Shit. I blink. "I was dealing with my own problems," I manage to say.
"Yes, I can see that now." His voice is gentle, almost sleepy. "But I couldn't forgive you for a while. I've been here before, you know. Not here-here, but somewhere like here."
"The ice ghouls?" I ask, before I can stop myself.
"Yes." He tenses, then pushes himself upright. "A whole planet full of pre-Acceleration sapients who probably aren't going to make it without outside help because they took so long bootstrapping their techn that they ran out of easily accessible fossil fuels." He swings his legs round and sits upright, next to me but just too far away to touch. "Living and breeding and dying of old age and sometimes fighting wars and sometimes starving in famines and disasters and plagues."
"How long were you there, again?" I ask.
"Two gigs." He turns his head and looks straight at me. "I was part of a, aI guess you'd call it a reproductive unit. A family. I was an ice ghoul, you know. I was there from late adolescence through to senescence, but rather than let them nurse me, I ran out onto the tundra and used my netlink to call for upload. Nearly left it too late. I was terminally ill and close to being nestridden." Sam looks distant. "All the pre-Acceleration tool-using sapients we've seen use K-type reproductive strategies. I'd outlived my partners, but I had three children, their assorted cis mates and trans mates, and more grandchildren than"
He sighs.
"You seem to want me to know this," I say. "Are you sure about that?"
"I don't know." He looks at me. "I just wanted you to know who I am and where I come from." He looks down at the stones between his feet. "Not what I am now, which is a travesty. I feel dirty."
I stand up. He's gone on for long enough, I think. "Okay, so let me get this straight. You're a former xeno-ornithologist who got way too close to your subjects for your own emotional stability. You've got a bad case of body-image dysphoria that YFH failed to spot in their excuse for an entry questionnaire, you're good at denialself and otherand you're a pathetic failure at suicide." I stare at him. "What am I missing?" I grab his hands: "What am I missing?" I shout at him.
At this point I realize several things at once. I am really, really angry with him, although that's not all I feel by a long way, because it's not the kind of anger you feel at a stranger or an enemy. And while I've been working out like crazy and I'm in much better physical shape than I was when I came here, Sam is standing up, too, and he has maybe thirty centimeters and thirty kilos on me because he's male, and he's built like a tank. Maybe getting angry and yelling in the face of someone who's that much bigger than I and who's shocky right now from repeated bad experiences isn't a very wise thing to do, but I don't care.
"* * *," he mumbles.
"What?" I state at him. "Would you care to repeat that?"
"* * *," he says, so quietly I can't hear it over the noise of the blood pounding in my ears. "That's why I didn't kill myself."
I shake my head. "I don't think I'm hearing you properly."
He glares at me. "Who do you think you are ?" he demands.
"Depends. I was a historian, a long time ago. Then there were the wars, and I was a soldier. Then I became the kind of soldier who needs a historian's training, then I lost my memory." I'm glaring right back at him. "Now I'm a ditzy, ineffectual housewife and part-time librarian, okay? But I'll tell you thisone day I'm going to be a soldier again."
"But those are all externals! They're not you. You won't tell me anything! Where do you come from? Did you ever have a family? What happened to them?"
He looks anxious, and suddenly I realize he's afraid of me. Afraid? Of me? I take a step back. And then I register what my face probably looks like right now, and it's like all my blood is replaced with ice water of an instant, because his question has dredged up a memory that was, I think, one of the ones my earlier self deliberately forgot before the surgery, because he knew it would surface again and forgetting it hurt but knowing it might be erased by crude surgical intervention was even worse. And I sit down hard on the bench and look away from him because I don't want to see his sympathy.
"They all died in the war," I hear myself saying woodenly. "And I don't want to talk about it."
WHEN I sleep, another horror story dredges itself up from my suppressed memories and comes to visit. This time I know it's genuine and true and really happened to me, and there's nothing I can do to change it in any detailbecause that's what makes it so nightmarish.
The ending has already been written, and it is not a happy one.
In the dream, I am a gracile male orthohuman with long, flowing green hair and what my partners describe as a delightful laugh. I am a lot youngerbarely three gigsand I'm also happy, at least at first. I'm in a stable family relationship with three other core partners, plus various occasional liaisons with five or six fuckbuddies. We're fully bisexual, either naturally or via a limbic system mod copied from bonobos. My family has two children, and we're thinking about starting another two in half a gig or so. I'm also lucky enough to have a vocation, researching the history of the theory of mindan aspect of cultural ideology that only became important after the Acceleration, and which goes in and out of fashion, but which I hold to be critically important. The history of my field, for example, tells us that for almost a gigasecond during the old-style twenty-third century, most of humanity-in-exile were zimboes, quasi-conscious drones operating under the aegis of an overmind. How that happened and how the cognitive dictatorship was broken is something I'm studying with considerable interest and not a few field trips to old memory temples.
One of these visits is the reason I am not at home with my family when Curious Yellow comes howling out of nowhere to erase large chunks of history, taking with it an entire interstellar civilization, and (to make things personal) my family.
I'm visiting a Mobile Archive Sucker in the full physical flesh when Curious Yellow first appears. The MASucker is a lumbering starship, effectively a mobile cylinder habitat, powered by plasma piped from the interior of a distant A0 supergiant via T-gate. It wallows along at low relativistic speeds between brown dwarf star systems, which in this part of the galaxy are spaced less than a parsec apart. During the multigigasecond intervals between close encounters, the crew retreats into template-frozen backup, reincarnating from the ship's assemblers whenever things get interesting. The ship is largely self-sufficient and self-maintaining (apart from its stellar tap, and a tightly firewalled T-gate to the premises of the research institute that created it centuries ago). Its internal systems are entirely offnet from the polity at large because it's designed for a mission duration of up to a terasecond, and it was envisaged from the start that civilization would probably collapse at least once within the working life of the ship. That's why I've come out here in person to interview Vecken, the ship's Kapitan, who lived shortly after the cognitive dictatorship and may have recollections of some of the survivors.
Now here's a curious thing: I can't remember their faces. I remember that Lauro, Iambic-18, and Neual were not simply important to me, not just lovers, but in a very real way defined who I was. A large chunk of my sense of identity was configured around this key idea that I wasn't solitary: that I was part of a group, that we'd collectively adjusted our neuroendocrinology so that just being around the others gave us a mild endorphin rushwhat used to be a haphazard process called "falling in love"and we'd focused on complementary interests and skills and vocations. It wasn't so much a family as a superorganism, and it was a fulfilling, blissful state of affairs. I think I may have had a lonely earlier life, but I don't remember much of that because I guess it paled into insignificance in comparison.