Vaddum retreated from the world of stifling comforts and too many words. He took to haunting abandoned factories and warehouses, derelict mines and ships, the ghosts of obsolete technologies. It was in these wasted spaces, from their discarded sinews, that his sculptures began to form.
When Darling started to deal Vaddums into the HC art world twenty years later, fame found the man once more. Vaddum instinctively ran from its glare: the greater world again conspiring to steal something from him. He fled to the farthest arm of the Expansion, which, at that time, was a half-barren rock called Malvir. But demand for Vaddum's work grew. The pieces still entranced Darling, for whom the woven metal and plastic were brilliant with the fiery spaces of the factory that had inspired them.
Many messages from Darling had been ignored over the years; Vaddum still hated his fellow bootstrap for discovering him. But Darling's sheer persistence won out. The sculptor agreed to see him for a single hour.
Mira smiled. The hotel was vast. Columned, cathedral-like, towering, its aeries housed a population of custom-trained predator birds. They kept the environs almost free of airborne nuisances, and screamed a piercing and constant music. Mira wondered how the high, swooping pitches would look rendered in Darling's light show.
There was a message waiting in her room. Ink on wood pulp: an exotic missive from the gods.
It directed her to an address on the edge of the blast zone. The zone was a vast crater of scorched earth, the result of industrial sabotage seven years before; a synthplant had gone nova without any known cause. The perpetrators had never been caught, and it was guessed that they had perished in the accident, unhappy neighbors of the synthplant who'd never realized the potential radius of destruction.
The entity she knew as Blackbox One had lived in the blast zone, and had managed the synthplant's materials acquisition. The message gave his real name: Oscar Vale. He had survived through sheer luck, on personal leave when the synthplant exploded. Blackbox Two had appeared three months ago. A party of climbers, scaling the steep side of the blast crater for sport, found a survivor in the rubble. Literally nothing left but a black-box, the occupant's mind on minimum cycle speed and the internal battery almost expired. He was revived in hospital, where he claimed that his name was Oscar Vale. Two versions of the same person.
Someone had done the unthinkable. Copied an AI.
But the story had never made the news services; an outbreak of a military virus thought long extinct had swept through the hospital. Doctors and nurses died, and the admin AI self-expired: falling on its own sword in tacit admission of some terrible error.
The disaster's scope had been carefully controlled, exactly calibrated. The Oscar Vales were both spirited to the Home Cluster for comparison.
But their experiences had diverged for almost seven years, so absolute comparison was not possible until both had undergone a radical mindwipe. A theoretician of such matters, a Dr. Alex Torvalli, had performed the test just prior to his sudden, unexpected demise.
The address on the gods' missive was Vale's. He'd been shipped back to Malvir by fastfreight. Reinstalled in his life, he was now recuperating from a strange memory loss.
"Mr. Vale?"
"That's what they tell me."
"My name is Dr. Arim ben-Franklin. I'm a psychologist studying memory disorders such as yours."
"Hey! The fan club!"
"Yes, I suppose I am a fan. Do you suppose I could come out and see you? Talk to you?"
"Sure. If you don't mind the curse."
"Curse?"
"The Curse of Oscar Vale! Right after I woke up like this, a few of you headshrinkers wanted to talk to me. But so far, no one's made it out here. Transport accidents, broken legs, you name it! At least, that's what my datebook tells me. I'm never sure, myself."
"I'm sure I'll be fine."
"All right. I have therapy until fourteen today. Fourteen-fifty?"
"Perfect."
"Do me a favor, though. Call when you leave the city. Otherwise I might forget. Wander off. I spend a lot of time in the local garden."
"Certainly."
"See you, Doctor…?"
"ben-Franklin."
"Right. Just keep reminding me."
His body was standard SPCAI issue. The millimeter radar in her glasses returned the cold blue of a smartplastic endoskeleton, the dark threads of distributed intelligence, and, where his stomach might have been, the curvature of his AI core, its metaspace generator warping the geometries of gravity. Nothing extra. Nothing special.
She removed the glasses, put one earpiece into her mouth.
"You don't know who I am, do you?"
Oscar Vale looked embarrassed, but not flustered. "I got a lot of friends, me. You know the trouble." He waved one hand, as if rolling through names in his head, too many to mention. "At a party, right? Right! Can't always place everyone. The whole world looks different, you know? New visuals. Used to have Fabrique Double Reds, way down into the deep infras. Could tell if the suppliers were lying; bios anyway. Get that hot skin on their neck, or on the forearms. Not you, though. Cool as a cucumber."
Mira shook her head. With his SPCAI eyes, he couldn't even see full visible. He'd gone from talking about his old eyes to seeing with them in a seconds-long fugue of remembering, forgetting, remembering. She'd called him from the hotel before leaving. She'd called him from the limo. She'd introduced herself at the door.
And they'd been talking for half an hour. But again Vale's memory had undergone a little crash, a resetting of variables to zero.
"I'm the psychologist whom you spoke to earlier today."
"Doc! Sorry. I was expecting you sooner."
"I'd asked you if you had any unusual contacts or experience before the Blast Event."
He looked puzzled for a moment. A bad sign.
She'd tested a theory on her way over. Asked the question in passing to the hotel's human concierge, the limo's AI, a beggar on the street. The old saying was true: Malvirians knew exactly what they were doing at the moment of the Blast Event. But Vale's memories ended a few months before the Event. Of course, Vale couldn't just say exactly when his memories ended. She sighed, returning to the task of bracketting the date. Vale had sat through twenty minutes of the binary search without complaint. He just needed the occasional reminder of who she was and what was going on.
"September 1?"
"We haven't got a September here. Hey! You must be from off-world!"
She made a fist in frustration. "Convert to HC Standard, please. Remember?"
"A workday! That bastard Simmons tried to sneak in some—"
"December 1?"
"Don't seem to…" The puzzled, grasping look on his face, as if something were almost visible through a haze. She spoke before he drifted away again.
"October 15?"
"Friday. The birds were making a racket that morning. Went to—"
"November 7?"
He snapped his fingers a few times, smiled an empty smile, an affable shell of a person. He still tested well above 2.0 on the Turing scale, but there was something missing. Some vital connection had been lost. Apparently it wasn't enough to be real, a legal person, to have that solid base of curiosity, initiative, a capacity for setting goals: the Knack of Wisdom, as the SPCAI called it. One had to have memory, too. Vale's therapists had tried a simple minder implant, a device that he could query for details, appointments, names, faces. But he simply forgot to use it.