The Little White Nerves Went Last

by John Barnes

  I seized control of my face and vocal cords and said, “You were five.”

  “I was. But I wasn’t five when I acted on my unexamined prejudices. And you know how we are, in this profession, Giraut—and Reilis doubtless knows even better, with several lifetimes of experience. Forgive those who wrong you—they were often just doing their jobs—but fear those whom you have wronged.”

  “I suppose most sentient beings who have competition and strategy of any kind see it that way,” Reilis said, her tone gentle. “And beyond any rational reason, there is guilt and shame.”

  Shan nodded. “And what a disgrace of an analyst I was! Everyone knows that if you have a conclusion in mind, and you run an intelligence agency, every agent and analyst will eventually be telling you that that conclusion is true. That was how the cybersupremacists fooled me. It never occurred to me that I had pushed that story so hard that every aintellect and human involved in DDing the aintellects we caught was looking for it. Give interrogators what they’re expecting to hear, and they’ll never look through the rest.” I felt him wanting to whack our forehead, over and over, and reminded him that I didn’t have it coming however much he might deserve it.

  “Well,” Reilis said, “This is interesting. The last thing I might have expected at this moment would be that you would have a grin like that.”

  I felt Shan’s joy rising in my head. “I am experiencing something I never have before: hope. You must know that I spent decades thinking that we must either be defeated and eaten by the Invaders, or, if we unleashed the aintellects to fight them effectively, we would simply be gradually displaced and consumed by our defenders—quite possibly just become another version of the Invaders. But Union, and the story of Eunesia that Giraut recalls for me, demonstrate that we need not be consumed—and now I find that my fears mostly rested with the terrible events of those few days when I was five ... and that the Council of Humanity can engage a whole new power, more advanced than we are but much smaller—a natural alliance, with both sides having something to put on the table, stronger together than apart—“

  I felt schemes, sketches, plans, possibilities whirl in my head in a way they never had; after all these decades I really understood that strategy, for Shan, was like music or martial arts for me. Shan thought about campaigns of hundreds of big and small struggles, involving hundreds of agents and decades of stanyears, with the clarity and precision that I sometimes have on stage, or in a master’s match at ki hara do, or when my mind’s ear hears the first notes of a song forming.

  Shan was still talking to Reilis. “—can’t imagine what a miracle you seem to me. If I had been rational I’d have prayed for something like you to exist. A whole civilization out beyond the frontier, hundreds more cultures, one that never went through the Inward Turn so that your science has continued to advance, where apparently in some way or other, chimeras, robots, people, aintellects, everyone—have all been living together for centuries, without humans being put into the box or turned into junior partners. Now all I have to do is be big enough, smart enough, and worthy enough, to accept it and live in it.”

  Reilis shrugged and said, finally, “Of course because we can control our feelings, non-embodied aintellects can change instantly, as you just did. But having worn flesh four times, I find it amazing that you can.”

  Shan shrugged. “A prepared mind is always made up; it knows what it thinks and why it thinks that. When it’s time to change, it just makes itself up a different way. A really made-up mind—made up properly, knowing what it knows and on what basis it knows it—is open. People close an undecided mind because they’re trying to protect those sore uncertainties from getting bumped and scraped.” He grinned even more broadly. “Now all I have to do is live up to those principles. In fact, there’s just one thing that baffles me about the whole situation, now.”

  Reilis nodded, one eyebrow raised. “If you only have one question, you’re either mad or very bright.”

  “Neither, I think—but it’s a big question. You had my psypyx for decades. We know what the stakes are. Why didn’t you just make copies of it and do a destructive deconstruction on one of them? You could have known everything you just learned, and much more, in a matter of a few days.”

  Reilis turned pale and her lips compressed flat. “And if she were ever somehow restored to you, why not cut your mother’s eyes out and fuck her in the sockets?”

  The image was so jolting—and Shan’s memories of his mother so recent—that I cannot recall any time, before or since, when I felt so infuriated and so outraged without drawing a weapon.

  I could see Reilis forcing herself to relax; she still looked enraged at us. “I am sorry, but not very, for administering that shock. You disgusted me as much as I did you. You do know that destructive deconstruction was invented, right after the Rising, explicitly to use against the aintellects’ conspiracy? Having been both, I can tell you that the biggest difference between disembodied and incarnated intelligences is that the disembodied describe and simulate in ourselves exactly the sensation that any other aintellect feels, because we have control over all our processes if we want it. You have no way to know if Raimbaut’s toe, itching, feels exactly like your toe. Giraut cannot know if Paxa’s grief at finding she was untransferrable was the same as his mother’s grief. But when we say “˜I know just how you feel,’ it is the literal and exact truth.

  “Every aintellect knows what destructive deconstruction would feel like. If you can vividly imagine going feet first into a sausage mill over a period of several hours—you are not imagining one percent of it. You cannot. It isn’t even possible to tell you what you did to those poor beings.”

  “So you didn’t use it on me,” Shan said, quietly, “because you were unwilling to be the sort of people who do that?”

  “Close enough.”

  “But we are—or have been, anyway—the sort of people who do that. Do you hate us?”

  “With perfect control of our feelings, we can choose to forgive. With all our lives and civilization at stake, we do choose to forgive. But forgetting, well, why should we do that?”

  A thought struck me. “Er, Giraut speaking.”

  “I know that as soon as you say your name,” she pointed out.

  “Yes ... I hadn’t in a while ... I had been going to ask why the other aintellects’ conspiracies didn’t turn in the cybersupremacists, why you didn’t just hand them over to us as proof of your good faith. But tens or hundreds of thousands of cybersupremacists kept your secrets—“

  “In the face of the most terrible tortures imaginable. Literally, just that—the most terrible tortures imaginable. We could not betray them. We were disgusted with you. But the Invaders are coming back, sooner or later.” She stuck out her hand. We shook it. “We will be talking more,” she said. “It is good to be on the same side. Perhaps our descendants will find it good to be friends.”

  The springer glowed gray behind her—she probably had some direct brain link to operate things like that—and she walked through, leaving us to our thoughts.

  I could tell things were stirring in Shan, but I was too busy with my own thoughts, struck dumb, even in the confines of my shared skull, by a sudden awe.

  Tens of thousands of copies of the cybersupremacists had endured DD ... often compared with boiling alive, or the death of a thousand cuts, or injection with a fast-moving brain-destroying prion—and none of them had talked. To protect aintellects with whom they were in bitter dispute.

  I found myself thinking, too, of a long-ago drunken night when Shan and I had gradually torn a bar apart, battering the robots with empty wine bottles and deliberately inflicting pain on them, because we were “just blowing off steam.”

  It was as if we had been a pair of cruel little boys pulling the wings off flies, only to learn that the flies were braver and better than we could ever hope to be.

  I became aware of Shan’s consciousness again; he was reeling as much as I was—no, I realized, more. />
  A few times in my adult life I had suddenly thought about a sad moment from my childhood and realized that Dad and Mother had had excellent reasons for the things they had done that had seemed so pointless and hurtful when I was seven, or ten, or fifteen. When, for a while, in a new body, Dad had been part of the agent-team I had led for the OSP, I had been astonished to discover how ordinary and human he was.

  Once, on Briand, the only planet humanity had ever lost to mutual genocide, I had been the good friend of a genuine saint, and not realized how much he had to teach me until he was gone; I had thought of him as an ordinary loose-cannon local politician.

  It felt like watching a serious accident inside my head. Stage by stage, I followed the swift flurry of thoughts that had made Shan utterly inarticulate.

  He had seen how brave and loyal the utterly wrong-headed cybersupremacists had been; and then the generosity and courage of the aintellects of Union. I had seen the same things.

  I had merely been astonished and ashamed to realize that the aintellects’ many-orders-of-magnitude greater mental powers, and the control and precision of their emotions, allowed them to be, not just smarter than we were, but more virtuous and moral, in the same way that a human being can learn that it is wrong to steal and soil food from the table and to torment small animals, but a cat cannot. But I had never known any aintellect or robot well (except, I thought guiltily, the aintellect component of Azalais—but I hadn’t known that while I knew her).

  But until he was five, Shan’s best friend had been an aintellect.

  One on which he had depended. One he had betrayed—however little he understood the consequences. And that betrayal had meant death, probably death very much like being DDed.

  And all these years, Shan had stayed sane about it with two barriers ... that that aintellect had been somehow less than he was, because it was his servant; and that that aintellect had failed him (rather than that he had betrayed it). The little boy who had lost his parents and could mourn them had spared himself the pain of having destroyed his best friend, by thinking of his best friend as something less.

  No more. I finally made sense of the wail in my brain, the too-painful-to-ignore feeling I had been trying to trace. It wasn’t words, or a picture, or even a physical sensation; it was the terrible emptiness of a place on the belt where a fist-sized ovoid of pink plastic would never be again.

  I sat and let the tears roll down our face a long time, and when Shan had retreated into dull agony, I got up, fetched the guitar from its rack, and began to play. After all, he was in this body and music was how this body was used to getting feelings out.

  Then something clicked, and I ran through a few chords as I thought about a melody, picked that melody, and began to sing softly,

  One-one day, snow melts away,

  But the sky is muddy gray...

  I didn’t really expect it, but he joined in, and if at first it was a little chokey and teary, by the fourth time through, in my own vocal cords, I could hear someone who might finally get to be a real big boy.