The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 17

“We’ve decided,” said Hemerthe as she came through his door.

Ruiz Aw sat in a chair, where he had been waiting for hours. “And?”

“We’ll help.” Hemerthe perched on the arm of Ruiz’s chair. “What other choice do we have? If we do nothing, would we survive? Probably not. At least you’ve given us the opportunity to do something. Even if it’s the wrong thing, at least we’ll have a comforting illusion. Right? Besides, if you should actually reach the enclave and broadcast the location of the Machine, no one will come looking for it in Deepheart.”

“I guess not,” said Ruiz. “What now?”

“We’re trying to contract for a sub, first. Meanwhile, would you like to meet your clone?”

Ruiz frowned. Perhaps at another moment, in another place, he’d be curious. All he felt now was a vague weary dread. “All right,” he said finally.

She got up. “Then let’s go. To his suite, if you don’t mind. We’ve told your clone nothing except that you’re here and you want his help. You’ll have to convince him to help you; we can’t compel him. So go easy on yourself.” She grinned, as though she had uttered a great witticism.

Hemerthe stood aside and Ruiz went through the door. His clone was sitting before a datascreen; he rose and turned to face Ruiz. Ruiz looked at that dark uninformative face and felt no sensation of recognition. The face seemed to belong to a person to whom self-doubt was unknown, for whom failure was unthinkable. Did I ever look so blindly confident? Ruiz shook his head in wonderment.

Hemerthe glanced from Ruiz to his clone. “Well,” said Hemerthe. “I suppose introductions aren’t in order, are they?” She laughed mischievously. “I’ll leave you to get acquainted.”

When she was gone, the clone nodded carefully. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello,” answered Ruiz.

“Sit down,” said the clone.

They sat and observed each other in silence. After a while, the discomfort of seeing a stranger with his face began to fade a little.

“This is very odd, isn’t it?” Ruiz said.

His clone nodded somberly. His face was unreadable, which struck Ruiz as terribly wrong. This was a mind identical to his own; how could it be so inaccessible? Had he really changed that much in the weeks just past?

Finally Ruiz spoke again. “What shall we call each other?”

The clone shrugged. “You choose; you’re the senior entity, according to the Fuckheads.”

Ruiz smiled. “What if I call you Junior, then?”

The clone smiled back. “Shall I call you Dad?”

Ruiz laughed. For some reason he had begun to feel a bit better. “If you like.”

“So, Dad,” said Junior, “what’s this job you want us to do?”

“It won’t be an easy job,” Ruiz said. “I’ve promised to destroy a machine.” He looked at his clone. How much of the deathnet remained in that duplicated mind? What could he do but ask? “Does the League deathnet still function?”

The clone shook his head a bit doubtfully. “The Deepheart Gench claims not enough remains to kill me. We’re not completely identical — something is always lost or skewed in translation, and my edges are not as sharp as yours were. My lights not so bright, my darks not so deep.” He gave Ruiz a critical glance. “Though I have to say that you seem quite different from the self you gave me. You look a little worn. Somewhat broken. Your body is damaged, but that’s the least of it, isn’t it? It worries me. I can’t help wondering what could do that to me.”

“We’ve been wounded before, body and soul,” said Ruiz a bit defensively.

“Of course, of course… perhaps it’s just the perspective,” said Junior.

“Perhaps,” said Ruiz. “Anyway, this is the story.”

He told the clone a greatly condensed version of the events of the past weeks, since their memories had diverged. He saw no point in mentioning his involvement with Publius — and the things Publius and Ruiz Aw had done to each other. He said little about his time on Roderigo. He said less about his traveling companions. He devoted considerable description to his visit to the Compendium, though he had not meant to — but he mentioned Leel only in passing.

When he finally told the clone what Somnire had told him, the clone shuddered and his eyes rolled back into his head for a moment. His color faded to a dirty gray and he almost fell out of the chair.

Ruiz caught him and eased him back into a more comfortable position. He felt a strange reluctance to touch his own cloned flesh, so he propped his other self upright in the chair and stepped back.

After a bit, the clone drew a ragged breath and seemed to regain his composure.

“A little of the net remained?” Ruiz said.

“Apparently.” The clone rubbed his neck.

“You’re all right?”

“I suppose. The weight of it is gone.” Junior’s mouth twitched into a small smile. “I’d almost forgotten how heavy it was.”

“Good,” said Ruiz. “It almost killed me, several times.”

Junior gave him a somewhat cool stare. “You risked my life without a lot of soul-searching, didn’t you?”

“Perhaps,” Ruiz said impatiently. “But this is important. If we don’t destroy the Orpheus Machine, humankind will become a slave race.”

“Yes, yes,” said his younger self wearily. “I grant you it’s important. Why must we be the ones to do something about it? Why not return to the pangalac worlds and organize a well-equipped force?”

“There’s no time,” said Ruiz. “By the time we could get home and find help, Roderigo might have the Machine. Or Delt, or one of the pirate Lords. Besides, who could we trust with such a secret? Who could resist the temptation to seize the machine and use it to make the universe a sweeter place?”

The clone looked at him with a look of resignation. “Ah. I see. We two, who know nothing of constructive solutions, are perfect for the job. All we know about is destruction — the only safe alternative.”

“Do you think I’m wrong?” asked Ruiz.

“No, no.”

“Will you help me?”

“If your plan seems feasible,” said the clone. “You have to trust your own judgment, I guess — especially if you’re twice the man you once were.” He chuckled.

Ruiz felt no great sense of achievement. Rather he felt a more intimate premonition of disaster — the time when he must go down into the Gencha enclave was now a little closer.

For a while it seemed there was nothing left to say, but Ruiz felt an unexpected curiosity. “Tell me,” he said. “How did it feel to become a person so suddenly?”

“You haven’t thought this through,” said Junior. “It didn’t feel any particular way at all. The Joined chopped my memories at the point of our arrival in Deepheart. We took a nap and then I woke up and Hemerthe was there. She — well, she was a man at the time — explained that I was Ruiz Aw the Second. And that you had sold me to Deepheart in return for their help.”

The dark face tightened and the black eyes grew even more unreadable. “So I was henceforth a Fuckhead, like it or not. It was something of a shock, I’ll admit.”

“I guess so,” said Ruiz faintly. When he had departed Deepheart, he had never imagined he would one day have to face the result of his bargain. He wondered if he would have made the same decision, had he known how things would eventuate.

Junior showed him a quick humorless smile. “Well. Don’t waste any energy sympathizing with me. From what you say… and what you don’t say, your escape has been more of a trial to you than my time in Deepheart has been to me. After all, I’ve only been out of the replicant tank for a few days, which is why I’m still in this body. The nights have been… interesting. During the day I train defense teams, so I’m still working at our old trade, in a way.” He laughed a bit sourly and looked away. “And if Deepheart survives SeaStack’s destruction, Hemerthe has promised to teach me how to make porcelains.”

Ruiz could find no appropriate response. The clone’s face was desolate.

Finally he said in a hesitant voice, “And Nisa? What of her? Have you seen her clone?”

Junior’s manner became hard and distant. “No. I try not to think of her. Tell me your plan for penetrating the enclave.”

Ruiz explained his less than exhaustive plan.

When he was finished, the clone nodded his elegant predatory head in understanding. “Holes exist into which we will likely disappear. But as you say, we have little time. How long, I wonder, will it take for Deepheart to charter a sub? If it takes a few days, we can work on your plan, grind a few of the burrs off of it.”

“All right,” said Ruiz.

The clone pondered. “We need intelligence. Deepheart has a fairly passive security apparatus — though it’s good for what it is. Get them to comb the datastream for us. I don’t think they’ll find out much — the Lords are suffering from extreme paranoia at the moment, and all their sensitive communications are going by courier.”

“Good idea, anyway. How do we learn more?”

“There’s no one here who could go out into SeaStack and survive long enough to bring back any useful news.” The clone smiled a bit sadly.

“One of us will have to go, then,” said Ruiz, full of sudden apprehension.

Junior shrugged. “I suppose. How else are we to make our plans? For all we know, Yubere’s fortress has fallen to one of the Lords, and who knows how far down the stack they’ve penetrated? If the Machine has already been captured and adequately fortified… then there’s no hope.”

“You’re right.”

They looked at each other in sober assessment.

“Do you want to go?” asked Ruiz.

“Yes, actually I would like to go. However, my personality isn’t yet perfectly integrated with my new body — or anyway that’s what Deepheart’s technicians tell me. There’s a lag in perception and reaction. It’s a terrible feeling, and sometimes embarrassing. A few of the men and women I’m training can best me at hand-to-hand; any competent slayer would chop me up.

This was an unpleasant revelation. Ruiz frowned. “How long before you recover your skills?”

“Not long. A day or two, I’m told. I’m much better than I was, and it’s an accelerating process. When I first came from the tank, I could barely walk.”

“Ah,” said Ruiz. He felt a dull dread. He had hoped to rest in Deepheart for a few days. Clearly he hadn’t been thinking.

Already the clone had been useful.

Ruiz was about to get up when the clone spoke again. “I can’t help this, I must ask you. What has become of Nisa? Your Nisa, the original?”

For the first time, Ruiz could read the clone’s eyes; he felt the same bittersweet pain.

“I lost her,” he said. “She was with me, she helped me escape the Roderigans. I’d have died on Dorn, without her help. But — and this will strain your credulity — she was taken by Corean. Corean.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. Corean must be mad, to have followed us to Roderigo. But she has Nisa, and Dolmaero. We didn’t know it until we were almost in Corean’s hands.”

The clone stared at the floor. “This is difficult to grasp. So much must have happened to you since our lives divided.”

“I suppose so.”

“Where do you think she is now?”

Ruiz saw again her picture in the datastream. “She’s here. In SeaStack. She’s for sale. She was listed in today’s market offerings.”

The clone leaned toward him, eyes glowing. “Who owns her?”

“There was a datastream code… but my screen is locked to input only, so I couldn’t look for her.”

The clone settled back. “Mine too. They say they’ll trust me one day.” A small sad smile twitched up the corners of his mouth. “Well, you probably think the same thing I do: that she’s bait. Corean must be fishing for you.”

“No doubt,” said Ruiz.

“So you’ll ignore the whole thing?”

Ruiz looked at his younger self, frowning. “Of course.”

When the clone started to laugh, Ruiz held his frown for a heartbeat. Then the laughter began to bubble out of him, escaping from some secret place, where it had hidden for most of the time since he had arrived on Sook.

If he laughed a little bitterly, that was not so surprising.

“Another night to rest,” Ruiz told Hemerthe, as she walked him back to his room.

“That seems reasonable,” she said. “And then?”

“Weren’t you listening?” he asked.

She had the grace to look uncomfortable. “Well, yes. But I’m a polite person. I like to observe the civilities.”

“Oh?”

“Yes!” She saw that he was smiling. “Well, I do. We all do.”

“I know,” he said. “You were the only people in Sea-Stack that I thought I could trust with my story. Maybe there are other decent folk in the city, but I wouldn’t know where to look for them.”

“Nor do we, which is why we’re so untrusting,” she said, wryly. “So. What did you think of Ruiz Aw, the famous slayer?”

“He isn’t me,” Ruiz answered instantly. “I find it hard to believe that we were ever alike. He’s so young. I was never so young.”

“You think so? He’s you—as you were when you came to us. Or as close as makes no difference.”

Ruiz shrugged. “Maybe… but I don’t recognize him.”

They reached his door. It slid aside, and Ruiz turned to Hemerthe. “Tell me something,” he said.

“Almost anything,” she answered.

“My clone… is he happy? Is he adapting to life among the Fuckheads? Will he want to stay, if we survive?”

She dropped her eyes. “That’s hard to say. We have anxieties about him. He still lives in his birth flesh, of course, so we don’t know what will happen when he cuts those bonds and flies free. Perhaps he’ll learn to appreciate our life, then. Of course, if he doesn’t survive… or runs away, one of his clones will eventually adapt. We keep trying.”

Ruiz frowned. Somehow he hadn’t pictured his clone’s future in quite those terms. Apparently Deepheart would contain a Ruiz Aw for as long as it existed.

“And Nisa? Is she happy here?” He had asked almost casually, but now he found that he wanted to know the answer, very badly.

Hemerthe seemed indecisive; she had the look of one who contemplates a kindly lie. When she answered, he wasn’t sure if she had succumbed to that impulse. “Again, hard to say,” she said. “You may ask her, if you wish.”

“No,” he said quickly. “There’s no point to that.”

In truth, he had no desire to see Nisa looking out at him from a stranger’s eyes. No desire at all.

He stepped inside his room. She laid a hand on his sleeve. “I’ll stay with you, if you wish.”

He shook his head. “Thank you, but—”

She smiled brightly. “Would you prefer another? I can advise you.”

“No, no. I know you mean well. But the one I want doesn’t live in Deepheart.”

“You’re making a tragedy for yourself, Ruiz Aw.” She seemed not at all angry, only a little sad. “Love exists only where you find it. Nowhere else.”

“I’m sure you’re right,” he said heavily, and started to close his door.

“Wait,” she said. “We’ve decided to give you some information; we judge its effect will be motivational. The address where your darling may be found — it originates from the Yubere stronghold.”

Ruiz’s head jerked up. After a pulse of disbelief had passed through him and then evaporated, he felt a strong sudden conviction: that the story of Ruiz Aw and Nisa remained unfinished.

“Thank you,” he said, and went inside.

When he lay down, he fell into the soundest sleep he had known for weeks. If he dreamed, his dreams were the sort that ease troubled hearts.

In the morning he called Hemerthe.

When Hemerthe appeared in the datascreen, Ruiz discovered that she had changed bodies. Hemerthe was now a short broad man with large square teeth, a swarthy face, and ruby earclips. He wore his gray hair in alternating spikes and sausage curls. It was a remarkably unflattering style; it made Hemerthe’s head resemble some sort of odd sea creature.

“What do you think of my new body?” asked Hemerthe in a deep gravelly voice.

No diplomatic remark came to mind, so Ruiz confined his response to a careful nod.

Apparently his amusement was visible, because Hemerthe scowled. “Life goes on, slayer. We have a saying in Deepheart: ‘The body is a play; the mind an actor.’ A great actor can bring beauty to the most ordinary drama.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Ruiz said in placating tones. It occurred to him that as much as the denizens of Deepheart took pride in the mastery with which they moved from body to body, the bodies still exerted some influence on the minds that rode them. This Hemerthe seemed noticeably more aggressive than the Hemerthe who had inhabited the slender woman.

Hemerthe shrugged his heavy shoulders. “It is. And now, what do you need?”

“A selection of paints — suitable for redecorating my Deltan armor.”

“We can find you better armor.”

“I’m sure — but I plan to pose as a deserter from Castle Delt.”

“Oh,” said Hemerthe.

Hemerthe brought him the paints a few minutes later. He seemed to have gotten over his pique. “These should bond to the monomol without difficulty. I have brushes, aerosols, a color wand. Which will you use?”

Ruiz picked up a brush. “This will do.”

“May I watch?” asked Hemerthe.

“Why not?” Ruiz said.

Ruiz claimed no great skill as an artist, but in this case a crude design would suffice. He’d already laid out the dull black-and-green-striped armor on the floor, latched together into a hollow man.

He cast his thoughts back over the years and remembered a world he’d fought on, long ago. The slaveholders there had invested all their wealth in the latest killmechs, rather than in living soldiers. Ruiz’s emancipators had defeated them easily, by retreating into muddy swamps where humans could survive and machines could not. Still, the first time Ruiz had seen one charging toward him across a green swale, he had been frightened into witlessness. At least part of that terror had arisen from the hideous armored Death painted on the huge chassis.

He picked up the helmet and turned it in his hands. He dipped his brush into a container of white paint and began.

An hour later he was done, and the armor carried, superimposed on its smoothly functional monomol panels, a crude depiction of ancient plate armor, the sort of cumbersome armor worn only on worlds so primitive that they had yet to reinvent gunpowder — armor encrusted with useless spikes and fins and knobs. Jagged holes gaped here and there, through which imaginary bone showed: a shattered femur, a few ribs, the articulation of a shoulder. On the helmet Ruiz had painted tattered plumes above a grinning skull.

“Not bad,” said Hemerthe judiciously, turning his head this way and that as he examined Ruiz’s efforts. “Vigorous and direct. I’ll abandon my plans to teach you to make porcelains. You show promise as a painter.”

Ruiz laughed. “Your way of life breeds tolerance in abundance.”

“True. Well, what else do you need?”

“Perhaps a skinmask. If the Lords are after me, I’d better not look like myself.”

“Who would you like to resemble?”

“I don’t know. What about you?”

Hemerthe laughed. “You’re a diplomat. By the way, we’ve chosen a person to sit at the other end of your camera link. We asked for volunteers. Only one seemed suitable. You know her.”

“Oh, no.”

“You object?”

Ruiz shook his head, finally. “No,” he said. As he spoke, he felt both the foolishness and the inevitability of the decision.

Before he left, Hemerthe seemed to struggle with himself before deciding to speak. “I must ask you, Ruiz. Why did you not arrange for your clone to have the advantage of a camera and an observer?”

Ruiz felt an irresistible impulse toward honesty, which for some reason he was unable to resist. “I’m not sure… unless it’s that I cannot entirely trust him, and so I must have an edge. ‘An edge’—the phrase sums up my philosophy, doesn’t it? You may so equip him, if you think my judgment is flawed.”

But Hemerthe only shook his head, a gesture Ruiz was unable to identify. Was it disapproval or pity? Or both?

“You are in charge,” said Hemerthe. “However, I must report a disappointment: the armor you requested for your descent into the Gencha enclave is unavailable. Armor equipped with the sort of atmosphere regeneration tech you described is apparently not used on Sook. The best we could do was to install carbon scrubbers and an external oxygen tank into a conventional urban warfare suit. You’ll have about three hours of clean air. Will that do?”

“I suppose it must,” said Ruiz.

Before he left Deepheart, Ruiz Aw conferred again with his clone.

“What information will you seek, and how will you go about it?” asked Junior in pedantic tones.

“What do you advise?” asked Ruiz, strangely amused.

Junior smiled ruefully. “Have you noticed? This is like an interior monologue in a bad holodrama. Remember when we fought the campaign on Gwalior? The clone squads they sent against us in the high desert that winter? All the jokes we made about them?” He laughed. “Is this justice?”

“Probably,” said Ruiz. “I’m beginning to believe that — if you live long enough — the universe will get even with you for every deed you do. That’s a frightening thought, isn’t it? For us, especially. Anyway… I’m going back to the Spindinny.”

Junior frowned. “I wonder if it still exists. Do you suppose there are any uncontracted fighters left in SeaStack?”

“I don’t know…. Do you have a better approach?”

“Hmm…” Junior rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “It’s difficult even to attempt the exercise. I can’t help thinking that if I could come up with anything, you would have done so already. It takes the edge off my speculations…. Well, if you find anyone alive in the Spindinny, I guess you plan to ask about work, and where the loot lies thickest.”

“Yes. Maybe I can find out if Yubere’s stronghold still holds out, and if the fighting has descended to the level of our ingress. Without being too conspicuous in my curiosity.”

“And if there’s no one there?”

“I have a few other avenues I can explore.” Ruiz thought of all the recent associates his clone didn’t know about: Publius the monster maker and would-be Emperor of Everything, the slavekeeper Diamond Bob, his friend Albany.

On an impulse, Ruiz said to his clone, “Remember Albany Euphrates?”

Junior smiled. “Oh, sure. A pretty good man, for a slayer.”

“He’s dead.”

“How do you know?”

“He was working for me, and one of my enemies took his head.”

“Oh. That’s too bad.” Junior seemed genuinely distressed, as he should have been, but Ruiz detected a trace of superficiality in his clone’s reaction. What did that mean? “Did you get even, or are we waiting for the universe to do the job?” Junior asked.

“Well. I didn’t kill Albany’s murderer… but I got to watch him die. Publius it was—”

“Good!” His clone’s face showed a degree of satisfaction that Ruiz now found a bit repellent, though he agreed with Junior’s basic sentiment. “Publius, eh? I won’t ask you about him. A greater monster than any of his children.”

For some reason Ruiz felt a compulsion to tell his clone about Publius. He debated the wisdom of this only for a moment, and then he told the story: how he had assassinated Alonzo Yubere, how he had lost all his people, how Publius had betrayed him, how he had allowed Publius to die. He told all this in growing shame, but when he was done, there was nothing in his clone’s face but bland acceptance. Looking at that face, Ruiz grew a little angry, though he could find no reason for his anger.

A silence followed. Finally Ruiz spoke again. “So, have you any further wisdom for me?”

Junior smiled crookedly. “No, I guess not. I have this urge to tell you not to do anything I wouldn’t do. But I can’t decide if that would be funny, or not.” He made a wry face.

Ruiz got up. He wondered if it would be appropriate to shake hands with himself. “It is a confusing situation.” He looked down at his clone and thought, What an oddly vulnerable-looking person, for all that he has the hands of a strangler. His anger faded into a strange pity. He spoke impulsively: “The Fuckheads told me that Nisa’s data-stream address is Yubere’s stronghold. What do you think?”

Junior’s head snapped up. “Really? How interesting.” He seemed lost in thought for a moment. “That would seem to mean that Corean holds the stronghold. Or perhaps she did hold it, and whoever took it from her is selling off her assets.”

“Those probably aren’t all the possibilities,” said Ruiz.

“No, no. Probably not.” Junior gave him a very odd look, and Ruiz had no idea what his clone was thinking. “But if we run across Nisa while we’re breaking the Orpheus Machine… and we all survive, she’ll have a decision to make, won’t she?”

“I suppose,” said Ruiz. His mouth felt dry.

The look on his clone’s face shifted and Ruiz finally made some sense of it. It was compounded of envy and desire, embarrassment and determination. “I really don’t like it here, much,” said Junior.

“Well, I didn’t want to stay here, either.”

“Yes. If we all survive, I wonder what will happen. It occurs to me that I’m the man who rescued her from Corean. You’re the man who took her to Roderigo and then gave her back to Corean.” Junior wore a taut challenging grin.

“That’s true,” said Ruiz. He felt an abrupt rage, which he struggled to keep from reaching his face. Had he been insanely naive, to think that he could trust his other self?

Junior slumped and dropped his face into his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just that I’ve lost her in a stranger way than you have. That must be why I’m acting this way.”

Ruiz’s rage disappeared as suddenly as it had arrived. “I understand,” he said. “I understand.”

When he went out the door, Junior was still hiding his face in his long strangler’s hands.