It was exhilarating. I thought about what the launch attendant had said: people with artificial bodies are perfect for space exploration. Perhaps he was right, and—
Something hit me in the face, soft, scrunchy.
“What the—?”
It took me a moment to make things out in the dim green light, especially since the glowstick was now on the far side of Karen, meaning her body was casting weird shadows across my field of view. The thing that had hit me in the face was Karen’s shirt.
I looked down—across—over—up—at her.
“Come on, Jake,” she said. “We may never have another chance like this.”
I thought back to the one previous time we’d done this; with the stress of the trial, we hadn’t tried again. “But—”
“We’ll doubtless return home on a regular transport,” Karen said, “full of other people. But right now, we’ve got an opportunity that may never happen again. Plus, unlike most people, we don’t have to worry about getting bruised.”
Her bra was flapping up toward me now, a seagull in our emerald twilight. It was … stimulating, watching her move as she bent and twisted, taking off her pants.
I caught her bra, wadded it up, and sent it on a trajectory that would get it out of the way, then began to remove my own shirt, which quickly billowed around me as its buttons were undone. My belt was next, a flat eel in the air. And then my pants joined Karen’s, floating freely.
“All right,” I said, to Karen. “Let’s see if we can execute a docking maneuver …”
CHAPTER 38
We had to strap in again ten hours later, as the rocket decelerated for a full sixty minutes. Although most manned flights to the moon apparently went to something called LS One, we were going to land directly at Heaviside Crater.
The landing was done by remote control and there was nothing for us to see; the cargo hold had no window. Still, I knew we were setting down on our tail fins; Jesus at Cape Kennedy had quipped, “In the way that God and Robert Heinlein meant you to,” but I didn’t get it.
It was near the end of the lunar day, which lasted, as I’m sure that Smythe guy would say, a fortnight. The surface temperature apparently was a little over 100 degrees Celsius—but it’s a dry heat. According to Dr. Porter, whom Smythe had consulted about this, we could manage ten or fifteen minutes out in the heat, not to mention the ultraviolet radiation, before we’d have a problem; the lack of air, of course, was a nonissue for us.
The cargo rocket didn’t have an airlock, just a hatch, but it was easy enough to open from the inside; the same safety rules that existed for refrigerators also seemed to apply to spaceships. I hinged the door outward, and the atmosphere that had been carried along with us escaped in a white cloud. We were inside Heaviside Crater, its rim rising up in the distance. The closest dome of High Eden was maybe a hundred meters away, and—
That must be it. The moonbus, a silvery brick with a blue-green fuel tank strapped to each side, sitting on a circular landing platform. It was attached to an adjacent building by a telescoping access tunnel.
The lunar surface was about twelve meters below my feet—far more than I’d want to fall under Earth’s gravity, but it shouldn’t be a problem here. I looked at Karen and smiled. There was no way for us to speak, since there was no air. But I mouthed the word “Geronimo!” as I stepped out of the hatchway.
The fall was gentle, and took what seemed like forever. When I hit—probably the first pair of Nikes ever to directly touch the lunar soil—a cloud of gray dust went up. Some of it stuck to my clothes (static electricity, I presumed), but the rest filtered back down to the ground.
There were little meteor craters everywhere within this bigger crater: some were a few centimeters across, others a few meters. I turned around and looked up at Karen.
For a woman who had been frail a short time ago, who had had one hip replaced and had doubtless lived in fear of breaking the other, she was quite gutsy. With no hesitation, she copied what I’d done, stepping out of the hatch and beginning the slow descent to the ground.
She was carrying something tubular … of course! She’d remembered to grab the front section of the New York Times, and now had it rolled into a cylinder. It was astonishing not to see her hair billow upward, or her clothes ripple, but there was no air resistance to cause any of that. I took a few quick hopping steps to the right to give her plenty of room to land, and she did so, a big grin on her face.
The sky overhead was totally black. No stars were visible except the sun itself, which glowered fiercely. I reached out a hand, and Karen grasped it, and we took huge bouncing steps together, heading for High Eden, the place we were never supposed to see.
Gabriel Smythe turned out to be a compact man of perhaps sixty, with white-blond hair and a florid complexion. He had taken up residence in High Eden’s transit-control room, which was a cramped space, dimly lit, full of monitor screens and glowing control panels. Through a wide window, we could see the moonbus, just twenty meters away, attached to the Jetway. It had coverings over all the windows I could see, preventing us from looking inside.
“Thank you for coming,” Smythe said, pumping my hand. “Thank you.”
I nodded. I didn’t want to be here—at least not under these circumstances. But I felt a moral responsibility, I guess—although I hadn’t done anything.
“And I see you brought the newspaper,” continued Smythe. “Excellent! All right, there’s a videophone connection between here and the moonbus. That’s the microphone, and that’s the camera pickup. He’s covered all the security cameras inside the bus, but we can still see him through the phone’s camera, when he deigns to transmit video, and he can see us. I’m going to call him now, and let him know you’re here. He’s being at least partially reasonable—he let one of the hostages go. Chandragupta says—
“Chandragupta?” I repeated, startled. “Pandit Chandragupta?”
“Yes. Why?”
“What’s he got to do with this?”
“He’s the one who cured the other you,” said Smythe.
I felt like slapping my forehead, but that would have been too theatrical. “Christ, of course! He’s also the one who started this whole damn mess with the lawsuit. He issued a death certificate for the Karen Bessarian who died up here.”
“Yes, yes. We saw. We’ve been watching the trial coverage, of course. Needless to say, we’re not pleased. Anyway, he says your, um …”
“Skin,” I said. “I know the slang. My shed skin.”
“Right. He says your skin will have wildly fluctuating neurotransmitter levels in his brain for perhaps another couple of days. Sometimes he’ll be quite rational, and sometimes he’ll have a hair-trigger temper, or be totally paranoid.”
“Christ,” I said.
Smythe nodded. “Who’d have thought it’d be easier to copy a mind than to cure one? Anyway, remember, he’s armed, and—”
“Armed?” Karen and I said in unison.
“Yes, yes. He’s got a piton gun—it’s for mountain climbing, and it shoots metal spikes. He could easily kill someone with it.”
“My God …” I said.
“Indeed,” said Smythe. “I’ll get him on the phone. Don’t promise him anything we can’t deliver, and do your best not to upset him. Okay?”
I nodded.
“Here goes.” Smythe tapped some keys on a small keypad.
The phone bleeped a few times, then: “It better be good news, Gabe.”
The picture on the screen showed the old me, all right: I’d forgotten how much gray I’d had in my hair. There was a wild look in his eyes that I don’t think I’d ever seen before.
“It is, Jake,” Gabe said. It was strange hearing him use my name but not be addressing me. “It’s very good news indeed. Your—the other you is here, with me now, here, in the transit-control room at High Eden.” He gestured for me to come into the camera’s field of view, and I did so.
“Hello,” I said, and my voice sound
ed mechanical, even to me. I’d forgotten how rich my real—my original—voice had been.
“Hmmph,” said the other me. “Did you bring the newspaper?”
“Yes,” I said. Karen, standing out of view, handed it to me. I held it up to the phone’s lens, so he could read the date and see the main headline.
“I’ll want to examine that later, of course, but for now, all right: I’ll accept that a rocket really came from Earth today, and you might have been on it.”
“Uncover the windows on the moonbus, and you’ll see the rocket,” I said. “It’s about a hundred meters away, and—let’s see—it should be visible off your left side.”
“And you’ve got a sniper, just waiting to pick me off if my face appears in the window.”
Gabe loomed in. “Honestly, Jake,” he said, “there are no snipers on the moon.”
“Not unless one came with him,” the other Jake said—gesturing at me. I had never heard myself sounding paranoid before. I didn’t like it.
Gabe looked at me. He lifted his shoulders and white-blond eyebrows slightly.
“Jake,” I said, gently, “you wanted to see me?”
The me on the monitor nodded. “But how do I know it’s really you?”
“It’s me.”
“No. At best, it’s one of us. But it could be any consciousness loaded into that body; just because the exterior looks like me doesn’t mean that it’s my Mindscan inside.”
“So ask me a question,” I said.
There were endless numbers of things he could have asked me, things only one of us could possibly know. The name of the imaginary friend I had when I was a kid, the one I never told anyone about. The one and only item I’d ever shoplifted, as a teenager—a handheld gaming unit I really wanted.
And I would have gladly answered those questions. But he didn’t ask them. No, he picked the one I didn’t want to answer. Whether it was because he perversely wanted to humiliate me, even though the revelation would presumably hurt him, too, or because he wanted to show me, so that I would convey to Smythe and the others, just how far he was willing to go, I couldn’t tell.
“Exactly where,” he asked, “were we when our father suffered brain damage?”
I looked at Karen, then back at the camera. “In his den.”
“And what were we doing?”
“Jake …”
“You don’t know, do you?”
Oh, I know. I know. “Come on, Jake,” I said.
“Smythe, if this is another trick, I’ll kill Hades—I swear it.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “I’ll answer. I’ll answer.” I really did miss being able to take a deep, calming breath. “We were arguing with him.”
“About what?”
“Come on, Jake. You’ve heard enough to know it’s really me.”
“About what?” demanded the other me.
I closed my eyes, and spoke softly, quickly, without opening them. “I’d been caught using a fake ID. We were shouting at each other, and he collapsed right in front of me. It was arguing with me that caused the hemorrhaging in his brain.”
I felt Karen’s hand alight on my shoulder. She squeezed gently.
“Well, well, well,” said the other me. “Welcome to the moon, brother.”
“I wish it was under better circumstances,” I said, opening my eyes at last.
“So do I.” He paused. “Who is that? The other upload?”
“A friend.”
“Hmm. Oh, my—it’s Karen, isn’t it? I saw the new you on TV. Karen Bessarian.”
“Hello, Jake,” she said.
“You must know your skin has passed on—that came out during the trial, didn’t it? What are you doing here?”
“I came with Jake,” said Karen. “He’s … we’re …”
“What?”
I glanced over my shoulder at Karen. She shrugged at the camera a little, and said, simply, “We’re lovers.”
The biological me looked stunned. “What?”
“You can’t picture it, can you?” said Karen. “A version of you with an old woman. You know, I remember when we met, at the sales pitch.”
The other Jake seemed momentarily flustered, then: “Right. Of course you do.”
“Age doesn’t matter,” said Karen. “Not for me. And not for Jake.”
“I’m Jake,” said the biological me.
“No, you’re not. Not legally. Not any more than the woman who died here was me.”
I could see Gabe and the others looking quite nervous, but nobody moved to stop Karen. And the other me actually looked pleased. “Let me get this straight: the two of you—Mindscan Karen and Mindscan Jake—are together, a couple?”
“That’s right.”
“So that means—that means, you, Jake, you aren’t with Rebecca?”
I was surprised. “Rebecca? Rebecca Chong?”
“Do we know another Rebecca? Yes, of course, Rebecca Chong!”
“No, no. We, I—she … she didn’t take well to my having uploaded. And, ah, neither did Clamhead—Rebecca is looking after her now.”
An actual grin broke out on his face. “Excellent. Excellent.” He looked at me, then at Karen, and practically laughed the words, “I hope the two of you will be very happy together.”
“There’s no need to mock us,” said Karen sharply.
“Oh, I’m not, I’m not,” said the original me, with glee. “I’m totally sincere.” But then he sobered. “Still, I’ve been following your legal troubles, Karen. Maybe you’ll both end up losing your rights of personhood.”
“We’re not going to lose,” said Karen sharply. “My Jake hasn’t just been a placeholder, looking after your life for you until you’re ready to reclaim it. He’s gone on, making his own life—with me. We’re not going to backtrack.”
The biological me seemed cowed by Karen’s forcefulness. “I—um …”
“So, you see,” snapped Karen, “it isn’t just about you and what you want. My Jake has a life of his own now. New friends. New relationships.”
“But I’m the real one.”
“Bullshit,” snapped Karen. “How would you ever back up that claim?”
“I’m the one with … the one who has—”
“What? A soul? You think this is about souls? There’s no such thing as souls. You live as long as I have and you know that. You see people slipping away, day by day, year by year, until there’s nothing left. Souls! Cartesian nonsense. There’s no magic, airy-fairy insubstantial part of you. Everything you are is a physical process—processes that can be, and have been, flawlessly reproduced. You’ve got nothing—nothing—that this Jake doesn’t. Souls? Give me a break!”
“You know that she’s right,” I said, gently. “You never believed in souls before. When Mom talked about Dad’s soul still being in there, in that wrecked brain, you felt sorry for her not because of what had happened to Dad, but because she was deluded. That’s the very word you thought; you know it and I know it. Deluded.”
“Yes, but—”
“But what?” I said. “You going to try to tell me it’s different now? That you’ve had some sort of epiphany?”
“You—”
“If anyone should be seeing things differently,” I said, “it’s me. In fact, I am—I can see all colors now. And I know nothing is missing in me. My mind is a perfect—perfect—copy of yours.”
“You wouldn’t know if something is missing,” he said.
“Of course he would,” snapped Karen. “When you get older, you’re painfully aware of things that are slipping away. Senses that are dulling, memories that can no longer be easily called up. You absolutely know when something you had before is missing.”
“She’s right,” I said. “I am totally complete. And just as much as you do, I want my life.”
CHAPTER 39
Two of me.
It was damned confusing, but I found myself thinking of him as Jacob, and me as Jake. It was one of those little mental tricks th
at we need more of as we get older. He was Jacob , with the OB at the end standing for “original body.” And I was Jake, with the final E for “electronic.”
I found that I, Jake, couldn’t take my eyes off the videophone screen, and its image of Jacob, my shed skin. Until a few weeks ago, we’d been the same person, and …
And prior to that, I hadn’t existed at all. He, Jacob, was the one who’d really had all the experiences I only thought I’d had. He was the one with the scar on his right arm from falling out of a tree at twelve, the one with the damaged ligaments in his left ankle from tumbling down some stairs, the one who’d had the arteriovenous malformation, the one who’d watched my father collapse, the one who’d made love with Rebecca, the one who’d actually seen the world with the limited palette our shared memories were painted in.
“I’m going to come over there,” I said to the videophone.
“Over where?” replied Jacob.
“To the moonbus. To see you.”
“No,” Jacob said. “Don’t do that. Stay where you are.”
“Why?” I replied. “Because it’s easier to deny my personhood, and my rights, when I’m just a bunch of pixels on a tiny display screen?”
“I’m not an idiot,” Jacob said, “so don’t treat me like one. I’ve got the situation contained. You coming out here will destabilize it.”
“I really don’t think you have a choice,” I said.
“Sure I do. I don’t have to open the airlock.”
“All right,” I said, conceding the point, “you can keep me out. But, come on, if you’re only going to talk to me by phone, I might as well have never left Earth.”
There was a pause, then Jacob said: “All right. Cards on the table, broski. You’re here because I want you to agree to stay here, in my place.”
I was taken aback, but I’m sure nothing in my artificial physiology betrayed that. I said, as calmly as I could, “You know I can’t do that.”
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