I knew the voice.
I even knew what would come next. What bad manners! Flicker, flash, pop, and there was General Julio Cassata, looking at me with the (barely) controlled sneer of soldier-to-civilian contempt, across a broad, bare desktop that hadn’t been there a moment before. “I want to talk to you,” he said.
I said, “Oh, shit.”
I didn’t like General Julio Cassata. I never had, though we kept running into each other’s lives.
That wasn’t because I wanted it that way. Cassata was always bad news. He didn’t like civilians (like me) messing in what he still called “military affairs,” and he didn’t much like machine-stored people of any kind. Cassata was not only a soldier, he was still meat.
Only this time he wasn’t meat. He was a doppel.
That was an interesting fact in itself, because meat people don’t make doppels of themselves lightly.
I would have pursued that odd fact farther, except that I was too busy thinking about all the things I didn’t like about Julio Cassata. His manners are lousy. He had just demonstrated that. There is an etiquette to the gigabit space that we machine-stored people inhabit. Polite machine-stored people don’t just dump themselves on each other without warning. They approach politely when they want to talk to you. Maybe they even “knock” on a “door” and wait outside politely until you say, “Come in.” And they certainly do not impose their private surrounds on each other. That’s the kind of behavior that Essie calls nekulturny, meaning it stinks. Just what I would expect from Julio Cassata: He’d overridden the physical bay we were in and the gigabit-space simulation of it that we were jointly occupying. There he was with his desk and his medals and his cigars and all; and that was just plain rude.
Of course, I could have pushed all that out and got back to my own surround. Guys do that sort of thing when they’re stubborn. It’s like two secretaries one-upping each other about whose boss gets put on the PV-phone first. I didn’t choose to do that. It wasn’t because I have any hang-up about being rude to rude people. It was something else.
I had finally got around to wondering why the real, or meat, Cassata had made a machine duplicate of himself.
What was before us was a machine simulation in gigabit space, just as my own beloved Portable-Essie was a doppel of my also beloved (but, these days, beloved only at second hand) real-Essie. The original meatCassata was no doubt chomping a real cigar several hundred thousand kilometers away, on the JAWS satellite.
When I figured out the implications of that, I actually almost felt sorry for the doppel. So I suppressed all the instinctive words that suggested themselves. I only said, “What the hell do you want from me?”
Bullies respond well to being bullied. He let a little of the fire go out of the steely-eyed glare. He even smiled-I think he meant it to be friendly. His eyes slid from my face over to Essie, who had popped herself into Cassata’s surround to see what was going on, and said, in what could have been intended as a light tone, “Now, now, Mrs. Broadhead, is that any way for old friends to talk to each other?”
“Is very poor way for old friends to talk,” she said noncommittally.
I pressed: “What are you doing here, Cassata?”
“I came to the party.” He smiled-oily smile, fake smile; he had very little to smile about, considering. “When we came off maneuvers, most of the old ex-prospectors got leave to come here for the reunion. I hitched a ride. I mean,” he explained, as though, of all people, Essie and I needed explaining to, “I doppeled myself and put the store on the ship that was coming here.”
“Maneuvers!” Essie sniffed. “Maneuvers against what? When Foe come out, are going to pull out six-shooters and fill skunks with holes like Swiss cheese, blam-blam-blam?”
“We have better than six-shooters on our cruisers these days, Mrs. Broadhead,” Cassata said genially; but I had had enough small talk.
I asked again, “What do you want?”
Cassata abandoned the smile and got back to his natural state of nasty. “Nothing,” said Cassata. “By that I mean nothing, Broadhead. I want you to butt out.” He wasn’t even trying to be genial anymore.
I kept my temper. “I’m not even butting in.”
“Wrong! You’re butting in right now in your damn Institute. You’ve got workshops going on. One in New Jersey, one in Des Moines. One on Assassin signatures. One on early cosmology.”
Since those statements were perfectly true, I only said, “The Broadhead Institute is in business to do that kind of thing. That’s our charter. It’s what we founded it for, and it’s why JAWS gives me exofficio status so I have a right to sit in on JAWS planning sessions.”
“Well, old buddy,” Cassata said happily, “see, you’re wrong about that, too. You don’t have a right. You have that privilege. Sometimes. A privilege isn’t a right, and I’m warning you not to put it on the line. We don’t want you getting in the way.”
I really hate those guys sometimes. “Now, look, Cassata,” I began, but Essie stopped me before I’d even picked up speed.
“Boys, boys! Cannot save this for another time? Came here to party, not to fight.”
Cassata hesitated, looking belligerent. Then he nodded slowly, looking thoughtful. “Well, Mrs. Broadhead,” he said, “that’s not a bad idea. It can keep a while; after all, I don’t have to report back for five or six meat hours yet.” Then he turned to me. “Don’t leave the Rock,” he ordered. And vanished.
Essie and I looked at each other. “Nekulturny,” she said, wrinkling up her nose as though she still smelled his cigar.
What I said was worse than that, and Essie put her arm around me. “Robin? Is pig, that man. Forget him, okay? Aren’t going to let him make you all gloopy and sour again, please?”
“Not a chance!” I said bravely. “Party time! I’ll race you to the Blue Hell!”
It was, actually, one hell of a fine party.
I hadn’t taken Essie seriously when she asked if I thought the party was too much of a big deal. I knew she didn’t mean it. Essie had never been a prospector herself; but every human being alive knew what this party was.
It was to celebrate nothing less than the centennial of the finding of the Gateway asteroid, and if there was ever a bigger deal in the history of the human race, I don’t know what it could have been.
There were two reasons why Wrinide Rock was chosen for the site of the hundredth anniversary party. One was that, basically, the asteroid had been converted into an old folks’ home. It was perfect for the geriatric cases. When the treatment for atherosclerosis made the osteoporosis worse, and the antitumor phages brought on Meniere’s syndrome or Alzheimer’s, Wrinide Rock was the place to be. Old hearts didn’t have to pump so hard. Old limbs didn’t have to struggle to keep a hundred kilos of meat and bone erect. The maximum gravity anywhere was about one percent of Earth-normal. Totterers could trot and skip; they could turn cartwheels if they wanted to. They couldn’t be caught by slow, uncertain reflexes in front of a speeding car; there weren’t any cars. Oh, they could die, of course. But that didn’t have to be fatal, because Wrinide Rock had the very best (and most heavily used) personality-storage facilities in the universe. When the old meat carcass passed the point of repair, the ancient put himself in the hands of the Here After people, and the next thing he knew he was seeing the world with unfiawed vision, hearing the tiniest sound, forgetting nothing, learning fast. He was bloody well reborn!—only without the mess and nastiness of the first time. Life-maybe I should say “life”—as a machine-stored intelligence was not the same as being in your own body. But it wasn’t bad. In some ways it was better.
So say I, and I ought to know.