Maria felt a deep chill pass through her; every time she thought she'd accepted just how seriously Durham took this lunacy, he gave an answer like that which drove it home to her anew.
She said, "Well, Autoverse life might turn out just as useless. You might have A. hydrophila spewing out useless mutations, generation after generation, with nothing you can do to fix it."
Durham seemed about to reply, but then stopped himself. Maria felt the chill return, at first without knowing why. A second later, she glared at him, outraged, as furious as if he'd come right out and asked her.
"I will not be there to fix it for you!"
Durham had the grace to look cowed, momentarily -- but instead of denying that the thought had ever crossed his mind, he said, "If you don't believe in the dust theory, what difference would it make if there's a scan file of you in the Garden-of-Eden data?"
"I don't want a Copy of me waking up and living for a few subjective seconds, knowing that it's going to die!"
"Who said anything about waking it? Running a Copy on a simulated TVC grid is a computer-intensive operation. We can't afford to wake more than one Copy while we're still running on a physical computer. Mine. As far as you're concerned, your scan file would never even be used to build a Copy; the data would just sit there, completely inert. And you could sit outside at a terminal, overseeing the whole operation, making sure I kept my word."
Maria was scandalized -- although it took her a second to weave through Durham's infuriating logic to find a target.
"And you -- certain that I'd eventually wake -- would happily take me on board under false pretences?"
Durham seemed genuinely baffled by the accusation. "False pretences? I've given you all the facts, and I've argued my case as hard as I can; it's not my fault if you don't believe me. Am I supposed to feel guilty for being right?"
Maria started to reply, but then the point seemed too ridiculous to pursue. She said, "Never mind. You won't get a chance to feel anything about it, because I'm certainly not offering you a scan file."
Durham bowed his head. "It's your decision."
Maria hugged herself. She was actually trembling slightly. She thought: I'm afraid of exploiting him? If what he's doing really is legitimate . . . finish the job, take the money. His Copy's going to spend a few seconds believing it's headed for Copy Heaven -- and that's going to happen whatever I do. The fifteen clones will just sleep through it all, as if they'd never been made. That's no Jonestown.
Durham said, "The fee would be six hundred thousand dollars."
Maria said, "I don't care if it's six hundred million." She'd meant to shout, but her words faded out into a whisper.
Six hundred thousand dollars would be enough to save Francesca's life.
18
(Remit not paucity)
MAY 2051
Peer seemed to be making love with Kate, but he had his doubts. He lay on the soft dry grass of a boundless meadow, in mild sunshine. Kate's hair was longer than usual, tickling his skin wherever she kissed him, brushing against him with an erotic precision which seemed unlikely to have been left to chance. Insect chirps and birdsong were heard. Peer could recall David Hawthorne screwing a long-suffering lover in a field, once. They'd been driving back to London from her father's funeral in Yorkshire; it had seemed like a good idea at the time. This was different. No twigs, no stones, no animal shit. No damp earth, no grass stains, no itching.
The perfect meadow itself was no reason for suspicion; neither of them were verisimilitude freaks, masochistic re-creators of the irritating details of real environments. Good sex was, equally, a matter of choice. But Peer still found himself wondering if Kate really had agreed to the act. She hadn't actually made love to him for months -- however many times he'd recycled the memories of the last occasion -- and he couldn't rule out the possibility that he'd merely decided to fool himself into believing that she'd finally relented. He'd never gone quite so far before -- so far as he presently knew -- but he had a vague memory of resolving to do a thorough job of concealing the evidence if he ever did.
He could clearly remember Kate beginning to flirt as they'd toured Carter's city, and then reaching out and starting to undress him as they stood in the exit doorway. He'd shut down all limits on her access to his body while she'd been unbuttoning his shirt -- and he'd bellowed with shock and delight when, in the middle of their physically plausible foreplay, an invisible second Kate, twenty times his size, had picked him up in one hand, raised him to her mouth, and licked his body from toes to forehead like a sweet-toothed giant taking the icing off a man-shaped cake.
None of this struck him as especially unlikely; if Kate had decided to make love again, it was the kind of thing he could imagine her doing. That in itself proved nothing. He could have scripted this fantasy to fit everything he knew about her -- or chosen the scenario, and then rewritten his "knowledge" of her to accommodate the action. In either case, software could have laid down a trail of false memories: a plausible transition from their meeting with Carter -- which he felt certain had actually happened -- to this moment. All memories of having planned the deception would have been temporarily suppressed.
Kate stopped moving. She shook her head, spattering his face and chest with sweat, and said, "Are you here where you seem to be, or off somewhere else?"
"I was about to ask you the same question."
She smiled wickedly. "Ah. Then maybe this body you hope is me only asked you first to put your mind at ease."
In the sky above her right shoulder, Peer could see a stray cloud taking on a new shape, a whimsical sculpture parodying the bodies on the grass below.
He said, "And then admitted as much?"
Kate nodded, and started slowly rising. "Of course. For the very same reason. How many levels of bluffing will it take before you get bored and say: Fuck it, I don't care?"
She lifted herself until they were almost apart. He closed his eyes and violated the geometry, licking the sweat from between her shoulder blades without moving a muscle. She responded by sticking her tongue in both of his ears simultaneously. He laughed and opened his eyes.
The cloud above had darkened. Kate lowered herself onto him again, trembling very slightly.
She said, "Don't you find it ironic?"
"What?"
"Trans-humans taking pleasure by stimulating copies of the neural pathways which used to be responsible for the continuation of the species. Out of all the possibilities, we cling to that."
Peer said, "No, I don't find it ironic. I had my irony glands removed. It was either that, or castration."
She smiled down at him. "I love you, you know. But would I tell you that? Or would you be stupid enough to pretend that I had?"
Warm, sweet rain began to fall.
He said, "I don't care, I don't care, I don't care."
+ + +
Peer sat on the lowest of the four wooden steps leading up to the back porch of his homestead, glancing down now and then at his bare feet and thin brown arms. Ten-year-old farm boy at dusk. Kate had made both the environment and the body for him, and be liked the tranquil mood of the piece. There was no invented family, no role to play; this was a painting, not a drama. One place, one moment, lasting as long as he chose to inhabit it. The scenery wasn't quite photorealist -- there were subtle distortions of form, color and texture which made it impossible to forget that he was inhabiting a work of art -- but there were no sledgehammer techniques: no visible brushstrokes, no Van Gogh lighting effects.