“What’d they want to know? I mean, after they’d read our Legacies?” Toby asked bitterly.
<They asked much about the Chronicles of the Myriapodia. I told them of our weapons, our victories, and what we know of the mechanicals. Especially of their interests here.>
“You told them?”
<The Philosophs so allow. This is a cusp moment in the long conflict with the mechanicals.>
“Mechs get in here much?”
<They have defenses, as do the Myriapodia.>
“They’d better be pretty fine ones.” Toby liked the lush greenery of this park, but it missed a quiet, slumbering ambience of Citadel Bisbop’s—at least, in boyhood memory. Neither did this city equal those lost, charming avenues he had toddled along, led by his mother’s hand. And he knew that nothing ever could.
<They wished to hear of the mechanicals’ work on anti-matter.>
“Aunt who?”
Quath made a metallic rrrrrttttt that might be something like laughter, though Toby had never been able to tell. She made the same sound at times that weren’t remotely funny, at least to Toby. When the rrrrrttttt stopped, she told Toby about how ordinary matter had an opposite kind, and if they met, both kinds disappeared in a flash of light.
“Seems dangerous stuff to tinker with,” Toby mused.
<They are studying the small specks which carry currents, the electrons, and especially their opposites, the positrons. Clouds of such pairs are created by spinning small stars, the neutron stars. The mechanicals study intensely in such places.>
Toby shook his head. “I want to understand this place, Quath—don’t trouble my head with tales of stars.”
<I was attempting to make what you once termed “small talk” before getting to serious discussion.>
“That’s small talk?” Toby paced in the little grove, listening to the mutter of people and commerce only a block away. Even this scrap of the natural world, a few trees and bushes, was enough to make him realize how much he had missed it. “I think I know what you’re working up to, though. My dad wants me back, tail between my legs—right?”
<You state things in animal metaphors. A very primate skill.>
“But I’m dead on target?”
<More. He has concluded his negotiations. To gain what he wishes, he needs to trade some items from the ship.>
“Let him. After he’s bargained away the Legacies, why be choosy?”
<The merchants here are avid for information on the clothing and jewelry of the Old Bishops. Their “folk art.”>
“Fashion, huh?”
<It seems a primate preoccupation. Augmenting yourselves with baubles.>
“Hey, you stick on an extra eye or leg fast as I can change my shirt.”
<You seldom change it.>
“Hey! I forget, sure, but—”
<It is not the same.>
Toby didn’t see why, but he felt something in Quath’s manner that made him uneasy. “Why come looking for me, mother of all cockroaches?”
<Your father has finished his trading. Now, to complete his own ends, he needs one thing more.>
Toby kicked at a fallen branch. “Should I care? Let him sell his teeth for it.”
<The important piece only you have.>
“Me? I haven’t got anything.”
<You carry a Personality.>
“Sure, but—say, what’s my dad been negotiating?”
<They have a different way of death here. An institution known as the Restorer, or the Preserving Machine. With a tissue sample and a memory reserve, it can recreate any person who once lived.>
Toby felt cold, sharp horror strike into him. “Shibo.”
<Yes.>
“I don’t like that.”
<I would think it was an issue for the persona herself.>
Toby blushed. He tottered, reeled—and sat down abruptly, head swimming. The air swarmed with blue-white dots. His chest heaved to drag in thick, moist gasps. He knew what Killeen wanted was wrong in some dark, terrible way, but he could not muster arguments. “I . . . I don’t know.”
<If the Shibo persona is to be used to reconstruct the living actual person, I would imagine that her cooperation is necessary.>
“They’ll confer with her?”
<I believe so. But a Personality in a chip cannot speak.>
“Sure, it’ll have to be through me.”
His head pounded and his hands clenched, strangely cold, but he made himself think. He had only to turn his attention inward and Shibo’s Personality rose like a massive stony wedge inside his mind.
It is tempting to go back into all that. I will have to think about it.
“What?” he asked her soundlessly. “But we’re so close. I’ve hardly even started to learn what you’re really like. Your memories, I love them.”
They are digital dust.
“They’re just as real as, as this grass, those trees.”
You do not believe that. Remember the ones who fought the fake animals? They embraced the simulated over the real. You laughed at them.
“But your self, it’ll last forever in chipstore.” He was grasping at straws of logic and hoped she could not sense that.
Nothing replaces life. Still, there are flavors here that you do not taste. Hard to describe, gray and cool and restful.
Craftily he said to her, “Let’s get through this trouble, then talk about this so-called Restorer.”
There is some sense to that, I admit.
“Good. Just let me straighten things out with my dad, just you and me, and—”
I have been thinking. Such a transformation might not make for happiness in myself or in Killeen. He is changed. Harder.
“He is that.”
I treasure this remove. Here I am free of the coarse and momentary, of jars and needs.
Toby caught a sliver of pale spaces, strangely delicious, of smooth surfaces flowing in a timeless place. “I see.”
You cannot. But I thank you for trying.
He gulped, his hands trembling, and gazed defiantly up into Quath’s hovering head. “I . . . I won’t let Killeen have her chip.”
<He is Cap’n. He will take it.>
“I have rights!”
<Not to keep a Personality. He will argue that a Personality should be liberated if it can be.>
He jerked angrily to his feet. “That’s not Family custom!”
<Your Family never had the technology before. With your species, where ability goes, custom follows.>
“Humanity must’ve had this, sometime ’way back, or else these people here wouldn’t have it. But our customs, they’re ancient—and they don’t say anything about bringing Personalities back.”
<This, then, is a measure of how far you have fallen.>
So simply put, the brutality of it was unanswerable. “Look, I still won’t give her up.”
<He will take her. He argues already that Shibo’s talents are needed, for the exploration of this place.>
“Exploration?” Toby could not get his mind off the prospect before him. And something more dried his mouth, tightened his throat—the strange currents running like searing rivulets when he thought of Shibo.
<For Abraham. And else, as well, I believe.>
“I need to think this over.” Toby got up unsteadily. Shibo herself was not causing this seethe inside him. It was something he felt, something about him and Shibo together, that he could not voice. Each time he tried, he felt a sickening churn, a whirlpool of coming nausea.
<I came to warn you. Killeen has ordered a search for you.>
“I won’t go back.”
“Oh yeasay—you will,” his father said.