While JonVon’s diagnostic program probed the fringes of Virginia’s slowly dying brain, he stripped off his surface gear.
The helmet, hip-pack, and skin-paint combination were one of the gifts from Phobos that he had kept to himself. Months ago he had used a pretext to set the autofactory to produce a dozen sets—enough of the modern models to equip his ten “boys” and himself.
After the cave-in, when he had found his way to the surface blocked, he had returned and gathered his cloned replicas. Just before they set off, though, a message from Suleiman Ould-Harrad had arrived. The ex-spacer offered to lead Saul down secret tunnels known only to his weird clan, and to help strike where Sergeov least expected it.
For a price, that is.
We probably won partly, by scaring the Ubers half to death, Saul mused while he monitored the flow back and forth between JonVon and the machine’s mistress.
It had been a strange army that followed Ould-Harrad and Ingersoll—the “Old Man of the Caves” —down passages nobody else had ever discovered, emerging almost beneath the Uber command post and attacking like an army of ghosts.
Ten tall figures in eerie black body paint, and a lurid score of wild, living trees—once men, but now symbionts who don’t even need spacesuits, anymore…
Saul knew that he was furiously thinking about anything—anything at all—rather than contemplating the sad form on the webbing. There was nothing he could do until the machine reported. He found that he was squeezing the duraplast helmet between his palms in nervous tension, and had actually pressed a dent into the black globe.
Oh, Virginia. Hold on, darling. Please, hold on.
The holo main display flickered, above the console. An image appeared: a nurse in starched white with an old-fashioned stethoscope around her neck looked gravely at Saul.
You are right, Doctor. The patient is clinically beyond the point of no return. Synaptic rates are receding. Progressive brain damage has been slowed, but not completely arrested. Cortex loss will, within fifteen minutes, cause erasure of memory and personality. There are no known palliative measures.She is dead, sir.“No! She won’t die! If her brain won’t hold her anymore, we’ll find someplace else for her to go. What about those procedures she’d been working on, for complete recording and absorption of personality?”
The simulation frowned.
Do you wish construction of Virginia Herbert simulation?He shook his head. “I’m talking about full transfer and absorption.”
There was a hiss behind Saul as the door slid open. “What’s going on here?” A hand on his shoulder pulled him around. Carl Osborn frowned and held a fist under Saul’s face.
“I got away from those boys of yours after they dumped me on the ice. Came down a garbage chute. Now I’m asking you a question, Lintz. What’s happening here! Why isn’t Virginia in the hospital?”
The man looked exhausted, angry. His suit sleeves were zipped back to flap at his sides like some medieval garment, patched and grime-spalled. Muscles throbbed and Saul knew at a glance that Carl was on the ragged edge of violence.
“Here,” he said reasonably, in his best bedside manner. “Hold her arm while I give her this medication.”
Carl blinked. He swallowed and moved over to lift Virginia’s waxen, chilled limb. “You… you’ve got to save her, Saul. I couldn’t stand it if… if…” He wiped his eye with the back of his free wrist. “She tricked me into being the one flung back. I… got back to her too late.”
“You did your best, Carl.” He checked an ampoule of amber fluid.
Carl didn’t seem to hear. “You’ve… got… to save her.”
“We will,” Saul promised. And he pressed the ampoule against Carl’s hand. The spacer blinked up at him in surprise at the hiss of injected drug—a quick—acting hypnotic.
He shuddered, opened his mouth as if to speak, but nothing came out.
“Good,” Saul told him, leading him by the arm over to the wall. “Now you can stay awake if you want to, Carl. Even ask questions, when I’m not busy. But I want you to relax back here. Loosen your muscles. Let everything below your neck nap for an hour or so. You need it.”
Carl stared at him accusingly, but remained where he was put. Saul went back to the console and spoke aloud to the machine.
“JonVon, is it feasible? What about the program I used in transferring my own memories into my clones?”
The holo tank flickered, and to his surprise a face he had known long ago appeared. It was a simulacrum of Simon Percell—from shocked white hair to tiny, broken capillaries on the great biologist’s nose.
He looks like an elderly version of Carl Osborn.
The famous bushy eyebrows bunched together.
Your clones are exceptional, Saul. No other genotype is amenable to such rapid forced growth to adulthood… probably due to the same combination of factors that gives you your immunity to disease.The memory-transfer program you used can only be applied between nearly identical human brains. Point-wise resonances have to run true. Nobody else’s phenotype follows genotype precisely enough.It would seem impossible to use that method with any but a tiny fraction of human beings. In other words, my friend, you appear to be one of the few potential immortals.Saul gaped. the verisimilitude was stunning. Simon was crisp, real. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Carl Osborn shiver—whether in awe of the patron father of the Percells, or at the revelation about Saul, was unclear.
“There’s no time, then. You, JonVon, you have to absorb her the other way, destructive or not. Virginia spoke of it as theoretically possible. Proceed at once.”
The simulacrum nodded.
There will be the superficial semblance of pain.Time was slipping away. Desperately, Saul growled. “Do it! Emergency override Archimedes!”
Proceeding.The reaction was almost immediate. Static flickered on all of the screens. Saul had to grab Virginia’s arms as her face contorted and her legs thrashed. Tendons hardened and she cried out like an animal caught in a trap.
Saul twisted the webbing, shaping makeshift restraints, binding her in tourniquets with only one objective—to keep the neural tap from tearing out of her head.
“You… bastard…” he heard the man behind him say. Carl’s voice was level, calm, as if he were commenting about the weather. “You’re… killing her,” he commented evenly. “If I… could move… you know, I’d take you apart with my bare hands.”
Saul finished tying her down. He stroked Virginia’s hair, and the touch seemed to calm her just a little. When he turned back, his eyes bulbed with clinging liquid that would not drop away. “If this doesn’t work, Carl, I’ll give you my throat and my permission.”
Their eyes met, and Carl nodded slightly. It was agreed.
Virginia moaned. The main holo display showed a rotating, color-coded perspective of a human brain, sparkling here and there like a sun undergoing white-hot flares and crackling magnetic storms. This was almost nothing like the Care Package episode, when Virginia’s surface consciousness was disoriented in the pulse-shocked data net. This time all of her was involved, her memories, her habits, her skills, her loves and hates…
Her.
The door slid open and Lani Nguyen stepped in, still wearing her patched spacesuit and tabard. Her gaze flicked from Saul to Carl to the keening figure on the webbing.