The Eternity Brigade (24 page)

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to him now,” Hawker concluded sadly. “We got him away from the army, which is what he wanted, but this isn’t exactly what we had in mind for him, either.”

He shook his head. “Maybe it would be kinder to kill him and put him out of his misery. But I just can’t do that. He’s been my friend forever, it seems. I owe it to him to try everything possible to save him.”

“And it wouldn’t do any good, even if you did kill him,” Amassa said. “The army would just dub him again, and start the whole process over.”

“At least that’s one thing they
can’t
do.”

“Everyone and everything can be dubbed,” Amassa said firmly.

“You don’t understand. Philaskut told us Green’s crystal shattered right after they dubbed him. That’s the whole problem—they can’t re-create his pattern.”

“You;re the one who doesn’t understand. Maybe his original pattern was destroyed, but they can still make a copy of him the way he is now.”

Hawker tensed. “What?”

“I looked at him closely while you were under outgo. He’s got a transmitter in his neck, the same as I do.” She stretched out her throat to show him the tiny button implanted just below the skin surface.

Looking at the device, Hawker remembered Philaskut saying everyone on Cellina had one. Self-consciously he put a hand on his own neck, but felt nothing. “What exactly is that?” he asked, trying to sound much more casual than he felt.

“It’s a transmitter. It makes readings of my molecular pattern and sends them to Rez Central, where my file is continuously updated. If I die, Rez Central will rez me exactly the way I was the instant before my death. Or, say, if I had my leg cut off, they could go back in the files to my pattern at the moment
before
my leg was cut off and rez me whole again.”

Hawker buried his face in his hands and gritted his teeth in frustration. All of this had been for nothing! They may have saved this particular edition of Green—but the army could dub him as he was before he was kidnapped, and poor Dave would have to go through that hell all over again. All this running, all this hiding—it was just a study in futility! He wanted to scream at his own stupidity.

Instead, he laughed. The hysteria burst out in gales of laughter that had tears pouring from his eyes and his nose running like a faucet. His whole body shook, and he turned over on his side away from Amassa.

“What’s funny?” his captor asked.

It took a few seconds for Hawker to bring himself back under control. “It’s ridiculous,” he said, wiping at the tears with the back of his forearm. “Here I am, worried about the army tracking us down, and they probably don’t even care. They’ve got Dave in their lab again, conducting the same old tests.”

“I don’t think so,” Amassa said. “In the bulletins, they definitely mentioned they wanted this one back if possible.”

“Why? That doesn’t make sense.”

“I didn’t pay much attention. Something about minute differences between the original and the dub. All I know is they wanted to make sure they couldn’t get the original before they made a dub. It sounded silly to me, too, but that’s what they said.”

Her fingers began kneading Hawker’s muscles in a sensual pattern, starting at his shoulder blades and working slowly down his body, distracting him from further thoughts.

Some time later, when Amassa went out to visit some friends, Hawker was left alone in the bubble with Green. At first the twisted man was in his unfortunate state of semi-consciousness, but after a while it cleared. He looked at Hawker and smiled. “Hi,” he said. “Down from your trip yet?”

“You know about that?”

“I was conscious a few times and saw you. It looked horrible.”

Hawker shuddered. “I don’t ever want to go through that again. Maybe
they
think it’s fun, but I can’t take it. You were right about them—they’re all heartless bastards.” He went into detail about the conversation he’d had with Amassa.

Green was very thoughtful after Hawker finished. Hawker, not knowing what else to say, ended with the apology, “I’m sorry, Dave, I tried to help, really I did. I guess I kinda fucked up again, huh?”

“It’s not all lost yet,” Green murmured

“Huh? What do you mean? Whether they capture us or kill us, they can still make more dubs of you.”

“But the dub isn’t as good as the original. It’s like a Xerox copy of a Xerox copy, it gets slightly fainter each time. The difference might not mean much in everyday terms. But in my case, they want to study the pattern as it was originally created, and minute differences could be very significant. That’s why they haven’t dubbed me yet—they want to make sure the original version is unavailable before they work on a copy.”

“Big deal. They won’t wait forever. If they haven’t found you in a couple of weeks, they’ll probably take their chances with a dub anyway.”

“But if a pattern can be destroyed once, it can be destroyed twice.”

Hawker blinked. “What’s that mean?”

“They can’t dub from my original pattern, because that broke. If we could get to this Rez Central, wherever it is, and destroy the file they’ve got on me
there
, they couldn’t use that pattern, either.”

“But how can we get in there? If that’s where they store the records of everyone on Cellina, it must be a very important place. They’ll have thousands of guards all the time.”

“Not necessarily.” Green smiled, a particularly grotesque expression on his twisted face. “It might even be one of the least guarded places on the whole planet.”

“I don’t believe that. They’d take good care of it. Just think what would happen if anything went wrong.”

“Oh, I’m sure they’ve kept it safe from enemy attack—probably buried underground or something, with lots of shielding. But as for intruders, why bother keeping guard? Everyone on Cellina is in the same boat—damaging the records might damage themselves. I don’t think anyone in the world—or at least in
this
world—would jeopardize his own immortality like that. The way you’ve described it, this culture is based on an implicit faith in the inevitability of resurrection. Nobody would attack Rez Central. Getting in there might not be the problem; finding out which records are mine and destroying them may be a bit tougher.”

His voice trailed off, and a glazed look came over his eyes, indicating he’d slipped from reality once more. Hawker sighed and moved away again, going to a chair to await Amassa’s return.

***

Over the next two days, Hawker managed to elicit more information about Rez Central out of Amassa. Although she’d never actually died herself, she had been there on five previous occasions to restore her body after several “accidents” had removed one or more vital parts. Hawker had to be careful to phrase his questions so she didn’t suspect he had more than a casual interest in the subject, but he learned enough to draw up tentative plans.

Rez Central was an enormous complex several hundred kilometers away. Its job was so vast—monitoring and recording the patterns of every person on Cellina—that it took an entire mountain to house it. The mountain’s core had been hollowed out and filled with ever-increasing data servers and resurrection chambers. The complex was entirely automated; no humans worked there. Amassa had seen no guards or defenses of any kind when she was there—but then, she was not a trained soldier, and hadn’t been planning any attacks on the facility.

Hawker talked the situation over with Green when the two men were alone and Green was coherent. The cripple digested the information and made some tentative plans, and also formulated a hypothesis for why the army was not using this process on the soldiers.

“They seem to need a whole mountain to receive and store the signals from these little transmitters. I can think of two drawbacks: it’s not very mobile, and it’s vulnerable to enemy attack. They can probably store all our old patterns in something the size of a briefcase, which is easier to carry around and harder for the enemy to find and destroy. What they sacrifice in our continued memory, they make up in flexibility.”

Finally there was another party for all the people in this bubble city, and Hawker persuaded Amassa to take him along when she connected her bubble to the others. She was rather jealous of him, but he argued that unless he had a chance at some variety he might go stale. Actually, variety of the sort this group could offer was the last thing he needed—but he did have to contact Belilo and/or Symington again if he was going to continue helping Green.

As he’d feared, he was greeted by swarms of people to whom everything new was an adventure. He was pinched and poked and petted and prodded by men and women who insisted most vigorously that Amassa must allow them to dub this fine primitive. Amassa, knowing full well she possessed an original in a world of copies, remained noncommittal.

After two hours of encounters, sexual and otherwise, with a strange assortment of people, Hawker finally found Symington and managed to pry him away from his own circle of admirers. The two men found a quiet corner to talk in, and related to one another their experiences over the past few days.

“It’s scary being a slave,” Symington admitted, “but I have to hand it to them; they can do things I wouldn’t even have dreamed of. Tesaak—she’s the woman who has me most of the time—she thinks of some of the kinkiest things to do. She dubs a copy of herself before she lost her virginity and watches while I deflower her—and then she joins in, and we both fuck her younger self. Then she dubs a second copy of me, and we—”

“A second copy?” Hawker tensed suddenly. “How do I know I’m talking to the real you, then?”

“What difference does it make?” Symington smiled. “I haven’t been the real me for centuries.”

Hawker relaxed again. “You’re right. This whole thing is so crazy.”

“You want to hear crazy. Because I’m a primitive, they keep wanting me to kill them over and over again. They think I’m some kind of fucking gladiator. They conjure up arenas and stage battles. They want me to kill them with spears and knives and even my bare hands. It gets tiring after a while.”

“Do you know what’s happened to Belilo?”

Symington paused, a cloud passing across his face. “No, I, uh, haven’t heard anything since Nya took her off.”

“Shit.” Hawker had been hoping to rescue her, too; her help would certainly be useful in the attack on Rez Central. But if they couldn’t locate her quickly and easily, they’d just have to abandon her and let her fend for herself. The longer they delayed, the more chance the army might dub Green again, and then all their efforts would be lost.

“Listen, let’s speak in English for a while,” Hawker continued, shunting over to his native language—a language they’d hardly spoken in hundreds of years.

“Huh? Why?”

“Because these people have all sorts of monitors, and we can never be sure they aren’t listening in. Nobody from this time speaks English, though.”

“You’ve got a plan, then?”

Hawker told Symington what he’d learned about Rez Central, and about his discussions with Green. When he described their tentative plans, Symington grew contemplative.

“Those are pretty wild assumptions you’re using,” he said.

“What have we got to lose?”

Symington smiled. “You’re right. Absolutely nothing.”

The two men waited for some hectic action to occupy the attention of the crowd elsewhere, and both slipped away to Amassa’s bubble. Green was in one of his comas, so there was nothing to do but quietly await Amassa’s return.

Amassa finally did come back. She looked at both of them and shook her head. “So here you are. It was most unsocial of you to leave together without telling anyone.”

“We wanted to see you here alone,” Hawker said. “We thought you might like having two primitives all to yourself at once.”

Amassa smiled, and Hawker saw his assessment was right—the concept did appeal to her. She spread her wings wide in a gesture of sexual preparedness, and stepped forward toward them, arms outstretched.

Hawker moved toward her to take her arms with his. His touch was soft and gentle at first—but then, without warning, Symington dove at her legs, tackling the woman knee-high, and Hawker tightened his own grip as Amassa began falling over. She gasped in amazement at the attack, and started reaching downward to her waist—but Hawker’s strong grasp held her firmly.

“Get the belt off her,” he told Symington.

The bigger man moved to comply, holding onto her viciously kicking legs with one arm while trying to unfasten her narrow belt with his free hand.

Amassa was still far from helpless. Her enormous, muscular wings beat furiously against the bodies of both men, battering them with considerable strength. She twisted and writhed in their grip, turning her head to bite Hawker’s ear, nearly ripping it in the process. Hawker, though, was a veteran of countless more fights than she was, and held firm to his purpose.

At last Symington succeeded in unfastening the belt. With its removal, the fight went out of the captive angel. Amassa let out a deep breath and sagged in Hawker’s arms. Hawker held on tightly suspecting a trick, but this was no ruse; Amassa realized that, without her belt controls, she was at the mercy of the two soldiers.