Vana Berenguer burst into quiet tears, emotionalized beyond all redemption. John Cornwell wiped the sweat from his brow and stared into an unfathomable distance. "Those poor bastards," he muttered. "Those poor bastards!"
The Selenite looked at him quizzically. "Who? What do you mean?" Cornwell had a growing look of unutterable horror. "The Seedees!" He turned to gaze at Krzakwa.
"We have our gods always with us, mythical beings that we imagine rule our lives. We blame them for our failings and so they serve us. These poor bastards . . . Their gods were real!" He shut his eyes, trying to blot out his inner vision. "What a horrible fate . . ."
The others were staring at him, bewildered, and suddenly Aksinia Ockels gasped, "Son of a bitch. I know that shape. . . ." She had been a biologist by training and now she racked her memory. She cried,
"God damn! T—4r+! Of course!" She leaped to her feet, rebounding in the low gravity, and fled from the room.
Krzakwa felt stunned, unable to grasp what was going on. "What the hell is happening to us?" It began again. And Brendan Sealock's almost dead body lay by the wall.
NINE
Cornwell and Krzakwa walked slowly across the heathered rise of the moor simulation, warm and safe amid the toys technology had created for them, and the clouds of the dark blue sky slid by unnoticed. They talked in a somewhat desultory fashion. John was saying, "I'm not sure I understand what you mean."
Tem found a hummock and sat, looking up, and for the first time really noticed the perfect harmony of this little illusion. He saw that the colored sky was not just a wall at some great distance, that it was the infinite heaven of innumerable literary references. A translucent eternity . . . "I'm not sure we can really do it. ... Even as an abstraction, it's complex. Personality transfer has been done between living people. In a sense, it's just an extension of Downlink Rapport. On one occasion, it was used to bring back a man who'd recently died."
"Really?" John looked slightly startled. "I don't remember ever hearing about anything like that."
"You wouldn't have. It's illegal on Earth.... A couple of years ago, on Luna, an important scientist had the bad judgment to have an aneurysm while he was working on a crucial transition zone in the higher math of a cataclysm system. More than just data . . . insights that he had failed to explain were lost. They put him on emergency life support." Krzakwa grinned, remembering. "Since I was a colleague of his, they brought me, among others, in with the idea that one of us might understand whatever they could get out of him. They tried to resuscitate him the usual way, but he was too far gone. So they grabbed a condemned criminal—"
"They have a death penalty on the Moon?"
Tem nodded. "It's a state secret, but, yes, they do. Anyway, they read off what was left of Dr. Hanscom's neuroelectrical patterns and pumped it into this poor fucker, right on top of his own personality. It resulted in a really bizarre psychosis, but we managed to reconstruct the transition math before he became catatonic."
Shaking his head, looking pale, John said, "I never imagined . . ." He stopped and thought about it. In a way that he had not really come to terms with, Elizabeth Toussaint's personality was overlying his own, and he shuddered. "All right, first things first. Is Brendan really gone?"
"Depends on what you mean. We still have an alien intelligence down in Iris that is a virtual unknown. It could give him back if we ask in the right way. But the process of contacting it again seems to involve a repetition of the danger. I've just got to think about it some more." John scuffed the mossy vegetation with his foot, watching it darken and lighten like velour. "The implications of all this are staggering. We're talking about more than immortality. Frankly, I didn't think we had come this far."
The Selenite shrugged. "What did you think the Data Control Insurrection was about, really? Even in the distorted history they taught me on Luna I could see that all this was coming. Why they allowed Shipnet is the real question; thetotal control they exercise over the elements of Comnet is the only thing that preserves the illusion of normalcy."
"I suppose . . ." John squeezed his eyes shut. "How would it work between Jana and Brendan? Aren't our personalities partially hard-wired into our heads? Neural pathways and all that?"
"Yeah. If we manage to get a good scan, we'll have a new person with Jana's memories and Brendan's emotional characteristics. Call it nine to one in Jana's favor."
"I ... don't know if it's worth it." Cornwell felt himself rapidly sinking into a fuguelike state. "Really, it seems . . ."
"We probably won't be able to do it. It's never been tried on someone so thoroughly dead before."
"But you said she'd keep."
"As meat, John! Jana had the extremely poor taste to freeze to death slowly. Every cell in her body is packed with ice crystals, ruptured."
"Because of me."
"All the more reason to think hard about the whole thing. Jana is—was—obviously unstable. In a way, we'll have the worst of both worlds. . . ."
Cornwell passed a hand over his face. "We'll have to talk to the others...."
"If you like." A wave of exhaustion passed through Krzakwa, and he noticed a grainy, faintly kaleidoscopic pattern pulsating in the sky, in time with his heartbeat. "I've got to get some rest. . . ."
Aksinia Ockels, wearing a rumpled orange space suit with the hood thrown back, was in a compartment of the containerized cargo hold where Brendan had stored the hefty mass of personal belongings that had come along with him on the Deepstar's flight. She'd been rummaging through his collection of antique books and had at last come upon the thing she sought. Now she stared fixedly at a color plate, a picture of a six-sided being, its parts neatly labeled, cephalosome, tail-sheath . . .
"I knew it," she muttered. She packed the book into a silver-lined environment bag and drew the top together intoits seal. Then, with some fumbling, she hardened her suit and hood and stepped into the airlock.
Krzakwa, who had just awakened from an unsatisfying nap upon the heather, was kneeling on the rim of the pool and splashing cool water on his face. The entrance at the far end of the dome made its
"cycling" warning and he wondered who had been outside. Finally the door came open and Aksinia came through, eagerness quickening her steps.
"What're you doing?" Tem asked.
"Reading." She came up and opened the bag that she carried, pulling out a book, and smiled. "Look at this." After a moment of turning slick pages, she had it.
"How the hell did you find a picture of a Seedee"—the oddness of it suddenly took hold of him—"in a book?"
She held it up so that he could see the cover. It was the 2007 edition of Raymond's Elements of Virological Anatomy.
"I don't understand. What're they doing with it?"
She smiled crookedly at him. "It isn't a Seedee, Tem. It's a T—4r+bacteriophage virus."
"I see." He picked up the book and read through the stereophotomicrograph's accompanying text. Gobbledegook, material far outside of his own specialty. "How did you come to find it here?"
"When we were in with Brendan, I knew I'd seen the Seedees before, somewhere. I think I even remembered the name.... I got an equivalency in bioengineering, back before residencies were required. I've forgotten a lot, but not everything. All it takes is something to jar it out. I wish I'd brought my tech info along! But I didn't. I suppose it was Beta-2 that saw to that. Shit! It never lets me care about things like that." She laughed softly. "When you people filled up Shipnet, you neglected the basic biology stuff. I ran a quick check on the cargo manifest. I was hoping . . . Anyway, this book turned up on Brendan's list." She looked at the man in front of her and was amazed to see how pale and watery his eyes looked.