I hung onto Kai, and we picked up the pieces of myself together.
I show Claire the mask, and the too-perfect electronic profile. “To get access to this kind of equipment and to create an alias with an electronic trail this convincing requires someone with a lot of power and access. Maybe even someone inside the Bureau, since we need to scrub electronic databases to cleanse the records of the Reborn.”
Claire bites her bottom lip as she glances at the display on my phone and regards the mask with skepticism. “That seems really unlikely. All the Bureau employees are ported and are regularly probed. I don’t see how a mole among us can stay hidden.”
“Yet it’s the only explanation.”
“We’ll know soon enough,” Claire tells me. “Adam has been ported. Tau is doing the probe now. Should be done in half an hour.”
I practically fall into the chair next to her. Exhaustion over the last two days settles over me like a heavy blanket. I have been avoiding Kai’s touch, for reasons that I cannot even explain. I feel divided from myself.
I tell myself to stay awake, just a little longer.
Kai and I are sitting on the leather loveseat. Thir big frame means that we are squeezed in tightly. The fireplace is behind us and I can feel the gentle heat against the back of my neck. Thir left arms gently stroke my back. I’m tense.
My parents are on the white couch across from us.
“I’ve never seen Josh this happy,” my mother says. And her smile is such a relief that I want to hug her.
“I’m glad you feel that way,” says Kai, with thir black voice box. “I think Josh was worried about how you might feel about me—about us.”
“There are always going to be Xenophobes,” my father says. He sounds a little out of breath. I know that one day I will recognize this as the beginning of his sickness. A tinge of sorrow tints my happy memory.
“Terrible things were done,” Kai says. “We do know that. But we always want to look to the future.”
“So do we,” my father says. “But some people are trapped in the past. They can’t let the dead lie buried.”
I look around the room and notice how neat the house is. The carpet is immaculate, the end tables free of clutter. The white couch my parents are sitting on is spotless. The glass coffee table between us is empty save for a stack of artfully arranged magazines.
The living room is like the showroom of a furniture store.
I jerk awake. The pieces of my memories have become as unreal as Walker Lincoln’s apartment.
Tau, Claire’s spouse, is at the door. The tips of thir secondary arms are mangled, oozing blue blood. Thie stumbles.
Claire is by thir side in a moment. “What happened?”
Instead of answering, Tau tears Claire’s jacket and blouse away, and thir thicker, less delicate primary arms hungrily, blindly seek the Tawnin port on Claire’s back. When they finally find the opening, they plunge in and Claire gasps, going limp immediately.
I turn my eyes away from this scene of intimacy. Tau is in pain and needs Claire.
“I should go,” I say, getting up.
“Adam had booby-trapped his spine,” Tau says through thir voice box.
I pause.
“When I ported him, he was cooperative and seemed resigned to his fate. But when I began the probe, a miniature explosive device went off, killing him instantly. I guess some of you still hate us so much that you’d rather die than be Reborn.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“I’m the one that’s sorry,” Tau says. The mechanical voice struggles to convey sorrow, but it sounds like an imitation to my unsettled mind. “Parts of him were innocent.”
The Tawnin do not care much for history, and now, neither do we.
They also do not die of old age. No one knows how old the Tawnin are: centuries, millennia, eons. Kai speaks vaguely of a journey that lasted longer than the history of the human race.
What was it like? I once asked.
I don’t remember, thie had thought.
Their attitude is explained by their biology. Their brains, like the teeth of sharks, never cease growing. New brain tissue is continuously produced at the core while the outer layers are sloughed off periodically like snakeskin.
With lives that are for all intents and purposes eternal, the Tawnin would have been overwhelmed by eons of accumulated memories. It is no wonder that they became masters of forgetting.
Memories that they wish to keep must be copied into the new tissue: retraced, recreated, re-recorded. But memories that they wish to leave behind are cast off like dried pupa husks with each cycle of change.
It is not only memory that they leave behind. Entire personalities can be adopted, taken on like a role, and then cast aside and forgotten. A Tawnin views the self before a change and the self after a change as entirely separate beings: different personalities, different memories, different moral responsibilities. They merely shared a body seriatim.
Not even the same body, Kai thought to me.
?
In about a year every atom in your body will have been replaced by others, thought Kai. This was back when we had first become lovers, and thie was often in a lecturing mood. For us it’s even faster.
Like the ship of Theseus where each plank was replaced over time, until it was no longer the same ship.
You’re always making these references to the past. But the flavor of thir thought was indulgent rather than critical.
When the Conquest happened, the Tawnin had adopted an attitude of extreme aggression. And we had responded in kind. The details, of course, are hazy. The Tawnin do not remember them, and most of us do not want to. California is still uninhabitable after all these years.
But then, once we had surrendered, the Tawnin had cast off those aggressive layers of their minds—the punishment for their war crimes—and become the gentlest rulers imaginable. Now committed pacifists, they abhor violence and willingly share their technology with us, cure diseases, perform wondrous miracles. The world is at peace. Human life expectancy has been much lengthened, and those willing to work for the Tawnin have done well for themselves.
The Tawnin do not experience guilt.
We are a different people now, Kai thought. This is also our home. And yet some of you insist on tasking us with the sins of our dead past selves. It is like holding the son responsible for the sins of the father.
What if war should occur again? I thought. What if the Xenophobes convince the rest of us to rise up against you?
Then we might change yet again, become ruthless and cruel as before. Such changes in us are physiological reactions against threat, beyond our control. But then those future selves would have nothing to do with us. The father cannot be responsible for the acts of the son.
It’s hard to argue with logic like that.
Adam’s girlfriend, Lauren, is a young woman with a hard face that remained unchanged after I informed her that, as Adam’s parents are deceased, she is considered the next of kin and responsible for picking up the body at the station.
We are sitting across from each other, the kitchen table between us. The apartment is tiny and dim. Many of the lightbulbs have burnt out and not been replaced.