The Little White Nerves Went Last Read online

  The Little White Nerves Went Last

  John Barnes

  ©Copyright 2006 by John Barnes

  Illustration by John Allemand

  * * * *

  People can behave rationally, but it can be one of the toughest challenges we face.

  The Invisible Man

  "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 General Theory of

  Employment, Interest, and Money

  "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

  * * * *

  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 chan
ge, 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.AndI 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?”