He sits down and laboriously types a letter to himself; it’s short and to the point. There’s no benefit in the body anymore; if Louie-the-ship cranks up the power on the catching coils, he can get a lot more momentum out of every shot coming through and his acceleration will be higher now, while he needs it most. He can get to 2026RU months ahead of schedule.
There is one Louie-the-body and he doesn’t even like being Louie-the-body. There are nine billion people on Earth right now, and at least twothirds of them live where superstorms can get them.
Sacrifice me, he writes. Be honest. I am just a small, ineffective processor that runs on too fragile a platform. Throw me away and go save humanity. I know you won’t feel good about it, Louie, but buddy, we both know it’s the thing you have to do.
The keyboard on which he is typing is “local”—it doesn’t communicate with any system bigger than itself—and that way he can send the message all at once before Louie can argue with him.
He thinks for a moment, and feeling silly—who else could this be coming from? but letters should be
signed
—he adds:
Louie Tynan
. Then he thinks for a moment and realizes that the only way to make sure Louie-the-ship does it is to order him, and adds,
That’s an order.
Regards,
Col. Louis Tynan, Expedition Commander.
He reads through it once more to think about how Louie-the-ship is apt to take this, tries to imagine himself in that situation, and feels like a
complete fool, but changes “
Regards
” to “
My love always
.” It feels better, so he hits the key to send it before he can get cold feet.
He’s riding on his exercise bike and thinking about getting a cold drink of water when his own voice says, “Louie?”
“Yeah?”
“We have to talk about it, you know.”
“Naw. We don’t. Look, you’re figuring that I won’t plug back in on schedule, and you’re right. There’s no reason to include the physical pain I’m going to experience, or the sensation of committing suicide, into your personality, you know. It’s the kind of thing nobody wants to remember, and this way you won’t have to. What I’m going to do is get good and drunk just before the next package arrives—we’ve got about a fifth left from Dr. Esaun’s old private store—and then climb up to the top of the main passageway. Anything up there that’s unsecured will get thrown all the way to the bottom,
muy pronto.
There’s a nice heavy steel bulkhead, and though I can’t figure it quite so exactly as you can, if you go for a ninety percent instead of a twenty percent momentum capture, I figure I’ll hit it at about two hundred miles an hour, headfirst. The pain is going to be momentary.”
“With the much larger mental capacity in here, the pain can be erased entirely. And besides, you know, the memory of pain is nothing; no one can make himself even slightly uncomfortable with even the most excruciating memories.”
He pushes the bicycle harder and says, “It just seems sort of fair to this body. I mean, this body has been me for so long, and now that the ship and the moon complex and all are me … well, I guess I just feel like a part is entitled to die conscious.”
“But you’re planning to drug yourself—”
“Maybe
barely
conscious. If I don’t want
you
to have the pain, imagine how I feel about it.”
The mechanical voice, so like his own that even Louie can’t tell the difference, laughs. “There’s one little problem. You made that decision to die for the whole human race. That’s something I’d like to have in my memories. Could you put on the scalpnet and jack for another moment, just long enough for me to copy the new memories? Leave the goggles and muffs off if you don’t trust me—that way, if you have to, you can just focus on the information coming in through your senses and pull out enough concentration to take off the scalpnet.”
It’s a reasonable request; Louie admits, on reflection, that something has indeed changed inside him with his decision to sacrifice himself for the sake of the mission. “Okay,” he says, and feels silly since by the time he spoke, Louie-the-ship probably knew from the direction he turned, or some little indicator invisible to Louie-the-body.
The funny thing is, he realizes as he reaches for the scalpnet, that he really feels like he is “Louie himself” even though he knows how much more capability and how much remembered experience Louie-the-ship has. He wonders if that is how Louie-the-ship, or for that matter Louie-on-the-moon or the wiseguys feel … or do they feel he is the one who is more real? He’ll have to ask while he’s connected—
He pulls on the scalpnet and snugs it down, its microfibers sliding around his hair to get firm contact with his skin, inducers targeting so that their millions of tiny pulses from all quarters of his brain every second can find the right axons to create the fake pulses in. Then he inserts the jack that will allow his mind and memories to be read by the machine.
His eyelids slam shut, so hard that his cheek muscles scream with pain.
There is a moment of hard motion, something in his muscles he doesn’t quite identify, and then his arms swinging with their full force bring his cupped hands up to burst his eardrums.
The pain and shock are incredible, and he reaches for the pain to give himself something to cling to, something that doesn’t come out of the machine, so that he can find the will and motor control to tear the scalpnet off—
The pain stops, abruptly, cut off like a light switch. His arms hang limp. He feels his memories going out through the jack and he rages against Louie-the-ship, furious at the betrayal, furious that he will have to die all the same (for he can’t believe Louie will let billions die to save this one old carcass) but robbed of all dignity and not trusted to do it well-He screams in frustration, and the sensation in his throat helps him again, but before he can even reach for control of his arms, his windpipe shuts all the way. The blood thunders in his veins, he reaches for that, for his pulse and the sense of pressure, anything to free him from—
His heart stops. His carotids contract.
There’s music, and he finds himself moving forward in a long dark tunnel, almost laughing because it is so much what they have told him it will be like, and sure enough his mother and father, who he hasn’t thought of five times in ten years, are there to greet him, and—
He wakes up. He’s in the machine; Louie-the-body and Louie-the-ship are one and the same, and instantly he understands that Louie-the-ship accepted the necessity but didn’t want to lose any of himself; he finds himself on both sides of the decision, matches them up instant by instant, accepts himself, ceases to feel like two, except, only, that he looks through the camera and sees his body lying dead on the deck, the sanitation robots about to close in and move it down to the freezer. This gives him an oddly split sensation, one part of him recalling having died in that body, the other part remembering killing it.
But stranger still is his realization that when he re-merged into the intelligence in the ship—when he fully became the “real” Louie Tynan—as he was yanked away from the light, and from Mom and Dad (Dad was just about to say something, and was smiling in a way he rarely did when he was alive) …
… there was a tiny bit of time left before the body died, and there was still a Louie in that body. So he did kill himself … and if he ever had a soul, it’s gone to heaven or hell now. Did he get another one by surviving? Is he truly soulless now?
It’s the kind of thing that he can think about, now, forever.
He hallucinates a warm South Pacific beach from before, and turns to Carla’s latest message to reread it again. They spend a month sailing along the Solomons; they laugh and talk a lot, and communicate better than they ever really did.
He doesn’t know whether he still has a soul, but he’s quite sure he can still feel love—and that’s more than good enough for a practical man, anyway. Four minutes—a bit over twenty-two brain-years-after the death of his body, he has made as much philosophic peace as he figures he’ll ever need with the idea.
John Klieg is feeling pretty cheerful; it’s hard to feel any other way when you’ve got four sets of mortal enemies on Earth and right now all of them are on a collision course with each other. He doesn’t think his call to Berlina leaked, but if it did, that’s all right too. The important thing is to get the Abdulkashim escape attempt blown, and to have the conspirators know that it’s blown; if his own sources don’t show a change of plans in the next few days, he’s got a couple of tricks in mind to call it to their attention.
Just now, about the only perk left to him are his hundred news screens, so he’s actually trying to watch all of them, just to see what that’s like. Derry is sitting beside him on the couch, quietly drawing horses—about the only thing you can say for this grimy, muddy frontier burg is that there’s plenty of opportunity for a horse-crazy kid. Glinda is catching yet another nap; she hasn’t been very much herself this last week, which he can well understand. Ordinary business competition is one thing and assassination and coup quite another. Klieg himself is surprised at how well he has taken to it.
He still doesn’t have a good backchannel into the States anywhere; he kicks himself daily for not having established one before he got here, but after all it was the first time he ventured out into the real sticks of the globe.
The screens are showing Clem’s granddaughters ravaging Europe, and Klieg is finding that kind of interesting. Americans don’t see much footage of Europe anymore, partly because of the refugee lobby—two million
Afropeans, plus about a million of various Euro refugees, will light up the switchboards if there’s any favorable or even neutral coverage of any event in Europe. And in the last twelve years a lot of Americans have picked up the same prejudices.
Right now, though, mostly you’re seeing the same old stuff—oceangoing ships driven up onto the shores, buildings you remember from postcards and calendars swaying and falling, that sort of thing. Half a dozen hurricanes and big storms have drenched the Mediterranean basin in so much water that the Med is filling up way above historic levels, and between the organic silt washing in, the dilution of the salt, and the darkness, most of what used to live in it is dying. The smell is said to be indescribable, which is one reason why Klieg won’t experience it on XV. The other reason, of course, is that even though it’s all very touching and a lot of history is drowning, Klieg is a people-now kind of person—and refugees from floods are pretty much alike everywhere. Lots of parades of crying kids, coughing old people who might not make it, people with a wiped-out look because everything is gone. The first time you see it, it’s moving. The hundredth time, it just doesn’t matter.
They’ve all seen, on the television, and on the pub’s two XV sets, what happened to Hawaii. The village has no particular hope, for it’s about to get the same treatment, and there’s talk that the storm surge might wash right over all of Ireland. Thus they gather in the church with Father Joseph, not because they think it is safer, or that anything better is going to happen, or even because the church has a slightly better roof (though it does), but because it seems a fit place to wait to die.
The last ones come in from the pitch-black night, a night so dark that the lightning flashes make it glow but do not allow anyone to see. The roads are said to be hopelessly muddy, but no one much wanted to try them anyway. If you must drown, might as well do it in County Clare; if you must live, might as well ride it out in a dry church on a hill.
Somewhere far to the west is Clem 238, throwing out the great storm surges that the government radar spotted hours ago.
There are plenty of candles, so Father Joseph has them light a few and encourages people to sing, over the sound of a few men boarding the stained glass windows on the inside (Father Joseph himself did the outsides hours ago).
He wishes, as priest to these people, that he were a profound man. Mostly he just handles the baptizing, marrying, and burying, and occasionally tries to persuade someone to do what is right. This is not a job for Father Joseph.
If, however, it’s a job for God Himself, then common sense says to ask Him. He leads more prayers. People drowse, but the priest hasn’t the heart to wake them.
The clock says it should have been dawn, but no dawn comes, not even as a crack of light in the great doors. The church smells of too many people and wet clothing.
Michael Dwyer volunteers to try using the big searchlight on his lorry-his “rig” he calls it since he listens to so much American music-and at least see what can be seen in the valley.
The church is now on an island, and the water is rising. Michael and Joseph discuss it very briefly. “I’d appreciate it if you’d not tell them.”
“Wouldn’t think of it, Father. Let’em not fear until the time to fear.”
They go back in, soaked to the skin and freezing cold, to tell everyone that it was too dark.
The next time, some hours later after their clothes have dried enough to be put back on, they need speak no words to each other. The water is higher, and it flows opposite the direction of the streams that once ran through the valley. On a whim, Michael climbs down to dip his hand in, and comes back saying “I tasted salt, Father. The ocean’s coming in.”