What I had to entertain me was Essie, and Albert, and my memories. Cassata wasn’t much good. My memories are plentitudinous (they include, after all, everything we could fit into True Love’s datastores, which is a lot), but the memories on top were largely Klara and largely sad.
Essie, on the other hand, is always rewarding . . . or almost always. The only times she isn’t rewarding is when I’m stuck in a tangle of irritation or worry or misery, and I’m afraid that’s where I was just then. After she’d arranged our Johore surround, pretty palace overlooking the straits and Singapore, and I just sat glumly, ignoring the Malaysian meal she’d ordered up, she gave me one of her searching Oh-Godis-he-getting-gboopy-again looks. “Something is bothering you,” she asserted. I shrugged. “Not hungry, I guess,” she offered, spearing a ball of rice with some kind of black things in it and chewing lustily. I made the pretense of picking up something in a leaf and chewing it. “Robin,” she said, “have two choices. Talk to me. Or talk to Albert-Sigfrid-any damn body, only talk. No sense twisting poor old head around alone.”
“I guess I will,” I said, because it was true. I was getting gloopy again.
Albert found me back on Wrinkle Rock, or anyway the simulation of it I had created to match my mood. I was on Level Tango, where the ships docked, wandering around and looking at the places where people I knew had departed from and never come back.
“You seemed a little depressed,” he said apologetically. “I thought I’d just see if there was anything I could do.”
“Not a thing.” I said, but I didn’t tell him to go away. Especially since, I was sure, Essie had sent him there.
He pulled out his pipe, lit it, puffed thoughtfully for a while, and then said, “Would you like to tell me what is on your mind right now?”
“Not a bit,” I said.
“Is it because you think I’m tired of hearing the same old things, Robin?” he asked, and there was real affection in those make-believe eyes.
I hesitated, then took the plunge. I said, “What’s on my mind is everything, Albert. Now, wait, I know what you’re going to say. You’re going to say which of all the things in everything is right on top. Okay. That’s the Foe. They scare me.”
He said peacefully, “There is a lot to be afraid of in that context, yes, Robin. The Foe certainly threaten us all.”
“No, no,” I inid impatiently, “I don’t mean the threat, exactly. I mean it’s so hard to understand.”
“Ah,” he said, smoking his pipe and gazing at me.
“I mean, I just don’t have any good idea of what’s going on with the universe,” I said.
“No, Robin,” he agreed kindly. “You don’t. You could, though. If you’d let me explain nine-dimensional space and a few of the other concepts—”
“Shut up about that,” I ordered, knowing I was making a mistake. I have a right to be humanly capricious, everybody agrees to that, but sometimes I think I carry it too far.
You see, there’s an infinity of knowledge reachable to me, because I’ve been vastened.
I don’t like to speak of what happened to me as being “vastened” when I talk to meat people, because it makes them think I feel superior to them. I don’t want them to think that, especially because, of course, I really am superior. That infinite resource of data is only one part of the difference between me and meat.
The available datastore wasn’t truly infinite, of course. Albert doesn’t let me use words like “infinite” for anything that can be counted, and as all of that knowledge existed in chip, fan, or track storage somewhere, certainly someone could have counted the stores. Someone. Not me. I wasn’t about to try to count the quantum bits of data, and I wasn’t about to try to absorb it all because I was scared.
Oh, God, I was scared! What of? Not just the Foe, though they were fearsome. I was frightened by my own vastness, which I dared not fully explore.
I feared, I hugely feared, that if I let myself expand to absorb all that knowledge I would no longer be Robinette Broadhead at all. I feared I would not then be human. I feared that the tiny parcel of data that was me would simply be drowned in all that accumulated information.
When you are only a machine-stored memory of a human being, you do your best to defend your humanity.
Albert has often got impatient with me about that. He says it is a failure of nerve. Even Essie chides me now and then. She says things like, “Dear dumb Robin, why not take what is yours?” And then she tells me little stories from her own childhood to buck me up. “When I was young girl at akademy, pounding brain over some damn nonsense reference volume on maybe Boolean algebra or chip architecture in Lenin Library, would often look around me in horror. Oh, real horror, dear Robin! Would see all ten million volumes surrounding me, and feel sick. I mean, Robin, sick. Almost physical sickness. Almost to point of throwing up at thought of swallowing all those gray and green and yellow books, to know all that could know. Was impossible for me!”
I said eagerly, “That’s exactly it, Essie, I—”
“But is not impossible for you, Robin!” she cut in severely. “Chew, Robin! Open mouth! Swallow!”
But I couldn’t.
At least, I wouldn’t. I held tightly to my physical human shape (however imaginary), and to my meat-human limitations, however self-imposed.
Naturally I dipped into that vast store from time to time. Just dipped. I only nibbled at the feast. When I wanted, as you might say, one particular volume, I would access that file. I kept my eyes resolutely fixed on that single “volume” and ignored the endless shelves of “books” all around. Or, better still, I would call on my retinue of savants.
Kings used to do that. I had all the prerogatives of any king. I did what kings did. When they wanted to know something about counterpoint, they would send for Handel or Salieri. If they had a moment’s curiosity about the next eclipse, Tycho Brahe would come running. They kept on hand a lavish retinue of philosophers, alchemists, mathematicians, and theologians. The court of Frederick the Great, for instance, was almost a university turned upside down. There was a faculty of all the experts in all the disciplines he could afford to feed, and a student body of one. Him.
More kingly than any king who ever lived, I could afford better than that. I could afford every authority on every subject. They were cheap enough, because I didn’t have to feed them or pay off their mistresses, and it wasn’t even a “them.” They were all subsumed into my one all-purpose data-retrieval program, Albert Einstein.
So when I complained to Essie, “I wish I understood what all this talk about shrinking the universe meant,” she simply looked at me for a moment.
Then she said, “Ha.”
“No, I mean it,” I said, and I really did.
“Ask Albert,” she said sunnily.
“Oh, hell! You know what that means. He’ll tell me anything I want to know, but he’ll go on telling me until it’s a lot more than I want to know.”
“Dear Robin,” she said, “is it not possible that Albert knows better than you how much is enough?”
“Oh, hell,” I said.
But, standing there with Albert in the gloomy metal tunnel of the (simulated) asteroid ship docks, it seemed to me that the time had come. There wasn’t any help for it anymore.
I said, “Albert, okay. Open my head. Dump everything into it. I guess I can stand it if you can.”
He gave me a sunny smile. “It won’t be that bad, Robin,” he promised, and then corrected himself. “It won’t be wonderful, though. I admit it’s going to be hard work. Maybe—” He glanced around. “Maybe we should start out by getting a little more comfortable. With your permission?”