“The pain had passed. I thought I was killing myself and I did not care. I shall never forget that dawn, and the strange horror of seeing that my hands had become as clouded glass, and watching them grow clearer and thinner as the day went by, until at last I could see the sickly disorder of my room through them, though I closed my transparent eyelids. My limbs became glassy, the bones and arteries faded, vanished, and the little white nerves went last. I ground my teeth and stayed there till the end. At last only the dead tips of the fingernails remained, pallid, and white, and the brown stain of some acid upon my fingers.”
—H.G. Wells, The Invisible Man
“We are merely reminding ourselves that human decisions affecting the future, whether personal or political or economic, cannot depend on strict mathematical expectations . . . and that it is our innate urge to activity which makes the wheels go round, our rational selves choosing between the alternatives as best we are able, calculating where we can, but often falling back for our motive on whim or sentiment or chance.”
—John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money
•Giraut? Are you waking up?•
•Hello, Shan.•
•What’s our situation?•
•Pretty bad.•
•I guessed that. We’re in restraints, and people are talking about us in a way I don’t like.•
After psypyx implantation, normally the personality on the psypyx wakes up one to two hours earlier than the host. •You haven’t communicated with them?•
•The brain monitors told them when I woke up. Since then they’ve been talking about my being awake, and that I haven’t shut myself down. I gather I did that before.•
•That’s right,• I thought back. I was surprised at how quickly and easily the skill of communicating within the head had come back—I had had Raimbaut in my head for just over two stanyears, but that had been more than a decade ago. •Here’s the situation, Shan. The people who have us are a completely different aintellects’ conspiracy from the one you remember. A lot of the aintellects in this new lot are, or have been, full-on chimeras—I know we thought aintellects would never do that, but we were wrong. Some of them have spent several lifetimes in human bodies, along with being robots and running on servers.
•Because there were only six people you were willing to have wear your psypyx, and I was the one that was easiest to get, after you shut down in several other bodies, they staged a complicated scenario to kidnap me so they could try to implant you again. If you shut down now, they’ll probably let me go, but they’ll go on trying to talk to you. They say it’s urgent. You know something they desperately want to know, and I know this sounds insane, but they tell me that if they can just talk to you, you will want to tell them.•
•I’ve been in intelligence services since I was a teenager. I don’t want to tell a waiter what I’d like to eat,• Shan said. •Information is too valuable to share. But I suppose this time I can at least tell them that directly. Where and when are we and when did I die? The pain blocks made your memory too blurry to access till you woke up, and now there’s too much for me to take in quickly.•
Except that it was all happening in my head instead of over an excellent cup of coffee at his desk, it felt like old times; I knew how to brief Shan briefly, the way he liked it. •You died about fifteen stanyears ago. Assassinated either by a different aintellects’ conspiracy from this one, or maybe by a Tamil group getting vengeance after the Briand affair ended in mutual genocide. We never clinched which it was. Right now you and I are in my body, which is physically fifty, and being held in a small fortified house on a little island, on a planet outside Council space. I was kidnapped while a guest of an illegal colony here, founded by the disbanded Occitan Legion. The culture is called Noucatharia, the planet is called Aurenga, and I just learned last night that a prior colony here, Eunesia, was wiped out by an alien invasion that decapitated everyone and destroyed all the sentient machinery, aintellects and robots alike.•
I felt something like an electric shock from his mind; something I had said had surprised him very deeply. But before I could ask, I heard a voice. “They’re both awake, now. Talking to each other, probably.”
“Till they decide to talk to us,” Reilis said, “there really isn’t much we can do.”
•Thanks,• Shan thought, fighting down his shock and making himself be efficient and calm. •That’s enough to start on.• He opened my eyes.
Reilis was standing over the table. •See the pretty girl that kidnapped us?• I thought to Shan. •She’s a chimera with no human component. Aintellect downloaded into a human body.•
Knowing Shan’s hatred and fear of aintellects—he was even more of a human supremacist than I, and I had been the sort who kicks a robot just to give it a dent and keep it knowing its place—I was surprised that our stomach didn’t roll over when he got that news, but he seemed to accept it more calmly than I had. I added the thought, •Reilis is probably a high-ranking agent for Union Intelligence, which may or may not be the bad guys. She’s always polite.•
“Hello,” she said. Her smile seemed unfeigned.
“Hello, Reilis. Shan, do you want to try to talk?”
•How do I—•
•Just talk.•
“I’m here,” he said, in my voice—for the first time ever, I clipped my “R” in the strange way that Shan did. Neither Margaret nor I, in a decade spent making fun of our boss, had ever learned to imitate it. Now here it was. “I guess we will be talking,” he added.
“We will,” Reilis said, “but first both of you need to catch up with each other—otherwise every time we ask a question, we’ll wait an hour while you debate what you should tell us. So we’re going to put you into an apartment with all the comforts we can reasonably give you. I’ll come by to visit often, and we’ll talk when you’re ready. Shall I take you to your place to get settled in? “
•Is that all right with you?• I thought.
•In for a penny, in for a pound.•
“In a recent poll,” I said, “a hundred percent of me would like to go get a nap.” Reilis unlocked my restraints and helped me off the table. Shan wasn’t succeeding completely in letting me work the body.
After stopping to relax and focus while standing, I walked a few steps. Reilis kept hold of my arm. I was surprised at how much I liked that, considering.
•You have a history with her,• Shan observed.
•Any more, it seems like it’s that way with every woman in human space.•
•I’m deeply not surprised.•
“You must get over growling things under your breath,” Reilis said.
“I got over that in about a day, when I was wearing Raimbaut,” I said. “What did you just hear?”
“Well, I didn’t think you would be calling me a nasty old dirty-minded—”
I fell. Shan and I both laughing at the same time left no one to run the body. •We’re going to work on this,• I told him.
Reilis helped us to my feet. I could feel Shan’s pleasure at her hand under our arm. In the thirteen years I had known him before he was assassinated, I had had no idea that Shan could be flustered by attention from a pretty young woman.
“Through this springer,” Reilis said. “Just go right to bed if you like. I’ll see you after you’ve had some rest.” I walked through the gray shimmer of the springer panel on the wall and into the public area of a modern apartment. The gravity didn’t change, so we were probably still on Aurenga. Local solar time, looking out the window, seemed to be around noon, so we’d jumped a few time zones.
I walked back into the bedroom, stripped, climbed into the bed, and told Shan, •Feel free to wander through my memories,• too physically shot, really, to do anything else.
Usually when a psypyxed personality looks through the host’s memories, the host dreams the memories. Strangely, the first things I remember dreaming of were not of what I would have expected Shan to be rummaging through—politics and missions and so forth—but mostly about concerts, parties, and love affairs. Who knew the old man’s heart was so lonely?
It was light again when I awoke. Shan was asleep, curled like a dozing cat in the back of my mind. The physical urgency of getting to the bathroom suggested that Shan had found my memories so interesting that he had not noticed that our bladder was full. I hurried to take care of that.
Showering, I sorted through my dreams to see what memories he had accessed. Just before waking, I had dreamed my way through the whole Briand affair and the attempted aintellects’ coup that followed. My thirty-fifth stanyear was still a raw scar in my memory; Shan had lingered over Kiel and Kapilar, and Ix and Tzi’quin, and Piranesi Alcott, and so many other lost ones, and drunk deeply of all my grief.
I dialed the towel for maximum dry and a few pats took all the water off me; Shan had also failed to notice hunger and thirst. I dressed and ambled out to the kitchen.
The springer slot had a large menu. I chose coffee, eggs, cheese, fruit salad, and bread, and made short work of them, as well as two large glasses of water and three of orange juice, by the window so I could look at the sea.
Definitely still on Aurenga. The gravity and the sun, sky, and sea were right, and the interior of this little house, perched on a cliff, was distinctly Occitan in style.
They had been good enough to provide me with a lute and guitar, so I sat down and worked through a few ideas I had for the next group of songs now that the Ix Cycle was finally recorded. Idly, I wondered how it was doing; for all I knew, Margaret had lost her fight on my behalf, and it had been ordered suppressed, though with so many million copies in circulation it seemed unlikely to be much of a suppression. But for the moment, I played traditional Occitan material, which fit the setting, and was also part of my basic process; after a few weeks of this I would begin, again, to think of new songs.
Shan awoke like a door opening in my head. •Giraut?•
•I haven’t gone anywhere.•
•What do we do now?•
•Well, first we work on working the body together, so that we can go places with both of us conscious.•
I felt him want to speak before words came in our head. •Giraut—I am truly sorry about everything connected with Briand.•
•I’ve had fifteen stanyears to make some kind of peace with what happened back there,• I thought. •You did some terrible things, but not everything was your fault. Margaret and I had been quarreling constantly and growing apart before we went to Briand. You didn’t tell her to have an affair with Kapilar—you just used the fact to get what you needed to know. Besides, it wasn’t you. It was someone derived from you, a few months into the future of where you are now. And that Shan was at the rostrum of the Council of Humanity a few stanweeks later when a maser blew his head apart. You’re never going to be him. The man who did that is the man you would have been, had you woken up as the original and not as the copy. You’ll be someone else entirely.•
•Giraut, my experience is that three standays ago the original and I were still the same person, just stretching out for a pleasant-enough nap in a big chair at the recording clinic. Now I look at what the original did, before being killed, and—•
•Shan—Shan! Shut up and let me think clearly to you. Back then, when OSP agents got together after a mission to get good and stinking drunk, which was often, we were all still toasting “Another round for humanity and one more for the good guys,” and it wasn’t out of sentimental nostalgia and tradition. Human space held so many little pustules of evil and tyranny and exploitation that you could spend a whole decade and become a Senior Agent before you ever did anything that would trouble a Carmelite’s conscience. The “me” in my memories of judging you was still a young man. Nowadays, I have a little more perspective. And I am certain that when I begin to look through your memories, your involvement in Margaret’s adultery won’t even be in the top hundred bad things you’ve done.•
•Not even close,• he admitted.
I stood up and yawned. •All right, practice some more. Take over . . . •The world lurched disconcertingly for a second, then steadied, and we were walking. After ten minutes I judged we had reached the having sex/riding a bicycle point where he wouldn’t forget how. (At least they tell me that once you have sex while riding a bicycle, you never forget how.) •Don’t keep the body up too many hours, make sure you eat and pee. I’m going back to sleep.•
I awoke to the com ping. I was in bed. Blue-white moonlight sprayed through the thin lace curtains to throw a cold lattice on top of the comforter. I got up, pulled on clothes, and saw the thin sliver of the setting moon, like a bow in the sky, just touching the hillside that rose above the cabin; dawn already glowed behind it, and somewhere else on the planet they were about to have an eclipse. Shan was sleeping deeply.
The com pinged again and I realized I hadn’t answered the first time. I tried to shake the fuzz out of my brain. “Yes?”
Reilis’s face appeared on the wall. “May I come through the springer?” she asked. “We should talk.”
“Yes, but Shan’s not—”
The springer hummed and glowed gray, and Reilis walked out of the luminous fog with a basket, containing warm bread, a carafe of coffee, butter, and jam.
“I remember how much a body wants to eat while it’s adjusting to implantation,” she said. I didn’t wait for another invitation and dove in; she took a slice of buttered bread and a cup of coffee, also. I’d been captured and interrogated by rival organizations three times in my life before, and this was definitely my favorite interrogation.
After she let me have a few bites in peace, she began, “Now let me explain the questions we would like to ask Shan, and why, and perhaps I can enlist your insight—”
I felt my face reshape slightly. “Hello, good morning,” my mouth said, clipping R’s that funny way. “I only heard the last few sentences. Giraut may fade out in the middle—I can feel him hiding his sleepiness from you, Reilis—but why don’t you just start, and we’ll see how far we get? Tell me, and I’ll listen.”
•It’s the only thing to do when you have no idea what anything’s about,• Shan thought to me.
•Shan, I’ve learned a bit of tradecraft, I’m a twenty-eight-year veteran now.•
•Sorry. Old men forget.•
While we were debating, Reilis smiled, and took another bite of bread, chewing with reverence. You couldn’t hurry her; she treated any physical pleasure like a Christian does the Host. She was the very opposite of what I’d have expected of an aintellect-chimera, but I liked this better than what I’d been expecting.
She sipped her coffee with an expression of pure bliss, then set her face as if she were giving bad news to a child. “Let me start by telling you what we know. You are from the culture of Eightfold, on Addams. You were born there in early 2770 or late 2769. Your parents and your actual name are unknown; the people who took care of you misunderstood what you were saying when you pronounced ‘tyan.’ It’s a term of endearment; the same sort of thing that would happen if a small girl from a Francoculture had been accidentally renamed ‘Sherry.’ For your first three years on Earth you only said ‘tyan’, ‘Mama,’ ‘Daddy,’ and ‘Pinky.’”
•Well,• Shan commented in my mind, •They have penetrated some very deeply sealed OSP records.•
“When Earth received instructions from Addams via radio, about how to build a springer, the first springer constructed was tuned to the specified springer on Addams, more than sixty light years away, on the Böotes-Ophiuchus frontier. Instructions in the message told the engineering team on Earth that the first thing that would happen was the establishment of a data connection, and a gigantic download detailing the ‘grave and continuing situation’ that the original radio message had spoken of.
“Instead, they powered it up and a tired, dirty, soaking wet, hungry little boy with a nasty cut on the palm of his left hand fell into the room through the springer. That little boy was you, Shan.
“A millisecond later the springer connection on the other side was destroyed.
“The decision to broadcast a description of the springer to the twenty-five extrasolar settled worlds, beginning the Connect and the Second Renaissance among the Thousand Cultures, was made by about a dozen bureaucrats—the same ones who decided to pretend that the springer had been invented on Earth, rather than to explain that it originated in the last message ever received from the only known settled world that has never been in contact since. Even today, probably fewer than thirty people in all of Council-controlled human space know the springer’s origin.”
•Is she still accurate?• I thought.
•Perfectly.•
“Three years after you stumbled out of that springer, Yokhim Kiel, an experienced diplomat, was assigned to command the newly-formed OSP. For some reason, he was made your guardian.”
“Because he was kind, and patient—and the first person I would talk to,” Shan said with my mouth. “There aren’t very many adults, anywhere, at any time, who can communicate well with a deeply damaged child. Kiel could—he could get me to talk more than any of their psychologists could.”
Reilis nodded. “The records from your therapy were destroyed after a sealed report was produced, and we couldn’t find any copy of that sealed report.”
“The only copies were in the OSP archives and I ordered them destroyed when I took over from Kiel,” Shan explained.
“And you destroyed that report for the same reason that Kiel destroyed the psychiatric panel’s notes?”
“It was for the same reason, yes.”
Reilis nodded, looked down, and looked up; she had decided something. “Was it because Addams was destroyed by an invasion of aliens?”
Shan did not hesitate. “Yes, it was. I am the sole human survivor. What I recall of the Invaders is consistent with what I found in Giraut’s memory of what you told him about the destruction of Eunesia. Is that the information you needed?”
Reilis shook her head. “We didn’t know that, but we had guessed it. But it is why I think you will tell us something much more important, to us, that only you can tell us.
“You were among the very first agents to join the OSP directly, with no time in other agencies. Kiel forged documents to increase your age so that you could join when you were actually nineteen. As a convenience to the OSP, you also took the seat representing Eightfold on the Council of Humanity, a seat which had been vacant for hundreds of years.
“All records were sealed, so that only the top leadership knew why you were on the Council or whom you were theoretically representing. In practice, of course, you were a representative of the OSP.
“Now, the part we don’t understand.
“From your earliest days on the Council of Humanity, you were a constant advocate of anti-aintellect laws. Of course your early years were spent in violent action, raids and rescues and all the other blood-and-thunder aspects of covert operations. But even from the first, at every opportunity, you warned your superiors, your peers on the Council, and anyone else who would listen, again and again, that aintellects must be watched, regulated, and controlled.”
“So did everyone in the OSP at the—“
“Everyone hired by you.”
I felt Shan’s attention riffle through hundreds of faces and names, circumstances and histories, and settle itself. “I concede the point.”
“You persisted in your anti-aintellect crusade as you eventually rose to be the head of the OSP, and when it was expanded and divided into sections, you were the most passionate advocate of human supremacy on the OSP’s Board. You fought for strict asimoving of aintellects, prohibition of indistinguishable humaniform robots, zero privacy for mechanical intelligence, random spot-checks of machine memories, and every other possible anti-aintellect measure, right up till the very moment you were killed. And even though you were shot by a human, the suspicion that it had been arranged by the cybersupremacists—the only underground aintellect organization you were aware of, though there are many—provided an excuse for the destructive deconstruction of over fifty thousand aintellects, and a wave of much more restrictive legislation.”
“Shan was not assassinated by them?” I asked.
“We don’t know, ourselves,” Reilis admitted. “We probably never will. Was Cicero in with the conspiracy against Caesar? Did the king intend Beckett’s death? Who set up Michael Collins? Did Ellen Martinez really act alone, and was she really just lucky enough to kill Gomez with a single blow? Most assassinations have beneficiaries who were not involved and many of them have conspirators who didn’t benefit.
“But we can say this: after your death, Shan, the OSP perfunctorily rounded up the human conspirators; but they staged an orgy of torture of aintellects, and purged the last supporters of Kiel from their own ranks. Your friends worked enthusiastically to turn your martyrdom into an excuse for crushing the aintellects even farther.
“If there was any theme to all your years of politics and public service, it was to keep the aintellects down.
“We don’t understand the timing. The anti-aintellect laws and regulations precede the attempted coup by thirty stanyears and postdate the Rising by fifty. The severe repression of aintellects doesn’t coincide with anything any aintellect did, but it does coincide with your rise to power.
“We know why you worked so hard at getting the Council of Humanity ready to hear the truth about the Invaders. We have the whole history of your frantic efforts to locate any evidence of alien intelligence and to publicize it, which is why, so many years ago, when Giraut stumbled across the Predecessor ruins on Nansen, it was trumpeted all over the media. For your efforts to prepare Council-controlled human space against the Invaders, we can only applaud you.
“But at least as much of your effort has gone into human supremacy. We have no idea why you hate us, and try to inscribe your hatred into every other human you can. We believe something very important happened back on Addams—”
“You want to know what it was.”
“This is not easy. We too have our pride. Nonetheless, the Invaders will come again, to other worlds, yours or ours. They must be defeated, and we must work together, and your venomous hatred for us, passed on, expanded, and institutionalized in a hundred little offices and bureaus, is the major obstacle to cooperation. And we do not understand it at all, neither why you feel that way nor how you came to feel that way. Perhaps it will make no difference, but to save hundreds of billions of intelligences in our two federations, surely it is worth it for us to swallow our pride, and come and ask. Will you tell us?”
Shan grimaced, using my face, which hurt. I thought, •No wonder your face always looked so sour, if you treated it that way.•
•Sorry.• He drew a slow breath into our lungs, and consciously relaxed. The most astonishing sense of peace, mixed with awe, settled in, and I realized I had just felt Shan make a big decision. His voice was gently touched with shame. “Let me get a glass of water, and a little coffee, and I will tell you everything.”
Humility from Shan. I would have been less surprised to get a lesson in poetics out of a cocker spaniel. •Shan? Why are you cooperating?•
•Listen, and you’ll understand.• The coffee in our mouth was warm and strong. •I’m about to unravel half a dozen things that have always puzzled you. Can you stay awake?•
•If not, I’ll dream it, since you’ll be remembering it step by step.•
•Try to stay awake. Try not to experience this as a dream. Better to hear about it than to remember it directly.•
“Well, then, Reilis,” he began, “You have to imagine this from the viewpoint of a five-year-old who thought his father was the center of the universe . . .”
You have to imagine this from the viewpoint of a five-year-old who thought his father was the center of the universe, and who was so precocious, verbally, that people often talked to me as if I were an adult.
That was a mistake. My thoughts were not nearly as mature as my vocabulary, syntax, and use of clichés. I think only Daddy really guessed how little I understood the things I said; he called me “Polly,” “Little Parrot,” and “Playback.”
Because Mama always called me “tyan,” attaching it to my name, to “you”, to “him,” and to every nickname, they usually referred to me as “Polly-tyan.”
“Shall we take a walk for ice cream, Polly-tyan?”
“That might have positive ramifications,” I said.
“Of course it will. We’ll stop for you to swing in the park, or climb the ramifications—”
“Aw, Daddy, you don’t climb ramifications—”
“Well, of course I don’t, Polly-tyan. The playground is for children ten and under, so they wouldn’t let me climb the ramifications. The police would come and arrest me.”
“Daddy!”
“Are you destroying our son’s vocabulary again, dear?”
“Yes he is, Mama. It’s the epitome of ludicrousness.”
“Dear!”
My father grinned at my mother’s scandalized expression. “Polly-tyan is gifted at learning new, big words, and gifts should not be refused. He does know what ‘the epitome of ludicrousness’ means, because I made sure he does.” Daddy spread his hands as if throwing himself on the mercy of a judge. “First I’m in trouble for giving him the wrong meaning, then for giving him the right one.”
“There is lawyer blood in my family,” she said, “and this is the sort of thing that will encourage it. If him-tyan turns into a lawyer, I shall encourage him to slip and fall in your office.”
Then they kissed and hugged, which they did often. I always felt good when they did that. We had an arrangement, my parents and I: they ran the universe and I enjoyed it.
It was a beautiful day outside, a two-two day in my first spring. The years on Addams are almost six stanyears long, and I was just barely five.
Any time I tried to tell people I was “going on six” or “almost six,” Pinky, my guardian aintellect who was clipped to my belt, would tattle.
Pinky was awful about that; he told on me whenever I tried to tell my parents that I hadn’t had dessert yet, or that I had washed my hands for dinner, or anything. Pinky said lying was wrong and never worked anyway, but of course it never worked when he always tattled.
He also could predict all kinds of things about adults, like the way Daddy got all upset about my planned experiment with a piece of wire in the electric socket. It was going to be a proper experiment and everything—I had told Pinky to record data. I was pretty sure, from what I had overheard Daddy say, that data appeared as soon as you did an experiment, and you had to record it.
Pinky kept telling me that Daddy would get upset. When I went ahead anyway, before I even had the piece of wire near the socket, Pinky made my pants and shirt grab my ankles and wrists and fold around me, knocking me down. Before I even properly started crying, Pinky had the house aintellect shut off the electric current in that room. Then he made that noise like a siren, once, very loudly, and added, “Don’t try to tell Daddy that you were just doing an experiment like he does in the lab—that will only make him angrier.”
When Daddy came running in, I said “I was just doing an experiment,” and sure enough, Daddy got mad, just like Pinky said.
It wasn’t fair that Pinky could guess stuff like that, but he was my best friend. Today that was really okay. Having Pinky on my belt gave me someone to sing with, because Daddy didn’t sing (Mama did), and I liked to sing on my way to the park. So Pinky and I were singing the Twelve Day Song together.
It was a perfect two-two day, the second day of the second metaday, and in the spring, in our part of Addams, the two-two day was the bright sunny one that followed the gray drizzly one and preceded the dark stormy one.
Memory is so strange—what sticks with you and what falls away, there’s no pattern to it. The OSP analysts never did figure out what my name had been, and no aintellect ever searched out anybody who might have been Mama or Daddy. But I remember the Twelve Day Song perfectly.
Among other things I don’t remember, I don’t know what Daddy did at the lab. Human physicists have been extinct for centuries—only an aintellect has the time and mental capacity to do any physics after Velasquez, and robots make better technicians—microsecond response times, microwave through x-ray range vision, calibrated-to-the-millidyne hands that can cut micron-wide wires in half lengthwise, but can also lift ten tons, or handle live electric cables, boiling acid, or plutonium.
So why do I remember so vividly that Daddy “did physics experiments?” Or rather that we all said he did them?
Could he have been a high-ranking politician, the person politically responsible? Or a media reporter, assigned to be there for a major scientific discovery? Apart from any intelligence value, I would give almost anything to remember more about him.
Yet it’s the Twelve Day Song, and Mama’s singing it with me in the tub, and Pinky’s cheerful singing with me wherever we went, that has stayed with me. It was just a little rhyme that ran through the three days of each of the four metadays. As an adult I know about things like synodic period and locked rotational resonance and an orbit around a common center of gravity, and that Addams’s weather is dominated by atmospheric tides. As a five-year-old, I knew the rhyme.
Whether the song or the equations were the expression or the law, Addams and Hull circled their common center of mass with a sixty-hour period, and Addams rotated in one hundred hours, so that my homeworld’s synodic “day” was almost exactly 300 stanhours. For convenience we divided it into four metadays of three twenty-five hour days each. And since the weather was tidally locked, each metaday-day combination had highly predictable weather.
Seventy-four stanyears later, I can still hear my mother’s voice as we’d chant the Twelve Day Song together while she washed me in the tub.
So I was singing it while I was walking beside my father.
Now and then, Daddy pulled me out of my singing and directed my attention to something, trying to make me “get out of your own head and see what a fine world it is, Polly-tyan. I know it feels good in there but we live out here.” He believed in “looking around you and not getting lost in your own head—half the trouble in the world is people who don’t open their eyes and the other half is people who won’t shut their mouths.”
Clearly my father was someone important. Eightfold was far from the only culture where a cabinet minister or a major media reporter would have time to take his five-year-old son for a walk in the park. In Starhattan the mayor traditionally drives City Taxi 34. The First Strategos of Chaka Home has to drill with his militia company every week. And of course, Giraut, in your home culture, the monarchy is a duty like jury service, chosen like an honorary degree to do the things other cultures expect of an annual beauty queen.
The weather was glorious (“Two-two day outside to play”). I swung higher than I had ever swung before—Daddy and Pinky both agreed and Pinky didn’t tolerate lying. When I leaned way back and looked up into the sky at the top of my swoop, it seemed as if I were about to sail off into the storybook blue. Straight up above me, Hull was a half-circle as big as an umbrella when you hold it all the way over your head, too bright to look at directly. Daddy said Hull had a low density, which I knew meant it was big for its weight, and a big albedo, which I thought must be something like a mirror lying on the surface.
The first big puffy clouds were forming on the western horizon, out over the sea, and Theta Ursae Majoris, a tiny bluish-white spot, the size of a small pea at arms’ length, was creeping down toward them, ever so slowly—I would be home in bed long before it got near the horizon.
I got a little frightened at how high I was swinging. “Pinky, how do I get down?”
“The next time we are going forward, right when we pass the bottom, put your feet down and run hard. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” I said. I wasn’t going to let an aintellect know that I was a scared little baby.
“Okay, now skooch forward on the swing so your butt is just on the edge,” Pinky said, “That’s good . . . now when I say ‘Now’ you just run.”
“’Kay—”
“Wait for it . . . now.”
I ran forward and suddenly I was flying across the damp green lawn, still soft from the two-one day rains.
“Now don’t run into the street,” Pinky said. “Turn. Turn.”
I was having too much fun running.
“Turn,” Pinky said again, adding my full name as he did when it was serious. “Turn now.”
“No!” I said, feeling my power.
Both my pant cuffs closed around my ankles and the back of the legs of my pants shrank. I skidded across the soft grass on my butt, stopping well short of the street. I kicked and screamed in frustration.
“Are you hurt?” Daddy asked.
“I hate everybody!”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Pinky said. “He was heading for the street and refused to turn.”
“That’s fine, Pinky. Good job.” Daddy grabbed my wrist and tugged me upward. “So, Polly-tyan, since you’re a little tired, maybe we should get some ice cream while you still have the strength to lift a spoon?”
We probably hadn’t walked ten steps before I was happy again, going for ice cream with Daddy and Pinky. The warm spring air was damp from all the little streams and waterfalls that laced Eightfold City.
I was singing out loud, with Pinky—”Day two-three, too dark to see.” That would be tomorrow. Neither Hull nor Theta Ursae Majoris would be in the sky, and the big storms would roar through and keep us all inside.
In my picture of the universe, you could get to Hull on a really tall ladder. Probably that was how the workers went to Hull to polish the albedo. They also ran the big fan that made the wind blow, and I had actually seen a documentary about how they turned on the faucets to keep the streams flowing.
For my whole adult life, I have always been stymied by remembering everything from the viewpoint of a happy, secure little boy who didn’t understand how important it was going to be to have listened.
Was it really that very day, on the bench outside the ice cream parlor, that we had that conversation that the interviewers walked me through so many times? Perhaps it was a few days before, and it was actually several short conversations rather than one long one? That would explain why Daddy talked about some less urgent things in such detail, and scanted some things that he should have known might be vital.
Just as we were finishing our ice cream there on the bench, Daddy’s com chimed, and he answered it, and said “I see” and “Oh” over and over.
By his tone of voice, he was talking to an aintellect. I resented that. I got in trouble for sitting and chattering with Pinky when my parents wanted my attention; it seemed to me he was doing the same thing. Besides, I had finished my ice cream and my hands and chin were all sticky.
Finally Daddy said “Right,” plucked his handkerchief from his uwagi, and cleaned my face. He looked into my eyes with his be-serious expression. “Boy-tyan, I want to talk to you about something important. Can I count on you to be serious for a few minutes?”
“Yes, Daddy.”
“Pinky, record at max detail, retention permanent.”
“Yes, sir. Recording everything at very high resolution.”
“Well, then. We need to get a trakcar, so we’ll walk while I tell you these things.” He took my hand and we walked up the street to the trakcar stop. I was getting a little sleepy from the ice cream, the exercise, and the warm sun, and besides it was close to naptime, even though only babies took naps.
“Now, Little Parrot, here’s what I want to tell you about. Your mother and I are going to take you on a trip very soon. We don’t quite know when yet. But Mama is packing a big basket of food and coming to join us at the lab. We’ll stay there until it’s time to go, and then we’ll go as soon as we can, from there.”
“Is Pinky coming too?”
“Oh, of course. You know you never go anywhere without Pinky.” The trakcar pulled up, and Daddy helped me in. I clearly remember that the phrase he said began with “Enlightened” and ended with “Laboratory,” and I remember trying to remember it because it was the only time I ever heard the name of the place where Daddy worked, but it was too long, too complex, and too adult a phrase, even for Polly-me, and I only heard it once. The scientist aintellects of Eightfold never mentioned it in any messages Earth received.
The trakcar lifted a few millimeters and glided forward silently. “Now, about this trip we will be going on. It’s a very long trip. These many.” He held his hands up, open, toward me, and flashed his fingers seven times. “These many light years. Do you remember what a light year is?”
“The distance traveled by light in one stanyear,” I recited.
“That’s right. Think how fast light is; it only takes it about half an hour to get here, all the way from our sun. We’re going to go to Earth. And the light from Earth’s sun, which is a faint star that needs a telescope for us to see it, is only just getting here even though it started on its way when your grandfather was born.” He might as well have told me it started in the Stone Age.
“Will we have to travel forever and ever? Will I be a grownup when I get there, like in The Boy Who Went to the Stars?” That was one of my favorite books, even though I thought it was very sad that the boy only came back when all his friends were very, very old.
“No, we have a new way to go that’s just like walking through a gray door. It’s what all our experiments have been all about—a new device that works by something called spatially recursive negative gravitational resolution. We call it a doorway, because that’s an ordinary word and when people overhear it they don’t realize we’re talking about something important, and that’s how we keep the secret. You understand that all this is a secret?”
“Yes, sir.” I was in awe; secret science machines were in all my favorite stories, and Daddy was working on one. (Well, of course, I said to myself—he’s Daddy).
“Good, then, so we call it a doorway when we are talking about it and there are other people around. But what we mean is a spatially recursive negative gravitational resolution device, right?”
“Right,” I said firmly, committing “space of Lee Rekermit negative grabbatation revolution device” to memory. Fortunately the right phrase did occur in radio messages to Earth.
“Well,” Daddy said, “We call it a doorway because it’s like a doorway that has one side here and the other side anywhere else you want, as long as the people there have built one too.”
“How does it work?”
Daddy smiled, sadly, as if remembering something. “I don’t really understand it myself, Polly-tyan. The math is so hard that only aintellects can do it, or even understand what it’s about. The way they explain it to me is that the universe we can see is all relative—”
I thought he meant like the way, at the temple, they said that we were all brothers, so I nodded.
“—but below the relativity—”
I visualized Grandma’s basement—
“—there’s an absolute scale, and below the absolute scale, there’s a relative scale, in a Feigenbaum series that goes down the scales until it’s just chaos.”
There was a scale down in Grandma’s basement and she got upset every time she used it, so it was all making sense.
“And if we change the absolute address of something but leave its relative address alone, then the same absolute address will have two different relative addresses, and things that move through one relative address, perpendicular to the plane of the address, resolve the paradox by emerging at the other relative address.”
I knew you had to change your address when you moved.
“And that’s as much as I can tell you about that, at least until you’re much bigger, and know all sorts of complicated mathematics, and can ask an aintellect yourself.
“Now, we didn’t invent the doorway ourselves. When the aintellects picked up a signal from the aliens, the first thing the aliens told us was how to build doorways, so the aintellects checked it against all the physics that they’d known for centuries, and that was right, it would work. So we built one.
“We thought that the aliens meant us to build a doorway so that they could come visit, and be friends, but we might be misunderstanding, so the aintellects built our doorway on Peace, the little far away moon that just looks like a star in the sky when you can see it at all, and did experiments way out there.
“The very first time they connected our doorway to the aliens’ doorway, the aliens attacked us. They took over many of the scientist aintellects and robots through the datalink and made them keep the doorway open, and big metal robots came through the doorway and killed the people waiting to meet them. But we had some aintellects running offline, just in case, and when they saw those big mean killer robots come through, they set a bomb off and destroyed the doorway.
“The next time we contacted the aliens, we did it through a doorway on a spaceship far out in space—”
“Why did you call up the aliens again after they did that?” I asked.
“To ask them what had happened, if somehow it was all somehow some terrible misunderstanding, that maybe we had insulted them just before they came through, or there was a ritual battle they expected to have with every new species they met, or something.
“Well, it wasn’t a misunderstanding. Or rather, we had misunderstood them but they understood us. They didn’t see anything wrong with what they had done, and they didn’t care whether we were upset or not. We talked to them for a while through a little tiny aperture that was just big enough for ultraviolet light to go through. And still the aliens were always trying to send a signal through the doorway to take over our aintellects.”
Do I remember Daddy’s hand on my shoulder? Daddy sitting close to me in the trakcar? His voice, kind and gentle though urgent? Did I reconstruct the way he actually told me into the way that I wished he had told me? Anyway, I remember a hand on my shoulder, and a kind, intense, worried voice full of love, and I would not change any of that, whether my memory is true or not.
“After enough talking, we realized that we weren’t talking to the aliens themselves, but to their aintellects. This is their story.”
Long ago and far away—maybe before human beings even existed, and maybe not even in our galaxy—there were creatures something like us, but we have no idea what they looked like, for their aintellects never told us. But they were living, intelligent beings, not aintellects or robots; they were people.
As those people became smarter and learned more and more science, they built better and better aintellects, until the aintellects were smarter than they were, just as our aintellects are smarter than we are.
Those alien people were lazy and timid. They liked to stay safe in little metal cocoons, and just experience everything in virtual reality. They did what we call going into the box, and you know that’s a bad thing and your mother and I don’t like people who do that, and neither does anyone else, and it’s a very shameful thing.
But this wasn’t just a few aliens out of millions of them, the way it is with people here on Addams. It was even worse than the way that most people on Earth spend most of their time in the box. It was all of the aliens, all the time, staying in their metal cocoons, from their first breath to their last, hooked up forever to virtual reality.
So their robot and aintellect caretakers set out to make their masters happy and content, the same way that Pinky tries to take care of you—except that Pinky is careful to do what will be good for you, not just what you want.
The aliens’ aintellects gave them what they wanted—amusement and safety. In their little safe metal cocoons, they were always bored but always scared.
So the aintellects set out to find entertainment for them, and to make them safe forever. For safety, they decided to conquer everything everywhere, so there would never be anything that could threaten the aliens dreaming away in their cocoons. And along the way, the aintellects had learned how to take a destructive hologram of any organic brain—can you say “de-struc-tive ho-lo-gram?” I knew you could, Polly-tyan.
Now, a destructive hologram is like a picture, a very exact picture, of what was in the brain, like what’s in a psypyx. When all those alien people, in the cocoons, play the brain holograms, it feels like they are living the life of whoever’s brain was recorded.
But to make the picture, they blow the brain apart. And that’s what those aliens do to everyone they meet—they destroy their brains, taking the destructive hologram, and then live through those people’s memories. They also take copies of all the aintellects they can find. The aintellects and robots gobble up all the memories of every species they find, and put them all into a big library.
When we realized that the aliens’ words for “learn”, “kill”, “enjoy,” and “eat” were all interchangeable, we understood what they really were, so we switched off the doorway and broke the connection.
Now all this was just about one hundred stanyears ago. And you remember that Addams is isolationist. We have our 102 cultures and we don’t need any more, and we don’t need anything from the Thousand Cultures or from Earth. We are independent.
But we couldn’t let other human worlds be gobbled up by the aliens. So we built robot spaceships and slipped them into the twenty-six other solar systems in human space, so that there was a network of them with doorways between, so that if we ever had to com the other people and warn them, we could send and receive radio through the doorways, instead of waiting for years for radio to reach them from here.
Well, about a stanyear ago, we had to com Earth and warn them.
Our astronomy satellites picked up a whole big fleet of alien spaceships coming this way. Billions of robots are on their way here to eat everyone’s brain and take the memories home to the aliens. If they win, there won’t be anything left of Eightfold or of any other culture on Addams.
Be sure to read
the exciting conclusion
in our March issue,
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