain fact is, any civilisation based on what humans think of as computers is never going to get much further than the evolutionary equivalent of potty training, because the hardware will let them down: it’d be like trying to build a ladder to the stars out of freshly boiled spaghetti. Not to put too fine a point on it, that’s the reason why I took it on myself to give mankind silicon-based information technology in the second half of the twentieth century. It was my way of encouraging humanity to develop along the lines I wanted them to go along; or, if you prefer, sabotage.
Our people, by contrast, use real computers, ones that work; and what drives them is not tiny quivering rocks, but organic brains.
To begin with, we used bees: a nice, straightforward hive mind that could handle binary code quickly and efficiently (and the honey was a nice bonus, as well). But bees took up a lot of room and had a tiresome habit of stinging you or dying of pique, so we switched to ants instead. Ants were good enough to get us halfway across the galaxy — to here, in fact — but they were still limited. They could do yes/no stuff, run up the left channel or the right, but they couldn’t think in more than two dimensions. Then we landed on Earth, and guess what we found. That’s right: terrestrial frogs.
Well, it was exactly what we needed. The frogs we found here weren’t sentient, like us; we weren’t obliged to build schools for them or give them the vote. But their brains were inert microcosms of our own; like ours in the way that a Matchbox toy car is like a real Ferrari. Six Earth frogs could outcompute several million ants, and do things ants never could. So we converted our antiquated, no pun intended, systems to Raniform Activated Memory, and never looked back.
Anyway, that’s what was missing from the elevator when you tried to fire it up. Reasonably enough, you couldn’t figure it out from first principles (and of course I’d never actually told you; I didn’t want you skipping off and leaving me, which was why I’d hidden the elevator in the first place) so you were stuck here after all, with no way of getting off the planet. Meanwhile, the black hats were closing in. What to do?
You won’t like what I’m about to tell you.
As you came out of the church, you saw some guy with a scythe cutting the grass in the churchyard. You walked up to him and hexed him; you turned him into you. Then, while he was still wondering what the hell was going on and why he suddenly felt different, you thumped him on the head and left him sleeping peacefully for the black hats to find. Then you ran away.
I don’t know whether you felt bad about it at the time. Me, I’d have felt bad about it and I’ve never actually liked humans terribly much. Since you were always that much closer to them, I guess you probably felt pretty raw about the deal, but not bad enough to hold still and let the black hats catch you instead. I don’t know, and you don’t, obviously, so it’s not much use speculating, is it?
Looked at objectively as a tactical gambit, though, it was smart. But things didn’t pan out the way you’d intended; because as you sprinted away from the churchyard, leaving your scapegoat to his fate, you ran straight into the black hats and the lumpy end of a hay rake. The rest, I’m sorry to say, is pyrotechnics.
As for the little guy in the churchyard: I don’t know why it works this way, but if one of us turns someone into something and then dies, the hex goes away and they’re back to normal immediately. So the little guy came to no harm, no thanks to you. In human terms, that’s a good thing. I didn’t see it that way, but I’m biased.
So there I was: my son dead, all my fault. All I could think about was, how am I going to put this right? Because I couldn’t just leave it like that, accept. It’s not the way we do things where you and I come from. We fix.
Now, then. Back home, we’d known for centuries how to synthesise a copy of a living thing from one small sample taken from the original — what you’ve come to call cloning. But we’d also taken an irrational dislike to it at a similarly early stage. I don’t know why; purely a cultural thing, something like some humans not eating pork or
wiping their bottoms with their right hands. Anyway, it was taboo, verboten, not to be done under any circumstances. But it could be done. That, of course, was all I knew about it, since because of this taboo thing the actual technology was kept very quiet indeed, and I’d never come across it.
But I had time; God knows, I had plenty of time. I could figure it out from first principles. Easy. It’d take a few hundred years or so, but I could make another you, not absolutely identical but a damn sight better than nothing, provided I had just a tiny piece of you to start with.
That’s the trouble with burning at the stake, though; it’s so annoyingly final. Nothing left but ash, with all the genetic codes burned out. I went through your things, looking for a hair or a stray toenail clipping, but that was no good. When you died, you see, all the imaginary human bits fell out from under the hex, and the hair and nails and flakes of skin vanished into thin air. You were gone. Completely.
All I found was a single lock of Philippa’s hair. And that gave me an idea. When — not if; when I got you back, I’d clone you a Philippa Levens from the lock of hair, and then everything really would be right again, as if I’d never interfered.
Anyway. I set to, brushed up on my high-school science, figured out what I didn’t know. After a century or so I could see it was going to be a long job, so I hit on a short cut.
I caught an Earth frog, and grafted bits of me into the poor little sucker, like grafting apples, to make it a true Homeworld frog. Then I turned it into a human. Sure enough, it believed it was human, and set out to make its way in the world — with a little help from me, of course. From then on, it was a matter of subtle genetic engineering. In each generation, by fiddling about with the lives of innocent humans and badgering them into forming relationships with other innocent humans, I bred you, chromosome by weary chromosome, a dash of spliced-in frog now and again to keep the levels topped up, personality traits woven in heedless of trouble and expense. Backwards-calculating the genome was a mammoth task in itself — it took two hundred and ninety-seven thousand arranged marriages over three hundred and twenty years just to get the shape of your nose right. The whole project nearly fell apart in 1782, when one of your key ancestors somehow managed to die of cholera in southern India while my back was turned. I had another nasty turn in 1869, when one of your however-many-greats-it-is grandmothers in Andalusia ran off with a handsome but entirely unscheduled bullfighter on the eve of her wedding to the candidate of my choice. But I fixed both of them, and a score of others besides; and now here you are. Not the original you, by any means; but close enough for government work, as the saying goes.
That just left the final stage: mental attitude.
Physically and mentally, you were as near as dammit to completion. The hardware was ready and the operating system was installed, but I still needed to do the last bit of programming. I needed you to fall in love with Philippa Levens. And not just any old Philippa Levens; that would have been too easy. No, it had to be the right one, the one whose lock of hair I’d managed to get hold of so I could clone her for you. Philippa Levens 1.3.
Which one was that? Well, not the real one, because I didn’t have any of her to work with. And not the first pretend-Philippa-Levens, the one who ran off with her cousin, for the same reason. The lock of hair I had came from the second pretend-Philippa, the one who stormed off in a hissy-fit and got caught by the black hats. It’d got snagged on a stray bramble as she ran away from you, and it was pure luck that I was able to bag and tag it at the time.
So: impossible task number two. I had to make you fall in love with a girl you’d never really been in love with, first time around. I’d taken account of this during the centuries of the breeding-you process, making a few tiny tweaks and modifications here and there that would lead to you preferring the foul-tempered, miserable version of Philippa Levens to the sweet, charming Mark I. Astoundingly, I managed to lay the genetic and behavioural groundwork, so to speak, but even I couldn’t crack it so it’d be love at first sight. In order to achieve that result, I had to recreate a substantial part of the experiences that led up to Philippa 1.3 coming into existence. To be precise, you had to create your own Philippa 1.2, selfishly and without really considering anybody’s feelings but your own, only to lose her to someone else, just as happened the first time. Then you had to create your Philippa 1.3 as an even worse act of selfishness, and she had to find out at least part of what you’d done; then you had to seem to lose her for ever, and find yourself in such desperate, life-threatening schtuck that you’d go even further and create the scapegoat version of you to throw to the wolves, just exactly like the first time. And you did, just as I was sure you would. I managed it all by running off a bunch of clones of myself, partly because I can’t be in twelve places at once, partly so you’d be kept confused and terrified and thoroughly off-guard at all material times, therefore unable to put two and two together until it was time to send you to the Homeworld for a short interim briefing, using one of the spare elevators I’ve built over the years. To get you to the precisely calibrated pitch of panic I needed, I had my alter egos pretend to be evil clones gone astray and meaning me harm; and to help you grow the necessary degree of backbone, I put you through various unsettling hassles that I knew you’d be able to get yourself out of once you’d built up the necessary emotional muscle. Every step along the way, every single thing that’s happened has been in the script since the early seventeenth century; and, to my total astonishment and overwhelming relief, it’s all worked out just right, to the millimetre, to the half-second. I am, of course, the original me, the one you’ve been thinking of as Honest John, though my given name is, in fact, Rivet. It’s now (he glanced at his watch) 23:42:16 precisely, which is two seconds ahead of the schedule I wrote in 1619, but in the circumstances I think I’m entitled to say, So Fucking What? I’ve finished now. The rest is up to you.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
David stared at him for four seconds. Then he swung as hard as he could with his right fist and knocked him off his chair on to the ground.
‘Bastard!’ he pointed out.
Honest John sat up, wiped blood from his nose and glanced at his watch again. ‘23:43 precisely,’ he said. ‘I’m delighted to say we’re exactly back on schedule. Ouch,’ he added, with feeling.
David stepped back and tapped the girl lightly on the arm. ‘Your turn,’ he said.
‘What?’ She looked round distractedly. ‘Don’t understand.’
‘Your turn to bash him,’ David explained. ‘You do want to bash him, don’t you?’
To his surprise, she shrugged. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘What good would it do?’
‘But...’ He wasn’t quite sure how to put something so blindingly obvious into words. ‘But you heard what he said. He admitted it, it’s all his fault. He arranged everything—’
‘So?’
David’s jaw dropped. ‘Oh...’ he said in an anguished voice. ‘Oh well, guess I’ll just have to take your turn.’ He lashed out again, this time connecting with Honest John’s chin.
‘Hey!’ John said, picking himself up again.
‘Well?’
John’s voice was rich with awe and wonder. ‘I didn’t expect that,’ he said.
‘It’s your own fault, you brought it on yourself...’
‘I didn’t expect that. Don’t you get it? Four hundred years,’ John went on. ‘That’s the first genuine surprise I’ve had in four hundred years. Thank you,’ he added, smiling warmly, if a little lopsidedly.
A look of intense pain crossed David’s face; then he shook his head and turned to the girl. ‘I’m sorry—’ he began.
‘Don’t be. Not your fault.’ Her voice was as cold as last night’s take-out korma. ‘Blaming you would be a bit like blaming the stone rather than the small boy for breaking the window, don’t you think? And before you say anything, don’t blame him either. He was really only trying to be helpful, in his own misguided way.�
� She smiled bleakly. ‘You know the funny thing about this? I’d actually managed to forgive you for creating me when I thought you’d done it of your own free will. Now, though, I can’t forgive where forgiveness isn’t needed; and since it wasn’t you who fell in love with me, it was a dead Jacobean frog of which you’re an authentic modern replica, polite term for “fake” — well, no feelings are called for in this matter, and accordingly I have no feelings. That pretty well covers everything, wouldn’t you say?’ She laughed bitterly, and turned to look at Honest John. ‘Did I get that right, or did I leave anything out? And from now on, wouldn’t it all be much simpler and tidier if we had scripts?’
John shook his head. ‘None of my business any more,’ he said. ‘I’ve done my part. From now on, you’re on your own.’ He frowned, and asked David, ‘What’s so funny?’
‘You,’ David replied. ‘You said that like you expected us to believe it. But how the hell are we expected to believe anything you tell us?’
‘Simple,’ John replied, looking just a little confused. ‘You’re one of Us, remember? Just take a look inside my head and see for yourself. I was assuming you’d been doing that while I was explaining everything just now; from that expression on your face, I take it you didn’t.’
‘No.’ David shook his head. ‘And if you think I’m climbing inside your mind, you’re mistaken. I wouldn’t go in there if you paid me.’
John laughed. ‘You make it sound like it’s full of spiders.’
‘I have the feeling that what’s inside your head is way, way beyond spiders,’ David replied. ‘Besides, even if I did crawl in there and poke about, that’d prove nothing. For all I know, you can lie just as easily with your mouth shut as open.’
‘Please yourself,’ John said, apparently unconcerned. ‘But as far as I’m concerned, I’ve done what I set out to do, and flawlessly, and bang on time. Dammit, when you consider that your human pals can’t even do something as simple as build a road without it dragging on endlessly and costing twice as much as they thought it would, I think a pat on the back might be in order. Maybe even just possibly a word or two of thanks—’