The collected short fict.., p.69
The Collected Short Fiction, page 69
The unbound families did not flourish. The Pierces lost influence, despite being primes. Their final disgrace was cooperation with terrestrial governments during the Split, when Earth severed ties with the Moon to punish us for our presumptuous independence. Thereafter, for decades, the Pierces and their kind were social outcasts.
By contrast, the allied superfamilies handily survived the crisis.
The Pierces, and most unbound families like them, driven by destitution and resentment, contracted their services in 2094 to the Franco-Polish technological station at Copernicus. They became part of the Copernicus binding multiple of nine families and finally joined the mainstream economy of the post-Split Moon.
Still, the Pierces’ descendants faced real prejudice in lunar society. They became known as a wild, churlish lot, and kept to themselves in and around the Copernicus station.
These difficulties had obviously affected William as a child, and made him something of an enigma.
When my sister met William at a Copernicus mixer barn dance, courted him (he was too shy and vulnerable to court her in turn) and finally asked him to join the Sandoval BM as her husband, he had to face the close scrutiny of dozens of dubious family members.
William lacked the almost instinctive urge to unity of a BM-bred child; in an age of rugged individuals tightly fitted into even more rugged and demanding multiples, he was a loner, quick-tempered yet inclined to sentimentality, loyal yet critical, brilliant but prone to choosing tasks so difficult he seemed doomed to always fail.
Yet in those tense months, with Rho’s constant coaching, he put on a brilliant performance, adopting a humble and pleasant attitude. He was accepted into the Sandoval Binding Multiple.
Rho was something of a lunar princess. Biologically of the Sandoval line, great-grandchild of Robert and Emilia Sandoval, her future was the concern of far too many, and she developed a closeted attitude of defiance. That she should reach out for the hand of a Pierce was both expected, considering her character and upbringing, and shocking.
But old prejudices had softened considerably. Despite the doubts of Rho’s very protective “aunts” and “uncles,” and the strains of initiation and marriage, and despite his occasional reversion to prickly form, William was quickly recognized as a valuable adjunct to our family. He was a brilliant designer and theoretician. For four years he contributed substantially to many of our scientific endeavours, yet adjunct he was, playing a subservient role that must have deeply galled him.
I was fifteen when Rho and William married, and nineteen when he finally broke through this more or less obsequious mask to ask for the Ice Pit. I had never quite understood their attraction for each other; lunar princess drawn to son of outcast family. But one thing was certain: whatever William did to strain Rho’s affections, she could return with interest.
walked to the Ice Pit with Rho after an hour of helping her prepare her case.
She was absolutely correct; as Sandovals, we had a duty to preserve the reputation and heirs of the Sandoval BM, and, even by an advocate’s logic, that would include the founders of our core family.
That we were also taking in four hundred and eight outsiders was quite another matter . . . But as Rho pointed out, the society could hardly sell individuals. Surely nobody would think it a bad idea, bringing such a wealth of potential information to the Moon. Tired old Earth didn’t want it; just more corpsicles on a world plagued by them. Anonymous heads, harvested in the mid-twenty-first century, declared dead, stateless, very nearly outside the law, without rights except under the protection of their money and their declining foundation.
The StarTime Preservation Society was not actually selling anything or anyone. They were transferring members, chattels and responsibilities to Sandoval BM pending dissolution of the original society; in short, they were finally, after one hundred and ten years, going cold blue belly-up. Bankruptcy was the old term; pernicious exhaustion of means and resources was the new. Well and good; they had guaranteed to their charter members only sixty-one years (inclusive) of tender loving care. After that, they might just as well be out in the warm.
“The societies set up in 2020 and 2030 are declaring exhaustion at the rate of two and three a year now,” Rhosalind said. “Only one has actually buried dead meat. Most have been bought out by information entrepreneurs and universities.”
“Somebody hopes to make a profit?” I asked. “Don’t by noisy, Mickey,” she said, by which she meant incapable of converting information to useful knowledge. “These aren’t just dead people; they’re huge libraries. Their memories are theoretically intact; at least, as intact and death and disease allow them to be. There’s maybe a five per cent degradation; we can use natural-languages algorithms to check and reduce that to maybe three per cent.”
“Very noisy,” I said.
“Nonsense. That’s usable recall. Your memories of your seventh birthday have degraded by fifty per cent.”
I tried to remember my seventh birthday; nothing came to mind. “Why? What happened on my seventh birthday?”
“Not important, Mickey,” Rho said.
“So who wants that sort of information? It’s out of date, it’s noisy, it’s going to be hard to prove provenance . . . much less check it out for accuracy.”
She stopped, brow cloudy, clearly upset. “You’re resisting me on this, aren’t you?”
“Rho, I’m in charge of project finances. I have to ask dumb questions. What value are these heads to us, even if we can extract information? And”—I held up my hand, about to make a major point—“what if extraction of information is intrusive? We can’t dissect these heads—you’ve assumed the contracts.”
“I called Cailetet from Tampa, Florida, last week. They say the chance of recovery of neural patterns and states from frozen heads is about eighty per cent, using non-intrusive methods. No nano injections. Lamb shift tweaking. They can pinpoint every molecule in every head from outside the containers.” However outlandish Rho’s schemes, she always did a certain amount of planning ahead. I leaned my head to one side and lifted my hands, giving up. “All right,” I said. “It’s fascinating. The possibilities are—”
“Luminous,” Rho finished for me.
“But who will buy historical information?”
“These are some of the finest minds of the twentieth century,” Rho said. “We could sell shares in future accomplishments.”
“If they’re revivable.” We were coming up to the white line and the big porcelain hatch to the Ice Pit. “They’re currently not very active and not very creative,” I commented.
“Do you doubt we’ll be able to revive them someday? Maybe in ten or twenty years?”
I shook my head dubiously. “They talked revival a century ago. High-quality surgical nano wasn’t enough to do the trick. You can make a complex machine shine like a gem, fix it up so that everything fits, but if you don’t know where to kick it . . . Long time passing, no eyelids cracking to light of a new day.”
Rho palmed the hatch guard. William took his own sweet time answering. “I’m an optimist,” she said. “I always have been.”
“Rho, you’ve come when I’m busy,” William said over the com.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, William. I’m your wife and I’ve been gone for three months.” She wasn’t irritated; her tone was playfully piqued. The hatch opened, and again I caught the smell of cold in the outrush of warm.
“The heads are ancient,” I said, stepping over the threshold behind her. “They’ll need retraining, re-everything. They’re probably elderly, inflexible . . . But those are hardly major handicaps when you consider that, right now, they’re dead.”
She shrugged this off and walked briskly across the steel bridge. She’d once told me that William, in his more tense and frustrated moments, enjoyed making love on the bridge. I wondered about harmonics. “Where’s the staff?” she asked.
“William told me to let them go. He said we didn’t need them with the QL in control.” We had been working for the past three years with a team of young technicians chosen from several other families around Procellarum. William had informed me two days after the QL’s installation that these ten colleagues were no longer needed. He was coldly blunt about it, and he made no dust about the fact that I was the one who would have to arrange for their severance.
His logic was strong; the QL would not need additional human support, and we could use the BM exchange for other purchases. Despite my instincts that this was bad manners between families, I could not stand alone against William; I had served the notices and tried to take or divert the brunt of the anger.
Rho cringed as she sidled between the double toruses of the disorder pumps, whether in reaction to her husband’s blunt efficiency or the pumps’ effect on her body. She glanced over her shoulder sympathetically. “Poor Micko.”
William opened the door, threw out his arms in a peremptory fashion, and enfolded Rho.
I love my sister. I do not know whether it was some perverse jealousy or a sincere desire for her well-being that motivated my feeling of unease whenever I saw William embrace her.
“I’ve got something for us,” Rho said, looking up at him with high-energy, complete-equality adoration.
“Oh,” William said, eyes already wary. “What?”
I lay in bed, unable to get the noiseless suck of the pumps out of my thoughts, purged from my body. After a restless time I began to slide into my usual lunar doze; made a half-awake comparison between seeing William embrace Rho and feeling the pumps embrace me; thought of William’s reaction to Rho’s news; smiled a little; slept.
William had not been pleased. An unnecessary intrusion; yes there was excess cooling capacity; yes his arbeiters had the time to construct a secure facility for the heads in the Ice Pit; but he did not need the extra stress or any distractions now because he was this close to his goal.
Rho had worked on him with that mix of guileless persuasion and unwavering determination that characterized my sister. I have always equated Rho with the nature-force shakers of history; folks who in their irrational stubbornness shift the course of human rivers, whether for good or ill perhaps not even future generations could decide.
William had given in, of course. It was after all a small distraction, as he finally admitted; the raw materials would come out of the Sandoval BM contingency fund; he might even be able to squeeze in some mutually advantageous equipment denied him for purely fiscal reasons. “I’ll do it mostly for the sake of your honoured ancestors, of course,” William had said.
The heads came by shuttle from Port Yin five days later. Rho and I supervised the deposit at Pad Four, closest to the Ice Pit lift entrance. Packed in cubic steel boxes with their own refrigerators, the heads were slightly bulkier than Rho had estimated. Six cartloads and seven hours after landing, we had them in the equipment lift.
“I’ve had Nernst BM design an enclosure for William’s arbeiters to build,” Rho said. “These’ll keep for another week as is.” She patted the closest box, peering through her helmet with a wide grin.
“You could have chosen someone cheaper,” I groused. Nernst had gained unwarranted status in the past few years; I would have chosen the more reasonable, equally capable Twinning BM.
“Nothing but the best for our progenitors,” Rho said. “Christ, Mickey. Think about it.” She turned to the boxes mounted in a ring of two crowded stacks in the round lift, small refrigerators sticking from the inward-pointing sides of the boxes. We descended in the shaft. I could not see her face, but I heard the emotion in her voice. “Think of what it would mean to access them . . .”
I walked around and between the boxes. High-quality, old-fashioned bright steel, beautifully shaped and welded. “A lot of garrulous old-timers,” I said.
“Mickey.” Her chiding was mild. She knew I was thinking.
“Are they labelled?” I asked.
“That’s one problem,” Rho said. “We have a list of names, and all the containers are numbered; but StarTime says it can’t guarantee a one-to-one match. Records were apparently jumbled after the closing date.
“How could that happen?” I was shocked by the lack of professionalism more than by the obvious ramifications.
“I don’t know.”
“What if StarTime goofed in other ways, and they really are just cold meat?” I asked.
Rho shrugged with a casualness that made me cringe, as if, after all her efforts and the expenditure of hard-earned Sandoval capital, such a thing might not be disastrous. “Then we’re out of some money,” she said. “But I don’t think they made that big a goof.”
We slowly pressurized at the bottom of the shaft, Rho watching the containers for any sign of buckling. There was none; they had been expertly packed. “Nernst BM says it will take two days for William’s machines to make this enclosure. Can you supervise? William refuses . . .”
I pulled off my helmet, kicked some surface dust from my boots against a vacuum nozzle, and grinned miserably. “Sure. I have nothing better to do.”
Rho put her gloved hands on my shoulders. “Mickey. Brother.”
I looked at the boxes, intrigue growing alarmingly. What if they were alive in there, and could—in their own deceased way—tell us of their lives? That would be extraordinary; historic. Sandoval BM could gain an enormous amount of publicity, and that would reflect on our net worth in the Triple. “I’ll supervise,” I said. “But you get Nernst BM to send a human over here and not just an engineering arbeiter. It should be in their design contract; I want someone to personally inspect upon completion.”
“No fear,” Rho said. Gloves removed but skinsuit still on, she gave me a quick hug. “Let’s roll!” She guided the first cartload of stacked boxes through the gate into the Ice Pit storage warren, where they’d be kept for the time being.
The first sign of trouble came quickly. Janis Granger, assistant to Fiona Task-Felder, visited barely six hours after the unloading of the heads.
I had neglected to inform Rho about what had happened in lunar politics since her departure to Earth: Fiona Task-Felder’s election to president of the Multiple Council, something I would have said was impossible only a year before.
Janis Granger made a meeting request through the Sandoval BM secretary in Port Yin. I okayed the request, though I didn’t have the slightest idea what she wanted to talk about. I could hardly refuse to speak with a representative of the council president.
Her private bus landed at Pad Three six hours after I gave permission.
I received her in my spare but spacious formal office in the farm management warrens.
Granger was twenty-seven, black-haired with Eurasian features and Amerindian skin—all tailored. She wore trim flag-blue denims and a white ruffle-necked blouse, the ruffles projecting a changing pattern of delicate white-on-white geometries. Janis, like her boss and “sister” Fiona, was a member of Task-Felder BM.
Task-Felder had been founded on Earth as a lunar BM, an unorthodox procedure that had raised eyebrows fifty years before. Membership was allegedly limited to Logologists—nobody knew of any exceptions, at any rate—which made it the only lunar BM founded on religious principles. For these reasons, Task-Felder BM had been outside the loop and comparatively powerless in lunar politics, if such could be called politics: a weave of mutual advantage, politeness, small-community cooperation in the face of clear financial pressures.
The Task-Felder Logologists tended their businesses carefully, played their parts with scrupulous attention to detail and quality, and had carefully distributed favours and loans to other BMs and the council, working their way with incredible speed up the ladder of lunar acceptance, all at the same time as believing six impossible things before breakfast.
“I have the BM Project Status report from the council,” Janis Granger said, seating herself gracefully in a chair across from mine. I did not sit behind a desk; that was reserved for contract talks or financial dealings. “I wanted to discuss it with you, since you manage the major scientific project undertaken by Sandoval BM at this time.”
I had heard something about this council report; in its early drafts, it had seemed innocuous, another BM mutual-activity consent agreement.
“We’ve gotten a consensus of the founding BMs to agree to consult with each other on projects which may affect lunar standing in the Triple,” Granger said.
Why hadn’t she gone to the family syndics in Port Yin? Why come all this way to talk with me? “All right,” I said. “I assume Sandoval’s representative has looked over the agreement.”
“She has. She told me there might be a conflict with a current project, not your primary project. She advised me to send a representative of the president to talk with you; I decided this was important enough I would come myself.”
Granger had an intensity that reminded me of Rho. She did not take her eyes off mine. She did not smile. She leaned forward, elbows still on the chair rests, and said, “Rhosalind Sandoval has signed a contract to receive terrestrial corpsicles.”
“She has. She’s my direct sister, by the way.” Granger blinked. With any family-oriented BM member, such a comment would have elicited a polite “Oh, and how is your branch?” She neglected the pleasantry.
“Are you planning resuscitation?” she finally asked.
“No,” I said. Not as yet. “We’re speculating on future value.”
“If they’re not resuscitated, they have no future value.”
I disagreed with a mild shake of my head. “That’s our worry, nobody else’s.”
“The council has expressed concern that your precedent could lead to a flood of corpsicle dumping. The Moon can’t possibly receive a hundred thousand dead. It would be a major financial drain.”
