The clone nodded fervently. “Of course.” He laughed nervously. “And of course I’m ready. Everything’s fine.” His eyes darted around the yard, as if he was searching for an escape route.
Peer felt his chest tighten. He said evenly, “You don’t have to go ahead if you don’t want to. You know that. You can bale out right now, if that’s what you’d prefer.”
The clone looked more alarmed than ever. “I don’t want that! I want to stow away with Kate.” He hesitated, then added, “She’ll be happier in there, more secure. And I do want to be with her; I want to know that side of her.”
“Then what’s wrong?”
The clone sank to his knees in the dirt For a second, Peer thought he was sobbing, then he realized that the noise was laughter.
The clone recovered his composure and said, “Nothing’s wrong—but how do you expect me to take it? The two of us, cut off from everything else. Not just the real world, but all the other Copies.”
Peer said, “If you get lonely, you can always generate new people. You’ll have access to ontogenesis software—and no reason to care about the slowdown.”
The clone started laughing again. Tears streamed down his face. Hugging himself, he tumbled sideways onto the ground. Peer looked on, bemused. The clone said, “Here I am trying to steel myself for the wedding, and already you’re threatening me with children.”
Suddenly, he reached out and grabbed Peer by one ankle, then dragged him off the step. Peer hit the ground on his arse with a jarring thud. His first instinct was to freeze the clone’s power to interact with him, but he stopped himself. He was in no danger—and if his twin wanted to burn off some aggression on his brother-creator, he could take it. They were evenly matched, after all.
Two minutes later, Peer was lying with his face in the dirt and his arms pinned behind his back. The clone kneeled over him, breathless but triumphant.
Peer said, “All right, you win. Now get off me—or I’ll double my height, put on forty kilograms, and get up and flatten you.”
The clone said, “Do you know what we should do?”
“Shake hands and say goodbye.”
“Toss a coin.”
“For what?”
The clone laughed. “What do you think?”
“You said you were happy to go.”
“I am. But so should you be. I say we toss a coin. If I win, we swap key numbers.”
“That’s illegal!”
“
Talking was difficult; Peer spat out sand, but there was a seed of some kind caught between his teeth which he couldn’t dislodge. He felt a curious reluctance to “cheat,” though—to remove the seed from his mouth, or the clone from his back. It had been so long since he’d been forced to endure the slightest discomfort that the novelty seemed to outweigh the inconvenience.
He said, “All right. I’ll do it”
They created the coin together, the only way to ensure that it was subject to no hidden influences. The reality editor they jointly invoked offered a standard object ready-made for their purpose, which they decorated as a one-pound coin. The physics of flipping a real coin wouldn’t come into it; any Copy could easily calculate and execute a flick of the thumb leading to a predetermined outcome. The result would be controlled by a random number generator deep in the hidden layers of the operating system.
Peer said, “I toss, you call”—at exactly the same time as the clone. He laughed. The clone smiled faintly. Peer was about to defer, then decided to wait. A few seconds later, he said, alone, “All right, you toss.”
As the coin went up, Peer thought about encasing it in a second object, an invisibly thin shell under his control alone—but the long list of attributes of the fair coin probably included crying foul if its true faces were concealed. He shouted “Heads!” just before the thing hit the dirt.
The two of them fell to their hands and knees, almost bumping heads. A hen approached; Peer shooed it away with a backward kick.
President Kinnock, in profile, glinted in the dust.
The clone met his eyes. Peer did his best not to look relieved—short of severing ties with his body. He tried to read the clone’s expression, and failed; all he saw was a reflection of his own growing numbness. Pirandello had said it was impossible to feel any real emotion while staring into a mirror. Peer decided to take that as a good sign. They were still one person, after all—and that was the whole point.
The clone rose to his feet dusting off his knees and elbows. Peer took a hologram-embossed library card from the back pocket of his jeans and handed it over; it was an icon for a copy of all the environments, customized utilities, bodies, memories and other data he’d accumulated since his resurrection.
The clone said, “Don’t worry about me—or Kate. We’ll look after each other. We’ll be happy.” As he spoke, he morphed smoothly into an older body.
Peer said, “Ditto.” He reached up and shook the young man’s hand. Then he summoned one of his control windows and froze the clone, leaving the motionless body visible as an icon for the snapshot file. He shrunk it to a height of a few centimeters, flattened it into a two-dimensional postcard, and wrote on the back: to malcolm carter.
Then he walked down the road a kilometer to one of Kate’s little touches, a postbox marked us mail, and dropped the postcard in.
19
(Remit not paucity)
JUNE 2051
The anaesthetist said, “Count backward from ten.”
Maria said, “Ten.”
She dreamed of arriving on Francesca’s doorstep with a suitcase full of money. As she walked down the hall behind her mother, the case fell open, and hundred-dollar bills fluttered out and filled the air like confetti.
Francesca turned to her, radiant with health. She said tenderly, “You shouldn’t have, my darling. But I understand. You can’t take it with you.”
Maria laughed. “You can’t take it with you.”
Her father was in the living room, dressed for his wedding day, although not as young. He beamed and held out his arms to Maria. His parents, and Francesca’s parents, stood behind him—and as Maria approached, she saw from on high that behind her grandparents were cousins and aunts, great-grandparents and great-aunts, row after row of relatives and ancestors, stretching back into the depths of the house, laughing and chattering. The money had brought them all back to life. How could she have been so selfish as to think of denying them this grand reunion?
Maria threaded her way through the crowd, greeting people she’d never known existed. Handsome, dark- eyed seventh cousins kissed her hand and whispered compliments in a beautiful dialect she didn’t understand. Veiled widows in elegant black dresses stood arm-in-arm with their resurrected husbands. Children weaved between the adults’ legs, stealing food by the handful and cramming it into their mouths on the run.
The clinic’s neurologist turned out to be a distant relative. Maria cupped her hands to the woman’s ear and shouted over the noise of the party: “Have I been scanned yet? Will my Copy remember any of this?” The neurologist explained that the scan only captured memories laid down permanently as changes in synaptic strengths; the fleeting electrochemistry of this dream would be lost forever. She added cryptically, “Lost to whoever’s not having it.”
