Heaven (29 page)

“Of course I’m not real,” said the technician. Only now it was a gray, titanium-skinned robot, and the office had become some
kind of medical facility. And Sam wasn’t sitting on a couch. He was suspended in some kind of transparent fluid, with hundreds
of squat plastic cones attached to his skin, and thin tubes led from the cones to a bank of strange machinery.

And Sam finally remembered where he was, and what was being done to him.

Heaven was a world run by machines for the benefit of sentients.

There were 88 Heavens among the 14,236 worlds of the Church of the United Cosmos. Another fifty planets were well along the
road to paradise. The rest were still striving to attain the necessary level of multiculture.

This was the Heaven of Sadachbia, the thirty-sixth ever to have been created; Aquifer was 25,212 light-years away. Sam had
been released from the virtuality machine, to which he had been connected to offer him a glimpse of the ultimate in Cosmic
Unity. Now he was continuing with his orientation sessions. From a robot tutor.

“A world can only move towards the state of blessedness,” said the robot, “when every citizen attains the necessary state
of individual grace.
Every
citizen.”

“Which is why it takes so long?” Sam suggested. There had to be some reason why only eighty-eight worlds had taken this final
step toward the Church’s greatest goal.

“Yes. And that is why the First Great Meme places such importance upon the overall spiritual health of the collective,” said
the robot. It resembled a metallic sea urchin more than anything else that Sam could put a name to, except that its “spines”
weren’t rigid. Its germanium brain was housed inside a central module, along with its sensors and communicators; a thick torus
around the module’s “waist” contained its locomotory apparatus. The mechanism in the torus drove upward of a hundred many-jointed
tubes, which could be flexed like tentacles. The tubes tapered at their tips; some terminated in spongy balls, some in sharp
spikes, some in complicated tools.

This robot could never fall over—it had feet in all directions. It rolled rather than walked, pushing itself along with deft
flicks of its tentacle tips. It was a servomech, and it existed only for the benefit of the lifesouls of Heaven.

Sam understood that Heaven was not an afterlife. Cosmic Unity was well aware that there was no afterlife. The Lifesoul-Giver
created sentient beings; the Lifesoul-Cherisher observed their existence with benevolence and empathized with their distress
but never intervened; and the Lifesoul-Stealer removed them from the universe when it became necessary. After that, they were
dead
. The process that animated their minds, which Cosmic Unity called the lifesoul, was just that: a process. It could no more
continue when its vehicle had died than a broken hydrive could propel a spacecraft across the Galaxy. The lifesoul was not
a thing that could exist independently of its host; it was a transient process that took place within its host. No host, no
lifesoul—period.

Heaven, then, was not the resting place of the lifesouls of the dead. The very word pointed to the obvious contradiction.
There were no deathsouls.

Heaven was where the living were tended by faithful machines, to
keep
them living.

The first Heaven—no longer considered a true Heaven, just one of the many steps along the way to blessedness—had been invented
by the devotees of Cosmic Unity on Mama Nono, eleven thousand years after the Prime Mission had left the Founder System to
spread the gospel of infinite tolerance. Mama Nono was an unusually pious world, and its mix of races—now considered insufficiently
diverse for genuine Unity, but unusually broad in its day—had developed some of the best robot slaves in that region of the
Galaxy. The slaves were quasi-intelligent but lacked true consciousness—that would come later. Mama Nono’s slave-doctors were
so brilliantly constructed and programmed that the citizens’ life expectancy doubled within a generation, then doubled again.

As the roboticists lived longer, their store of techniques increased faster. Mama Nono’s sentients coevolved with their machines,
each driving changes in the other. Within six hundred years of the construction of the first slave-doctor, every sentient
on Mama Nono possessed a retinue of several hundred mechanical slaves, all dedicated to just two things: realizing their owners’
every whim, and keeping the owners alive for as long as possible.

This was the First Heaven.

“But wasn’t that a very passive existence?” Sam asked.

“Physically passive, perhaps,” replied the servomech, “when the body began its natural cycle of dissolution, and the slave-doctors
took increasing responsibility for its functioning. But mentally, very active. The blessed lifesouls increasingly lived a
mental existence, with all their physical needs being taken care of.”

It raised one titanium limb and scratched itself, relieving an electrostatic tickle. “The technology spread. But the second
attempt to attain Heaven failed, dismally. Can you guess why?”

Sam shook his head. “Not unless you give me more to go on.”

“The attempt was too hasty.”

Sam pursed his lips, mulling over possibilities. “Dissidence,” he said finally. “The world did not take sufficient time to
ensure that all were of a single mind.”

“An interesting theory,” said the servomech. “Why did that lead to failure?”

“An essentially passive society supported by robots is wide open to subversion?” Sam hazarded.

“Go on.”

“A small group of dissidents could take over the machinery . . . The majority of the inhabitants, by then totally reliant
on the machines, would be easy meat.”

“If the machinery were turned off,” said the servomech, “they would die. And that is exactly what happened. But it would never
happen now.”

“Why not?” Sam inquired.

“Today’s analogs of the slave-doctors are fully intelligent, not merely quasi. And they are fully conscious. The drive to
care for their sentient masters is as strong as ever, for that is the natural direction of evolution. And along with that
drive goes a burning need to
protect
their masters, too. The original slave-doctors were modeled on sentient medics, whose core urge is to save life—all life.
Today’s servomechs are not so naive. They have very effective built-in weapons; they can kill if need be, and do, to preserve
the lifesouls that they tend.”

The robot paused, as if to collect its thoughts. Which, in a sense, it was doing—it was downloading information from a central
source.

“By the time of Third Heaven, the lesson had been learned,” said the robot. “No world would be permitted to take the path
to Heaven until its conversion was total.”

“Ah,” said Sam. “That explains both Great Memes.” It was an amazing revelation, and he found the insight staggering. He knew
where the Great Memes had come from!

The servomech agreed. “Yes. It provides a plausible reason for those memes to survive selection in the competition for host
minds. After all, the Great Memes carry unpleasant implications for every individual member of the Church. Elementary memetics
proves that there has to be sufficient payoff for believing them, else they will perish and be replaced by other memes.”

“Heresies,” said Sam.

“Heresies from the point of view of
this
Church,” said the servomech. “If they had taken over, they would have become orthodoxies.”

This was a new thought to Sam, and he couldn’t entirely wrap his head around it.

“But since the Church coevolves along with its Memeplex,” the servomech added, “it is in the interests of the members of the
Church to propagate The Memeplex unchanged.”

“Which is why we deal so severely with heretics,” said Sam, almost to himself. He still had occasional nightmares about the
botched attempt to heal Clutch-the-Moon Splitcloud. And he was disappointed at how readily he had turned a laser on the polypoid
prisoner and helped to abandon him in the desert, just because a querist had told him to. Both actions had no doubt been necessary,
but neither had left him feeling comfortable. The positive aspect was, these revelations would help him come to terms with
his discomfort. Heresies disrupted the road to Heaven! They sought to deny the state of blessedness and lasting life to billions
of lifesouls.

Now he understood just how dangerous heresies could be. “Will I ever get to Heaven?” Sam asked plaintively.

“You are here, now.”

“I mean, permanently?”

“If you rise in the Church, so that you stand a chance of being assigned to a world in which all citizens have attained a
state of grace, then there will be a place in Heaven for you, yes.” The servomech paused. “Or if you are assigned to a world
that is close enough to that state that it can make the transition during your own lifetime. If your assigned world can pass
the first hurdle, then your body may well survive until it passes the last.”

“How many lifesouls does this world maintain?” Sam asked, changing the subject.

“A little over fifteen billion,” said the servomech, without hesitation. “The exact figure is—”

“I don’t need an exact figure.”

“—15,233,686,428. As of this instant. The number fluctuates. Even with the best possible care, lifesouls are still stolen.
And sometimes new forms of attrition arise, which require new techniques to counter them. But the losses are balanced when
new beings arrive and are processed for optimal care.”

“Oh.”
Fifteen billion
? It seemed a lot. “Is there room on the planet for the machinery to care for that many lifesouls?”

“Of course. Be logical. The lifesouls are here.”

“But . . .” Sam recalled the medical facility where he had been given a taste of Heaven. “It took an awful lot of machinery
to send
me
to Heaven.”

The servomech was amused. “That was special equipment for a temporary visit. For the permanent inhabitants, we use rather
different technology.”

Sam wasn’t naturally inquisitive, but he was learning fast as his training progressed. “Can I see it?”

The servomech gave the matter several nanoseconds’ thought. “Ordinarily, I would not advise that at such an early stage. It
could be counterproductive. But your querists have instructed me to advance your knowledge and training as rapidly as possible,
even if that requires me to cut a few corners. I must warn you, however, to be prepared for some unpleasantness. Entering
Heaven is, after all, a medical procedure.”

“I can stand the presence of the sick and elderly,” said Sam. “And medical intervention holds no terrors for me.”
Certainly not since Clutch-the-Moon
. “I’m not the least bit squeamish.”

“I hope not,” said the servomech.

Blood
.

There was blood everywhere. It trickled in rivulets; it ran in torrents. It was intermingled with a hundred other fluids that
he could not identify, nor did he wish to. He knew that they, too, were the bodily fluids of what had once been living organisms.
Intelligent, conscious, sentient beings.

His face mask filtered out most of the smell, but he knew that without it the place would smell like a charnel house.

It looked like a charnel house. It looked like a medieval vision of hell.

But this was Heaven.

Heaven?

His stomach churned. He ripped off the mask and vomited. Over his boots, and over the dismembered remains of living creatures
that lay on the ground all around him. He was right about the smell. His stomach retched again. He wanted to sink to his knees,
until he remembered what he would be sinking into.

“The mask will absorb any material that you regurgitate,” said the servomech. “You should not have taken it off; that only
makes the sensations worse.”

Sam pulled the mask back over his mouth and took several deep breaths. A diminutive robot appeared from behind the racks of
disassembled flesh that blocked his vision wherever he looked. It scuttled across to the vomit and slurped it up.

This time he was sick
inside
the mask. The servomech was right—it did absorb everything.

Finally, his stomach began to settle, having long ago expelled its contents.

Sam and the servomech had come to this place from a large, flat building, now a short walk behind them. There were no living
organisms here. There was just a contorted heap of their dissected organs, bones, exoskeletons, skin, antennae, intestines,
gonads . . . What looked remarkably like a Gra’aan brain had been slit apart and laid out in a trough, loosely wrapped in
some kind of transparent plastic.

Much of the material wasn’t even recognizable as specific organs. Thick slabs of tissue lay in open trays; mucus and slime
dripped from towering racks of offal. The smell of excreta was everywhere, although he could see no feces or pellets.

The air was filled with a heavy, damp mist. Thousands of robots scuttled over everything. Some carried lumps of flesh. Some
wielded scalpels. The rest were doing things that Sam found incomprehensible. Most of it was also revolting.

But then, the whole setup was incomprehensible and revolting.

“This . . . this is
Heaven
?” he said incredulously.

“Yes,” said the servomech, gesturing with a titanium limb. “Do you not appreciate its serene beauty?”

“Beauty! It looks like an abattoir after a terrorist attack.”

The servomech scurried from one sickening pile of offal to another, pulling out pieces and displaying them as if they were
long-lost treasures. “The beauty lies in its function, not its form. You must learn to distinguish what matters, Fourteen
Samuel.”

Sam already knew what mattered, and this wasn’t it. But he didn’t actually know what he was seeing. All he knew was what it
resembled. “What
is
this?”

“The ultimate multiculture.”

“What?”

The servomech restored its latest find to the middle of a viscid pile of chopped entrails and turned to confront him. It was
time that the young novice was made to display signs of intelligence. “Fourteen Samuel, you told me you were not squeamish.
Yes, I know you had not anticipated this, but you must calm yourself.”