Vestiges of Time (9 page)

ing, and the playback, we will want to feed your replicates that data from your memories which is felt to be of value to them.”

“I think I follow you,” I said, “but I’m not altogether certain. Now I’m supposed to have this, well, telepathic control over—”

KaphNo raised a hand to interrupt. “We prefer the term ‘resonance.’ In your case, resonance control. ‘Telepathy’ is such a sloppy term.”

I recalled another being in another place who had said how sloppy were human terms for psionic effects. I guess she was right.

“You will be expected to exercise resonance control over the replicates. They, in turn, will follow your commands in terms of resonance
response.”

“Okay,” I agreed. “This resonance control I’ll have over them—Won’t that make it possible for them to do anything I tell them without their having, well, personalities of their own?”

“That would hardly be practical, Harkos,” KaphNo said flatly, perhaps doubting my understanding of any of it. “We are talking about
several hundred
replicates. Of course, you could personally direct one or even two to a very large degree, but to control even two well, or three or four in any fashion at all, would be a fulltime job. You would have to be placed in a sensory- deprived situation and then spend all your waking hours flitting from one subject to another, directing its every task.

“No, Harkos,” he said loudly, “you are to be the
general
of hundreds, not the
puppet master
of a handful. Your replicates will have, to a limited degree, of course, distinct memory patterns, distinct experience programs, distinct behavior patterns—in short, for want of a better term, personalities. Your control over them will be of a more general, over-all fashion.

“Here’s the way you’ll do it: ‘Harkos R52, take six men and try to knock out that guard post on the next

street. Harkos R87’s platoon will converge with your detail and together you will go to the assistance of Harkos R210 two blocks to the north.’ That, Harkos, is the way you will direct your troops.”

I leaned back, smiled, sipped my beer to the bottom of the mug, then called EnDera and asked her to please get us both a refill.

“Do you understand the distinctions now?” KaphNo asked, sitting down.

“I think I’m beginning to, but tell me, just how does this resonance business work—no, how will it
seem to me?
I guess is what I’m asking.”

“I don’t think I can give you a definitive answer to that as yet. Oh, thank you.” EnDera had brought us the beer. “Never before has anyone attempted resonance control with so many'replicates. Experience in the past has dealt with no more than two or three replicates and their senior. But we know there are three levels of integration with your replicates.

“RCL One—RCL stands for resonance-control level —RCL One would probably very closely coincide with your normal, waking, conscious operation. You will be very much ‘in your own head,’ as it were, and your directing of the replicates would be very analogous with the way a conventional commander in the field directs his troops: he uses radio and/or video; whereas you will be, well, directing by means of your thoughts, so to speak, your ‘sympathetic awareness,’ We doubt that this will be greatly taxing, and you should be able to master it quite easily, almost instinctively, one might say.

“RCL Two we consider an intermediate stage. In it, v/hich would require slightly greater mental concentration, you would be directing your attention to one or a few replicates, more fully aware of their thoughts and activities, of their sensory input, but hardly fully integrated with them.

“RCL Three will probably be the most difficult to

adjust to, for in it you would be allowing your response patterns—your
self,
your
soul,
if you feel poetically inclined—to fully mesh with that of a single replicate.” He spread the fingers of his thin hands and then brought them together so that the fingers of one hand entwined with those of the other, mating with one another like the teeth of cog wheels. “At RCL Three you would be able to see through the replicate’s eyes, hear with his ears, taste with his tongue, even speak with his vocal, cords—and, of course, experience his pain. In essence, you and he would be a single person inhabiting two bodies.

“We do not believe that it will be necessary for you to use RGL Three to any great extent. In fact, we advise against it.”

“I see.”

“The training, as you can see,” he went on after a moment, “will not be all on the part of the replicates. You yourself will have a great deal to learn in the process.”

I nodded dismally. Maybe it wasn’t going to be the sinecure I had thought it would be.

“But I am certain you will find it interesting and rewarding,” KaphNo said, as if to cheer me up.

“Tell me about this cerebral-recording business,” I said, my mouth damp with beer and foam. “You explained to me about the so-called brain waves and all that, and I think I’ve got some idea of what you’re doing when you’re making these recordings—” “Essentially similar to the recording of any electromagnetic phenomenon,” KaphNo interjected, “but the modulation end of it is a lot more sophisticated.” “So you told me. But what am I going to be doing while all this is going on?”

KaphNo smiled one of those rare smiles of his, stretched, drank beer, relaxed, and said, “We are getting a little out of my field. This is more in psychologist GrelLo’s domain, but I’ll tell you what I can.

“The recordings will be accomplished through several phases, as I think I mentioned to you earlier. First of all, before any actual recordings are made, you will make up what we call a ‘mnemonic autobiograph,’ with GrelLo’s help, of course. Your life experiences will then be broken down into a number of clearly defined categories—any of which you consider of a highly personal or private nature and/or nonrelevant to our training purposes will be struck from the initial records. Prying into your personal life will be avoided as far as possible. She and her technicians will go after the specific memory types desired.”

After calling to EnDera for still another refill of our beer mugs, I asked, “How is this done?”

“During the recording sessions, which GrelLo will supervise, you will be given drugs to help you relax and to facilitate memory retrieval. Half a dozen or so electrodes will be placed at various spots on your scalp and the back of your neck. That’s all. Very much like an EEG, if you’ve ever had one. The machines and the computers do the rest.”

“And after the memories are recorded?”'

“They will be played back to you in a shorthand fashion and you will be given the opportunity to edit them before GrelLo and her staff further edit them. After that, the tapes will be ready to be played to your replicates.”

“Well, it doesn’t sound like there’s anything to be afraid of there,” I said, wondering if that was true. How great a chance was there that I might give myself away as not being what I claimed to be? I’d have to play that carefully indeed.

KaphNo was giving me another of his smiles. “As if there were much you have ever feared, my general.” “Don’t overrate me, KaphNo. I’m no superhuman warrior out of some Norse saga. Just a simple soldier.” “No longer that. Not when you have an army that will literally obey your slightest whim.”

“That does scare me a little.”

“It shouldn’t. You have the capacity to handle it.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“This isn’t something we’ve undertaken lightly. We know what kind of man you are, HarkosNor, otherwise we wouldn’t have chosen you.”

Do you really? I asked myself. And was hit by a sudden feeling of chill: What if they
did know?
What if they knew who and what I really was?

(Maybe they do know, said that cantankerous part .of my mind. Maybe they’ve known all along.)

And thoughts like that could have led me down the dark paths I’d followed the night before, down into plots within plots within plots, and I wasn’t ready for all that again.

“Are you feeling well?” KaphNo asked.

“I’m okay. I think I ate too much for supper. A touch of indigestion.”

“Should I call EnDera? She could get you something.”

“No, I’m fine now. Would you like another beer?” We each had another, and then another, and before the evening was over KaphNo was weeping like a baby, telling me about a sweetheart he’d once had, long ago, the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen, and how he’d lost her to another.

EnDera was already asleep when I groggily crawled into the room that was a bed. I didn’t bother to wake her. We both needed the sleep.

Of EnDera and KaphNo

Within the crystalline vessels called encanters, the manipulated and irradiated cells whose DNA carried data identical to that within my body began to grow and divide, and grow and divide again, in a fashion very similar to that which takes place within a mother’s womb. Cells that had originally been unspecialized began to differentiate and develop particular characteristics the parent cells had not had. Still hardly more than microscopic, within the embryos, the rudiments of organs—heart, liver, brain, lungs, digestive tract— began to take shape. In the murky fluid of the encanters the masses of cells curved, fattened, backbones began to grow, and the buds that would later be arms and legs began to sprout. Not yet did they look even vaguely human, but the indications were there if you knew how to look for them. With the passage of days, of weeks, the cells continued to grow, to change, to become. ...

As the embryos within the replication encartters in the laboratories of the Underground evolved through recapitulation toward “birth,” which for them would consist of no more than being placed in larger encanters where most of the organs and much of the tissue of their bodies would begin to function in more nearly normal fashion, I was going through some processes myself.

With a voice recorder, a note pad, and a pencil, with the help of psychologist GrelLo—a rather mature woman, attractive, and not unpleasant to work with— I was putting together what they called a mnemonic

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autobiograph, but which was more nearly a quickly sketched outline of the principal memories of my life and the structure of my life as I saw it in retrospect— which was one hell of a thing to do, since I had to make up a lot of it as I went along.

As far as possible I used real events from my past, modifying the suitable ones to fit into the patterns of this world as I knew them. Claiming to be a foreigner, bom and raised in the Central European country of SteeMehseeh, helped in covering some of my fabrications—but not much.

However, GrelLo didn’t seem to be as much interested in my life itself as she was interested in categories of memories, my “epistemological mnemology,” she called it: the taxonomy of my mind. She wanted to know how I classified my thoughts and memories, to determine what categories were relevant to the clones —excuse me, the replicates—and to determine how best to call up those specific memories for recording.

For example, she didn’t much care when or where or how I’d learned to operate and maintain an automatic slug-throwing rifle, but she did want to know and to record everything I had ever known about the subject itself. My personal feelings about slug throwers and the experiences I’d had with them were irrelevant, or at best secondary, unless they told how to use and maintain a slug thrower in the field, how to load and fire with accuracy under real combat conditions. This saved me a lot of embarrassment, and from their discovery of my falsified past. Or so it seemed at the time . . .

By the time the replicates could justifiably be called “babies” and had been placed in the “newborn” encanters, GrelLo and her assistants and technicians had already begun to record my memories.

When I wasn’t in session with GrelLo and her people, or in conference with ThefeRa and his people—

for I had a lot to learn before I could ever hope to begin training the replicates—or in conference with AkweNema and the lord DessaTyso—learning the ins and outs of the BrathelLanza, the breadth and depth of the organization, their plans, their goals, the structure of their organization and the structure of the organization to which they were opposed, and, of course, the tactical and strategic goals of the revolution in military terms—when I wasn’t involved in these things, all of which consumed large chunks of time, I furthered my own education with the tapes and disks and books in the suite they’d given me, and called upon the Underground’s central library computer, and, on occasional spent a little time with EnDera, for she would live in my suite for as long as I wished, and with KaphNo, who was becoming almost a friend.

Of the two, I’m not certain which was the less complex person. Perhaps it was EnDera. A beautiful, intelligent girl she certainly was, and one whose parents, foreigners themselves, had tried to raise as a normal citizen of NakrehVatee. They had come from southern China, immigrants to North America who, because of their background in their native land, were allowed to enter one of the higher middle castes devoted to artistic endeavors. EnDera had done much the same things as other girls of her caste and social status, gone through the same sort of training and education, the same introductions to their segment of society, to their prescribed version of life and love and sexual experience, for within certain caste-limited bounds, the society of NakrehVatee was rather permissive sexually. But there had always been a diiference for EnDera: she wasn’t quite like her peers, her skin wasn’t the same darkish color, nor her hair the same texture, nor were her eyelids shaped the same. And for those reasons, and for some others, neither did she think in the same ways.

After completing her education in the arts, hoping