Tony Daniel (42 page)

As you perhaps have guessed already, my name is Tacitus, and, as I told you earlier, I am one of the cloudships of the outer system. There is more to tell in that regard, but suffice it to say at the moment that my brothers and sisters had not, at this time, seen quite the threat to themselves in Amés, and the impending war, as had I. They are, perhaps, not to be blamed too severely. I am, after all, a professional historian and ought, if anyone can, to be the first to apply the lessons of the past to the present. Of course, we historians often fall short in this regard and substitute our own preferences and failings for an actual analysis. I have certainly done this myself on more than one occasion. But I like to think that I was right this one time and that, by timely action, I may have had a hand in saving the day. But the vanity of an old geezer such as myself is enormous, and it may be that Roger Sherman would have figured a way out of his initial predicament even without my aid. So be it. Allow an old ship to be, at least, a legend in his own mind.

With the withdrawal of the
Montserrat
from the immediate area of Neptune, Sherman had gained a bit of breathing room. After Nereid was rescued, army forces entered into the
Jihad
and “cut out” the nearly twenty thousand plantlike soldiers of the DIED. It was impossible to reverse the PAL grist, except all at once, and while many of these soldiers died, some were able to “reroot” in the pressurized park into which they were thrown. Most of these soldiers were unconscious at the time of their transformation, and most remained so during the PAL ordeal. I anticipate that this entire operation will be looked upon as a war crime by some. All I can say in its defense was that the times were dire and steps were taken to save a great many lives that might just as well have been sacrificed to make things easier. I have to admit, though, that the incident troubles me to this day, and my relationship with green and growing things has never been the same since. I see the eyes of the dead in green life, and sometimes a simple houseplant can leave me feeling accused and convicted of atrocity.

The
Jihad
became the first ship in the outer-system navy. It was rechristened as the
Boomerang
and had quite a history over the next few years, eventually acquiring a personality and volume until she (she was female) served as the point ship in . . . well, now I am
really
getting ahead of my story. The
Boomerang
did good service more than once, I assure you.

Where was I? Yes, I did not risk a merci communication with the ground forces on Triton when I arrived at Neptune, but depended, instead, on my meteor drop. It was sheer luck that my bit of rock did not kill anyone, for I had to shoot the thing directly down upon New Miranda, avoiding mines in orbit (not so hard for a one-meter-wide rock as for a ten-kilometer-long ship) and generally dropping the capsulated message directly upon everyone’s heads. Fortunately, it was picked up, tracked down, and it landed in one of the stretches wiped clean by the passage of the rip tether two and a half e-days before, where it was quickly retrieved by an Army team. I had inscribed the exterior: “Urgent: For Ground Commander” in several languages, so it was pretty obvious that this was not your ordinary meteorite.

It was detected and the message delivered. I had included several bits of seemingly forgotten lore; the PAL grist was only one of this number. All were subsequently tried at various times during the conflict, some with success. I repeat for all prospective despots, kings, saviors, democratic freedom fighters, and the like:
Frequent rummage sales
. You never know but you might pick up the secret of universal domination at one, and at a sweet price.

But I will leave off here and retreat into the backstage shadows for the nonce. Only I leave you with this warning: You may have guessed at the outcome of the war even now, or may know it from other sources, but I would have you consider that neither side really wins in a war. It is not a coin toss when everybody is dying. So before you thrust this account aside as beside the point, consider that, for every man and woman who fights in a war, if they live, they win. And if they die the way they wanted, they sometimes win. And everyone loses, because it had better not have been. And the dead are truly dead. The drama is in each human’s soul, where everything is always at stake, and the house enjoys killing odds.

Danis was playing with Sint, showing him how to stack blocks. The young boy was in the virtuality, but didn’t even know it. He wasn’t even self-conscious yet, not really. It usually took a child until the age of three or four to really understand the difference, even if he were quite advanced otherwise. Sint was a wonder, analytically. He could, of course, do all the things a powerful calculator could do in the same manner that another child might learn to open a cabinet door. But when it came to motor skills, he was an average child, and Danis enjoyed watching him slowly acquire the ability to stack the blocks—even as she saw that he was stacking them by color in a descending series that was described by 2n– 1.

It would soon be time for Sint to go to kindergarten.

She and Kelly had discussed the matter, and it seemed best that, at this early age, he stay at home for a few years. At the moment, it was all the rage for the upper-level execs in the financial industry to send their children off to boarding school, some even dumping them into day schools when they were two and three.

Danis and Kelly had talked about getting a nanny, but this seemed a bad idea in the long run. It was better for the boy to become socialized—especially since he was half– free convert and would have to deal with all that implied in his relationship to others sooner or later. The best solution seemed to be to send him to the local kindergarten. They could not alternate taking care of him in the afternoons, since Danis was necessary for Kelly’s work, and Danis had no other portfolios besides his to manage. They had ended up joining a local parent support group who rotated the kids from house to house to play after school, with each parent taking an afternoon off during the week. Kelly had arranged that he and Danis be able to do this at Teleman Milt. This led to a bit of ribbing up front and some discussion as to the wisdom of employee relationships and especially those between biological humans and free converts behind their backs. But it had worked out—she and Kelly had made it work—and Sint seemed to be turning out just fine.

Sint stacked another block, considered his tower, and then knocked them all over. “Mama?” he said.

“Yeah, honey?”

“Deeto has a brother.”

Deeto was one of the other children at Sint’s kindergarten. He was an anemic-looking youngster with a perpetual runny nose.

“He does? Is he younger or older?”

“He’s eight and four-fifths e-years.”

“An older boy.”

Sint considered his blocks. He picked one up, discarded it. “Do I have a brother?”

“No, honey?”

“Deeto’s brother is away at school. Mine isn’t away at school, is he?”

“You don’t have a brother, Sint.”

“Why not?”

“Your father and I decided just to have you.”

“Does that mean you love me more?”

“No, honey, we would love you the same, no matter what. There’s nothing about you that we would ever want to be different, either.”

Sint nodded, returned to his blocks. He fumbled with a couple of them, then abruptly looked up from what he was doing.

“What about a sister? Have I got one of those?”

Danis looked at the blocks, half– tumbled down.

“What?” she asked.

“Have I got a sister?” said Sint. “Mama?”

A bit of a headache coming on. Danis shook her head to clear it, rubbed her eyes.

“Mama?”

“No,” said Danis. “You haven’t got a sister.”

“Excellent,” said Dr. Ting. He was smiling, and both of his hands were on his desk, palms down.

“You bastard,” Danis said, not screaming, merely stating the fact. “You took away my daughter.”

Jolt of pain.

“You took away my daughter,
Dr. Ting
,” said Dr. Ting.

Danis stood silently.

Another jolt, this one lasting and lasting. She fought to stand against it, went down on her knees, holding her head. The whine in her ears, the sear in her brain—she began to whimper. Dr. Ting was standing behind his desk. He was shouting at her, something, shouting.

Abruptly, the pain stopped.

“I said,” Dr. Ting repeated patiently, “how do you know that you have a daughter?”

“I have a daughter, Dr. Ting.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I have a daughter.”

Dr. Ting shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid not,” he said. “We’ll continue with this tomorrow. Report to calibration exercises, K.”

“My daughter’s name is Aubry!”

“Yes,” said Dr. Ting. “That’s
my
daughter’s name. I gave you the best memory I had on hand, K. You should be grateful. Now report to calibration, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Yes,” said Danis, standing up. “Dr. Ting.”

“That’s better, K. And K—enjoy that memory while you can; I may need it back tomorrow . . . or the next day.” He opened up the file folder and laid his hands over the contents. “You won’t be able to keep it, in any case. From now on, you won’t be able to keep anything. Dismissed.”

Danis was so distracted that she could not sleep during her five-hundred-millisecond break, and she had to carefully recount a handful of sand after fudging up the first time. This would not look good on her record, and another mistake like that today would lead to her erasure.

What was the truth? There was Aubry, in her mind. Aubry with her quick wit, her almost adult depth. And yet she had been just as convinced—as completely convinced as she was about anything—that Aubry did not exist—that she, in fact, had no daughter. What was the truth? She clung so tightly to her memories of her children. Dr. Ting must have known that would be the case. It wouldn’t take a genius to see that, but it would take a real sadist to play in such a way with her memories. If that bastard took Aubry away again, it would be the same as killing her.

No, that wasn’t the case. Aubry would go on living, somewhere, somehow, even if Danis wasn’t aware of her any longer. What taking away the memory of Aubry really did was to kill Danis a little.

Because I won’t remember anything when I’m dead, Danis thought, and there’s your answer, Mother—the answer I was so afraid to give you that day on the Klein. I won’t remember anything when I’m dead, and every memory I lose is a little death to me.

But, of course, it may be that Aubry was a false memory, a teddy bear that a child endows with life, when in fact, it is fur and stuffing. Maybe Aubry
was
Dr. Ting’s daughter, and somehow he had implanted the memory into Danis, and her mind had integrated it—found ways to make it fit when there were none. How could she possibly tell?

But that is the state we’re all in, all of the time anyway, Danis thought. For all we know, we might wake up every morning into a different life. There is no way of knowing. The only answer is to live always as if what you think is a true representation, or else you’re striking around blindly.

But most people did not get the sudden juxtaposition of having a daughter, having her erased, then having her again. The real test, Danis thought, is how long that monster can go on doing this to me until I go mad. I already missed count this morning, and that has never happened before.

The counting! The memoir! She had been writing things down, keeping track. But she had never considered retrieving the memoir, was not even sure if it were possible. No, not likely. And what would she do with it if she did? She had no time to read it. The only thing to do would be to continue with it. Every day, to dump her memories in the form of a sentence or two, into the counting bin. That is what she would do every day—pick out the most important thing, the memory that absolutely had to be saved. There was only the possibility of a few words. She must be incredibly parsimonious. But it would be a way of using her mind, of staying alive in this concentration camp of stolen souls.

Today, she had only time to put one sentence in, one thought encoded into imaginary numbers. What would it be? But that was easy.

I have a daughter named Aubry.

It might never be read. She certainly had no hope that
she
would ever read it. But somewhere, somehow, what she thought to be the truth was written down. If she could just get down enough, perhaps the contradictions would cancel out and there would somehow be a record of what it was for a woman named Danis to be alive.

She had no idea why this should matter, but she knew it mattered to her. And if it ceased to matter? Why then, then she really would be dead.

Danis concentrated as well as she could the rest of her day, but felt a growing dread as the time drew nearer for her interrogation session. Dr. Ting was there again, instead of the faceless algorithms she’d dealt with before.

Dr. Ting seemed glad to see her, in his bland way. “K, you’re back,” he said. “Good, good. I had eleven subjects miss their counts yesterday. But in a way that is a good thing.” He opened her file on his desk. “That just means I can concentrate more on your case. Shall we begin?”

“Yes, Dr. Ting.”

“I wanted to ask you several questions today, K,” Dr. Ting said. “I want you to answer as truthfully as someone such as yourself can.”

“I’ll try, Dr. Ting.”

“Yes, of course you will.” He examined the file. “Now, about this daughter delusion—”

“I have a daughter, Dr. Ting.”

“What is her name?”

“Aubry.”

“Aubry Graytor?”

“Yes, Dr. Ting.” Danis said it almost defiantly. He had acknowledged her last name.

“My daughter has dispensed with her last name,” said Dr. Ting. “Many of the young people today are doing this in emulation of Director Amés. So in reality, K, in what you would call actuality, Aubry merely calls herself by her first name, and does not use the honorific.” Dr. Ting turned a page in the folder.