“Yes.” Cassata nodded agreeably, looking around appreciatively. “That’s much better. Nice place you’ve got here, Mind if I help myself?” He didn’t wait for permission but headed for the bar.
“Mind all this crap,” said Essie. “Spit it out, Julio. Embargoed our ship, right? Why?”
“Only a temporary inconvenience, my dear.” Cassata twinkled as he made himself a Chivas and nothing. “I only wanted to be sure I got a chance to talk to you.”
Even a counterirritant can be too damn irritating. I said, “So talk.” Essie gave me a quick, warning look, because she heard my tone. I was keeping myself under control. I wasn’t in any good mood to talk to Julio Cassata.
Some people think that machine-stored people never get all wound up and flustered, because we’re just bits of data arranged in a program. It isn’t true. At least, it isn’t true for me, and especially not just then. I’d been up and down in an emotional carnival ride-keyed up in the first place by the party; exalted and somber while I listened to the story of Tangent’s terrible trip; torn with a hundred emotions by running into Kiara. I wasn’t about to enjoy talking to Cassata.
Of course, I seldom do enjoy talking to Cassata. I don’t see why anyone would. His main conversational gambits are orders and insults; he doesn’t talk, he issues statements. He hadn’t changed. He took a long pull on his Scotch, looked me in the eye and said:
“You’re a pest, Broadhead.”
It wasn’t a promising remark. Essie, halfway through making me a Mai Tai, twitched and almost spilled it. She looked at me worriedly. It’s Essie’s policy to do all the fighting herself when we’re in a situation that calls for it. She thinks I get too excited when I’m the one that yells.
But I fooled her this time. I said politely, “I’m sorry if I’ve caused you any inconvenience, Julio. Would you be good enough to tell me why you say that?”
What remarkable self-control I displayed! It was a lot more than the lout deserved. A lot more than I would have given him if I hadn’t, at the last moment, realized that I ought to feel sorry for him.
What I had realized was that, after all, he was under sentence of death.
Major General Julio Cassata and I go back a long way-there’s no use adding up the years; arithmetic gets all mixed up when you’re in gigabit time. We had had many contacts, and I hadn’t enjoyed any of them.
He wasn’t a stored personality himself, though. That is, usually he wasn’t. Like many meat people who have to deal with us stored souls on an urgent basis, he makes a doppel of himself and sends it out to talk to us. It isn’t quite the same as a face-to-face in real time, but the difference is only psychological. Well, painfully psychological. He inputs himself as a machine-stored intelligence and comes looking for us—whichever of us he wants to talk to, sometimes me. Then he says whatever he has to say, listens to what we have to say in return, carries on a conversation just as well, in the form of a disembodied bundle of bits in gigabit space, as he would if he and we were meat people around a table-no, not just as well; a hell of a lot better, at least in that we are that much faster. Then meat-Julio calls his doppelganger-Juio back and listens while it tells him what happened.
All that is straightforward, and certainly not painful at all. It is also very efficient. The pain comes later.
The doppel asks just what meat-Cassata would have asked, objects to what he would have objected to, says just what he would have said-as of course it must, being him. And it isn’t like sending an ambassador out and waiting for a response, because even the best of ambassadors, assuming that any ambassador could do the job as well as a doppel does, would certainly take time to do it. The doppels take at most a matter of seconds, if the conference is to take place at planetary distances-longer, of course, if the person the meat man wants to talk to happens to be at the other end of the Galaxy. Before the meat person has a chance to wonder how the conference is going to go, the doppel is back and tells him.
That’s the good part.
Then comes the only part that’s not so good, because what do you do with the doppel after it’s done its job?
You could just leave it in storage, of course. There’s plenty of capacity in gigabit space, and one more stored personality wouldn’t matter much. But it bothers some people to have duplicates of themselves around. It especially bothers someone like Cassata. Being military, he’s got the military mind. A stored duplicate of him, knowing everything he knows, isn’t just an annoying loose end. It’s a security risk. Someone might find it and ask it questions! Threaten it! (With what?) Torture it! (How?) Hold its feet to the fire (if it had feet)-well, I don’t know exactly what goes on in Julio Cassata’s mind, and I thank God I don’t every day.
All of that is quite foolish, of course, but the doppels are Cassata’s own, and if he thinks some imaginary enemy might sometime find out from them the secrets of his service, no one else can interfere. He’s a shift commander for JAWS, the Joint Assassin Watch. That means he’s in charge of a large part of the defense programs against the eventual coming out of the Assassins from their kugelblitz. So if he wants conferences with parties at a distance, which he does, he has to do this sort of thing almost daily, which means that if he left his doppels in storage, there would be hundreds and thousands of Major General Julio Cassatas around.
So he doesn’t just store them. He kills them.
That’s what it feels like to Cassata himself, anyway. When he terminates his doppel, it feels as though he’s assassinated a twin.
And the other bad thing about that is that the doppel itself-himself, damn it-knows that’s what’s going to happen.
Sometimes it makes our conversations sort of gloomy.
That’s why I didn’t rip Julio Cassata to simulated bloody shreds for his impudence. He was as surprised as Essie. He unwrapped a fresh cigar, staring at me. “You all right?” he demanded.
“All right” wasn’t anywhere near a correct diagnosis, because I was wondering just how close my doppel had got to Klara and how she would react when she saw it, but I had no intention of telling Julio Cassata any of that. So I just said:
“I’ll be fine when you tell me what all this is about.”
I was quite polite, but Cassata had never subscribed to the theory that politeness should go both ways. He worried off the end of the cigar with his teeth and spat the nasty little plug of tobacco on the floor, watching me carefully. Then he said: “You aren’t as important as you think you are, Broadhead.” I managed to keep the smile on my face, though the temperature was going up inside. “You think the embargo is just for you. Wrong. That Heechee ship came right here from the core, you know.”
I hadn’t known. I didn’t see what difference it made, either, and said so.
“Classified material, Broadhead,” Cassata rumbled. “Those Heechee Ancient Ancestors, they’ve been blabbing their heads off. They should’ve been debriefed at JAWS first!”
“Yes,” I said, nodding. “That makes sense, because naturally things that happened half a million years ago or so are pretty important military secrets.”
“Not just half a million years ago! They know all about the present state of readiness in the core! And there are meat Heechee there, plus this Waithers guy who’s actually been there and seen it for himself.”
I took a deep breath. What I wanted to do was to ask him all over again whom he possibly was trying to keep all these secrets from. But that would have meant prolonging an old argument, and I was tired of being with Cassata anyway. I just said, still politely, “You said I was a pest, and I don’t see what the Heechee ship has to do with that.”
He had the cigar well lit by then. He blew smoke at me and said, “Nothing. That’s a separate thing. I came here because of the ship, but I also wanted to tell you to stay out of the way.”