Retreating to her private room, she waited anxiously for Nick to come to her with a report. Sometimes she slept, knowing she would awaken when he came. She welcomed him each time he appeared to visit her; sometimes she was alerted by the distant sound of his boots on stone paving as he approached. And once, when she was awake and out of her room, his figure simply materialized, came instantly into being before her.
He’d played that last trick only once, for she’d immediately made him promise never to do such a startling and inhuman thing again.
During these usually peaceful visits, the couple spent more time in the grassy garth of the cloister than in any other single location. The lady yearned after the sun, but demurred when Nick suggested they might, they very easily could, go someplace else entirely, visit some mockery of a real-world location naturally much sunnier than London. Or he could just as easily brighten his artificial British daylight to tropical levels.
“No dear, don’t do that. Will you never understand? I have the feeling that such reality as I still possess might fray out altogether if things keep changing around me as fast as you can change them.”
Whenever she tired of the cloister’s muted, confined beauty, or when some random program Nick had set in motion decreed unscheduled rain, graying the sky above the open garth and splashing their hands and faces with felt wetness, she welcomed the illusion of uncontrollable nature. At such times they moved indoors, pacing the gloomy depths of the Abbey itself, or taking refuge from rain and gloom in what Nick called the Jericho Parlour and the Jerusalem Chamber—old, incomprehensible names for parts of the living quarters whose timeless, insubstantial luxury now belied the ancient stonework of the walls.
Inside these living quarters, Nick, never giving up the fight for verisimilitude—as much to give himself a foretaste of fleshly life as to placate Jenny—had now arranged for imaged machines to serve them with imaged food and drink. The processes of eating and drinking, similar to what she could remember from her fleshly phase of life, relieved hunger and thirst—or effected changes that seemed to her analogous to satisfying real fleshly thirst and hunger—as she remembered those sensations.
Not that she was ever reallyhungry or thirsty here in the Abbey, or ever tired to the point of exhaustion—certainly she was never in pain. Nick in his concern had seen to it that her life was—endlessly comfortable. The sensual experiences she was allowed to have were all of them muted, different.
And gradually she understood that this existence must lack many things, subtle things, that were not as obvious as breathing or touching. It bothered Jenny that she could not remember exactly what those missing experiences were, of what else she was being deprived.
“Nick, I haven’t told you everything that’s missing here. A great many parts of real life are lacking.”
Of course he was surprised—how stupid he could be sometimes!—and concerned. Dismayed and intrigued and challenged, all at once. “What things are they?” he demanded.
“That’s just it! I don’t know, yet I can feel the loss. If I knew what they were …” Jenny gestured, clenched her fists, gave up at last in exasperation.
Eventually words came to her in which to express at least one of the missing components of real life.
“Here in our world, as you call this existence, nothing can be depended on to last. Everything is exactly as changeable, as transient, as everything else. You, me, the rain, the stones, the sky—it’s all the same.”
“It seems to me,” Nick retorted, “that it is out in what you call the real world that things are never permanent. Even our bodies, once we have them, will wear out and decay in time.”
“But not for a long, long time, Nick. And as long as we have bodies, we’ll be real.”
Meanwhile her mind clung to the imaged stones of the Abbey, as at least suggesting endurance, a balanced struggle between permanence and change, a concept she found somewhat comforting.
Jenny once asked her sole companion whether he had ever known any other electronic people.
“No. Unless you count an expert system or two, like Freya, or the Boss’s new bodyguard Loki—but that’s really a very different thing.”
“What is Loki like?”
“How can I tell you? A nature basically somewhat like mine—but very paranoid. Swift-moving, strong—in the ways an optelectronic man can be strong.”
“Do you get along with him?”
“Not very well. I suppose no one could. Loki was not designed to get along with people.”
One day Nick as a surprise, an attempted treat, suddenly furnished the Abbey with realistic sounds of running water besides the rain, a burbling stream somewhere, a sound that grew louder the closer Jenny approached the western entrance, those main doors which she had never opened. He pulled them open for her now, and London was gone; there was the little stream crossed by a mossy footbridge, beyond which a path went winding away into a virgin forest.
“No, Nick. No. Just close the door. I want no entertainments. All I want is—”
“Yes, I know, love. I know what you want, and I’m doing my best to get it for you.”
Another day, high up in the north tower, he pointed out that the strong, silent tidal inflow of the Thames was visible if you knew where to look for it. And sure enough, looking over and around what Nick said were called the Houses of Parliament, which stood on the near bank, she saw the broad curving river as described. London’s taller towers, far more modern, gray and monstrous, were half visible to virtual eyes behind the curtaining virtual rain, hanging in the virtual distance.
But none of that really helped at all. Genevieve’s existence was made endurable only by the power she had been given to put herself to sleep whenever she wished, by simply willing the event. She availed herself of that refuge times beyond counting, often to find herself awake again, with little or no subjective sense of having rested, or of any duration whatsoever having passed. Her best hope to achieve the sensation of rest was to prolong the process of temporary extinction by simply entering her bedroom, an act that tended to bring on slowly increasing drowsiness.
Hawksmoor, alone with his thoughts while Jenny enjoyed one of her frequent periods of sleep—at least Nicholas hoped they were enjoyable—willed his own human image naked, and in that condition stood looking at himself in a virtual, multidimensional electronic mirror of his own devising. It was a mirror that could have existed in no ordinary space, and it showed the front and sides and top and back and bottom, all at once.
Nick’s knowledge of human anatomy, and of the shapes and sizes and arrangements and textures of flesh that were ordinarily considered desirable, came not only from the databank references but from direct observation of human behavior, on this voyage and on others—including the behavior of a number of humans confident they were unobserved.
There had been a time, before the mobilization of the demonic Loki, when Nick’s secret observations had extended even to the behavior of the Premier himself, especially on certain occasions when Varvara Engadin was sharing Dirac’s room and bed.
But in Loki, Dirac possessed a handy means of keeping Nick at a distance when he didn’t want him, as well as of summoning him when he did.
Nick told himself, almost convinced himself, that his knowledge of human love was already considerably more than merely theoretical. Ever since his creation—his own first memories were of being aboard the yacht, with control of most of a ship’s circuitry at his electronic fingertips, his to do with as he pleased—he had been able to watch the most intimate biological activities of a succession of human shipmates, including people he knew as well as strangers. Obviously programs duplicating organic sexual excitement, love and pleasure, would have to be of enormous complexity—but Hawksmoor prided himself that programming acceptable variations of those things would not be beyond his powers.
But at the same time Nick felt—he considered it probably accurate to use the word “instinctively” to describe this feeling—that Jenny’s yearning for a body w
as fundamentally right. Something, perhaps many things, had always been missing from his world, from the only universe of experience that he had ever known or, in his present form, could ever know. The events called joy and love and satisfaction had to be of greater potential than what he or any being could program into himself. To know such things in their full meaning there had to be a giving from outside. Jenny represented that—but what could Jenny, as miserable as she was now, give him?
“Until we have flesh of our own, we are doomed to be no more than ghosts.” At some point she had spoken those words to him. And in the universe they shared what was once said could never be forgotten.
Eventually a standard year had passed since Dirac’s daring boarding of the station and the loss of Frank Marcus, among others, in savage combat.
Still Nick had failed to convince Jenny to be satisfied with any of the zygote images he had presented for her approval. The project to grow bodies for Jenny and himself had been on hold for months.
THIRTEEN
Loki, the Premier’s optelectronic bodyguard, was wont to be irascible. He frequently reminded anyone, organic or not, who addressed him as if he were human that he was not a human being at all, but rather belonged to the category of events or objects more properly denoted personal systems.
But it seemed to Nick that Loki acted like a person in many ways.
Loki expressed no opinion, because he was not required to have one, on the humanity or lack thereof of Hawksmoor or any other entity save Loki himself—itself, if you please.
One important way in which the bodyguard-and-personal-servant system called Loki served the Premier was as a surefire means of summoning or dismissing his pilot, architect, and sometime bodyguard called Hawksmoor.
Fully self-aware or not, Loki was an effective, specialized AI being, capable of ordering Hawksmoor about when necessary.
When Nick thought about this situation, he supposed that he ought to have realized from the hour of his creation that Dirac would prudently have arranged some such way to maintain power over him. But actually the facts of Loki’s existence and nature were a very recent and very disquieting discovery.
Fortunately for Nick’s hopes of independence, for his secret projects, Loki was seldom fully mobilized, and when he was, he paid relatively little attention to Nick. But eventually Hawksmoor complained to his boss. Nick protested that Loki was harassing him. If Dirac wanted Nick to do the best possible job on all his multitude of assigned tasks, he would have to modify the system.
Dirac agreed to make some modifications, restricting Loki to a more purely defensive use.
Nick thanked the Boss and industriously returned to work.
Part of his self-assigned clandestine project was now to oversee a team of simple robots in the creation of a nursery. This was a small volume of space to be walled off from the rest of the station by new construction, a secret facility in which his and Jenny’s new bodies, emerging fresh from the artificial wombs, could be safely brought to maturity, or near maturity, without being allowed to develop minds or personalities of their own. This nursery, as Nick called it in his own thoughts, would of course be located near the secretly operated wombs, in a part of the station where people rarely went.
Still Jenny hesitated, withholding her final approval from any of the zygotes Nick’s searching robot managed to turn up. Millions more tiles had now been tested by the robot, but the surface of the cargo’s possibilities had barely been scratched. Nick himself reviewed the most likely candidates before bringing the very cream of the crop to Jenny for her consideration. Then he set aside those she rejected—the rate was one hundred percent so far—keeping them on file for possible use if and when the lady should weary of her insistence on perfection.
Meanwhile, a slow parade of mindless images, of possible Jennys, were sent along by the searching robot to model for Hawksmoor alone. For a time the show of naked women amused and excited him, and added to his enjoyment by making the images behave in the manner of fleshly women he had secretly observed.
But presently this enjoyment wearied. And afterward Nick felt dirty, guilty. As if he had stood by, allowing the woman he loved to be defiled by someone else. Out of respect for his lady and for himself he turned the prancing parade into a slow, dutiful march. For of course the job of reviewing possible bodies still had to be done. He inspected succeeding candidates in the manner of one saddled with a weighty responsibility.
Nick’s own yearnings to inhabit flesh were not entirely a result of his wish to be with Jenny. To some extent they certainly predated his rescue of the lady. But before he encountered her, such cravings might have been largely subconscious, and he might have thought them mere aberrations. In that epoch he had never questioned that he himself was perfectly at home, self-sufficient, in the current mode of his existence.
But now he could feel absolutely certain of almost nothing about himself.
“Or—I thinkI have feelings. I can see myself acting as if I do—how can I know myself any better than that?”
Yes, he thought that his own wish to have a body of his own had developed into a fixed idea, a compulsion, only when Genevieve, unequal to the task of trying to make do with images, swore that she had to have her body back—a beautiful, female, healthy, satisfactory body, of course—or go mad.
Nick was frightened to hear her say that. He feared madness, for himself as well as Jenny, and he felt it a distinct possibility, though he wasn’t at all sure what it would mean for an electronic person to go mad.
In the back of Nick’s mind another fear lurked, though he tried to convince himself that the worry was irrational: Would Genevieve, once reestablished in the flesh, be tempted to rejoin her husband? She said she now loved Nick and feared Dirac, but Dirac was, after all, the father of her child.
And yet another worry: What would happen if progress with the artificial wombs was made in such a way that Jenny was somehow to be granted her body before he, Nick, got his—what then?
She who had been Lady Genevieve was still haunted by recurrent fears over what might have become, and what was going to become, of her protochild. Hers and Dirac’s.
Part of the feeling was resentment, a fear that the child would somehow become her rival, her replacement.
More and more now, Genevieve insisted to Nick that she was really terrified of Dirac. She would be happy never to see her tyrannical husband again.
Nick for the most part believed these protestations—because they made him so gloriously happy. Even in his moments of doubt he clung fervently to the hope that they were true.
Nicholas, ready to deal with the difficulties of obtaining two bodies rather than just one, ready to abandon the only world he knew to take on the mysterious burdens and glories of flesh—emphasized to Jenny his determination that, whatever else might happen, they should remain together.
What good would a body be to him if she had none?
But the corollary of that was, how could he bear to have her regain her flesh if she left him behind in the process?
“You really do want me to come with you when you go back to that world, don’t you?”
“Of course, Nick.”
“You have to understand that, one way or another, if I’m in that world, Dirac won’t be. And vice versa. You must understand that. He’d never tolerate—what I have done. What you and I will be doing.”
“Then we must make sure he’s not around to bother us.” She was quite calm and deadly about that.
Nick of course had never had genes before. Programmers who brought nonorganic people into existence did not approach their jobs by such a roundabout route. On first deciding to assume flesh, he had been ready to accept almost any presentable form. But now he had to face the fact that it was not only possible but necessary, with expert help and a lot of hard work, to choose what physical attributes he’d like to have, and then make up a suitable set, or find the closest possible approximation, from the existing Solarian supplies.
&nbs
p; On assuming flesh he would of course be giving up a great deal of mental speed and sureness, and he could not help but regret in advance the losses he was going to suffer. Naturally there would be gains in other areas, compensations deriving from his new organic brain. But the compensations were subtler than the losses, harder for him in his current mode to define or even imagine.
Outweighing any such problems, of course, was the fact that in the fleshly mode he would have Jenny … haveher, solid to solid, flesh to flesh. And this was a thing of awe, a profound mystery that he could not begin to fathom.
Nick needed to be reassured. He pleaded with his lady: “You’d want to be the one to show me how to live in a body? You must realize, the idea, the concept, of having real flesh is very strange to me. It’ll take me a while, with my new organic brain, to learn to use muscles instead of thoughts. I’ll forget where I am, I’ll be terribly slow and clumsy. I’ll fall down and bruise myself, and—and I don’t know what.”
He earned a laugh with that line. It was in fact the first real laugh that Nick had ever heard from her. But it was over in a moment.
Having been thus offered a kind of sympathy, Nick kept on. “I realize that kind of an existence is very natural for human beings, of course.” Just as being in the womb or in the cradle, is natural, but I don’t want to do that.“But still. I could wind up needing extensive medical therapy, surgery, just to keep my body alive. I could spend my first month or so of real life in a medirobot.” In fact Freya2 had warned him that such might be the case.
Jenny soothed him, offered comfort. “I’ll show you how to live in your big clumsy body. I’ll show you everything. And I’ll take care of you if you need help. Oh, Nick … By the way, have you found a new model for yourself that you like better?”
Nick had, and now paraded the latest version of his potential self for her approval.
Genevieve frowned with interest at the walking, posing image. “That’s rather a different look, Nick—”
“Don’t you like it?” Suddenly he was anxious.
Berserker Wars (Omnibus) Page 78
