Prophets

The procession ended at the entrance to the Hall of Minds. It hadn’t changed since Flynn had last been here, on his first equinox. That was close to seventeen standard years ago. Four solstices come and gone, and four equinoxes as well, and before the next solstice he planned to be as far away from here as he could get.

“Am I that bad?”

“Give it a rest—please.”

The Triad awaited his father’s body at the entrance; the three oldest people on Salmagundi, shaved bald so their forehead tattoos were more visible. Where most people had four or five glyphs marking each pilgrimage to the Hall of Minds, these three had dozens. Flynn only had one, and he could not imagine what now lived behind these Elders’ eyes. Their faces were expressionless, and they gazed out at the procession in a way that didn’t seem quite human.

His father bore six glyphs on his brow. Six ancestors. Six residents of the Hall of Minds.

The Triad led his father’s body and the procession into the central rotunda. The space was vast and echoing, occupying half the aboveground volume of the building. It easily held the thousand-plus people of the procession.

The Triad led Flynn’s father to the center of the rotunda, where a circular dais supported a pair of square obelisks about twice the height of a man. One member of the Triad stood in front of each pillar, while the sled floated to rest between them. The last member, a woman by her voice, stood at the head of the contragrav sled and spoke.

“We are here to commit Augustus David Jorgenson to posterity. We are ready to cast his shell aside and commit him to the archive, where this unique individual will enrich our lives in perpetuity.”

“God, how I hate the way they say ‘unique’ . . .”

“They do end up looking alike, don’t they?”

“Yeah, Gram. They do.”

The reception after Augustus Jorgenson’s funeral was held at the Jorgenson estate, another place that Flynn had avoided for over a decade. It was probably the largest house in Ashley, and one of the oldest. Fitting, perhaps, for one of the chief founding families of Salmagundi.

Also a sign of the importance of Flynn’s father, there were at least twelve people there to eulogize him before the wake proper. Of course, each eulogy had little to do with Augustus David Jorgenson himself. Flynn had to listen to all of them, out of respect for his father, or who his father had once been.

The series of speakers talked about the people Augustus David Jorgenson had chosen to make part of his own mind, the people he had ritually downloaded. They spoke briefly of them, and of the people they had downloaded, and those they had downloaded . . .

Long passages became little more than a melange of names and dates without any context. A muddy narrative that became as bland and meaningless as most of the people around him.

It was never supposed to be like this. Gram had explained to him the founding of Salmagundi. How once they were a hundred light-years from the crumbling Confederacy, and free of the laws against the heretical technologies, the founders had decided to record their minds not to build a culture, but to preserve a knowledge base in a population that was just on the edge of sustainability. With a human mind archived, they would never again want for a sanitary engineer, an astrophysicist, a neurosurgeon, a hydroponics expert—

Over the course of 150 years, it had become something other than necessity. It had become a combination of ancestor worship and a promise of immortality. Flynn wondered if many people knew how much a fraud it all was.

He wondered how many cared.

After the endless eulogy ending with the—to Flynn, ironic—toast to the Founders, he drifted through the wake like a ghost. The crowd and the conversations obligingly parted around him. No one seemed to be eager to engage Augustus’ only son in conversation. The lone tattoo on his brow was a beacon of his oddball status even to those who didn’t know him personally.

That was fine by Flynn. He walked up to the buffet, removed a small meat-filled roll, and retreated to the empty solarium. He sat on a wrought-iron chair and looked up through the tinted glass at the small golden ball of Salmagundi’s sun.

There were no plants here anymore, not like when he was a child, when his father was his own age. Then, this room was filled with flowers. Teased and tended by his father, when Augustus was still his dad. He had a love of the natural world, and the endless abundance of the planet Salmagundi with its two-year-long seasons. A love that Flynn had inherited.