“Well,” Myra said practically, “if he is going to be reborn at all—which is his belief, not mine—I am sure it would not be as a bad thing.”
She was silent for a moment, then smiled. “Let’s see how they’re coming with our house.”
The house that had been Ranjit’s father’s had now begun to show the effects of Myra’s reshaping—one big bedroom for Ranjit and Myra to share where there had been two smaller ones, three baths (and a half bath on the ground floor for visitors as well) where there had been only one. None of it, however, was finished, and sidestepping all the piles of tiling and plumbing and general refurbishing was thirsty work. And Myra said, “What would you think about a quick swim?”
It was a great idea, and Ranjit admitted as much at once. Within twenty minutes they were in their suits and on their bikes on the way to the raft anchored nearest to Swami Rock.
Since the waters nearby quickly fell off to a depth of a hundred meters and more, they took along their diving gear. That included the latest carbon-fiber tanks, capable of holding air at a pressure of a thousand atmospheres. They had no particular plans for going that deep, but there was always the brutal history of the area to view underwater. It was here that—nearly four centuries back, when Trinco was dominated by the Portuguese invaders—their sea captain had destroyed the original temple in a fit of religious fury. (The fact that some of her own ancestors had been among the vandals didn’t diminish Myra’s interest at all.) The seabed around the rock was still littered with recognizable carved columns.
Once underwater, Ranjit and Myra paused to inspect an elaborate doorway. Ranjit was giving his wife a mock-reproachful shake of the head as he traced a crack that defaced the lotus carvings, when the light above them suddenly dimmed.
Looking up through the brilliantly clear water, Ranjit saw an enormous shape passing just above them.
“It’s a whale shark!” he shouted through his aquaphone, so loudly that his voice was distorted into something resembling the old monk’s as reshaped by his throat mike. “Let’s go and make friends with it!”
Myra grinned and nodded. It was not the first time she and Ranjit had encountered these huge and entirely harmless plankton eaters in the waters around Trincomalee. As much as ten meters long, they were capital ships attended by a retinue of remoras, some attached to them by their suction pads, others swimming hopefully near the enormous mouths in the expectation of table scraps to feast on.
Ranjit started to inflate his buoyancy compensator, rising slowly up the shot line. He expected that Myra would follow at the same pace and was startled when he heard her voice, tightly controlled but clearly under a strain. “Something’s wrong with my inflator,” she gasped. “Be with you in a moment.” Then there was a violent hiss of air as her flotation bag suddenly filled. Ranjit was thrust aside as she was dragged violently upward.
It was in moments such as that when even the most experienced divers could panic. Myra made the fatal mistake of trying to hold her breath.
When Ranjit caught up with her on the raft, it was already too late. Blood was trickling from her mouth and he was not sure if he had caught her last whispered words.
He replayed them in his mind until he was standing on the pontoon of the air-medic helicopter that had arrived just in time to confirm what he already knew.
What she had said was, “See you in the next world.” He bent to kiss her chilled forehead.
Then to the helicopter pilot he said, “Let me use your phone. I need to talk to Dr. Ada Labrooy right away.”
48
THE SOUL IN THE MACHINE
If there was any patient for whom Dr. Ada Labrooy would pull out all the stops, it was certainly her beloved aunt Myra. It wasn’t entirely up to her, however. The alien machines that could do the job were fortunately nearby, getting ready to transform old Surash into the abstract of himself that would live on in the machines. But the parts had not yet been assembled together. Some were stacked in the hall outside Surash’s hospital room, some were on pallets in the yard, a couple were still on the trucks that had brought them from the Skyhook. It would take time to put them all together.
Time in which the remorseless agents of decay would be doing their best to make Myra’s body unusable.
They had to buy time. There was only one way to do it. When Ranjit bullied his way into the chamber where what was left of his wife was being worked on, he at last understood why they had tried so hard to keep him out. Myra wasn’t in a hospital bed. She was submerged in a tank of water with half-melted ice cubes floating on its surface. Rubber cuffs at her neck and groin gave work space to the preservation techs, each perfusing Myra’s body with some chill liquid while Myra’s actual scarlet blood ran into a—toilet? But yes, that was where it was going!
From behind him a voice said, “Ranjit.”
He turned, his expression still horrified. The tone of Dr. Ada Labrooy’s voice had been kind, but the look on her face was stern. “You shouldn’t be here. None of this is pretty.” She glanced at a dial and added, “I think we’re in time, but you should get out of here and let us work.”
He didn’t argue. He had seen all he could stand to see. Over a long and happy marriage he had seen his wife’s naked body many times, pink-tinged and healthy, but now it was a bluish-violetish shade that he could not bear to look at.
The waiting time was forever, or seemed like it, but at last it came to an end. Ranjit was sitting in an anteroom, staring into space, when Dr. Labrooy came in, looking flushed and even happy. “It’s going well, Ranjit,” she said, taking a seat beside him. “We were able to establish all the interfaces. Now we’re just waiting while the data transfer is going on.”
Ranjit translated that for himself. “That means Myra’s being stored in the machine? Shouldn’t someone be there while that’s happening?”
“Someone is, Ranjit.” She lifted her arm to display a wrist screen. “I’m monitoring the flow. You know we’re lucky that the Grand Galactics have a habit of storing a few samples of every race they exterminate, so the Machine-Stored were already tooling up for the job before they got here.”
Ranjit scowled at a word. “What do you mean, ‘storing’? Are you talking about something like, I don’t know, some kind of coffin or urn or something?”
Ada scowled back. “Haven’t you been keeping up with the news, Ranjit? It’s nothing like that. It’s like the Machine-Stored themselves. They’re what you might call stage two machines. Stage one is just making exact copies of people and tucking them away for samples. Stage two is giving them life within the machine—no, wait,” she said as there was a tiny bell-like sound. Her eyes were on the news screen as she lifted her arm and spoke into the contraption on her wrist. A moment later the screen went black. When it lighted up again, Ranjit’s heart stopped, for what it was displaying was his wife as he had seen her last, wearing her swimsuit as before but now lying motionless on a surgical cot….
No, not motionless. Her eyes opened. Her expression was puzzled but interested as she lifted her hand and rotated it to study the fingers.
“You’re seeing her in her simulation,” Ada informed him proudly. “Later on she’ll learn how to simulate any surround she likes, and how to interact with others in the simulation.” Then she whispered again into the thing on her wrist. The screen went black once more. “We aren’t being fair to her, though. Let’s let her have her privacy while she gets used to what’s happened to her. You and I can get a cup of tea, and I’ll try to answer all your questions, assuming you have some.”
Oh, Ranjit had questions, all right. The tea in his cup, undrunk, grew cold while he tried to make sense of what had happened. At last there was another tiny bell and Ada smiled. “I think you can talk to her now,” she said, and nodded toward the screen, which abruptly displayed Myra again. “Hello, Aunt Myra,” Ada said to the screen. “Has the briefing program told you all you need to know?”