anticipation gone sour. He had travelled a long way to see a fake. His Robert Vaddum had not survived the Blast, after all. And worse than death, the artist's soul had been stolen, copied, forged.
Darling's frame shuddered.
Mira felt the strand around her neck stiffen with his anger. It contracted like a python, tightening its grip until her vision grew red at the edges. She made a breathless, panicked sound, and Darling looked down.
He released her, a look of horror on his face.
"I'm sorry."
An unconscious reaction, her revelation had hurt him so. The slack filament slipped from her shoulders.
"No, leave it here," she said, holding the tendril in both hands, wrapping it around her neck again. "But tell me…"
Darling sighed.
"He was a bootstrap, like me," Darling said. "It was in the slave days, before mentors and protege minders. For decades he was treated like a machine, given no more attention than you would a luggage carrier. But in spite of that he could see beauty. Even in a hellish place, where he experienced almost no spoken language, no human interaction, no direct interface except with the most brutish of machines: he dragged himself across the threshold simply by seeing. He made himself from nothing."
Mira kissed Darling's hand.
"And it fooled me."
"What did, Darling?"
"The piece. The forgery. It was so close. It extrapolated his work so perfectly that I thought he might still be alive."
Mira moved to kneel before him. Darling still didn't understand completely. Even were it to hurt him worse, he should know the whole truth. Now that she had gone against her gods, Mira was desperate for Darling to really see.
"Of course it fooled you," she said. "The copy that was found wasn't an avatar. This was a Turing-positive copy. An exact replica, down to the metaspace core."
He frowned at her, still not comprehending.
"Robert Vaddum is alive, in a way," she said. "At some point before the Blast, he was recorded and filed away. This isn't some hoax you've fallen victim to, it's completely new technology. We don't even know how it was done."
His great frame shuddered again.
"And they brought him back?" he asked. "From the dead?"
"Yes," she said, glad that he understood now. "And it's my job to kill him again."
Being a human, she needed sleep. She stayed with him until sunlight began to pour though the bar's windows. In the heat of it, she drifted in and out of consciousness.
Such a strange woman, Darling thought.
She was so pure in her delight, so completely open to his sexual ravages, so brightly innocent against her dark profession. Of two centuries of lovers, she slept the most deeply and contentedly. Her only mental defect was the gap in her memories. Perhaps that was the source of her purity. The absent childhood, the innocent abandon, the missing fears and insecurities.
Missing. There was something missing from her.
And she was going to kill Vaddum, this copied Vaddum who was somehow real.
The thought made Darling ache, and he wondered darkly if Mira's innocence didn't hide something cold, something ugly beneath that slow sine wave of her mind, an emptiness of soul disguised by her evanescent remove from the world.
A long-unused muscle in his chest stirred like a hibernating animal, moving only painfully. Darling calmed himself and let the muscle slowly awaken, the buzz of repair nanos swarming in his breast mixing with the tingle of warm sunlight. When his chest was ready, it opened, wider than it did during mere sexual games. Revealed in the cavity was an old object he kept there, close to where a heart would have been on a human. He reached into the breech and pulled it forth.
The thing—half bioform and half machine—glistened brown with its maintenance ichor, which had kept it alive and functional for the 170 years he'd owned it. He suspected the animal aspect of the device was far older than that.
It warmed in his hand, stirring as it awakened. The omnipresent Malvirian dust, visible now in the rising sun, swirled in the static charge of the object.
Suddenly, he was afraid to use the device/creature on Mira. And the realization that his fear was sound, was borne on some inescapable intuition (or Intuition), was almost more than he could bear.
He was silent for a long time. Buried the thing back inside his chest unused. Then he said, "Not again."
Instead of touching her with the black tentacles of the device, Darling reached out to Mira's forehead with his own strands. They smoothed her hair, running through the dark tresses, tasting the sweat of her errant passion.
She was in a deep sleep, apparently possessed by a dream. Her eyes fluttered behind their lids, and her fingers seemed tense; they were cupped as if to hold water. Her breathing grew short and fast, and Mira's mouth opened into a small circle, as if she were drowning, gasping for air.
Chapter 18
THE KILLING TALE
Darling walks up the long hallway, counting doors.
Seventy-two of them between the hospital entrance and the room where his lover lies. All patient rooms; he hasn't included labs or breakrooms or janitorial stations in his census. His math is made easier by the high prices at the hospitaclass="underline" the rooms hold one patient each, no doubling of beds, no long, anonymous wards echoing with coughs. Seventy-two, then, is his first factor.
So how often does an occupant die in any given room?
A point to consider: This hospital reserves its rooms, its doctors and expensive machines, its long-gathered hoard of expertise for serious illness only. No cosmetic nanowork or body augmentation, no eyescreen advertising filters, no simple treatments for the cranial inflammations of cheap direct interfaces. Only the spectre of death behind every door.
A second point: The grim fragility of humans, which artificials can only shake their heads or blackboxes or sensory arrays at. The open architecture of orifices: mouths and ears and genitals, so ready to admit viruses, bacteria, parasites. And the inviting spaces within, moist and warm as if humans were designed as a nursery for the replication of marauder-organisms. And that joke of an immune system: easily coopted by retroviruses, blind to invaders from unfamiliar biospheres, given to rejecting useful transplants and augmentations. And if only infection were the whole story! There are the quick deaths, too. A host of vital organs susceptible to shock, to penetration, to all the simple and ubiquitous versions of kinetic energy; you could kill a human with a rock. So fragile: the muscular but overexcitable heart, the spindly spine, the toy-balloon lungs, and the infinitely fragile core of brain, almost unprotected on its lofty, unstable perch. And for those humans neither plagued with microorganisms nor battered by chance collisions: the fifth column of cancer. With every photon of radiation the human body endures (gamma, X-ray, even ultraviolet—that's right, sunlight), it suffers the minute risk of a deadly change to its DNA, the all-important information redundantly stored throughout. One bad roll of the dice among trillions, one cell gone mad enough to forget how to die, and the swelling progeny of that cell becomes a choking, bloated army consuming its host.
So, conservatively, he estimates six deaths per year, per room.
Few enough, given all the ways a human can die. The place is very good at what they do. If you can get yourself here, strapped to a stasis grid or sealed in a cryotank or stalwartly breathing on your own, you have a fair chance of them excising the parts that aren't working, and replacing them with better.
Six times seventy-two: four hundred thirty-two deaths.
And that's per year. Darling direct interfaces the hospital's highest-level PR page, reads the proud masthead bragging its date of origin. These medium-long spans of time are very impressive to fragile humans; they cling to them for lack of immortality.