Mindscan

30

I wish I could see the Earth: that would give me a place to focus my thoughts when I was thinking about Rebecca. But the Earth was straight down, and looking at the floor didn’t fulfill my emotional need. Of course, nothing short of actually seeing her would do that.

Rebecca thinks the universe sends her messages—subtly at first, she says, and then, later, if she doesn’t get them, the universe starts whacking her with two-by-fours.

I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. I knew the universe was indifferent to me. And yet, perhaps out of respect for Rebecca, I did find myself looking, listening, watching, paying attention: if there was a way out, maybe the universe would give me a clue.

In the meantime, I took another of Brian Hades’s suggestions—one I hoped wouldn’t leave me feeling quite so sordid afterwards. I decided to try mountain climbing here on the moon. I’d never done much of that sort of thing on Earth—Eastern Canada is not known for its mountains. But it sounded like it might actually be fun, and so I inquired about it at the recreation desk.

Turns out the guy who usually led climbing expeditions was my old traveling buddy Quentin Ashburn, the moonbus-maintenance engineer. No one was allowed on the lunar surface alone; the same common-sense safety rules that applied to scuba diving also applied here. So Quentin was delighted by my request to go climbing.

It used to be, I’m told, that spacesuits had to be custom built for each user, but new adaptive fabrics made that unnecessary: High Eden stocked suits in three sizes for men, and three for women, and it was easy enough to see that the middle male size was the right one for me.

Quentin helped me suit up, making sure all the connections were secure. And then he got some special climbing equipment that was stored on open shelves in the change room. Some of it I recognized—lengths of nylon rope, for instance. Others were things I’d never seen before. The last piece was, well, a piece: a thing that looked like a squat, thick-bodied pistol.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s a piton gun,” he said. “It shoots pitons.”

“Well, let’s hope we don’t run into any of those,” I said.

Quentin laughed. “Pitons are metal spikes.” He opened the gun’s thick chamber, and showed me one. The spike was about ten centimeters long. It had a sharply pointed front and an eye at the other end to which a rope could be fitted. “We shoot them into the rock and use them as footholds or handholds, or to hold our ropes. On Earth, people often drive in pitons by hand, but the rock here is quite hard, and there’s too much risk of rupturing your glove and exposing yourself to vacuum. So we use piton guns.”

I’d never held a gun of any sort in my life—and, as a Canadian, I was proud of that.

But I took the device, and copied Quentin, who slipped another one of them into a capacious pouch on the side of his right thigh.

Finally, we put on the fishbowl helmets. They were impregnated, Quentin told me, with something similar to electronic ink: any portion of them could become opaque—blocking out sunlight. Then we cycled through the airlock, which happened to be adjacent to the pad where the moon-buses landed.

“Your pride and joy is gone,” I said over the intersuit radio, pointing at the empty pad.

“It’s been gone for days,” replied Quentin. “On its usual run to LS One. But it’ll be back tomorrow, to take some passengers to the SETI installation.”

The SETI installation. Where they listen for messages from the universe. I tried to listen, too.

We continued on, walking over the lunar soil. Although the suit massed about twenty kilos, I still felt much lighter than I ever had on Earth. The suit air was a bit startling—completely devoid of any odor or flavor—but I quickly got used to it, although—

No, it’s gone. I’d thought for a second that another headache was coming on, but the sensation passed almost at once.

The crater wall was far in front of us. As we walked, the sun disappeared behind it, and stars became visible. I kept looking up at the black, black sky for the Earth, but of course it was never visible from here. Still…

“Is that Mars?” I said, pointing at a brilliant point of light that was shaded differently from the others—it was either red or green, but I’d never heard of “the green planet.”

“Sure is,” said Quentin.

It took us about ten minutes to half-walk, half-hop over to the crater wall, which was craggy and steep, rising far above us. Since we were in shadow, Quentin had turned on a light in the center of his chest, and then he reached over and flipped a switch on my suit, activating a similar light.

“Wow,” I said, looking up at the inky wall. “That looks … difficult.”

“It is,” said Quentin, amiably. “Where would the fun be if it were easy?” He didn’t wait for an answer, which was a good thing, because I didn’t have one. Instead, he undid the pouch on his thigh, and pulled out his piton gun. “See?” he said, pointing with his other hand. “You aim at a cleft in the rock.”

I nodded.

He took a bead with his gun, then fired. There was no sound, but the gun obviously discharged with a sizable kick, judging by the way Quentin’s hand jerked back. A metal spike flew silently into the rock. Quentin tested it to see that it had lodged securely, and threaded a rope through it. “Simple as that,” he said.

“How many pitons does it hold?”

“Eight. But there are oodles more in each of our pouches, so don’t worry.”

“It, ah, looks like it packs quite a kick,” I said, gesturing at the gun.

“Depends on the force setting,” said Quentin. “But, on maximum—which you’d use for granite, and such…” He adjusted a control on the gun, and fired away from the crater wall. The spike shot across the intervening vacuum and sent up a cloud of moondust where it hit.

I nodded.

“All right?” said Quentin. “Let’s go!”

We started climbing the rocky face, climbing ever higher, climbing toward the light.

It was exhilarating. I was outdoors, and the lack of walls made it seem, at least for a time, like I was no longer a prisoner. We made our way to the top of the crater rim and—

—and fierce sunlight lanced into my eyes, triggering another headache before the helmet darkened. God, I wish my brain would stop hurting…

We walked around for a while on the gray surface, which curved away to a too-near horizon. “Magnificent desolation,” Chandragupta had said, quoting somebody or other. It certainly was. I drank in the stark beauty while trying to ignore the pain between my ears.

Eventually, a warning started pinging over the helmet speakers, a counterpoint to the agonizing throbs: our air would soon be running out.

“Come on,” said Quentin. “Time to go home.” Home, I thought. Yes, he was right. The bloody moonbus engineer was right. It was time to go home, once and for all.

Deshawn and Malcolm had spent the entire recess researching and conferring, and, as we returned to the courtroom, I heard Deshawn tell Karen he was “as ready as I’ll ever be.” Once Judge Herrington had arrived, and we were all seated again, Deshawn dove into his cross-examination of the Yale bioethicist, Alyssa Neruda.

“Dr. Neruda,” he said, “I’m sure the jury was fascinated by your discussion of the gerrymandering of the line between personhood and nonpersonhood.”

“I would hardly accuse the highest court of the land of gerrymandering,” she replied coldly.

“Perhaps. But there’s a glaring oversight in your commentary on people becoming more than one individual, isn’t there?”

Neruda regarded him. “Oh?”

“Well, yes,” said Deshawn. “I mean, human cloning has been technically possible since—when? Twenty-twelve or so?”

“I believe the first human clone was born in 2013,” said Neruda.

“I stand corrected,” said Deshawn. “But isn’t cloning taking one individual and making it into two? The original and the copy are genetically identical after all, and yet surely they both have rights and are people?”

“You should take my course, Mr. Draper. That is indeed a fascinating theoretical issue, but it’s not relevant to the laws of the United States. First, of course, no sensible person would say that they are the same people. And, second, human cloning has always been banned here—it’s even banned up in Canada—and so American law has had no need to incorporate the concept of human clones into its definitions of personhood.” She crossed her arms in a so-there gesture. “Individuation still stands as the law of the land.”

If Deshawn was crestfallen, he hid it well. “Thank you. Doctor,” he said. “No further questions.”

“And we’ll call it a day,” said Judge Herrington. “Jurors, let me admonish you again…”

It had been some time since I’d connected with another instantiation of me, but it happened that evening, while I was watching the Blue Jays play. They were doing so badly, I guess I was letting my mind wander. Maybe my zombie was willing to watch them get slaughtered, but the conscious me couldn’t take it, and—

And suddenly there was another version of me inside my head. I told the wall screen to turn off, and strained to listen.

That’s strange…

“Hello!” I said. “Hello, are you there?”

What? Who?

I sighed, and went through the rigmarole of explaining who I was, ending with, “And I know you think it’s 2034, but it’s not. It’s really 2045.”

What are you talking about?

“It’s really 2045,” I said again.

Of course it is. I know that.

“You do?”

Of course.

So it wasn’t the same instantiation with the memory problem I’d encountered earlier. Christ, I wondered just how many of us there were. “You started by saying something was strange.”

What? Oh, yeah. Yeah, it is.

“What is?”

I dropped a pen I was using.

“So?”

So I managed to catch it before it hit the floor.

“Well, there’s no slow, chemical component to your reaction time anymore,” I said. “Now, it’s all electric—happening at the speed of light”

That’s not it. I was able to watch the pen fall, to see it clearly as it moved downward.

“I haven’t noticed any heightening of my awareness like that.”

I don’t think it’s heightened awareness … There. I just ptcked it up and dropped it again. It fell in slow motion.

“Fell in slow … how is that possible?”

I don’t know, unless…

“Oh, Christ.”

Christ indeed.

“You’re on the moon. I mean, I suppose you could be anywhere with reduced gravity, including a space station spinning too slowly to simulate a full Earth gee. But since we already know that Immortex has a facility on the moon…”

Yes. But if I’m on the moon, shouldn’t there be a time delay as I communicate with you? The moon’s—what?—four hundred thousand kilometers from Earth.

“Something like that. And light travels at 300,000 kilometers per second, so—let’s see—there should be a one-and-a-third second delay, or so.”

Maybe there is. Maybe.

“Let’s test it. I’ll count to five; when you hear me say five, you pick up the count, and carry it through from six to ten, then I’ll come in for eleven to fifteen. Okay?”

Okay.

“One. Two. Three. Four. Five.”

Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.

“Eleven. Twelve. Thirteen. Fourteen. Fifteen.”

No delays that I could detect.

“Me, neither.”

Then how…?

“Andrew Porter said something about using quantum fog to scan the original Jake Sullivan’s brain noninvasively…”

You think that the duplicates are all quantum entangled?

“ ‘Quantally.’ The adjective is ‘quantally.’ ”

I know that.

“I know you do.”

Quantally entangled. So we are connected instantaneously.

“Exactly. What Albert Einstein called ‘spooky action at distance.’ ”

I suppose it’s possible.

“But why would Immortex create another duplicate of me on the moon?”

I don’t know, said the voice in my head. But I don’t like it here.

“Well, you can’t come down here, to Earth. There can be only one of us here.”

I know. Lucky bastard.

I thought about that. “I suppose I am.”

Karen was back on the witness stand, this time as called by Maria Lopez, rather than Deshawn. “Earlier,” said Lopez, “when cross-examining Professor Alyssa Neruda, your attorney, Mr. Draper, used the term ‘gerrymandering’ in relation to defining the line between life and death. Do you recall that?”

Karen nodded. “Yes, I do.”

“You’re a professional writer; I’m sure you have a large vocabulary. Could you enlighten us as to what that odd-sounding word—‘gerrymander’—means?”

Karen tilted her head to one side. “It means to redefine borders for political advantage.”

“In fact,” said Lopez, “it comes from an act by Elbridge Gerry, does it not, who redefined the political districts in Massachusetts when he was governor of that state, so that his party would be favored in upcoming elections, isn’t that so?”

“Gerry”—said Karen, pronouncing it with a hard G, “not Jerry. We’ve ended up saying gerrymander with a soft G, but the governor—and later, vice-president—pronounced his name with a hard G.”

I smiled at Karen’s ability to find a polite way to say, “So go fuck yourself, smart ass.”

“Ah, well, yes,” said Lopez. “In any event, the governor ended up redefining the borders of Essex County until it looked like a salamander. So, again, to gerrymander is to flagrantly move lines or borders for political or personal expediency, no?”

“You could say that.”

“And the lawyer for the plaintiff accused the Supreme Court of simply gerrymandering the line between life and death until they found something that was politically palatable, did he not?”

“That was what Mr. Draper was implying, yes.”

“But, of course, you want the men and women of this jury to gerrymander another line—the obvious, clear demarcation that is brain death—to another point, for your personal convenience, isn’t that so?”

“I would not put it that way,” said Karen, stiffly.

“And, in fact, you have a personal history of playing this gerrymandering game, don’t you?”

“Not that I’m aware of.”

“No? Ms. Bessarian, do you have any children?”

“Yes, of course. I have a son, Tyler.”

“The defendant in this case, is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“Any other children?”

Karen looked—well, I couldn’t tell; it was a contorting of her plastic face I’d never seen before, and so I didn’t know what emotion to correlate it with.

“Tyler is my only child,” said Karen at last.

“Your only living child,” said Lopez, “correct?”

Sometimes you read in novels about people’s mouths forming perfect “O’s” of surprise; flesh-and-blood human faces can’t really do that, but Karen’s synthetic countenance managed it perfectly while Lopez asked her question. But that expression was soon replaced with one of anger.

“You’re a woman,” said Karen. “How can you be so cruel? What does the fact that I lost a daughter to crib death possibly have to do with the matter at hand? Do you think I don’t still cry myself to sleep over it sometimes?”

For once, Maria Lopez looked completely flustered. “Ms. Bessarian, I—”

Karen continued. “For God’s sake, Ms. Lopez, to bring that—”

“Honestly, Ms. Bessarian,” exclaimed Lopez, “I had no idea! I didn’t know.”

Karen had her arms crossed in front of her chest. I glanced at the jury, who all looked like they hated Lopez just then.

“Really, Ms. Bessarian. I—I’m terribly sorry for your loss. Honestly, Karen—I—please forgive me.”

Karen still said nothing.

Lopez turned to Judge Herrington. “Your honor, perhaps a short recess…?”

“Twenty minutes,” said Herrington, and he rapped his gavel.