Netlink (13 page)

“I need you to grow something special from the Naga,” he told the DalRiss. “Here’s how it will work.…”

Mind, Dev had learned, was best defined as a particular patterning of information; his survival at the Second Battle of Herakles, as mind alone quite distinct from his biological body, proved as much. In a sense, the »
DEVCAMERON
« now inhabiting the DalRiss exploration fleet was a
copy
of the original Dev Cameron’s mind, an original that had died when the body creating it had vaporized.

Or…
was
it? When his body had been destroyed aboard the DalRiss city ship
Daghar,
his awareness had been elsewhere, not within the ship that had been destroyed. Certainly, he didn’t feel like a copy. His memories were intact, up to the moment of the explosion, and afterward. Since the memories themselves were a part of that information pattern, however, he couldn’t put a lot of store in their purely subjective revelations, but his impression was that his mind had been at another node, aboard another DalRiss ship, at the instant
Daghar
had vanished in a nuclear fireball.

It was not something he cared to examine too closely. He still didn’t know whether he should think of himself as dead… or merely mislaid.

Time passed, and the DalRiss fleet continued its orbit about the Device, watching. Three times more as they waited, lone alien ships rose impossibly from the corona of a dwarf star and vanished into emptiness and twisted space without acknowledging the fleet’s presence.

Throughout that time, meanwhile, the object »
DEVCAMERON
« had requested continued to grow, deep within the interior of one of the DalRiss cityships. As for
»DEVCAMERON
,
«
his attention was elsewhere.

He was linked once more with the Naga, busily reproducing himself.

Chapter 9

A computer program, any program, can be duplicated. Sophisticated programs can duplicate themselves as they run and can even improve on the original design. Given an advanced enough biotechnology, there seems to be no reason why the human mind cannot be duplicated the same way and transferred as a living program to another, possibly artificial body.

There is considerable question as to why anyone would want to create a duplicate of his or her own mind. The most frequently advanced suggestion is that personalities could be downloaded and stored in this way from time to time against the possibility of death, as a kind of emergency backup life.

Of course, this would do the original personality no good; from his point of view, he would still be quitedead, while his duplicate lived on, complete with his memories of everything that had happened up to the moment of replication.

—
Never-Never Mind

D
R
. A
NN
C
ECIL
M
ULGRAVE

C
.
E
. 2556

What »
DEVCAMERON
« was attempting to do was similar in principle to what had happened to him by accident twenty-five years before, at Second Herakles. His mind—soul, ego, self-awareness, whatever he chose to call it—existed as patterns of information within the Naga fragment nodes aboard one or another of the DalRiss city ships. The Naga that had patterned his mind in the first place could make a second pattern, a copy that could be downloaded into the Naga-fragment probe that was being grown inside one of the largest of the DalRiss ships.

“Okay,” he thought to the Naga. “Let’s do it.”

He could feel the process, though the sensation was literally indescribable, a kind of stretching or thinning of self and self-awareness and a panicky moment when it felt like he was going to lose his grip on Self entirely. For a time, »
DEVCAMERON
« hovered on the edge of consciousness, clinging to… what? To the mental image he held of himself, he supposed, as distinct from the strange and alien flows of consciousness that surrounded him.

It was curious. When he was linked aboard one of the living ships—as opposed to downloaded into an artificial DalRiss body—there was a definite sense of space and freedom, a vast expanse within which he could move and imagine almost without limit. That, he realized with a shock, had just ended. He felt…
cramped,
almost as though he’d just been downloaded into a DalRiss body again, and in another moment he saw why.

A whale giving birth to a minnow, the DalRiss cityship
Sirghal
released the probe, a forty-meter, trilaterally symmetrical wedge of absolute blackness.

Shock gave way to anger. “Wait!” »
DEVCAMERON
« called out over the radio link with
Sirghal.
“You downloaded the wrong one!”

“No,” the voice of »
DEVCAMERON
« replied in his mind. “Everything is exactly as it should be.”

The sound of his own mental voice almost panicked him; then, as full realization swept through him, »
DEVCAMERON
«, the
second
»
DEVCAMERON
«, saw what had happened and was forced to accept it.

Planetary Nagas frequently budded off small pieces of themselves, creating a
self
as opposed to the far vaster and more powerful
Self.
Riding in nanotechnically grown bodies inherited from civilizations destroyed in ages long past, those fragments could sally forth into the great gulf at the center of the universe to explore. When a
self
returned, it melded with the parent once more, and the knowledge it had gained while separate pooled with the ocean of knowledge that had remained behind. »
DEVCAMERON
« had just done something similar, duplicating his mind and downloading it into the Naga probe ship. Unfortunately, his memories were a part of that mind; from his point of view, he’d somehow just mysteriously changed places with the duplicate.

His new body had been grown about a core of hydrogen and was powered by an ingenious device grown by the DalRiss in mimicry of human quantum power taps. Using a pair of tuned microsingularities to draw power from the quantum energy fluctuations of hard vacuum, the QPT produced energy enough to turn hydrogen into white-hot plasma constrained by magnetic fields within the Naga fragment’s body. Released astern, a thin, hard, stream of matter expelled at relativistic velocities, the plasma had sufficient thrust to drive the Naga wedge forward, a living rocket.

»
DEVCAMERON
« experimented with his new body for a moment. Damn it, it
felt
like just a few hours ago he’d been safely aboard the
Sirghal,
thinking about how he could duplicate himself, providing an expendable human mind for the passage through the Device.

The coldness of his own rationalizations surprised him. He’d been well aware that his duplicate would be expendable, something that could be sent through the Device to the other side with only a faint hope of recovering it later. Hell, he’d been thinking at the time that he could create tens, even hundreds of duplicates and keep sending them through until one, at last, was able to get back with some useful information.

Dev Cameron—and for the first time in many years it was
not
»
DEVCAMERON
« who was examining the question—saw himself, saw what he had become, in a new light. Being the expendable duplicate could change your entire perspective.

Hell,
he thought a bit wildly.
It could ruin your whole day.

“Don’t think of it that way,” »
DEVCAMERON
« told him from the fastness of
Sirghal,
looming above and around him now like a vast, black mountain.

“That’s easy for you to say,” he told himself. “You’ll be nice and safe here while I’m dropping down the throat of an alien time-and-space machine.”

“You know you want to find out what’s on the other side.”

“How do you know that?”

“You and I didn’t part that long ago.
I
want to know what’s over there. Don’t you?”

He thought about it, but only for a few seconds. “Yes. Yes, I do.”

“I envy you.”

“You might not if you were sitting where I am.”

But the bitterness was gone. The initial shock, anger, even disappointment, he was realizing, had been caused mostly by the surprising shift in his point of view, so firmly had he expected to be back aboard the
Sirghal,
launching his second self aboard the probe. Now that
he
was the probe, however, he found he was looking forward to this. His exploration would be dangerous… but the greatest danger was that he might emerge in an area of space-time far removed from another Device. If that happened, he would be marooned; his Naga probe had no starfaring capabilities of its own. Even his reserves of reaction mass, the hydrogen used to propel him forward and adjust his pitch, yaw, and roll, were sharply limited. If he couldn’t just turn around on the other side and come back, he would die… eventually.

Eventually might be a long time, too. Once powered up, his quantum power tap was self-sustaining and would provide energy indefinitely. He no longer depended on such bulky inconveniences as food or air. He could live for quite a long time on the other side, even after his hydrogen ran out. He wondered what the limiting factor was. Proton decay? The disintegration of his Naga’s cellular structure?

His destination was sure to be a place of wonder. He would not be bored.

Maybe that’s what being an optimist is,
Dev thought wryly.
You find the best way to look at something no matter which side of the argument you’re on.

He found he enjoyed the irony of arguing with himself. Once the initial surprise had worn off, it was much like downloading a jig program—software that allowed you to have simulated discussions with imaginary fragments of your own personality. This was the first time, however, that Dev Cameron had ever experienced both sides of the conversation as two separate people, each a coherent, complex, and integrated personality in its own right.

As he began accelerating toward the end of the Device, outlined still in blue light cast by the Naga across his perceptions, he realized that he did want to go. For days, now, he’d been hungering for information on who had built this structure, and why, and what they were doing in a dead star system. Soon he would know.

He refused to say good-bye to himself. »
DEVCAMERON
« was a bastard, and he was still angry at his other self’s cavalier attitude toward another intelligent being.

Thinking about that drew him up short. The attitude he was seeing—experiencing, rather—was identical to that of the DalRiss. For humans, perhaps the most alien feature of the DalRiss was the—literally—inhuman way they used other life forms… their Achievers, for instance, tailor-made to open paths for the DalRiss ships across light years, yet doomed to die upon accomplishing that feat. The DalRiss used life forms, both those they had created and those they merely encountered, the way humans used metal ores or stones or the raw materials converted by nanofabrication technology.

Was he losing his humanity? Had he been apart from other humans for too long?

Was there anything he could do about either?

The path of the alien ship had already been downloaded into the Naga probe’s navigational storage. Firing short, precisely timed bursts from his main thruster, Dev descended toward the Device. He took a last look behind at the swiftly receding masses of the
Sirghal
and dozens of other DalRiss ships. The white dwarfs wheeled across the sky, trailing spiraling rivers of red fire. He was reminded of zero-G rhythmic gymnasts, swirling crimson streamers as they leaped and tumbled; the memory of Earth and New America was painfully sharp, and he turned his full attention to the growing silver needle ahead.

Time passed. He had to be careful in applying thrust, for the star-hot plasma from his main drive could have fried DalRiss ships with a careless flick of his tail. At last, though, he was on the proper track and accelerating inward, matching exactly the alien vessel’s speed of approach. So little was known about the technology they were borrowing here; speed might well be as important as path in determining where—and when—he emerged.

So, too, might mass, for that matter. The probe possessed only a tiny fraction of the mass of those alien ships.

Well, it was too late to do anything about that now. The other Dev Cameron would correct it next time around, if he failed to report back.

It occurred to him that he needed a name for his living vessel, something more than “the Naga probe.”

“Katya,”
he said.

“Sorry, Brother,” his other self said. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

“I’ve named the probe
‘Katya,’ ”
he said.

There was a long silence from the DalRiss fleet. “It seems appropriate.”

“Listen. If you make it back and I—” He stopped, flustered. Here he was, giving himself a message. “Staticjack,” he said. “I think I’m schizzing out.”

“Hold it together a little longer, Brother. You’re almost there. We read you nearing the horizon where the aliens vanished.”

The Device swelled in front of him, an immense wall of mercury-bright silver rotating so quickly that there were no details of surface at all. All of his Perceivers’ eyes were trained on the thing; strain as he might, Dev could see only silver and a wavering of vision at the edge of the ultraviolet that might be some sort of force field or even a twisting of light through strangely bent space.

Lights appeared, ahead and to either side… an artificial effect, he decided, designed to serve as a guide for inbound ships. The lights receded into the distance, outlining a tunnel that appeared to go on and on forever into the depths of the Device.

Then he realized that he could no longer see the Device at all. It had vanished as light flared around him, the beacons shifting into streaks of rainbow glory.