Count to a Trillion (19 page)

“If I commit murder, and find out later that my first copy committed it, with the memories of the deed merely passed on to me, may I render up him to be hanged, while I go unpunished? The memories of the crime, the personality traits of the murderer, are still mine. Suppose he made a hundred copies, or two? Or should all who did the evil be rendered up for judgment?”

“You’re asking me? I’d spare not a damn one of them. The evil men do, if it is copied over, must copy over the vengeance as well. Otherwise you’d just make a new copy to do your murdering for you, and let him dance at the end of the rope while you went dancing with his girl.”

“By the same token, the good a man does, if copied over, must copy his reward.”

“But you not are really the real Blackie for real. You are just built to think you are.”

“Then the builders have not built in vain, but have been successful, for so I do indeed think. I have suffered for you. Do you owe me nothing?”

“Suffered how? You cannot feel pain. You’re perfect.”

“Not now. But I recall the pain, then, in the dark.”

“When?”

“Then! In the dark! When I stood between you and cannibalism, killing men I knew and loved. The long watches when I was weak with thirst and growing weaker, and I knew that there was a way to suck the moisture out of the cells of your frozen body—a body that, as far as any rational evidence could prove, contained nothing but a broken brain, broken because a fool in his pride shoved a needle into its delicate workings!”

The face of Del Azarchel drew a deep, ragged breath. “I was not perfect, not then. I suffered thirst. Wealth was measured in ounces of water. That was what we traded and swapped and bribed enemy crewmen to our side. At that time, you were the perfect one, were you not? You slept in comfort. You were rich, in the way we measured riches. And I was the beggar again. Do you know what I thought about, when I floated next to your coffin in my parka, my breath too dry to steam, my homemade toy gun in my hand, and my eyes seeing only floating hallucinations caused by light-starvation? Do know what I thought about?”

Montrose bowed his head. He knew. “That damned boot. The one you found in the gutter when you were a kid.”

“That damned boot,” said the face of Del Azarchel, nodding solemnly.

“OK,” said Montrose. “So I owe you. What do you want?”

“I want you to trust me. Throw the switch. Make me into what is beyond Man.”

“You’re not afraid?”

The pallid mask smiled, and its lids were half-closed. “Deeply and terribly afraid. That is why I am not in the room, no doubt. The previous version of me, I mean. He is likely to be monitoring from a distance, in another room, weeping. But I do not think you will fail. I think you have done what you set out to do.”

“While I was smart and crazy?”

“Exactly so. I don’t think your basic personality changed, Cowhand. It was still you. The real you. The you I trust! Throw the switch, if you please. I am not sure how long I can maintain the appearance of courage.”

“Listen, Blackie, I…”

“Haste! It is your footsteps I follow! I had to watch while you plunged a bone rongeur into your forebrain! Now you must do for me as I did for you, and stand and watch the outcome, unable to help, and suffer as I did.”

Menelaus felt as if something was being bent inside him, like a green stick, bending too far and snapping. He touched the command. The symbol streams on the walls around him surged into a hurricane of motion.

The mask of Del Azarchel opened its mouth.

It screamed.

8

Posthuman Alterity

1. What Is Between You?

A squad of technicians in parkas ran into the room, along with a figure in a white fur coat with a red cross on his back: this was the old Oriental doctor from Del Azarchel’s entourage. Del Azarchel himself came in a moment later, sliding silently in his tall black chair.

The screaming and wailing lasted for roughly forty-five minutes, and then the brain activity switched to a sleep cycle. Delta-wave rhythms and REM patterns appeared in the information flow.

Interesting. Montrose wondered if the Iron Ghost screamed when it augmented up for the same reason a baby does when it is born. To be sure, the machine did not need to flood its lungs with air, but the neurological transformations that accompany a baby’s change from breathing through his umbilicus to breathing air might need to be repeated in the machine-mind, as new neural channels had to form. An immediate dream-response was only to be expected. Dreaming was the means a complex system like the human brain employed to index and assess information. The sudden amplification in intelligence would drench the creature’s mind with all fashions of inputs and nuances which previously could have been shunted into the unconscious, ignored, not categorized.

The technicians had set up their slates of library material here and there about the room, or wrenched the tops off the large cylinders that dotted the floor, or brought out slender crystals from medicinally-spotless carrying sheaths—Montrose assumed these were some sort of memory units—and once the main crisis had passed, everyone asked Montrose questions at once. The technicians were asking about the intelligence augmentation process, and the doctor was asking him to touch his nose with his fingertip while closing both eyes.

It was Del Azarchel who saved him. Blackie gave him a nod, and gestured toward the exit with a glance of his eyes. The bowing technicians and the sliding doors got out of his way automatically, as if controlled by the same motion circuit. Del Azarchel slid out of the room in his silent black chair, and Montrose followed.

They were in a grim and windowless corridor whose walls were hung with cables. Iron doors bright with energy and temperature warnings stood locked to either side.

However, down the hall were a flight of stairs leading up to a more civilized portion of the complex, corridors paneled in polished wood and hung with portraits of stern-faced men in dark academic robes.

When Blackie’s chair climbed these stairs, Montrose saw how the base was constructed: The device rode a carpet of small hairs, each hair like the leg of a caterpillar, moving in sequences with its neighbor.

It looked remarkably flimsy, but when Montrose mulled over a few rough-estimate calculations in his head he was able to deduce an upper and lower limit for the load-bearing capacity and tensile of each hair that was well within the limits for bio-sculpture even from his day. Moderate number-crunching capacity was involved, but nothing the wealthiest man in the world could not afford. But the energy loss was high: Montrose just resigned himself to the notion that every appliance in this modern antimatter age was wasteful of energy. Men living on the shore of a sea don’t conserve seawater.

At the top of the stairs was a more comfortable room, this one adorned with flowers in jade vases and books in teak bookshelves.

Montrose seated himself on a comfortable, pleasantly warm couch, and put his feet onto a crystal-faced viewing table with a sigh of contentment. He rolled his eyes upward, and only then noticed that, here, again there were no windows.

Was the whole damn place underground?

Montrose remembered the images of cities being atom-bombed from space. Perhaps during the hundred fifty years while the
Hermetic
was away, the architecture had followed military necessity. A technology that could riddle Earth with ultrahighspeed train tubes could build any number of comfortable bunkers as many miles below the bedrock as the interests of safety might demand. It made for a depressing picture.

Back in my day,
Montrose thought,
we may have released ethnospecific germ warfare, but we did not use strategic-level atomics!
Society had certainly degenerated, morally and perhaps mentally, during the interim.

And when the
Hermetic
had returned, she had brought with her a power unimaginably more dangerous than mere atomic fusion. For the first time, Montrose wondered if Blackie’s notion of letting a machine version of himself run the world was not so bad.

A world without war …

Montrose tried to think of something from his childhood, anything, that had not been effected by the wars, hot wars and cold wars, his mother’s generation had so meagerly survived. Fear of contamination touched everyone. It changed how close folk stood, how they shook hands. The depopulation had changed everything. The ruins of a once-great national highway system were like the aqueducts of medieval Rome, a testament to wealthier days. Even the snows and ice storms and endless cold weather had been the product of war, indirectly.

Maybe Blackie’s idea of how to run this new world was not as dangerous as the other likely alternatives. Montrose did not like that thought: He hated it like hell, but it pushed its way into his consciousness anyway. Maybe a world run by machines would be better …

Preoccupied, he almost did not notice Blackie touching that heavy bracelet of red metal on his wrist. Montrose almost did not hear the soft snap, like that of a heavy electromagnet pulling a bolt, which came from the door behind him.

Montrose pulled his feet off the crystal table, and sat up. Something was wrong.

Del Azarchel’s face was flushed red. Montrose could not tell if this was rage, or a drug reaction. Perhaps both. He guessed that Del Azarchel had just injected himself with some chemical carried in the red metal amulet.

“What’s up, Blackie? What’s got your goat?”

“My bride!”

“Come again?”

“Don’t pretend ignorance! The Princess Rania!”

Montrose remembered the portrait of the lovely woman he had seen.

“What about her?”

“What is between the two of you?”

“Between—? I’ve never met her.” Then the magnitude of what Blackie was saying crashed in on him. He started to laugh. He could not help it. Montrose sat back in the chair, and hooted and guffawed. “You’re jealous! You’re jealous of me! Of
me
! And with a gal I ain’t never laid—”

“What?!”

“—eyes on.”

Del Azarchel was thrown off his rhythm. Montrose rushed out more words before he lost the initiative: “Blackie, are you out of your mind? Pestiferous pox! When would I have met her? You have been with me for every minute since I woke up. When did I court her? While you were in the bathroom? Must have been a short-a-way sort of wooing, if I could consummate in less than five minutes, and clean myself up before you came back in. Or was it while I was working on your damn robot brain for you? Hey!”

Montrose figured now it was his turn to get mad. He stood to his feet, and his big bony hands knotted into fists. “Just a poxy minute, you phlegm-spewing unwashed pest! I was just working my brain to a nub trying to cobble your mechanical wonder over yonder into some sort of shape—as a favor to you! For you!—and you come back and accuse me of—”

Just as suddenly as it had come, his anger left him, blown out like a candle left near an unlatched door by the sheer unlikelihood of the accusation.

“—come to think of it, what in the pox are you blaming me for? What did I do? When?”

Del Azarchel’s black chair slid forward. He reached out and tapped the surface of the table, bringing it to life. “I was watching your operation. Look at this—”

2. Daemon and Ghost

The scene was an odd one indeed.

Montrose saw his own figure, his skin as red as if he were sunbathing, dancing around the room in a series of controlled, manic jerks. The motions seemed inhumanly smooth, despite the suddenness of the starts and halts, as if he had somehow achieved greater control over his muscles than normal nerve impulses allowed. His fingers fluttered through some sort of sign language. He was both humming and speaking and singing. How in the world he had trained the vocal cavities in his head and chest to do that, he had no idea.

It sounded like Chinese music, or, at least, something not on a diatonic scale. The melody wavered and paused, and then folded back on itself repeating and inverting certain chord progressions. It was like listening to Mozart, if Mozart were experimenting with a nonstandard scale.

The purpose was clear. The figure in the cold room, dancing naked, was trying to establish a multiple channel of interfaces with the Iron Ghost, like a typist keying two different messages with either hand, while typing out a third with foot pedals.

“How was I keeping myself warm?”

Del Azarchel pointed to an inset. Monitors in the room tracking his temperature showed his skin at 112° Fahrenheit. The dancing figure was running a fever.

“What kind of brainwave is that?”

Del Azarchel said, “Researchers call it the epsilon wave. Your brain is the only brain in history to produce it. Note the activity spikes. That is why you are hyperventilating and sweating. You body is trying to keep enough oxygenated blood flowing to your brain to keep you … awake.”

“Awake?”

“Possessed. Whatever you might call the epsilon brainwave condition.”

Montrose jerked back from the image, putting a hand up as if to ward off a blow.

Del Azarchel merely looked at him curiously.

“My eyes. I turned and looked at the camera. It was—it’s not—”

“Some crewmen reacted that way to your stare aboard the ship. This was before we sedated you. Interesting that you, too, would flinch.”

“My brother once told me you can make a dog back off if you stare into its eyes without blinking. Animals can’t hold a man’s gaze, except cats, I guess. Damn cats. Hey! Look at the floor!”

He meant the floor shown in the record. The image showed the cold room floor lit up with the spirals and angles of the Monument script. Screens and inset windows around the walls opening and closing rapidly, flickering.

While the naked man danced across them, parts of the Monument script lit up, rotated, and shifted position, trailing after his feet, spreading where his fingers flung them, to overlap other segments of the Monument. Colored lines and diagrams snapped quickly into and out of view around the knotworks and labyrinths newly-formed by the overlaps.