And for the second time since climbing down the shaft I lay bruised and aching in the dark with broken glass embedded in my leg. My makeshift lantern must have been knocked over and doused when I fell. Instead of searching for it I held the view-ring to my eye. The ring showed me the cell in greenish tones, revealing almost as much detail as I might see in daylight. Fexler lay on the floor, sprawled at my feet, the gun still clutched in his outstretched hand, a wisp of smoke escaping the barrel. Around his head a black and spreading pool of blood.
‘Thank you.’ Fexler – my Fexler from Castle Morrow, a projection of white light – stood beside the corpse, watching the splayed limbs, face unreadable.
‘Fexler, good to see you,’ I said. And it was. Any company in such a place is welcome. I drew a deep breath, taking in the stink of chemicals and fire from the gun, the tang of blood. The Builder halls felt real at last.
‘Why all the silence and mystery?’ I edged through the glass and dust to set my back to a wall, in part for support, in part because it’s good practice.
‘The men of my time lived amongst wonders but they were made no differently from their forefathers who wore skins and ate raw meat in caves, or from their descendants who carry iron swords and live in ruins they can’t comprehend. In short they had the same instincts as any man. Would you trust a copy of yourself?’
‘So they set spells on you such that no data ghost could kill the person from whom they were copied?’ I asked.
‘So that no data echo could harm any human, or ask for them to be harmed, or take actions that might lead them to hurt. It has taken a thousand years of subtle manipulation, of twists and sleights of logic, for me even to reach the stage where I could point someone like you in this direction, Jorg.’
‘And why would you?’ My hand settled on the fallen oil flask. I gave it a swirl. Maybe a fifth of it remained.
‘Data echoes are not just forbidden from harming their original template. In fact whilst the person whose data created any particular echo still lives there are an enormous number of restrictions placed on that echo, for the convenience, privacy, and peace of mind of the person in question. In the world that I inhabit I have been very much a second class citizen for considerably longer than your empire has existed.’
‘In Castle Morrow?’ The world that he lives in?
A tight smile, quick and gone. ‘Imagine an ocean wider and deeper than all others, full of wonder and variety, and on the surface a thickness of ice broken only here and there. The echoes that the Builders left behind, “data ghosts” if that’s how you want to call us, we echoes swim in such an ocean and the places where we may be seen in this thin world of yours are like the holes in the ice where we can surface. We exist in the joined complexity of the Builders’ machinery, and in places such as the terminal at Morrow we may be seen.’
‘So why aren’t you?’
‘Why aren’t we what?’
‘Seen? Why was it just you haunting that cellar?’
Another smile, more of bitterness in it than of friendship. ‘Second class citizen. The menial duties fell to me. Keeping an eye on the savages.’
I had to remind myself that the Fexler who shared anything with me lay on the floor, his blood cooling around him. The Fexler talking to me was not a man, just the idea of a man, an idea held in a machine. I reached out a foot to nudge the dead man. Fexler’s echo shuddered as if the action disturbed him.
‘So why did he kill himself?’ I asked. ‘And what stopped him?’
‘He started a war,’ Fexler said. ‘And finished it.’
‘Hell I lit up one of your suns, it didn’t make me take a knife to my throat straight after.’
‘The weapons Fexler Brews launched could not be detonated with a fire.’
‘You saw that?’ Fexler’s ghost had been watching me six years back, under Mount Honas?
‘Our weapons burned like suns – exactly the same way. Each needs a trigger to ignite it, a smaller, more primitive implosion. Your fire at Silo Eleven using weapons relocated from Vaucluse melted the implosion components into a critical mass. What you saw was a partial ignition of the trigger that would then light the sun. The fuel for the “suns” is short-lived, it’s a matter of half-life, the fuel for the rockets that bore them lasts little longer. All that remains now are the triggers.’
I wondered if the original Fexler had liked the sound of his own voice so much. In any event it was a sobering thought to know I laid waste to Gelleth with a fraction of the spark that would light a true Builder Sun. And despite my words, the dead of Gelleth had haunted me, literally and in dreams. To have burned the whole world in such fashion would have been … uncomfortable.
‘And even with his gun he didn’t manage to kill himself?’ With such toys at their disposal it seemed unforgivable for any Builder to fail in the act of taking a life.
‘These cubicles were designed to hold key personnel in stasis until conditions improved to the point where life might be sustained outside again. Fexler was perhaps not thinking clearly as he sat here wrestling with his conscience. Maybe he didn’t appreciate that the automatic systems would kick in to preserve him or perhaps he just didn’t realize how quickly they could act.’
‘Either way, he left you in the shit along with all the real people in the world.’
‘He did.’ Fexler’s image flickered, a frown above his eyes.
I grinned. It must have been odd to spend a thousand years cursing the man you were copied from. ‘So now I’ve freed you and
