The chimpanzee soldier snorted, a sound tinged with grudging respect.

Stepping back, I turned to Clara’s comrade and asked, “Did you mean what you just said — about being willing to do something for us?”

“Sure, why not?” The ape-ditto shrugged. “Any buddy of Clara’s is a bud of mine.”

I stared at the gray ghost of Yosil Maharal, as the news gradually sank in

“A … missile attack?”

“That’s right. Little remains of your home — and your archie — but a smoking crater. So your only hope now is the same as mine. Successful completion of my experiment.”

I reacted with churning fear and dread, naturally. This cheap red body that I wore, though small, was equipped for a full range of emotion. And yet, I’ve stared death in the face so many times, and till now always managed to put off that final losing match. So why not hope? Maharal could be bluffing. Testing my reactions.

I kept a blank face, turning things around. Testing him.

“Continuity, Professor. That’s what it’s all about. Even with the new technology to refill élan cells, your clay body can’t be replenished more than a few times. You’ve got to emulate my copying ability in order to make soul-impressions from one ditto to the next, indefinitely. Without an organic brain to return to, it’s your only option.”

He nodded. “Go on.”

“But something’s eluded you. Whatever I do — however I manage to make such good copies — the knack isn’t easily duplicated.”

“That’s right, Morris. I believe it has partly to do with your casual attitude toward the dittos that went missing over the years. An attitude you demonstrate even now. See how relaxed you are, on hearing that your real body was destroyed? Anyone else would be frantic.”

I felt anything but relaxed. In fact, I was pissed off! But other priorities ranked higher than going orbital and screaming at this fellow. All my other prisoner-selves would have diagnosed Smersh-Foxleitner syndrome by now. They’d decide to feign a lackadaisical attitude. Act unimpressed. Draw Maharal out.

Shall I stay with that approach? Or try a new tack in order to surprise him?

At the moment, shackled down, I saw no way to take advantage of surprise. Better save it for later.

“You see,” Maharal continued, warming to his subject, “we humans are all still deeply rooted in the animal response set … the desperate drive to continue organic existence. Inherited survival instinct played an important role in our evolution, but it can also be an anchor, pinning down the Standing Wave. It’s one reason why few people make truly first-rate ditto impressions, without affectual holes or memory gaps. They hold back, never letting their entire selves roll fully in the clay.”

“Hm. Cute metaphor,” I replied. “But there are millions of exceptions. In fact, lots of folks are far more careless with their golems than I am … or was. Experience junkies. Org-warriors. Janitors who make commercial throwaway units by the gross. And blue cops who will gladly jump in front of a train to save a cat. Then there are nihilists—”

That word made Yosil wince, his expression briefly pained. A deeply personal kind of pain. Something clicked as I put together some disjointed clues from what felt like only yesterday.

“Your daughter,” I guessed, stabbing at a hunch.

He nodded, an unsteady jerk. “Ritu might be called a nihilist, of a certain kind. Her dittos are … unpredictable. Disloyal. They don’t care. At another level I … don’t think she does, either.”

One could easily read guilt in his supple gray features. A hopeful track to follow. A new track, since none of my other captive-selves would have met Ritu. Might I use this tenuous personal connection in some way? If I could force Yosil to view me as more of a person …

But Maharal only shook his head. His expression hardened. “Let’s just say that no simple or single trait explains your ability, Morris. In fact, I consider it a rare combination, perhaps impossible to replicate in another person who remains enmeshed in his own complicated life. The local viewpoint — parochially limited and yet addictive — has long been recognized as an unseverable chain. An anchor, keeping the soul ensnared.”

“I don’t see—”

“Of course you don’t see. If you did, your mind would quail from the majestic beauty and terror of it all!”

“I—”

“Oh, it’s not your fault.” Having surged, his emotion drained away as quickly. “Each of us remains convinced that our own subjective viewpoint is more urgent than anyone else’s — indeed, even more valid than the objective matrix that underlies so-called reality. After all, the subjective view is a grand theater. Each of us gets to be hero of an ongoing drama. It’s why ideologies and bigotries survive against all evidence or logic.

“Oh, subjective obstinacy had advantages, Morris, when we were busy evolving into nature’s champion egotists. It led to human mastery over the planet … and several times to our species nearly wiping itself out.”

I had a sudden recollection of first meeting this fellow — Maharal’s gray ghost — at UK on Tuesday, shortly before his original was found dead in a ruined car. That morning, ditYosil spoke of his archie in surprising terms, describing realYosil as a borderline paranoid, drifting in and out of dark fantasies. Later, he described nightmares about “technology gone mad … The same fear that Fermi and Oppenheimer felt when they watched the first mushroom cloud …”

It seemed easy enough to dismiss at the time. Intriguing, but also melodramatic. Now I wondered. Could father and daughter have different versions of the same underlying tendency? A penchant for unreliable copying? How ironic, then, if one of the founders of modern dittotech was unable to make golems he could depend on!

I started speculating exactly when Yosil Maharal made his great conceptual breakthrough. Last week? Monday? Just hours before his death, when he thought himself quite safe and alone? A growing suspicion made me feel creepy, all up and down my spine.

Meanwhile, the gray golem kept talking. “No, the value of egotistical self-importance cannot be denied, back when individual humans competed with each other and with nature to survive. Only now it’s a mixed blessing, fostering waves of social alienation. More fundamentally, it limits the range of plausibility wave functions that we’re willing to perceive, or to collapse into reified events that others can share and verify—”

Maharal paused. “But this is going over your head.”

“I guess you’re right, Doc.” I pondered for a moment. “Still, I think I read a popular article a while back … You’re talking about the Observer Effect, right?”

“Yes!” He took a step forward, enthusiasm briefly winning over his need for scorn. “Years ago, Bevvisov and I argued whether the newly discovered Standing Wave was a manifestation of quantum mechanics, or a completely separate phenomenon that happened to use similar transformation dynamics. Like most scientists of his generation, Bevvisov disliked using the word ‘soul’ in relation to anything that could be measured or palpably manifested in the physical world. Rather, he believed in a variant of the old Copenhagen quantum interpretation — that every event in the universe arises out of a vast sea of interacting probability amplitudes. Unreified potentialities that only take on tangible effect in the presence of an observer.”

“In other words, that ‘subjective viewpoint’ you were talking about.”

“Right again. Someone has to consciously notice the effect of an experiment or event, in order for the wave functions to collapse and for it to become real.”