“And you mean the term ‘at least’ quite precisely.”
“Precisely.”
SEVEN
Hard Copy
Killeen found the Restorer by himself. When he came back with the Shibo he looked tired but smiled a lot. Toby found the Shibo very much like his memory of her. Besen wasn’t so sure.
“How was Resurrection City?” he asked Killeen.
“Had to go through three Lanes to find it. Mechs’d messed it up pretty bad.”
The Shibo said very precisely to Toby, “I do wish that you had not removed my chips.”
Toby seemed to remember her speaking in a more clipped way, quick and to the point. He figured that the Restorer had installed a speaking augmentation to correct for damage. “I had my reasons.”
“I had mine.” She stared at Toby until he looked away.
The next waxing Killeen seemed out of sorts. It got worse for three more days and then Killeen and Shibo had an argument right in camp, loud and abrasive and ending with her throwing a pot at him.
Next day she moved out of his bunk and made her own.
She wouldn’t talk to anybody about it. Killeen of course never did.
Toby could find no way to approach her, she seemed prickly, all angles and angers. Finally he asked her straight out how she liked her new state. “I don’t,” she said.
“Rather be in chip?”
He meant it as light and friendly but her face clouded. “Yeasay.”
“Heysay, life’s more than any Aspect.”
“I was a Personality.”
“Well, yeasay, but—”
“This way is analog. In digital, you can . . .”
“Can what?”
“You would not know.”
“Try me.”
“You can . . . fly.” She shook her head violently. “No, that is not it. Better than flying.”
She tried to talk about it but all Toby could get was that being a real person was like crawling through mud that you could never wash off. Digital was clean and pure and, well, something more, too.
She kept trying to tell him how it was and getting frustrated at the words that came out of her mouth, as though they belonged to somebody else. He guessed that in some way he could not understand, they did.
Shibo took some Bishops and went to live a short distance away right after that. Killeen didn’t talk about her and by that time Toby had a hundred other things to do. The Family wanted to spread out through the esty. Success, or at least survival, brought out the worst. People who fought well together turned disagreeable. He worked with them, using some bits of Cermo that operated something like Aspects and Faces working in concert. Besen took up a lot of his time, too, but that was not work.
Killeen had his morose times but held the Family together when some factions wanted to take off into other Lanes. Toby thought Killeen was doing a pretty fine job and told him so and they got along better. But his father had his moods. Killeen wouldn’t talk to Shibo at all anymore.
Pretty soon Toby just gave up on the whole Shibo thing. There was plenty to do, yeasay.
EIGHT
The Thirst That from the Soul Doth Rise
Ah, you disgusting old fart, Nigel thought. Hopeless. He could call up the pictures, sounds, aromas, with utter ease—
NASA. Dear dead old Post Office of a space program, when what the world needed was Federal Express.
He had said that to Nikka, over thirty thousand years ago.
NASA. Both telescopes and rockets were round right cylinders, each with a point. Masculine tech, right-angled in all its particulars, wedded to the graceful curves of the feminine; collaboration.
Cybervores. He had watched them feeding once. Not so much beings as moving appetites, organizations of currents and plasma that could feed upon metals, ionizing them to produce satisfying gauzy halos of effervescent tasty potentials.
So many sharp, clear memories.
So deeply, thoroughly, not his own. Not now.
Unearned memories stick in the mind, give it an emptiness that lies beyond words.
He had known the truth in that small, passing moment when he met Killeen. Sure enough, the old frontal lobes yielded up the instant datum that he had met this man before. Had caused his people to be cast down into planetary darkness, to suffer torment, to resist and trim and emerge through millennia of pain.
