Again Imrani didn’t know quite how to put it. “Is he real?”
Elydia was genuinely surprised. “Why, of course! What on earth do you mean?”
“I mean, is he Rodric?”
“Oh, I see. You’re asking if he was cloned? No, no. He’s his own person, a lover I found some years afterwards.”
Imrani was puzzled. “But he looks exactly like him.”
She nodded. “Felix voluntarily had himself remodelled, body and soul—insofar as that is possible—so that he would resemble Rodric as closely as possible.”
“Body and soul?”
“Psycosmetic surgery. As a recuperatory worker, you can’t be unaware of it.”
“It’s illegal unless it’s remedial.”
“Yes,” she said with the weary dismissiveness of someone who had often debated the issue and no longer intended to. “It was his own choice. I put no pressure to bear on him whatsoever. You never end up with an exact double in any case, but then no one could ever have exactly replaced Rodric. In fact, when I realized that Felix was determined to go through with it, I insisted that he be given none of my former husband’s artistic tendencies. A reflection is sufficient; a copy would have been just that—a poor imitation.”
Imrani was finding it hard to take this on board. “He chose to have himself remodelled?”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
Elydia sat down on the couch opposite, picking up a small lump of tomb crystal that stood as a centrepiece on the occasional table beside it.
“I think perhaps he understood the depth of my love for Rodric. I think perhaps he loved me so much he was prepared to make himself into something as close to Rodric as possible.”
Imrani wondered if he was expected to find this noble: to him it was distinctly creepy.
“And did it work?” he asked.
“In what way?”
“Do you love him like you loved Rodric?”
“He’s not the same man. But he’s a perfect substitute. I love him well enough.”
Imrani frowned. “I don’t see how you could recapture what you had.”
Elydia gave a short laugh. “That’s not it. You young always have quaint, romantic notions of what constitutes love of another person. You love an image of the thing, not the thing itself. You project your own notions of identity on to it. It becomes the mirror of your desires.”
“So you pretend.”
“No, no, you misunderstand me. The physical resemblance was the least important part of it. Before he was rather too gauche, too gushing—”
“What was he? What did he look like before the change?”
She shook her head, as if she could scarcely remember. “That’s not important. He’s achieved his desires. To be with me. To have what he wants from me—love, companionship, fulfilment. What more are our lives for?”
Imrani found it too outlandish to contemplate. His love for Shivaun had been something totally unexpected, totally beyond his control. In some ways he hadn’t even liked her, yet when they were together he’d never felt more alive.
Elydia was giving him a grandmotherly look. He finally voiced the question he had been wanting to ask ever since his recovery:
“Are you an Augmenter?”
“I am. Augmented, too.”
She raised the crystal so that it glittered with the fishes’ rainbow hues.
“You’re surprised.”
He could only nod.
“That’s because people are led to believe that the Augmented are distortions, freaks. That’s not the case.”
His disbelief must have shown, because she said, “Would you like to see some?”
It was the last thing he wanted. Did she intend to summon a parade of them from somewhere?
To his vast relief, she simply spoke to the console: “We’d like to see some library images of humans who underwent physiological modification. Pre-purge, if you will.”
The console optic blinked. “Do you require a commentary?”
“A brief one will suffice.”
The optic blinked again, and Imrani was looking at the head of a man who appeared ordinary except for the absence of hair, flattened ears and lateral slits where his nostrils should have been. The console told him that the man was an aquatic, with nasal gills that enabled him to remain underwater for an hour or more. Another holo replaced it, this one showing a very squat figure with sunken slitted eyes, adapted for high-gravity environments. A third was of a carbon monoxide breather who looked ordinary except for her ruddy skin and bloodshot eyes.
“This is routine,” Elydia interrupted somewhat peevishly. “Show us the Synthivores and related groups.”
The scene shifted again to an interior with a group of diners around a table. Imrani saw nothing unusual apart from the quaint bodywear until he realized that the table was serving what looked like coloured fibres in an oily black gravy. The commentary informed him that the diners called themselves the Inorganicists. They were a group who refused to eat anything animal or vegetable and had had their alimentary canals redesigned so that they could subsist off plastics, powdered minerals and rocks.
Now a view of the Martian Badlands appeared, and another group were shown being showered by slops of refuse that a garbage train was jetting into a crater sump. Naked and hairless, they were laughing and falling about, licking the mess from one another’s bodies, delirious with the fun of it. Their skins had a greenish hue, held chloroplasts that enabled them to photosynthesize; but their most useful trick was the ability to respire anaerobically so that their blood sugars could be converted directly to alcohol, enabling a permanent drunken high.
This was too much for Imrani, and his face must have shown it because Elydia told the console to pause.
“Do they revolt you?” she asked.
“No. It isn’t that. Well, not exactly. They just look a little … well, weird, I suppose.”
“Weird enough so that they should have been exterminated?”
“No. I didn’t mean that.”
“They were. Every one of them.”
To emphasize the point, she instructed the console to give details of the fate of each of the “variants” shown. All had lived for a time in various habitats throughout the Settled Worlds—the aquatics had swum the Venusian seas—and all had been eliminated during what Elydia called the purges, either by direct genocide or by deliberate incarceration.
“Those that weren’t killed were sterilized,” Elydia informed him. “When they died, they were the last of their kind.”
It was a slightly different version of events from the one he had been brought up with. The networks always portrayed the Augmenter Wars as a reaction of ordinary men and women against creatures who were intent on supplanting Homo sapiens sapiens.
“Do you think they deserved that?” Elydia was asking him. “They only wanted to live peacefully in their places. A lot of them were designed for work that no ordinary human would do. But people are easily stirred against others who seem weird to them.” She used the word in the same tone he had. “No doubt you were taught that they were easy to hunt down because they looked so blatantly different and set themselves apart. But many were forced to live in ghettos, while others showed no obvious changes to the casual eye and lived peacefully alongside other humans. They were especially persecuted when the purges started. Augmentation need not mean noticeable changes to the human physique. I, for example, have merely had my skeletal, muscular and cardiovascular systems enhanced for improved stamina and strength.”
Again his disbelief must have shown. Elydia smiled, then held the crystal out and closed her fist around it. Slowly she crushed it over the table, letting the glittering white granules cascade down on to the whorlwood surface, stirring the table to shake its back and fold itself up before stalking off into a corner to sulk.
Elydia brushed her hands clean, as if she had completed a purely routine task.
Tomb crystal was as hard any rock. Imrani thoug
ht about it.
“Can Felix do that, too?”
“Indeed. I wanted him to be as strong as me.”
He thought of Felix’s arm around his shoulders, of bones that might have been built of plasticeramic, muscles of high-density fibrils …
“The Augmented came in many shapes and forms,” Elydia said. “Some were designed purely for sport or idleness—or pleasure.”
At her instructions, the console now showed an impossibly voluptuous woman and an impossibly well-endowed man. To Imrani’s eyes, both looked grotesque, a view unmodified by Elydia’s information that both had enhanced nerve-endings in their sexual organs and were capable of extended multiple orgasms.
“In the early days there was a yearning to experiment with the body, to see how far the human form could be stretched, as it were. Much of it promised to open up fruitful new avenues of physicality for the human race. Then the puritans of the Noocracy engineered public opinion to reject human variation. The Augmented were either exterminated or forced to flee.”
She was awaiting some response. Again, he was lost for one.
“It was not the war of liberation now portrayed for public consumption,” she said. “The Augmented were victims, not victimizers. They have no desire to rule, or dominate. They merely wish to take their proper places—their proper places as gaily coloured threads, if you like, in the varied tapestry that is our human destiny.”
He had heard her preach sermons to bereaved congregations, and the phrase had a similar sort of manufactured air. Not that Elydia had ever publicly expressed her Augmenter sympathies to outsiders, let alone revealed that she was in fact herself Augmented. Surely the Noocracy must have had some inkling of it? Charon was obviously a bolthole for changelings, and only his naivety had prevented him from seeing it until now. No doubt it was an Augmenter that had rescued him from the ice. He’d never quite had the courage to ask.
“So you see,” she said, “we’re not so very different from you, not so different at all. Haven’t we done our utmost to protect you during your confinement here? We are no one’s enemies except those that wish to destroy us.”
And then, as if she had satisfactorily completed her business, she rose.
“What about the womb?” he said.
“The womb?”
“Shivaun died to deliver it to you. You’ve never told me why.”
“There are reasons. Good reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“Your curiosity is understandable, but I’m afraid I can’t satisfy it—at least, not yet.”
“You owe me an explanation. I nearly died out there as well.”
“I know.” She sounded contrite. “Believe me, your bravery is appreciated, it really is. I realize that my silence on the matter is a terrible discourtesy, but I can only ask you to bear with us. Soon you’ll understand everything.”
It was always the same answer—no answer whatsoever. They told him nothing, kept him here like a prisoner.
“Was Shivaun Augmented?”
“Not as such.”
“Then why did she bring you the womb?”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“She never got the chance. Was it because of what happened to her husband and sons?”
Elydia scrutinized him, as if deliberating.
“Their deaths distressed her greatly,” she said. “I felt obliged to explain that simple gill implants could have saved them.”
“You converted her? Just by saying that?”
“No, no, dear boy. It was far more complicated than that.”
She sat down again, putting her hands together as if in prayer, making a big show of collecting her thoughts. Everything she did struck him as a little contrived, over-practised. He didn’t trust her in the slightest.
“In my earlier years,” she said at last, “long before I came here, I once helped a newly appointed arbiter on Venus produce a batch of daughters by parthenogenesis. Nothing illegal in that, except that she was an ambitious woman and wanted her offspring to be reflections of herself. She wanted them to become faithful servants of the Noosphere, as she herself was. So I helped her—we were friends then. I helped her design them so that they would have a healthy interest in spiritual matters, a keen interest in the afterlife. There were seven of them.”
“You used psycosmetics?”
“And more. I was ambitious myself, keen to try everything I could. Perhaps it was against my better judgement, even then, but which of us is free of indiscretions?” She shrugged. “As you know, the results are always unpredictable in any case. This particular mother-to-be didn’t want the distraction of raising her brood herself, so they were farmed out to fosters and raised without knowledge of their true lineage.”
Elydia paused, almost as if expecting him to guess the rest. When he remained silent, she went on:
“I followed their progress intermittently over the years, even after I had fallen out with their mother. Differences in philosophy, you understand. One of the children eventually became an intercessor in a minor shrine, another turned rather mindlessly Devout, while a third departed the Noospace to proselytize among the Oort communes and was never heard of again. Three failed signally in their calling—they were solid citizens, but no more. The last of them was Shivaun.”
He stared at her in astonishment.
“I never forget a tissue sample,” she told him, “or a retina scan. As soon as she turned up here, I knew who she was. My files confirmed it. She was that arbiter’s daughter. And acolyte, as it transpired.”
Imrani made the connection. “Miushme-Adewoyin?”
“None other. Shivaun was less than delighted when I revealed this to her. You see, she’d set her heart on becoming an expediter and was already under Miushme-Adewoyin’s tutelage at one of the seminaries in Melisande.”
He didn’t see, quite. “What’s so wrong in that?”
“The urge had been designed into her. By me, at her mother’s behest. Shivaun took it badly. She felt as if she had been robbed of her free will. As if her life-path had been preordained. Understandable, don’t you think?”
Imrani thought about this. Shivaun would have shared the same ancestors as Bezile when communing in a shrine, but there was no way she would have known this since the dead could not speak of the living, only respond to the needs of the communicant. Not that Shivaun had ever used a shrine in all the time he had known her. No wonder she’d been such an angry person. No wonder she’d betrayed Bezile at the end.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Elydia said to him. “Why, in that case, did she proceed to become an expediter? Did she ever tell you?”
“Why?”
“I surmise it was so that she could get close to Bezile, be her faithful servant until such a time that she could exact her revenge. We can’t be sure about these matters, but how else could it be explained? When the womb fortuitously came into her hands, it was the perfect opportunity to act in the most brazen defiance of her calling.”
Imrani was tired of the sound of her voice, the crafted words that spewed effortlessly out of her mouth. They were drowning him.
“I also believe she came here because she herself then intended to be Augmented. Alas, we reached her too late.”
Imrani fell into contemplation. Shivaun had never revealed any of this to him. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that at least she had brought him with her, at least he had been with her at the end. It didn’t help in the slightest.
“No doubt,” Elydia said, “she would have hoped you would join her. In Augmentation, I mean.” She rose, walked to the doormouth. “You should consider it, you know, consider the physical enhancements you might desire. There’s no compulsion, naturally, none whatsoever. But think about it, don’t dismiss it out of hand.” She winked at him. “There are quite a few advantages.”
And then she was gone, the door puckering shut behind her.
Imrani stood there for a while before flopping into his slouch. He had t
o admit he was dismayed and disappointed by the revelations. True, he’d always wondered about Shivaun, wondered about her rage; but the mystery had been preferable to the facts. Sometimes it was better not to know.
He blanked the optic and studied the dusting of tomb crystal on the rug. Elydia’s presence had filled his chamber like something stifling. Did she truly think he might consider becoming Augmented himself? It went against everything he believed in. At the recuperatory he was used to restoring the human body after injury or illness, and that meant remaining as true to the existing phenotype as possible. That was where the skill lay. Not that he had anything personal against the Augmenters: in his view, people should be free to lead the lives they chose, as long as they didn’t interfere with others. But he wasn’t about to start having fins or fabricated innards added to his physique, thank you.
He watched the fish orbit relentlessly in their bowl. Finally he went over to the doormouth and quietly asked it to open.
“Sorry,” it replied. “I’m shut for the night.”
Only Elydia and Felix could open it. He was a prisoner until morning. He gazed around the chamber, his cell for the past year, a place where he had never felt at home. It was an hour past midnight, the depths of the night, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to sleep. In a corner alcove, screened by a curtain, was a small shrine. He hesitated, then ordered the curtain to scroll up.
The shrine was old, its optic veined, chrome-plated prayer terminals worn smooth to the white plastic below by the passage of many hands. For the past month he’d used it every day, sometimes twice a day. He’d grown Devout by necessity, because the companionship it offered was his only comfort now that Shivaun was gone. He sat down and reached for the hood.
• • •
Yet again the darkness. This time I did not wait.
“Is this true about the Augmenter purges?”
I was directly addressing Chloe and Lucian.
“It’s Elydia Chan-Vetterlein’s version of the truth,” Lucian replied.
“We don’t subscribe to it,” Chloe added, “but we want you to hear all sides. In the end, you must make up your own minds. When as many facts are available to you as we can supply.”
Mortal Remains Page 23
