“Old Earth.”
We walked on. Johnny pointed out another ruin. “The Forum.” Descending a long staircase, he said, “Ahead is the Piazza di Spagna where we’ll spend the night.”
“Old Earth,” I said, my first comment in twenty minutes. “Time travel?”
“That is not possible, M. Lamia.”
“A theme park then?”
Johnny laughed. It was a pleasant laugh, unself-conscious and easy. “Perhaps. I don’t really know its purpose or function. It is … an analog.”
“An analog.” I squinted at the red, setting sun just visible down a narrow street. “It looks like the holos I’ve seen of Old Earth. It feels right, even though I’ve never been there.”
“It is very accurate.”
“Where is it? I mean, what star?”
“I don’t know the number,” said Johnny. “It’s in the Hercules Cluster.”
I managed not to repeat what he said but I stopped and sat down on one of the steps. With the Hawking drive humankind had explored, colonized, and linked with farcaster worlds across many thousands of light-years. But no one had tried to reach the exploding Core suns. We had barely crawled out of the cradle of one spiral arm. The Hercules Cluster.
“Why has the TechnoCore built a replica of Rome in the Hercules Cluster?” I asked.
Johnny sat next to me. We both looked up as a whirling mass of pigeons exploded into flight and wheeled above the rooftops. “I don’t know, M. Lamia. There is much that I have not learned … at least partially because I have not been interested until now.”
“Brawne,” I said.
“Excuse me?”
“Call me Brawne.”
Johnny smiled and inclined his head. “Thank you, Brawne. One thing, though. I do not believe that it is a replica of the city of Rome alone. It is all of Old Earth.”
I set both hands on the sun-warmed stone of the step I was sitting on. “All of Old Earth? All of its … continents, cities?”
“I believe so. I haven’t been out of Italy and England except for a sea voyage between the two, but I believe the analog is complete.”
“Why, for God’s sake?”
Johnny nodded slowly. “That may indeed be the case. Why don’t we go inside and eat and talk more about this? It may relate to who tried to kill me and why.”
“Inside” was an apartment in a large house at the foot of the marble stairs. Windows looked out on what Johnny called the “piazza” and I could see up the staircase to a large, yellow-brown church above, and down to the square where a boat-shaped fountain tossed water into the evening stillness. Johnny said that the fountain had been designed by Bernini but the name meant nothing to me.
The rooms were small but high-ceilinged, with rough but elaborately carved furniture from an era I did not recognize. There was no sign of electricity or modern appliances. The house did not respond when I spoke to it at the door and again in the apartment upstairs. As dusk fell over the square and city outside the tall windows, the only lights were a few streetlamps of gas or some more primitive combustible.
“This is out of Old Earth’s past,” I said, touching the thick pillows. I raised my head, suddenly understanding. “Keats died in Italy. Early … nineteenth or twentieth century. This is … then.”
“Yes. Early nineteenth century: 1821, to be precise.”
“The whole world is a museum?”
“Oh no. Different areas are different eras, of course. It depends upon the analog being pursued.”
“I don’t understand.” We had moved into a room cluttered with thick furniture and I sat on an oddly carved couch by a window. A film of gold evening light still touched the spire of the tawny church up the steps. Pigeons wheeled white against blue sky. “Are there millions of people … cybrids … living on this fake Old Earth?”
“I do not believe so,” said Johnny. “Only the number necessary for the particular analog project.” He saw that I still did not understand and took a breath before continuing. “When I … awoke here, there were cybrid analogs of Joseph Severn, Dr. Clark, the landlady Anna Angeletti, young Lieutenant Elton, and a few others. Italian shopkeepers, the owner of the trattoria across the square who used to bring us our food, passersby, that sort of thing. No more than a score at the most.”
“What happened to them?”
“They were probably … recycled. Like the man with the queue.”
“Queue …” I suddenly stared across the darkening room at Johnny. “He was a cybrid?”
“Without doubt. The self-destruction you described is precisely the way I would rid myself of this cybrid if I had to.”
My mind was racing. I realized how stupid I had been, how little I had learned about anything. “Then it was another AI who tried to kill you.”
“It seems that way.”
“Why?”
Johnny made a gesture with his hands. “Possibly to erase some quantum of knowledge that died with my cybrid. Something I had learned only recently and the other AI … or AIs knew would be destroyed in my systems crash.”
I stood, paced back and forth, and stopped at the window. The darkness was settling in earnest now. There were lamps in the room but Johnny made no move to light them and I preferred the dimness. It made the unreality of what I was hearing even that much more unreal. I looked into the bedroom. The western windows admitted the last of the light; bedclothes glowed whitely. “You died here,” I said.
“He did,” said Johnny. “I am not he.”
“But you have his memories.”
“Half-forgotten dreams. There are gaps.”
“But you know what he felt.”
“I remember what the designers thought that he felt.”
“Tell me.”
“What?” Johnny’s skin was very pale in the gloom. His short curls looked black.
“What it was like to die. What it was like to be reborn.”
Johnny told me, his voice very soft, almost melodic, lapsing sometimes into an English too archaic to be understood but far more beautiful to the ear than the hybrid tongue we speak today.
He told me what it was like to be a poet obsessed with perfection, far harsher toward his own efforts than even the most vicious critic. And the critics were vicious. His work was dismissed, ridiculed, described as derivative and silly. Too poor to marry the woman he loved, loaning money to his brother in America and thus losing the last chance of financial security … and then the brief glory of growing into the full maturation of his poetic powers just as he fell prey to the “consumption” which had claimed his mother and his brother Tom. Then sent off to exile in Italy, reputedly “for his health” while knowing all the while it meant a lonely, painful death at the age of twenty-six. He talked of the agony of seeing Fanny’s handwriting on the letters he found too painful to open; he talked of the loyalty of the young artist Joseph Severn, who had been chosen as a traveling companion for Keats by “friends” who had abandoned the poet at the end, of how Severn had nursed the dying man and stayed with him during the final days. He told of the hemorrhages in the night, of Dr. Clark bleeding him and prescribing “exercise and good air,” and of the ultimate religious and personal despair which had led Keats to demand his own epitaph be carved in stone as: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
Only the dimmest light from below outlined the tall windows. Johnny’s voice seemed to float in the night-scented air. He spoke of awakening after his death in the bed where he died, still attended by the loyal Severn and Dr. Clark, of remembering that he was the poet John Keats the way one remembers an identity from a fast-fading dream while all the while knowing that he was something else.