"Yes. What you surmise is true, Mr. Charlie."
Shock occulted my vigor. I dizzied, felt my heart would simply burst-but I had no heart! Sitor Ananta used the stylus, and my horror dimmed to astonishment. "Why am I here? What are you going to do with me?"
"I merely wish to question you. About the others. I prefer your cooperation. The information I seek can be gleaned directly from your brain, but that process
is ternbly laborious and very expensive. You can, if you want to, simply tell me what I need to know and spare me all that."
A hellswirl of panic seized me as I understood: In this new time, I was but an object, a thing, three pounds of electrified glutinous tissue teased with electrodes.
The stylus moved once more, and I calmed down. The chamber filled with light, or seemed to. All that remained of my terror was a taste of loneliness. "Where am I?"
A thug's smile creased Sitor Ananta's young face. "Your life is measured on a calendar made of dust, Mr. Charlie, yet you want to know everything-as if anything matters for you anymore. Have you seen yourself-what you look like now? Have you seen your final face?"
My voice creaked like a pine: "I have."
A laugh punched from Sitor Ananta. "The dead come back for laughs, Mr. Charlie. Or as wetware. The Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group used you the way you, in your time, would have used an electronic toy to inform neophytes. Shall we see what program they chose to store in you?"
The stylus swizzled on the moonpiece, and I spoke in a voice orphaned from my wilclass="underline" "In order to locate an electron in a specified spin state at a given moment, measurement must give the differences in the phase fields-parallel and antiparallel components of spin, et cetera. There is no absolute phase. The real and imaginary parts of the wave amplitude are indistinguishable, that is, they can't be separated in some absolute way. Such constraints are functions of observer consciousness-what we humanists call mind. Adopted conventions specify the signs of complementary values, what physicists refer to as a deep-gauge symmetry. The observer perspective is what's important here. The relative ascription of plus and minus signs, used to define oscillations of wave amplitudes, requires the component of V-1, the imaginary value called i. It's
the idea of the thing, for it posits both a thing and its absence. It's easy to believe that a thing can exist out there, independent of the observer, but the posited absence of a thing is obviously an expression of consciousness. So, you see, all energies, forces, and fields that make up the material expression of things are functions of an abstract geometry. And abstract geometry, which requires I, is a function of consciousness!"
"Well, wax me mind, eh, Mr. Charlie?" Sitor Ananta laughed darkly. "Is that how the Friends' crude translators managed amazement? They sounded to you somewhat as you would imagine buccaneers, didn't they? Well, their primitive translators got that unintentionally right. They're thieves, Mr. Charlie-thieves who stole you from thieves. Your head, after it had been expensively restored to its current useful condition, was originally stolen from the Common Archive by lewdists. I'm sure you remember them fondly. They used you for quite some time, didn't they? Weird bunch. There's been no sexual procreation among civilized human beings for centuries. We regard it much as your era did bestiality. Disgusting. We control our hormones. Yet the lewdists revel in vicariously experiencing that hormonal animalism, and they worked your brain the way you in your time would have used a cathode monitor to view pornography. Atavists is
what they are. And there's a surprising lot of them, too-fascinated that we were once as mindlessly glandular as beasts, and not so long ago. But it's not the lewdists I'm interested in. They're a harmless bunch of degenerates. It's the Friends of the NonAbelian Gauge Group I want to know about."
Sitor Ananta got up and walked toward me. Slimhipped and flat-chested, the being had a masculine frame but a feminine mien. "The Friends are dangerous. They're enemies of the Commonality-anarchists, a selfish cult intent on usurping the law. But all this need not trouble you. All I want is for you to remember what you witnessed when they activated your visual cortex. What did you see when last you saw as you are seeing now? A verbal description will aid the
authorities in pinpointing our enemy's location."
Dread stalked me, but I was reluctant to help this creature in anything. Something about it-its sexlessness, the rogue's hook to its smile, the very fact that it treated me like an object that could be manipulated-inspired defiance. I
searched back and dredged up lines from Keats's "The Fall of Hyperion": I ached to see what things the hollow brain
Behind enwombed: what high tragedy
Was acting in the dark secret chambers
Of the skull. .
"Perhaps we should chat a little longer," Sitor Ananta said in a thick, quiet voice. "I imagine that most people of the past who arranged to have their heads frozen upon their demise expected the future to be a glorious Eden where they would be woven new bodies, young, perfect bodies, and allowed to partake of the wonders that evolved while they slept like the dead." A cold laugh snicked. "Isn't that a rather selfish view for anyone to have of the future?"
"Optimistic," I whispered. "I wanted to see what would become of us. I wanted nothing for myself other than to see."
Sitor Ananta's poisoned smile deepened. "All optimism is selfish. Only pessimism accurately approaches the selfless and impersonal violence of reality, Mr. Charlie."
"Stop calling me that."
"Ah, yes, I would. Except I really can't. You see, my translator, as advanced as it is, has some trouble with your language's concept of gender and name preference. I don't sound as garbled as the rebels did, I'm sure, but it would take some adjustments to correct my translator's mode of direct address. I'd rather not bother now, if you don't mind, Mr. Charlie. At least we understand each other, which is better than what you endured with the others."
"The others never threatened me."
"But they used you. They activated the parts of your brain that served their interests with no regard at all for you."
"And what regard have you?"
" will tell you. I represent the Commonality, the future you went to such lengths to see. We are the ones who have restored you. And now there are two options open to us, two uses for you. If we wish-and the decision is entirely mine-you will be installed inside the governing center of a very powerful machine, a mining factory on one of the asteroids of the Belt. There you will serve the Commonality by extracting and refining useful ores. After each successful work cycle, the amygdala and limbic core of your brain will be magnetically stimulated, inducing a sustained pleasurable rapture so gratifying you will sing praises of me and the Commonality for the trouble we took to revive you."
"And the other option?" I queried angrily. "Torture? Death?"
"Oh, no." Sitor Ananta looked sincerely stricken. "That would be ugly indeed. You see, Mr. Charlie, here is my predicament: It is illegal to use the heads or any of the body parts of members from the Commonality-alive or deceased. Only the dead of the past have no rights-those like yourself. They are simply dead. Unfortunately, most of those corpses are useless to us, decomposed beyond any
hope of restoration. We have, however, found a few caches of frozen brain tissue from the archaic era. They are quite rare and located in regions difficult to access. We would never use torture or wanton destruction to squander any one of those heads. They are such a valuable commodity. You see, Mr. Charlie, we have the technology to construct artificial intelligence sufficiently complex to operate mining factories, but the expense is enormous. Despite the rarity and difficulty of obtaining frozen human heads of the past, it's still so much cheaper to revive and install them in our machines." My interrogator leaned back against the table. "Of course, a mining factory requires a cooperative intelligence. If you prove uncooperative, then I will have to recommend that