04. Birth of Flux and Anchor (15 page)

And, in fact, they did exactly that. The four-and-a-half-month gap. The pressures, the guilt, the doubts and fears of her work as the project moved from theory to reality.

And then, most horribly, they showed her the outcome. The ceremonial robe, the short sword, the cubicles, the alarm, the guns going off, the bullets tearing through her . . .

She believed that much, for such things were already in her mind even back at the time of her own personal experiment on herself. There wasn't a false note in it anywhere, partly because it was, in fact, all true. Or, rather, it almost rang true.

"If it happened as you showed me, and I was killed, why am I here and not with you? I have not a wound upon me."

And they showed her what happened—exactly. Showed Coydt with Marsha Johnson taking the ultimate gamble and wrenching her back from the dead. Showed the medic giving her the sedative ...

"Your soul was halfway to us, which is why we heard," her mother explained. "We knew that unless we could find a way, you would try once more."

It was pretty convincing stuff, she had to admit, and, worse, her own resurrection fascinated her in spite of her doubts and fears.
Literally back from the dead . . .

"Don't think for a moment that Coydt saved you out of altruism," her father commented. "She did it partly as an experiment, partly to save the terrible commotion your death would have caused at a critical time."

That
she could believe. The trouble was, she was believing all of this, and she wondered just how far that belief really extended.

"No matter what the motive, your action would have been the cause of a greater evil," her mother told her. "It is dishonorable to atone for future wrongs when one has made no attempt at halting them."

It was a strange sort of logic that hit home.

"What would you accomplish by suicide?" her father asked her. "An inconvenience to them, no more. You would not stop the idea, but you would leave the awesome power entirely in the hands of people like Coydt. There would be no one to spy upon her, to keep her and those like her in check, for no one else would know the full, awesome power of this new thing but them. They would be demons, loosed and unchecked among the innocent, isolated population of a new world. If such a force as this exists, which can be used for untold good or unspeakable evil, is it the moral, the ethical thing to abandon it entirely to evil without doing battle?"

"But—what could I do? They already have the upper hand, and unless I miss my guess, they have me too."

"They have your body, not your soul," her mother admonished her. "Only you can give them that, as you tried to do. Having brought you back, they cannot do away with you. If they can be convinced that you no longer will destroy yourself, they will restore you. Go with them to this new place. Show them what
good
this new thing can do. Be vigilant against its use for evil."

"But I can do little! I have spent half my life fighting such forces, and they always win! That is why I wished to leave this world. I am tired of fighting!"

The moment she said it she knew it was the truth and felt terribly ashamed.

"Then there is no honor left in you and no hope at all," her father said in deep disgust. "You have been given something no one else has: a chance to reconsider after the fact. If you stand tall, and fight evil, there is no shame, even if, as fate sometimes wills, the evil triumphs. The honor is clear and the soul shines with virtue. But to not fight, to surrender to the evil and slink away—that is a worse evil, and the stain and dishonor can never be wiped from the soul."

"Please—our time is nearly gone," her mother pleaded. "There is another thing to think upon. All your life you have pushed back your humanity. You have remained aloof, a machine, pushing all desire back where it creates permanent and painful wounds. You cannot possibly feel the souls of those who need you unless you release those feelings and find humanity there. The flesh and mind are of one accord. Neither can be whole while the other languishes."

Even after death her mother was still after her to get married! "Mother, I am fifty-one. It is too late for that now."

"Anyone whose machines can restore the dead can make themselves young and beautiful once again," her mother noted. "Why shrink from such a thing? It is no reason now, merely an excuse."

She had never said this to anyone before, not aloud, not even to herself. Now she felt compelled to say it. "My parents, you must now know my shame. I have never felt the need for men. I have never found them very appealing or attractive save on an intellectual level. When I was seventeen, and at university, I had an infatuation, an affair, with another girl. When I saw how I was being drawn to that life, I recoiled. I could not bring dishonor, misery, and shame to you. This is common, accepted, by others of our adopted culture, but I could not bring shame to you. I vowed then and there that I would never again partake of the flesh, for I could not allow it and contain my passions in secrecy." She was crying now, the first really good cry she'd had since childhood, and it felt very good. "Now you know my true shame."

Her parents' ghosts seemed more saddened than shocked at this revelation. Finally, her mother said, somewhat hesitantly, "We do not understand it, but we accept it, my darling."

"Perhaps your machine could fix that up too," her father grumbled.

The fact was, it probably could—in fact, while open homosexuality was a norm these days and hardly a cause for more than a few eyebrows being raised in the technocrat's culture in which she lived her life, her neurochemical nature of sexual preference was well enough known that it could be altered with existing noncomputer treatments. She simply didn't want to change it. She never had wanted to change it.

"We love you no matter what," her mother assured her. "We always will. Neither death nor the passage of time can change that. Stop hiding now from yourself and from the world. Be young again and find your inner peace. You can make this new world a place where happiness reigns and the evils of the old world are left behind. Do not abandon it. And to successfully lead the fight, you must be as honest with others as you are with yourself. Remember us, and this, and know that our love is with you always."

The figures, and the voices, were fading now, and although she cried out to them through her sobs and tears, they were gone. She cried thirty-seven years worth of tears, then slipped off to a deep, peaceful sleep, the best, in fact, that she'd had in her memory.

The psychiatrists of Site K were quite pleased with themselves. The computer had merely confirmed their diagnosis, and helped supply the mechanics of the cure. The tact was perfect, and would restore Suzy Watanabe to full participation, they felt sure. The only really serious worry they had was whether they could make the release and restoration convincingly difficult for her to achieve.

They brought her around slowly, acting as if nothing had happened and explaining their new activity by her emotional release. They freely admitted to her that they had been using mild hypnotics to find a starting point, but when she suspiciously suggested that they had induced the ghosts, they turned it back on her, noting that they couldn't do anything that effective with the kind of drugs they used and suggesting that in fact she herself had created the ghosts out of her own subconscious as a way to break through to sanity.

Watanabe knew enough biochemistry to accept what they were saying, and she'd faced enough psychiatrists on and off that they were totally in character and totally convincing. In fact, she would gladly have accepted their theory that the ghosts were the product of her own mind except that logic prevented it. She was not the Watanabe who'd been killed; she was the Watanabe of several months earlier. How could her subconscious have known the most intimate details of her death and resurrection?

There were only three possibilities that explained it all, she knew. Either they induced it, she induced it, or it really happened, no matter how incredible that was. She could not believe that they induced it, not only for the surface reasons but also for the little things. Coydt's people would have brought back a friend, not an enemy. The ghosts would have forgiven her, not reacted as in fact her father and mother would have. Her views had not changed. They were going to turn her loose still an enemy, and a powerful and knowledgeable one at that. Even giving them a degree of subtlety she didn't believe they had, she couldn't believe they would create a situation where she'd decide to go to New Eden and keep her division. She was the only one with nothing to lose willing to stand in their way there. Remaining back here, Coydt would have her godship all to herself.

And there was the final thing that had bothered all of them since it was discovered. Given the same mass, and the same encoding, it should be possible for the computers to create duplicates of people. There was no scientific reason against it—but you couldn't. Or dogs, or cats, or even fish. Plant life, yes, and much microbial life as well, but not anything even remotely complex in the animal kingdom. It had dashed their hopes to use many of the animals—cows, horses, chickens, and the like—as templates, sending perhaps no more than a dozen each up the line and creating extras there. A little genetic engineering would prevent the ills of too close inbreeding when they had a larger population. Instead, they had to ship as many animals up as they would require in the early days.

Why not? Because they had souls, as the religious leaders suggested? Because, for some reason, those souls could not be duplicated, only transformed? And if souls existed, then where might they go after death?

With that came the acceptance of the visitation, and the acceptance, too, of a somewhat Buddhist outlook on the cosmos. Humanity had always survived its revolutions, after all. It had survived its own instinct for mass collective suicide. Might there not be some divine powers looking over some great plan out there, somewhere?

And, with that, her rehabilitation became in fact very swift, although they did not dare from this point to use their computer or other sophisticated methods on the scientist. It was a twin irony: Watanabe desperately wanting to get back to work as soon as possible, and the psychiatrists not wanting to probe
too
deeply lest they find some reason not to let her do just that.

To gain some trust, they shipped her back to Titan and put her under the care of the company's regular psychiatric staff. That staff itself was more cautious, but amazed at the change in the scientist, who'd lost none of her fire and brilliance but seemed to be a whole new person.

This was, in fact, the way Watanabe saw herself. Etsuko Watanabe was dead; she'd died in a fit of madness a few months before. The new Suzy was comfortable with herself, relaxed, and confident if no less fearless. The past, both civilization's in general and her own, was now a teacher, not a jailer. She took an interest in her appearance, and flirted openly with a couple of women she found attractive. To her doctor's disapproval, she started smoking cigars again, but she no longer worried about them. She no longer had any reservations about curing herself of whatever anything might give her, using the programs. Van Haas was impatient for her release now that she was committed to the project, and they allowed her access to her computers and staff on a carefully monitored basis. She could eventually have turned herself into a sexy teenage bombshell, but she rejected that out of hand. She was a director, an example, and she had to be the boss. Nobody took orders from a teenage bombshell. Just herself, in prime health and condition, at about age thirty to thirty-five was what she had in mind.

Her chief assistant, Michiko Iki, had taken over direct supervision and had done a superior job—perhaps, Suzy thought, a better job than she herself could have done. Half of her people were already there, handling the other end, and a fair percentage were supervising the transport on this end. Right now her section was handling the least glamorous and most routine part of the job; after the bulk of supplies and personnel had been sent, it would again become a backwater department while she concentrated on energy services. Then she could get back to the theoretical work and experimentation that interested her the most—and which was, after all, the product for which Westrex was paying.

In spite of her pressing and her protests, though, she could find no trace of Marsha Johnson. She realized that the assistant must have been put on ice along with others involved in the incident, but before Suzy's full reinstatement she didn't have the clout to find out more, and after it she was far too snowed under with work to press it, and she would have had to press it with Coydt personally, and in spite of the fact that the brigadier had saved her, she had no change of heart regarding the military in general or Security in particular, and her leverage there was as a result nonexistent.

Toby Haller had felt keen excitement at the order to "go" on the project, as he'd had tremendous praise for his work all the way up to the Director Korda himself, yet he'd been there, day after day, week after week, as others in his section were sent forward to their posts and given their assignments while he remained on Titan, having less to do. It was not merely that he was eager to go; the early birds were getting hands-on experience right now on installed 7800's, and they would have a jump on him for the future—and more influence on overall design as a consequence.

Even his old friends were leaving. Marsha Johnson was gone, although there were rumors of something unsavory in that, and so were Caesar Fanfani and Mark Weinbaum. Lisa Wu was still around someplace, but her job was removing her from any social breaks with what was left of the old gang. It was almost like graduation, where friendships built up over the years are suddenly dissolved in nothing more than vague promises to have a reunion someday, promises seldom fulfilled.

Sari Kittachorn. however, was using her friendship with him and his lack of meaningful work to her advantage. The early planners of Westrex's scheme for nontechnical colonization, in itself a social experiment, were here now, and while they understood the broad basics of the project, they were hazy on specifics. Haller was asked to brief some of them on his section, since he would be working closest with them.