Pain was washing over me, and I gave into it.
My flesh Jasso body was damaged enough that no one would be surprised if it didn’t survive. I left it completely, with enough circuits shut down that it would never regain “consciousness” and slowly die. I didn’t even keep tabs to know when it stopped breathing finally.
But I didn’t just go back to the ship and encyb. I returned to the ship, yes, but I entered another flesh body there, one of my preparations, that I had grown and kept ready, just in case.
Now I was hoping I would need it.
So I sat, enfleshed and itching, inside my ship, watching the dials, watching another newly decanted body kept alive by medic equipment. Watching that equipment slowly withdraw as the body integrated its own systems. Watching… and waiting. The question was…
The eyes opened. Unfocused and wandering. Then they integrated, and intelligence glinted within them. “Report,” he barked.
“How do you feel?” I said softly.
“Who are you? Report! What happened after I—” He sucked in air, on a gasp.
“They accepted the covenant.” I gave him what I thought he wanted most, immediately.
“All of them?”
“All of them.” He relaxed.
“Lesper?”
Took me a blink to remember that that was the Remaldori leader’s given name. “Dead.” There had been no way that I could have gotten close enough to that one to make a pattern, even if I had wanted to… and known it would work. I hadn’t been sure it would work with my leader. But I had hoped. His force of personality made it a hope.
I reached out and touched his cheek. He jumped a little, and gazed at me though wide opened eyes. “Who are you?”
“Your medic, for now. How do you feel?”
He took a deep breath, I could almost see him testing out his body, searching for pain, or damage, or mutilation. Half puzzled, he said slowly, “I don’t hurt.” Another breath, almost appalled. “At all.”
“That’s good. That’s what I hoped for.”
“It’s impossible,” he stated bluntly. “Whatever happened on the platform, my leg always aches.”
“Not any more. Ever again.”
“Who are you?”
“My real name… translates as Jolly,” I told him. Then, taking a risk: “You knew me as Jasso, before.”
He took one look. “Impossible.”
Well, Jasso had been male. But this body was female. “The first time I as Jasso met your security leader, my tail went so tight it took half a morning for it to loosen again.”
His ears twitched. “That’s the commonest male reaction.”
“You told me to let her make the first and second steps. And that those lucky enough to have her choose them hadn’t any complaints yet.”
“You’d better explain.”
My tail curled nervously. I took a deep breath. “It’s simple, really. My people are much, much more advanced than yours. We can do things your people can’t. One of them is… is move about from body to body. As easily as you put on a uniform and then change to another.”
Clipped: “I don’t believe you.”
“We can. We do. Mind, soul, persona, identity, individuality, whatever you want to call it, is only a pattern, really. Such patterns can be reproduced, or moved. Just like you take a computer file and put it on a tape and then take the tape and put the file in another computer.”
He didn’t say anything. He didn’t believe a word of it.
“I don’t remember what my original body was like. I don’t even remember how many different bodies I’ve inhabited—”
He froze. I remembered that his world, like so many others, had its legends.
“I can’t enter an already occupied body. The body of Jasso, like the one I’m wearing now, was grown for the purpose. It never had a… a previous owner.”
Silence. Unbelieving silence.
I decided to give him the works. “You died. The body your… your selfness was housed in died. But I copied your pattern, when I was working with you, and stored it. I wasn’t sure if I could, without your cooperation, and without all the proper equipment, but your personality is so strong it worked. I had already grown a body for you, just in case.”
His mouth worked. “Why do you lie? I know this is my body.”
I had prepared for that. I held up a reflecting surface. “Is it?” He looked at himself.
“Yes!”
“Sure?”
He stared, glared. “I look… younger. Is that some part of whatever miracle treatment saved my life?”
“No. It’s because I grew this body from some spare cells of yours, so it’s an exact duplicate of your original. But I didn’t bother to age it past maturity. Prime. You’re a male in his prime again.”
His mouth worked again. I tilted the surface, so it showed his body. He stiffened. The climate inside my ship was controllable to almost anything. So I hadn’t bothered with putting clothes on him. Nor had I bothered—why should I?—duplicating the scars he had acquired in his first life. “Where—”
I kept tilting the mirror. It showed a smooth, unscarred body… two firm muscled, straight legs.
He sat up, felt the left one incredulously.
Finally: “I begin to believe. But why?”
“Why did I do it at all? Or why you?” I touched his cheek again. Touch is the most primitive of senses, but also the most effective. “It’s the same reason. I liked you. I didn’t want the waste your death would mean.”
“None of my people ever got a second chance like this, did they?”
Infinity, the altruism of the man. But I had almost anticipated that, and I had an answer ready. “But I need you. I’m still so ignorant. I have only limited resources. Without your wisdom to draw on, how can I effectively help keep your people on the path you’ve started them toward with your sacrifice?”
“I see.” He didn’t accept it right away, of course. But it gave me an edge. I was a cybber, with a cybber’s long, long-term mentality. Keep him busy helping his people, get him used to cybbing, pop him on occasion into a pure cyb, to do this or that—
I had been a single cyb for too many long cycles. It was time I had a partner again.
It was even worth spending most of my time enfleshed, and itching. Besides, once I convinced him that emotions could strengthen a working relationship instead of just, as he had once put it, murky the air, he was a most effective scratcher.