"Merely an attempt to bring scientific closure to the unknowable. To offer certainty where there is none, as if you tried to determine the beauty of a painting with an algorithm," the doctor said.
But he offered the address of an expert in crank medicine, who might know more. And who might, he implied, be a crank herself.
Darling visited the woman, sat listening, surrounded by looming shelves filled with vitriated brains, spines, nervous systems extracted whole and spread like nets. The old woman had never seen the tester, but she knew the legend: A species of parasite exists, spread by some ancient starfaring host across a wide swath of systems beyond the Expansion, evolved somehow to consume the epiphenomena of life. These animals drink the subtle energies that play on the epidermi of animals or plants, preferring those of intelligent creatures, of Turing positives, so to speak. A few of these leeches have been captured—by NaPrin Intelligencers or Tarava monks, whichever legend you prefer—and their natural sensitivities incorporated into a machine that is part bioform, an engineered relative of the parasite. This creature/device can test a thinking animal, human or a Chiat, its hunger for the subject reflecting the measure of her soul.
A long trail followed, made winding by the exigencies of trade and the still simmering Rebellion, delayed by lapses into depression at the hopelessness of it all. But finally, Darling found his graiclass="underline" a Turing meter for humans. He bought it from an old NaPrin soldier, paying what was after the long search a paltry sum. The man claimed to have once been an elite shock trooper, all fear of death brainwashed from him. The soldier had become disturbed by his own calm, his lack of terror at the extinction that steadily approached him in his old age. He regretted that missing awe of nothingness. He'd purchased the animal/machine to learn if he was still human.
The soldier wouldn't answer when Darling asked him how the test had gone for him. Just smiled emptily, not unhappily, and explained how it worked.
"You touch it lightly to the forehead, just here. The tentacles will grasp the temples, just so…"
Darling replays the instructions in his head, the old man's hollow voice ringing in his ears as black liquid fingers steal across his lover's white face, the almost phantom sound of the creature's movement blending with the crackle of its field generator. One unruly hair on Rathere's forehead waves mindlessly in the electric breeze, and her face grows whiter still in small circles around the tentacles' contacts, which glow like bright little coins in the sun.
When the device delivers its result, Darling's processors lose their separate tracks, their supremely parallel architecture. The whole is brought together and consumed by the question: Is this true?The constant data of senses, self-repair, even the basest levels of kinetic and positional awareness that are never absent from Darling's mind are washed away. All he thinks, or indeed is, is the question: Has Rathere, the person of her, really gone away?
A poet might say he is blinded by the pain.
The doctors—some human, some comfortingly artificial—have theorized how Rathere may one day rise from this bed. The consumed brain tissue has been replaced: data-blank, but hungry for information. There was a great deal of the brain left when she arrived, at least when expressed with so crude a statistic as a percentage. ("My lover is 53 % the person she was," Darling has often muttered to himself. Enough to win an election, or some game with a zero-sum scoring system.) And the brain is mysterious in its connections and methods of storage, as strange in its way as the metaspace manifold that forms the artificial mind. Perhaps some new pathways will develop, the doctors say, new arrangements, negotiations, and deals among neurons, a black market of thoughts and feelings like a society rebuilding itself after a long and dreadful war. Many graves to be dug, not a house left standing, perhaps a new constitution to write and new borders to be drawn, but the same old flag and national anthem.
But for nineteen months nothing has changed.
And now she has failed this test. This last attempt at knowing her, of seeing behind the closed eyes, has returned a row of zeroes.
Darling looks at the array of objects he has brought here from his travels. Drawings and sculptures, crafts and clothing, discarded trinkets and strange formats of industrial waste, stuffed and mounted animals and the extraneous bits of aliens who slough their skins or other organs. Quite a collection. He has hoped these sights would rekindle his lover's mind, just as her adolescent tourism sparked the fire of personhood in him. In a way, these works of art are Turing tests themselves, signs meant to shake and measure the soul. But Rathere's camera-eye is run by less code than a cleaning robot, a self-charging battery, or a decent coffee-maker. She can take control of it; it's wired that way. She might even open her eyes, theoretically; their focusing powers are exercised along with all the rest. All has been kept in readiness. But there is no glimmer of hope, not that Darling can see.
Today his painful thoughts are colored by a new development.
A strange man has made Darling an offer.
One Reginald Fowdy, here in the hospital after nearly killing himself with an exotic combination of recreational toxins, has offered to buy his (Rathere's?) collection. And the man has named a huge sum, one that would keep Darling travelling without needing to trade for years. The thought has given him his first pleasure since he offered that last kiss to his lover, and sealed her away to die.
(Yes. Die.)
This Fowdy wants Darling to search out new objects, new artists, new fads and must-haves and trinkets for the very rich of the HC. Apparently, Darling's eye is good.
But the thought of this room bare—the idiot camera searching in vain for something to image, about which to write its little letters home that will never be opened—is too crushing. An admission that this death is real. That the lover who made him is gone.
A long time later, Darling rises from his contemplation of the new, golden sculpture, and walks toward Rathere's sleeping form. The camera greedily tracks him as he kneels to whisper an apology, to offer another kiss. (The trickery of life-sustaining machines: it still feels good to kiss her.)
Then he promises himself that he will never come here again. Not again to this room, and not the other sickrooms of the future, where all persons biological will surely, finally rest. Not again this pain.
He releases a pair of packets into direct interface, prepared several days before. Ownership of the room's artistic contents to Reginald Fowdy for the offered price, final payment and Rathere's organs to the hospital, objects all.
He picks up the human Turing meter and places it into a cavity in his chest, the only keepsake he can stand to take.
Darling shuts his ears as he walks from the room, so that he won't hear the whine of the little camera tracking him, following his passage as hopefully as a lost dog.
PART IV
THE BROKEN HILL
Wilde was quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, perverted work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. The slavery of Artificial Intelligence is counter-aesthetic and demoralizing.
On biological slavery, on the slavery of the (occasional) human, the future of the Expansion depends.
— Planetary Military Mind, Terra
Chapter 19
SECRET TWIN
The sun has cleared the mountains, spreading light across theflatlands, though the great bowl of the crater still brims with darkness. It will take half the day for the sun to tip high enough—like a bottle-mouth pouring some bright, viscous liquid—to fill the crater.