Rafe laughed. It was conscious effort. He remembered-a thing that turned him cold; a meeting Jillan had not known; that Paul assuredly had not; and for a moment he was the one pretending cheerfulness. It had hurt; it would happen again, he thought, for no reason, for nothing that made sense.
"Sooner or later," he began dutifully to answer Paul; but something caught his eye, a light far out in the dark.
"Something's out there," Jillan said, scrambling to her feet as he did. "Something's coming”
It moved in that rapid way things could here. Paul got to his feet and Jillan held to him, steadying him by that contact.
It whipped up to the barrier, a human runner.
Paul.
Doppelganger's doppelganger. It stared, stark and wide-mouthed, glowing like themselves, and with one strangled cry of grief, it spun and ran away, diminished as rapidly as it had come.
"What was that?" asked Paul, remarkably calm, considering the horror in his eyes.
Rafe turned and looked at him, far from calm himself-considered this second Paul-shape that had materialized inside the barrier with him and Jillan.
Jillan too, he remembered-the arms that had gripped him with more than human strength-
He set his back to the phantom wall, facing both of them, their united, guarded stare.
The pain-O God, the pain!
Rafe screamed while he had breath, while he had the strength. But it was too deep and too long, too thorough, pinned him between breaths and held him dying there until air began the long slow leak back into his lungs. Then the cycle ran round again.
And over again.
"There," said Kepta's vast slow voice after all eternity. "There. That's over now." And there was dark a time.
"Try to move," it said.
Rafe moved; he would have done anything it told him, not to have the pain. He kept moving and thrust aching arms under him, took the strain of muscle-stretch across his aching ribs, his belly, trying constantly to find some position that did not hurt and discovering fresh agonies at every shift.
"Easy," Kepta said out of that vast haze of his senses, awareness of light, machines that hummed and moved, having him as a mote in their cold heart. A metal arm moved at his face, thrust a tube into his mouth with persistent accuracy, shot a dose of tepid water down his throat. Other arms
moved spiderlike about him and closed about his arms, click-click. He was past all but the vaguest fear. He let his limbs be moved because gentle as it was he had resisted once and found no limit to its strength. Click-click. It faced him about and held him upright as he sat on the table,
"Over, then?" His voice was a ragged croak, his throat raw from screaming. "Over?”
"All done," Kepta said, taking shape in front of him. "Rest a bit.”
He was willing; the spider arms stayed still, like a cradle behind him. He leaned his head back, his feet dangling off the edge of the machinery. For a moment he blurred out again, head resting against the arms, heart still laboring, while the tears leaked from his eyes and the sweat slicked his skin.
"Where is it?" he asked then, meaning the thing that he had birthed. He had some proprietary curiosity; it had cost him so much pain.
"Here," Kepta said, "here in the machine.”
"You mean you'll give it a body.”
"No," Kepta said, and rested a ghostly hand on a large hummock that rose with several others to form the table, the base of several of the arms. "It has one. In here. Do you want to know how it works? Your template of a moment ago exists now. It will never know more than you knew when it was made. Always when I call it up it will be at the same moment.”
Rafe shook his head and shut his eyes, feeling everything slide into chaos, not wanting this.
"So I can always recover that point," Kepta said, "at need. A point of knowledge-and ignorance." Eyes slitted, till Kepta was a golden blur: "You still going to let me go?”
"Oh, yes." Kepta moved among the machinery, through one lowered metal arm. "You asked about bodies. This one” Kepta laid a hand on his own insubstantial chest. "You assume there's some substance to it, somewhere. There's not. It's a pattern. You want Jillan? I can call up that template. Or Paul. Or one of several of you.”
Paul One ran, raced into the dark, sobbing at what he had seen: himself; himself possessing Jillan and Rafe and he-himself watching helplessly from outside-
At last he found Rafe again, his own Rafe, beaconlike in the nowhereland, that shape that was Rafe and not, something blurred and larger, far larger.
"I know what you found," Rafe said. "I knew you would." And Rafe himself blurred further, into outlines vast and dark. "I knew it would hurt. Paul”
"Was it me?" he asked. "Was that my real body?”
"No," it said. "Only another duplicate.”
There was no more system of reference, nothing human left. It took him in its changing arms, took him to its heart, whispered to him in a voice still human though the rest of it was not.
"You don't have to be afraid. I won't hurt you, nothing will ever hurt you while I have you. You can't trust what you see, that's the first thing you have to learn. You want to be safe. But I can make you strong. You won't be afraid of anything. You want to know how this ship works? I'll tell you. Anything you want to know. That version you just saw? Nothing. Nothing. Another copy off your template. I have to tell you how that works, that next. The templates.”
"I recorded you," Kepta said, waving a hand past the mounded protrusions beneath all the array of shining spider arms, "not just the outward form, but at every level, in every function and structure-everything. The template's as like you as if you'd been spun out in bits, down to the state and spin of your particles: that's how exact it is ... all uncertainties made definite, paniculate memory, frozen in the finest definition matter can achieve. We just-play it out again. Call it up in memory and let it integrate. The visible manifestation, the body-a very simple thing: just light, quite apart from the more complex patterns. An image conceived off the template and maintained by quite inelegant means: the computer knows its shape, that's all, and revises it moment by moment by the direction of the program; but that program that animates it-that's quite another thing.”
"It reacts," Rafe said. "It thinks”
"That's the elegance. It does.”
"You've turned them to machines.”
"No. Contained them in one. They react; they think; they think they move. They're programs, if you like, smart programs that can learn and change, that get input they interpret in the same way they always did, or they think they do, that eyes work and mouths make speech, and muscles move. The body-is merely light, for passing convenience. It changes in response to signals the programs give. It can't input. But on other levels, in the purest sense, the programs can input from each other, can imagine, tend to perceive what they expect like smells and textures. Illusions, if you like. But they aren't. The programs aren't. They grow, and change, get experience, change their minds. They stay up and running until someone shuts them down.”
Rafe shook his head. The words writhed past, heard, half-heard. He hung there in the spider arms, looked at the machines, the mocking image of himself. "One large memory," he said past unresponsive lips, "one hell of a large memory, that thing. Wouldn't it be?”
"Oh yes, quite large.”
"Runs all the time.”
Kepta lifted his head in a curious way, his own mannerism thrown back at him, half-mocking, half-wary.
"I threaten you," Rafe said, and found it funny, hanging there, naked, in the steel, unyielding hands. "Do I? Suppose I believe that's how you do it, suppose I believe it all-There's still the why of it. You want to tell me why? And you still want to tell me you're putting me out of here?”
"Why's not relevant. Say that I wanted the template. That's all. When I call it up and it talks to me, it won't know a thing of what we've said; won't know what it is. It'll be the you that walked in here of his own free will. That's the one I'll deal with. Wh
y tell you anything? The template won't remember. You'd have to tell it what you've learned. And you'll be safe away from it.”
"Why?" he asked again. "Why let me go?"
"I said. It's easy. You're worried, aren't you? You're worried about your life, theirs-the whole species. That's why you don't really think I'll turn you out. You think of ships. Military. I understand this concept of yours, this collective of self defense. You think I've come to learn all I can; that I'm in advance of others who'll come to harm all your kind. No. I'm unique.”
"Then come in. Come into some human port and talk like you're civilized.”
The mirror-image blinked. "You don't really want that.”
"No," he said, thinking again, thinking at once of Endeavor, magnified a hundred-fold, O God, some major port-
"There'll just be yourself returning," it said. "The military will check records, put you together with the Endeavor business. You'll be answering a lot of questions. That's all right. Tell them anything you like. I'll be long gone from Paradise.”
"Where? To do what?”
"You're worrying again.”
"Are you afraid? Afraid of us?”
"Responsibility. You have this tendency-to make yourself the center, the focus. Jillan and Paul you're responsible for them; if your species died, you'd be more responsible than I who killed them. An interesting concept, responsibility-and within your context, yes, you could become that focus. I could wipe out your kind, based on what you know. And on what you don't. You couldn't fight me. Your ships can't catch me; my weapons are beyond you; there's just no chance, if I were interested. I'm not. So you're not the center, are you? That's a great loss to you . . . that your kind will live on without your responsibility. Could it even be-that you're not responsible for other things? Or that your friends are not in your universe at all?”
"What becomes of them?”
"They're not your responsibility.”
He flung himself for his feet. The arms prevented that.
"You're not necessary. You go to Paradise. You tell them what you like. Tell them everything you've seen. They'll be interested. Of course they will. You'll be famous of your kind-in certain ways. Very important. You'll certainly be the focus then. Won't you?”
Imagination filled it in-official disclaimers, the military swarming over him and his capsule like bees-Hallucination, they'd say, for general consumption. . . . "Damn you," he said to Kepta, shivering.
"Not my responsibility," Kepta said. "Not at all. I'll be gone. Nothing to fear from me; there never was. But you don't want to believe that. It takes something away from you." The spider-arms relaxed, the grip yielded. "Your clothes are there. I think you might be cold.”
He moved, on his own, crawled off the sweating, plastic surface. Everywhere about him was the stench of his own fear. He tucked his clothing to him and held onto it. "I stink," he muttered at it. "I want a bath. I'm going back to Lindy, thanks.”
Kepta would stop him, he thought; would move the arms again. But they all retracted with one massive snick of metal, clearing him a path.
"A machine could carry you," Kepta said.
"I'll walk.”
It hurt. Every movement hurt, however slow. Every thought did, in this trap that he was in. He limped toward the exit from this place, the way he had come in. He cherished the pain, that it filled his mind like needful ballast, filled cracks and crevices and darknesses and took away the need to think. Tears ran down his face, and he could not have said whether they were true tears or only a welling up of too much fluid; he was beyond all analyses.
<> destroyed the Rafe-simulacrum that <> wore and expanded past its limits with relief. <> had already absorbed everything that surfaced in Rafe-mind, all the suppositions, all the facts, all the emotive feeling. <> felt a lingering distress.
There was a time of adjustment afterward, there must be, in which <>'s human experiences and O's own flowed past each other in comparison, and <> kept them all. <> was interested for various reasons, but one reason assumed priority, that <> was due for challenge-indeed, had, to a great extent provoked it, seeing opportunity.
More, there was additional use in Rafe-mind for had worn it. Ancient and unbending as was, had slipped into it, and this was worth interest. It was always well, under any circumstances, to know just what was about.
And if had found some congruency to self in Rafe-mind, then <> was interested.
"Is it pleasant?" <> taunted across the width of the ship. had no answer, ' had taken a shape much more like 's own configurations, and the Paul-mind nested in it.
<> was thunderstruck.
"See," said <->> in an undertone of distress as <-> came slipping up to O's presence. "See, o> said as much. So did ((())). Even ((())).”
"Quiet," said <>, losing all amusement, and having searched the tag ends of Rafe-mind to account for the disaster, decided finally that Paul Gaines was, in this simulacrum, more than slightly warped.
Paul-mind, Rafe-mind informed <>, was stationer, and that meant a wealth of things. It meant a life style; it meant groups; and security; and comfort if one could get the value-items to exchange for it-which was one motivation for human ships moving constantly in transfer of materials from collection to consumption (but not the sole motive of those who ran those ships). This thread led to comprehensions. Paul-mind was not like Rafe. Paul Gaines wanted to be contained in something, in anything. Space frightened him; strangeness did; but what provided him comfort was never strange to Paul.
And there Paul sat, in 's heart, nested, protected and surviving.
<> was, to admit it, utterly chagrined.
Paul has other qualities, the Rafe-memories said. Rafe-mind called it bravery, and attached whole complexes of valuations to that word. Not group-survival over individual, though that was part of it. Not retaliation simply, though it might manifest in that; or equally well, by its negative. Not self aggrandizement, either, though it could be that; or equally well self-denial. The term attached to valuations of person-the affirmation of some ideal species-type, <> judged.
Rafe-mind was not sure it itself possessed this quality; but it desired it. To evidence that it did possess it, Rafe tried not to be disturbed.
For that reason Rafe had walked the corridor to the lab, while paradoxically the remnant of Rafe-mind <> still retained, recognized this act for what it was, that Rafe might comply and intend at the same time to make violent resistance, the moment Rafe had the chance.
Rafe-mind called this second concept dignity.
<> thought of it as self-preservation, but remembered it was, perhaps, strategy as well, that Rafe did this thing for all the group he perceived as his.
Responsibility.
And what group does Paul belong to? <> wondered, having information about the words Old Man, and ship, and an arrangement <> found disturbingly accusatory.
<> was Old Man too; <> had such a group. They were the passengers. Responsibility, Rafe would say again. <> felt no such thing. But to be the focus of loyalty, that appealed to <>.
would appropriate this Paul Gaines. There was no likelihood that would not, having no such thing as loyalty self.
Easier, <> thought, if Paul had met some segment of = = = =. Desire for containment, indeed. The Cannibal could have provided that, had <> not intervened. "Mad," said <•>, nesting close to <>, which <> sometimes permitted. "Pity him, <>.”
"Paul would find <-> quite disturbing," <> said. "So would all of them.”
"<"> know that," O> said. And, extraneously, as <-> often spoke: "<-> know bravery.”
O> had a certain skill, to dip into <>'s mind without leaving anything behind, not a unique talent, by any means. It was <>'s nature, and the ship's. "It is not-” <> said, and named a concept in O>'s terms.
"It feels like that," <*> said. "O> would have walked down that hall.”
"Of course <-> would," <> said, unsurprised. "For somewhat skewed reasons. It is not-” an
d <> named that word again, which neither Rafe-mind nor Jillan-mind (which <> also had) possessed the biological reflexes to understand.
"Go," <> said to <->, "and tell that need not skulk about. It's merely 's paranoid suppositions that <> would interfere.”
" supposes that <> can't," <•> said. " said to tell <> so.”
<> sent a pulse through the ship, violent enough to touch any sense. "So much for can't," <> said, and went off to keep a thing for which the Rafe-mind had no complete word, but promise was close enough.
Rafe Two sat, tucked up against the dark, invisible wall; and Jillan and Paul kept to their side of the containment. They stared at one another. That was all that was left to do in the limbo they were in.