He shrugged. “I’ve heard of them. Heretics, like the rest of them—they were purged after the Third Shining.”
Nefertity said nothing. Her shimmering heart dulled to bronze as she walked, the water about her feet in small pools now that reflected her pale blue form.
“Purged,” she said at last. Hobi nodded, embarrassed. “You killed them, then?”
“ I didn’t kill them!” His voice rose sharply and he blushed. “I mean, none of us did, really—this was hundreds of years ago. It was Prophet Rayburn—well, his father, actually—Roland Orsina—and the Tel Âl ibn Waba, the Prince of the Plague. You know. The first Ascendants. The Chosen.”
Nefertity stopped. “The Chosen.”
Her voice suddenly did not sound so calm. A deeper tone cut into it, more like a woman’s voice than a replicant’s. When Hobi looked at her he saw that the emerald had drained from her eyes. Now they glowed dead white, like the eyes of a rasa just pulled from its tank.
“The Chosen: you mean the recusants, don’t you? The zealots who survived the Second Ascension?”
Hobi started to agree, but the nemosyne cut him off. Her voice was husky with anger. Loretta Riding’s voice, he realized suddenly—one of Nefertity’s programs had been encoded with the dead woman’s persona, like the palinmplants that gave some rasas the memories of their earlier lives.
“The Chosen! They murdered children so that only they would survive, did you know that? In Meritor, Nebraska, where they’d sent them to be away from the cities, to be safe from the plague. Loretta was there, she’d volunteered to set up a folklife program recording the children’s accounts of the Holocaust. She left one day to come back to Evanston and the following week it happened. The Chosen came. They slaughtered the children and their teachers, and then they commandeered the Children’s Encampment and moved in with their own children and their drudges, their deacons and their mullahs. They claimed that their prophets predicted a Second Ascension, and they were right, of course; but is that any reason to butcher children like sheep?”
The husky voice grew quite shrill. Hobi shook his head anxiously.
“No—no, of course not—” he stammered. The nemosyne stared at him, through him; she had become something quite different from the beautiful automaton he had first glimpsed in Nasrani’s hidden room. Tongues of light rose and flickered from her shoulders and her arms. Her body glowed a fierce cobalt, like an android’s cooling in its adamant saggar. He had to look away from her, away from that face like a burning torch, those white-hot eyes piercing the dim tunnel.
She said, “That was why she went into hiding, with me—in one of the bunkers they built after the First Ascension. She shouldn’t have taken me with her, of course—I belonged to the Church—but by then everything was falling apart again. She moved her entire library into that little place. Books, videos, films, syntheses; and of course she had me, I’d recorded over ten thousand hours of material by then. And for the rest of her life she read to me, and recorded what remained. Her books, mostly, and her memories. What she recalled of the world before the First Ascension, and just after. She never went outside again.”
Hobi’s feet ached from the cold. He wanted to start moving again. He wanted to run. The nemosyne was silent. Slowly her eyes cooled, until they shone a very pale green, and the angry blue drained from her limbs and torso. She could have been a reflection on the surface of the water, a rivulet of light.
Hobi shivered, rubbed his prickling arms and was absurdly grateful that he could feel them. He asked, “What happened? In the end, I mean. How did she die?”
As she replied Nefertity’s voice was a woman’s voice, weary and sad. “She was not a young woman when we entered the bunker. She was old, and she grew very old. For some years I cared for her, when she could no longer move easily. I prepared food from what remained in her stores, and purified the water she obtained from her ground still, and carried her when she could no longer walk; but she grew more and more forgetful, and finally one day she must have commanded me to sleep. Perhaps she knew she was going to die soon, and wanted to spare me—although of course it would only seem that I grieved, and if there was no one else there to see me, why then what would it matter? A robot alone in a steel bunker, mourning her dead mistress—but it must have seemed too much like one of her old stories, the idea must have saddened her. She was the kindest and wisest of women, Sister Loretta. Some people said she was a saint—a real saint, not one of those cowards who waited until the bibliochlasm and what came after, before they grew bold enough to speak against the Ascendants—and before we went into hiding there was much talk of canonizing her among the women of the Church.
“Those were dark days, after the Second Ascension and the Third Shining. In the west they hunted women down like horses and bred them, until they saw the monsters they gave birth to. Then they just killed them, or used them in their experiments. That was when they started breeding the geneslaves. You told me there are geneslaves everywhere now. Well, then the notion was a new and monstrous thing. Loretta organized a movement against it, and the women tried to stop it. And failed, of course; I can see now that they failed.”
Again she was silent; if she had been a real woman he thought she would have sighed, or wept. Finally she said, “That was why she became so obsessed with me, with the project. ‘We cannot forget,’ she told me, ‘but we are human and we will forget—but not you, Nefertity, never you—’ ”
Her voice grew soft, almost a whisper, and she chanted,
“Let the stars
Plummet to their dark address,
Let the mercuric
Atoms that cripple drip
Into the terrible well.
You are the one
Solid the spaces lean on, envious. You are the baby in the barn.”
She was silent. Almost Hobi could have seen her, then, standing before her inhuman muse: a white-haired woman, thin and strong as a steel wand, with eyes blue and raging and a voice scraped raw from reading, her knuckles swollen from the ceaseless effort of turning pages, turning dials, turning history into myth and myth into a woman who would not die, would not fail her, would not forget.
“A saint,” he whispered, and Nefertity slowly nodded.
“But even saints die,” she said at last. “And to spare me from witnessing that, Loretta ordered me to sleep; and so I slept. For centuries, I slept. Then someone found the bunker, I suppose, and took me from it. I do not remember. By then they had forgotten about the nemosynes; they had lost the means to wake me, or even the desire. If what you told me is true, they must have brought me a very great way, and then forgotten me, for me to end up in this place. But again, I cannot remember. My files have been disturbed, my random memories were accessed. But they never woke me: in all these years and years, Hobi, only you came to wake me.”
She raised her hand, cool and heavy as glass, and placed it upon his. She said no more.
Hobi stared at her, embarrassed and awed and ashamed. This lovely thing, this creature of light and steel, woven with the memories of a dead Saint and the dreams of a million dead women: how could she have come to him, how was it he had been the one to call her from the darkness after all this time? The thought terrified him; suddenly Nefertity terrified him. What was she, really, this robot that was centuries old, this thing that had called him and his people murderers, monsters?
“You don’t believe me.” Nefertity’s voice was soft as her hand slid from his shoulder.