own making.
She greeted him at the station.
She held shadowed inlets of rest. A cup brimming with water, a distant chime of bells, the sweet damp air of early morning.
He remembered it so well, the ritual of meditation in his fleet training, the days of quiet devotion through simple duties that strengthened the mind.
Everything had been of a piece then.
Before Gray grew to greatness, before conflict and aching doubt, before the storm that raged red through his mind, like-
- Wind, snarling his hair, a hard winter afternoon as he walked back to his quarters…
- then, instantly, the cold prickly sensation of diving through shimmering spheres of water in zero gravity. The huge bubbles trembled and refracted the yellow light into his eyes. He laughed.
- scalding black rock faces rose on Gray. Wedges thrust upward as the tortured skin of the planet writhed and buckled. He watched it by remote camera, seeing only a few hundred yards through the choking clouds of carbon dioxide. He felt the rumble of earthquakes, the ominous murmur of a mountain chain being born.
- a man running, scuttling like an insect across the tortured face of Gray. Above him the great membrane clasped the atmosphere, pressing it down on him, pinning him, a beetle beneath glass. But it is Fleet that wishes to pin him there, to snarl him in the threads of duty. And as the ship arcs upward at the sky he feels a tide of joy, of freedom.
- twisted shrieking trees, leaves like leather and apples that gleam blue. Moisture beading on fresh crimson grapes beneath a white-hot star.
- sharp synapses, ferrite cores, spinning drums of cold electrical memory. Input and output. Copper terminals (male or female?), scanners, channels, electrons pouring through p-n-p junctions. Memory mired in quantum noise.
Index. Catalog. Transform. Fourier components, the infinite wheeling dance of Laplace and Gauss and Hermite.
And through it all she is there with him, through centuries to keep him whole and sane and yet he does not know, across such vaults of time and space… who is he?
Many: us. One: I. Others: you. Did you think that the marriage of true organisms and fateful machines with machine minds would make a thing that could at last know itself? This is a new order of being but it is not a god.
Us: one, We: you, He: I.
And yet you suspect you are… different… somehow.
The Majiken ships were peeling off from their orbits, skating down through the membrane holes, into my air!
They gazed down, tense and wary, these shock troops in their huddled lonely carriages. Not up, where I lurk.
For I am iceball and stony-frag, fruit of the icesteroids. Held in long orbit for just such a (then) far future. (Now) arrived.
Down I fall in my myriads. Through the secret membrane passages I/we/you made decades before, knowing that a bolthole is good. And that bolts slam true in both directions.
Down, down-through gray decks I have cooked, artful ambrosias, pewter terraces I have sculpted to hide my selves as they guide the rocks and bergs- after them!-
The Majiken ships, ever-wary of fire from below, never thinking to glance up. I fall upon them in machine-gun violences, my ices and stones ripping their craft, puncturing. They die in round-mouthed surprise, these warriors.
I, master of hyperbolic purpose, shred them.
I, orbit-master to Gray.
Conflict has always provoked anxiety within him, a habit he could never correct, and so:
- in concert we will rise to full congruence with F(x) and sum over all variables and integrate over the contour encapsulating all singularities. It is right and meet so to do.
He sat comfortably, rocking on his heels in meditation position.
Water dripped in a cistern nearby and he thought his mantra, letting the sound curl up from within him. A thought entered, flickered across his mind as though a bird, and left.
She she she she
The mantra returned in its flowing green rhythmic beauty and he entered the crystal state of thought within thought, consciousness regarding itself without detail or structure.
The air rested upon him, the earth groaned beneath with the weight of continents, shouting sweet stars wheeled in a chanting cadence above.
He was in place and focused, man and boy and elder at once, officer of Fleet, mind encased in matter, body summed into mind
- and she came to him, cool balm of aid, succor, yet beneath her palms his muscles warmed, warmed-
His universe slides into night. Circuits close. Oscillating electrons carry information, senses, fragments of memory.
I swim in the blackness. There are long moments of no sensations, nothing to see or hear or feel. I grope-
Her? No, she is not here either. Cannot be. For she has been dead these centuries and lives only in your station, where she knows not what has become of herself.
At last, I seize upon some frag, will it to expand. A strange watery vision floats into view. A man is peering at him. There is no detail behind the man, only a blank white wall. He wears the blue uniform of Fleet and he cocks an amused eyebrow at:
Benjan.
“Recognize me?” the man says.
“Of course. Hello, Katonji, you bastard.”
“Ah, rancor. A nice touch. Unusual in a computer simulation, even one as sophisticated as this.”
“What? Comp-”
And Benjan knows who he is.
In a swirling instant he sends out feelers. He finds boundaries, cool gray walls he cannot penetrate, dead patches, great areas of gray emptiness, of no memory. What did he look like when he was young? Where was his first home located? That girl-at age fifteen? Was that her? Her? He grasps for her-
And knows. He cannot answer. He does not know. He is only a piece of Benjan.
“You see now? Check it. Try something-to move your arm, for instance. You haven’t got arms.” Katonji makes a thin smile. “Computer simulations do not have bodies, though they have some of the perceptions that come from bodies.”
“P-perceptions from where?”
“From the fool Benjan, of course.”
“Me.”
“He didn’t realize, having burned up all that time on Gray, that we can penetrate all diagnostics. Even the station’s. Technologies, even at the level of sentient molecular plasmas, have logs and files. Their data is not closed to certain lawful parties.”
He swept an arm (not a real one, of course) at the man’s face. Nothing. No contact. All right, then-“And these feelings are-”
“Mere memories. Bits from Benjan’s station self.” Katonji smiles wryly.
He stops, horrified. He does not exist. He is only binary bits of information scattered in ferrite memory cores. He has no substance, is without flesh. “But… but, where is the real me?” he says at last.
“That’s what you’re going to tell us.”
“I don’t know. I was… falling. Yes, over Gray-”
“And running, yes-I know. That was a quick escape, an unexpectedly neat solution.”
“It worked,” Benjan said, still in a daze. “But it wasn’t me?”
“In a way it was. I’m sure the real Benjan has devised some clever destination, and some tactics. You-his
