“You think I’m jesting? Speaking in metaphors? He has a lot of anger toward you, and by extension toward myself, for having been you. Whips, chains, direct stimulation of the centers of’s-s-suffering? These are merely appetizers. The most disagreeable treatments you can possibly imagine are inadequate, mere infantile shadows of the truth, because you haven’t spent a lifetime reflecting on it, as He has.”
But Bruno was still shaking his head. “What do you mean, ‘having been me?’ Are you saying you’re Bruno de Towaji? A copy of myself?”
“Was,” the stranger spat. “Was. It’s a name I’ll sully no further. But yes; He pirates fax patterns out of the Iscog, and instantiates them in secret, in dungeons hidden away from civilized eyes and sensors. He’s particularly fond of your pattern—thereVe been dozens of us in His clutches at one time or another—but He keeps others as welclass="underline" Rodenbecks, van Sketterings, Kroghs… He even kept a Tamra for a while, though it didn’t seem to please Him. He’s kept a few others on occasion. Not that they last long, of course, the way He uses them up, but they can always be freshly printed, the’s-s-same pain recipes tried over and over until they’re perfected. I represent an unbroken chain, decades long. In the midst of our sufferings we pass down the histories and lore, from one generation to the next. He encourages the practice, as it deepens our despair.”
Bruno could only stare. Was the stranger mad? Was he speaking from delusion, or some demented sense of jest? The two men stared at each other, the one unbelieving and the other unbelievable, for a long string of moments.
“May I sit?” the stranger finally asked, in the same whiny, ingratiating tones. He sounded tired, though. More than tired. Exhausted, in the literal sense: a container that had been squeezed of its contents. His knees quivered beneath his scrawny weight. He looked ready to faint. “I shudder to contaminate your furnishings, Bruno, or even your fine little floor, but my’s-s-strength is limited.”
“Are you really myself?” Bruno asked, horrified to his very core, unable to reconcile a single trait or feature of this exhausted container with his own self-image. But the question needed no answer—the house would have corrected the lie already, would never have admitted the stranger in the first place if he were, indeed, anything other than what he claimed. “My God, my God, yes, sit down over here! Lie back! House, bring us hot soup and blankets. Immediately!”
Steering the stranger—steering himself—toward the couch, he realized that it was warm enough in here, that there was no literal need for soup or blankets. But the house and the stranger seemed to understand; the gesture was symbolic. Robots brought woolen bedclothes, with which the stranger permitted Bruno to cover him, and a mug of steaming broth, from which he dutifully sipped.
“Ah,” the stranger sighed, “you’re too kind. Literally too kind, for I’ve betrayed your secrets and bartered off your dignity more thoroughly than you could ever know. He knows what moves you, what hurts you; He knows everything about you. He knows how you wipe your ass! I told Him all of this, over and over. I deserve none of your’s-s-sympathy. And yet here I am, seeking it. Further proof of my unworth!”
“No, no! My God, Bruno, who’s done this to you?”
The stranger sat up angrily. “Do not call me that! I am not a Bruno! Call me Shit, or Remnant, or Betrayer.”
Bruno, leaning forward against one arm of the couch, shook his head. “I’ll do no such thing.”
“Sir,” the stranger pleaded, “do not call me Bruno. Unless you seek to upset me, sir. I deserve that, but I don’t desire it.”
Hugo let out a sudden mewl. In a corner of the room, trapped between a table and the wall, it stood perplexed, contemplating its golden legs and the prison that held them, perhaps considering an act of self-mutilation—Hugo had removed a leg more than once, sometimes for less reason than this. Once it had even managed to remove both of its arms, and had stood over them forlornly for a solid day, ignored by the house software, until Bruno had finally taken pity, broken off his experiments, and taken a screwdriver to the poor thing.
But even Hugo possessed a measure of self-respect. Barely sentient, barely knowing it was alive at all, the “emancipated” robot nonetheless managed to find and fulfill the occasional desire. It managed to play a little, learn a little, live a little; this fact was clear in its bearing. The stranger, who had no such air about him, eyed the thing, suddenly, with an envy that looked like hunger.
“Come,” Bruno reassured, and wished there were someone else here to reassure him, or better yet that he’d wake up and find this whole incident to be a particularly loathsome dream, the result of a too-early bedtime after much too heavy and spicy a meal. “Come on, uh, friend. We’ll get you calmed down, and then the two of us can climb in the fax together and reconverge.”
Even as he said it, the idea struck him as a poor one.
The stranger’s reaction was violent. “Are you mad? Are you mad, Bruno? I am every imaginable poison and pathogen! Look at this wreck, this wreckage of yourself, and ask ‘tvhat these memories will do to that proud bearing of yours. I know your weaknesses, sir; I know them far better than you, and I say keep your distance. I am your worst imaginable betrayer, and even / recoil at the idea! I’ll never join with you. Never!”
Bruno pulled back a little, seeing the huddled figure in still another light: a man who had been himself, but was himself no longer. A man whose harrowing experiences set him apart, entitled him to a sense of identity quite distinct from Bruno’s own. Suddenly, he felt ashamed for having suggested otherwise.
“I will call you Brazowy,” he said gently. “Or perhaps Kafiese. Those are translations; they mean ‘brown’ or ‘brown haired,’ as Bruno does.”
“I know what they mean,” the stranger snapped. “But I warn you, sir: you overestimate the dignity I’m able to’s-s-sustain. Those names are fair and pretty; I couldn’t bear them. Call me Fuscus if you must.”
“ ‘Muddy?’”
“Muddy! Yes, call me Muddy! That’s exactly what I am: the flooded, silted ruins of a once-grand mansion. I am clotted with muck from a distant source, and I’ll reek of it to the end of my days.”
Bruno nodded grimly. “Very well, then; Muddy it is. But you must tell me, who is this villain? Who dares to kidnap and torture the images of innocent people? He has the Queen, you say? Unthinkable!”
“You know who it is,” Muddy said.
“I don’t.”
“You can guess who it is, Declarant.”
“No, I couldn’t possibly.”
Muddy pushed a wild, gray-white lock of hair back over the rutted battlefield of his scalp, and cringed. “I can say the name, sir, but you’ll feel no surprise on hearing it. My tormentor is none other than His Declarancy, Philander Marlon Fineas Jimson S-S-S-Sykes.”
And it was true; Bruno felt his hair stand on end, his skin go clammy, his feet begin to tingle and sweat. He felt disgust, and anger, and betrayal, and above all, a deep sense of embarrassment for poor Marlon, that he should take his petty envies and covetousnesses so deeply and seriously and personally after all. But he felt no real surprise. In some sense, he supposed he’d known all along that Marlon was no good, that there was something really wrong with him.
“The really odd part,” Muddy said, and the whiny tone in his voice, while stronger than ever, seemed more forgivable, “is that he does it to himself as well. You’ll see him dragging his own copy down into the caverns, and the copy will be’s-s-screaming, ‘Oh God, it’s me this time! It’s a mistake; I’m on the wrong side! I’m supposed to be you!’ and His Declarancy will lock it down and torment it in the most savage ways, all the while yelling ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid! Why do you have to be so stupidl’ He’s harder on himself than he is on others, if such a thing is possible. There’s a kind of nobility in that.”