Lounging back on their massive bed, Nikka laughed despite herself. “Can’t you do your medical some other time? I was just getting in the mood.”
“I’ll recalibrate my secretors. Add some hormones. Give you an even better run for your money.”
“I wasn’t planning on paying money, and I didn’t have running in mind.”
He groaned as he tuned digital controls that the peeling had exposed. “A literalist! God spare the sacred erotic impulse from their kind.”
“I don’t understand why you keep me when I don’t want to be kept.”
Nigel was sitting in a stiff-backed chair, as if for a job interview. In a way, it was.
YOU ARE THE ORIGINAL. WE KEEP YOU IN ORDER TO CHECK THE FIDELITY OF COPIES.
“That uber-Nigel I saw once?”
THAT AND OTHERS.
“So I’m kept within a constricted parameter space?”
TO BE CERTAIN THAT MIXING WITH FUNDAMENTALLY DIFFERENT INFLUENCES DOES NOT CHANGE YOU INALTERABLY.
“I want to change inalterably.”
HIGHER PHYLA HAVE HIGHER USES. THE SYNTONY IS ENGAGED IN PURSUITS FOR WHICH YOUR STANDARDIZED, FIDUCIARY REPRESENTATION IS ESSENTIAL. THIS KNOWLEDGE SHOULD PROPERLY BE ENOUGH FOR YOU.
“You don’t know me all that bloody well, do you?”
WE KNOW YOU UTTERLY.
“You never will.”
WE CAN SIMULATE YOU WITHIN FINE TOLERANCES.
“A copy’s not the original.”
THAT IS THE POINT THE SYNTONY WISHES YOU TO UNDERSTAND.
“I shall wear my trousers rolled.”
WHAT?
Many millennia ago, they had made the Snark. Only rudimentary elements of what was to be the Syntony had spanned a tenuous web over the galaxy then, machines searching out life, protracted voyages down stretching corridors of eons and parsecs. The Snark was a low grade device, but records of it—that is, the digital self—had to remain somewhere. What bloody use was a Galactic Library if you couldn’t look up such?—The fossil debris of a life lived and loved and gone?
So they brought the Snark to him.
You are something like the form I knew, it allowed.
To Nigel the Snark was a floating cloud, green electrical forks working within. Nothing like the sphere he had actually seen near the moon. But this was not real space he was in, either. “Remember the universe of essences?”
You are in it still.
“And you?”
I still am not. You are a spontaneous product of matter. We lack windows you possess.
He was surprised, something he had thought impossible now. Even here, they carried their baggage. “And the other way ’round, I expect.”
As must be. All windows are partial.
“Some are rather larger.”
You seem more varied now, greater than before.
“I’ve . . . traveled.”
