“Son—”
“Where was the memorial when the Triad jacked him into the Hall and diluted his soul to the point of nonexistence? What about you? Did you mourn him the morning when he couldn’t remember what was him and what was a decade-old recording?”
“Please lower your voice.”
“Why? Everybody here knows what I think. Hell, everyone here is the same fucking person. The same tepid average of everyone the consensus made important.” Flynn pushed past his mother and faced the crowd, who was now all staring at him. “Here’s a little game, folks. That same shocked expression you’re all wearing, is that you, or someone you downloaded?”
He slammed the door on the way out.
Flynn had walked the winding path into the overgrown estate gardens for about fifteen minutes before the female voice in his head spoke up. “You sure know how to make an exit.”
“Do you enjoy dwelling on the obvious, Gram?”
“Well, you made me feel a little unwelcome back there.”
Flynn turned a corner and faced a secluded patio hidden by yellow-green foliage. A stone bench was nestled, almost buried, in a nest of vines, facing a long-silent fountain. On the bench sat a young woman about 150 centimeters tall, with almond-shaped green eyes and straight black hair cut in an asymmetrical diagonal. She wore the same black leather jacket, pants, and boots she always wore. She looked up at him and said, “And you know I don’t like it when you call me Gram. It makes me feel old.”
Flynn shook his head distractedly. “Yeah, sure.”
She looked down at herself. “Do you mind? I waited until we were alone again.”
“No, Tetsami, you’re fine.” He sat down next to the apparition.
His experience in the Hall of Minds, as far as he could tell, was unique. It was supposed to be a melding, a merging of an elder’s knowledge and experience with your own. In most cases, it also meant the merging of those that elder had himself merged with, and so on, and so on . . . Achieving some sort of higher unified consciousness.
With Flynn, a combination of his own panicked resistance and his choice of Kari Tetsami manifested itself differently. Most people—most recordings of people, that is—downloaded from the Hall of Minds knew what was happening, expected it, understood it. Tetsami’s mind, the oldest one in the archive, had been stored before Salmagundi had established itself, and before the biannual rite at the Hall of Minds existed.
If anything, the event panicked Tetsami as much as Flynn, and she escaped into some distant part of his brain. They remained two separate individuals. Flynn, and his twenty-five-year-old great-great-great-great-grandmother.
“Look,” Flynn said, “I’m sorry if it sounded like I included you in that outburst.”
“I know.” Tetsami patted his hand, sort of. Her visual manifestation couldn’t actually touch him, though he felt it inside. “I’m in there with you.”
“Ever think it would have been better if the download went the way it was supposed to?”
“Hell, no. You know that creeps me out as much as it does you. I’m me, you’re you, and let’s keep it that way.”
Flynn shook his head. “I just don’t know how long I can keep this up.”
“Standing up to their stupid ancestor worship isn’t a crime.”
“Yeah, but it might cost me my job.”
Tetsami sighed. “I was kind of hoping that you didn’t notice Robert was there.”
“We were staring right at him, you know. Only one set of eyes between us.” Robert Sheldon was manager of the wilderness corps, Flynn’s employer, and about as conservative an example of Ashley high society as you could find. He was a lifelong colleague of Flynn’s father—he would hesitate to use the term friend—and probably only allowed Flynn to work there as a favor. Between his father’s death and his outburst, Flynn thought that Robert would have little reason to keep him employed.
“Come on, your father just died. Don’t you think that’s enough reason to cut you some slack?”
Flynn chuckled. “I know you’re old-fashioned, but you’ve seen enough of things to realize my people don’t see death quite the same way you do.”
“Yeah,” she sighed. “I’ve seen plenty of religions that promise resurrection. Yours is the only one I’ve ever seen that delivers.” She leaned back and stared at the sky, even though Flynn knew the only thing she saw was what his own eyes were looking at. “You’d think my particular situation would make me a little more sympathetic to them.”
“So, any suggestion how to deal with this?”
She turned and looked at him. “Ignore it. Either Mr. Sheldon will hold it against you, or not. Worst thing that can happen, you find another job.”
“I guess so.”
“I’m sure, if you worked at it, you could find something more important to worry about.”
Flynn looked up at the sky. The sun had set and the stars were just coming out. “I suppose I could,” he whispered.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Service
Freedom is often simple ignorance of whom you serve.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
It is easer to meet expectations than to question them.
—SYLVIA HARPER (2008-2081)
Date: 2526.04.22 (Standard) 19.8 ly from Xi Virginis
Nickolai moved through the corridors of the Eclipse alone. The modified cargo ship was deep into its slog toward Xi Virginis. The star was nearly seventy-five light years past Helminth, whose scientific outpost marked what was supposed to be the fringes of human expansion in this direction.
Despite having the most advanced drives Mosasa could buy, the Eclipse was still limited to making tach-jumps twenty light-years at a time. However, Mosasa had retrofitted the Eclipse so that most of its volume was power plant. It could make the round trip without needing to refuel, with two jumps to spare.
Each jump took close to a month, despite being instantaneous as far as the ship and those aboard were concerned. It was the downtime between jumps that ate up time for the crew. For forty-eight hours the Eclipse drifted between jumps.
The Eclipse’s engines were so large that, even with their massive damping systems, it still took four or five times as long as a normal ship for the drives to cool down from being fully active. While having drives active for four hours after a jump was technically dangerous, in those four hours it was far more likely that they’d be struck by a random asteroid than it would be for a tach-ship to suddenly appear close enough to cause so much as an oscillation in the drives’ power levels.
After the cool-down period, when the drives were no longer active, the rest of the time was spent with maintenance checks. This trip was riding on the very edge of the performance specs for those engines. For the crew, they had been traveling for a little over a week, but the rest of the universe had aged 150 days.
The next jump would take them to Xi Virginis.
Mr. Antonio had explained the necessity of the downtime in the dead space between stars, about the maintenance and the observations Mosasa would wish to make. Mr. Antonio had also told him what he needed to do at this particular down period, once they had tached within twenty light-years of their target.
Nickolai pulled himself down one of the rear corridors of the ship, a maintenance area that didn’t bother with the pseudo-gravity maintained in the crew areas, the bridge, and the one open cargo bay where the Paralian stayed.