"Kiln People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

5 Clay Station

Damn.

I’m always grumpy getting up off the warming tray … grabbing paper garments from a rack and slipping them over limbs still glowing with ignition enzymes, knowing I’m copy-for-a-day.

Of course I remember doing this a thousand times. Still, it always feels like getting a long list of nasty chores, taking risks you’d never put your protobody through. I start this pseudolife filled with premonitions of a lesser death, dark and unmourned.

Ugh. What put me in this mood? Could it be Ritu’s news? A reminder that real death still lurks for us all?

Well, shrug it off! Life’s still the same as it was in the old days.

Sometimes you’re the grasshopper.

Sometimes an ant.

I watched gray number one head off to meet Miss Maharal. He took the Vespa, with today’s greenie riding on the saddle behind him.

That left one scooter for me to use alone. Seems fair. Number one gets to see Ritu and snoop around the affairs of a gazillionaire. Meanwhile, I must go visit the great witch of Studio Neo. At least I get to have my own transport. realAlbert turns away, shuffling out of the kiln room with nary a backward glance. Well, he needs to lie down. Rest the body. Keep it fit so we dupes can inload sometime tonight. I don’t feel snubbed. Much. If you’ve gotta be clay, it’s good to be gray. At least there are realistic pleasures to enjoy -

— like swerving through traffic, surprising stolid yellow-striped truckers as I cut in front of them, always alert for the telltale buzz of my cop-detector and making sure not to inconvenience any real people. Aggravating dits can be sport, just so long as each violation stays below the five-point threshold programmed into the publicams lining every street. (The threshold where they drop privacy constraints and form a grand posse.) I once racked up eleven four-pointers in a day, without triggering a single fine!

This little Turkmeni scooter doesn’t have as much power as the Vespa, but it’s agile and durable. Cheap, too. I make a note to order three more. Anyway, it’s risky having only two scoots on hand. What if I suddenly need to make an army, like happened last May? How will I rush a dozen red or purple copies of myself where they’re needed? By dinobus?

Nell obediently jots down my note, but she won’t put through a buy order till realAlbert wakes. Neurons okay all big purchases. Clay can only suggest.

Well, I’ll be Albert tomorrow. If I inload. If I make it home. Which shouldn’t be too problematic, I guess. Meetings with the maestra are wearing, but seldom fatal.

Slowing down for a light now. Stopping. Taking a moment to glance west, toward Odeon Square. Fresh memories of last night’s desperate flight and narrow escape still perturb my Standing Wave, even if it was only a green who suffered so.

I wonder who the waiter was. The one who helped me get away.

Light’s changed. Go! Maestra hates it when you’re late.

Studio Neo, just ahead. Charming place. It fills what used to be a huge windowless urban mall. Nowadays shopping is either a chore — you ask House to arrange deliveries — or else you do it for pleasure, strolling in person along tree-lined avenues like Realpeople Lane, where balmy venturi breezes flow all year round. Either way, it’s hard to picture why our parents did it in sunless grottos. A fluorescent-lit catacomb is no proper world for human beings.

So now malls are set aside for the new servant class. Us clayfolk.

Jitneys and scooters zip around the vast parking structure, conveying fresh dittos to clients all over town. And not just any dittos. Most bear specialized colors. Snow white for sensuality. Ebony for undiluted intellect. A particular scarlet that’s oblivious to pain … and another that experiences everything with fierce intensity. Few of these creatures return to their point of origin when the élan cells run down. Their rigs don’t expect them back for memory inloading.

Most Neo customers do return the scooters, however. To reclaim the deposit.

I park the Turkomen in a coded space set aside for folks like me — ditto intermediaries traveling on business, conveying important information between real people. Grays get priority, so the more luridly colored step aside as I enter the main arcade. Most do it reflexively, holding doors for me, almost as if I were human. But a few whites give way grudgingly, casting impertinent glares.

Well, what do you expect from whites? Pleasure is partly a matter of ego. Their kind needs self-importance in order to function.

Studio Neo occupies all four layers of the old mall, filling the grand atrium with a myriad holographic glows — an emporium of creative effort, illuminated by the garish logos of more than a hundred pushy production companies, each of them aspiring for pinnacle position in this anthill — a place up at the top the pyramid, where I’m heading right now.

The hungriest and most ambitious producers station dittowares right next to the escalators, offering free samples.

“Try me now and take home a special memory …” croons a pale form in a diaphanous gown, her figure enhanced in ways that real tissue couldn’t possibly support. “Then let us home-deliver. Your rig could enjoy me in person tomorrow!”

Tomorrow, she will be sludge in a tank. But I don’t say it. Manners, inherited from simpler days of youth, make me say, “No, thanks” — wasting breath on a creature who couldn’t care less.

“Had a rough day?” another one chants, this one exaggeratedly male, rippling in places where no natural man ever rippled — that is, outside the pages of a comic book. “Maybe your rig will inload you anyway, if you bribe him with something unique to remember. Try me and find out how good it gets!”

Or how weird it gets. No way to tell, of course, what kind of flesh this creature’s soul-imprint came from, whether a courtesan or a gigolo. The most aggressive or compliant of each kind tend to be crossovers, overcompensating for their upbringings, with relish.

This time I manage to pass without comment, riding the escalator to better precincts.

Some of the second-story firms offer specialized golem blanks. Put your mind into a toothy reptile, or a dolphinlike form to go deep-diving. Or go partying in a body with made-to-order parts. Some have hands like Swiss Army knives. I sometimes buy accessories from a discreet technical boutique, choosing enhancements for dittos sent on dangerous assignments. Pal shops here too, experimenting with ever more outré golems. He’d prefer that all his memories come that way, and none from his ravaged fragment of a natural body.

The next tout to approach isn’t selling sex. A gray like me, she’s dressed in conservative linen paper, fashioned like a TV doctor’s costume, all the way down to the endoscope hanging from her trim neck.

“Pardon the intrusion, sir. May I ask if you’ve been practicing prudent imprinting?”

I have to blink; it sounds familiar. “Oh, right. You mean protecting my real self from diseases that a ditto—”

“—might bring home and transmit through inloading. Yes, sir. Have you given any thought to how dangerous it can be to reclaim a golem that’s been who-knows-where in the course of a day? Exposed to everything from viruses to memic toxins?”

She offers a slim pamphlet and suddenly I remember a story in the news recently, played up mostly for humor, about people who evidently think we’re living in the bad old plague days of the Fizzle War.

“I try to stay clean. If there’s any question, I inload without touching my rig.”

“Memic toxins don’t require physical contact,” the imitation doctor insists. “They can spread via inloaded memories.”

I shake my head. “We’d be told if any such thing were—”

“There have been outbreaks in more than a dozen cities, around the globe.” Her professional demeanor slips, pushing the pamphlet. “They’re hiding the truth!”

They? A conspiracy fan, then. Talk about memic toxins! Could all of the agencies responsible for public safety — and all of their employees — collude to prevent the public from learning of a new plague? Even that wouldn’t suffice today, with so many clever amateurs around. Then there are the Henchman prizes, made alluring to draw confessions out of the most trusted lieutenant.

“An interesting hypothesis,” I murmur, backing away. “But then why haven’t the free-nets—”

“The toxin designers are clever. Varying symptoms from town to town! The free-nets correlate incidents, rumors, anecdotes. Nevertheless—”

Continuing to back up, I gratefully let the up escalator catch my heel, yanking me aboard the moving steps while feigning an apologetic-polite smile. The “doctor” stares after me for a moment, then swivels to approach another passerby.

Maybe later I’ll ask Nell to do a sift search on the topic of “memic plagues.” Till then, call it another aberrant entertainment served up by Studio Neo.

Now I’m passing the really classy establishments. “Scenarios Unlimited” will send you an expert interviewer — an ebony, zinglemindedly dedicated to create a script to match your budget and favorite fantasy. Then he’ll return with props and a complete cast of characters to play out any scene, from high literature to your darker dreams.

“Proxy Adventures” will take your imprinted-but-unbaked copy to some far corner of the world where they’ll kiln-activate it, put it through a day of frenetic escapades, then return the flash-frozen cranium in perfect condition, so you recall everything. A twenty-four-hour adventure, ready to serve.

Then there are specialists offering services no one imagined before golemtech. Almost anything that’s illegal to do to another human in flesh can be done to a ditto — though often with with fees and a perversion tax.

No wonder Inspector Blane hates this place. It’s one thing to contract out your duplicates for honest labor. Unions fought it and lost, and now millions earn a living in several places at once, doing whatever they happen to be good at, from janitorial service to nuclear reactor maintenance. A fair market offers top expertise to all, at affordable prices.

But expertise in entertainment? Brought down from the silver screen, liberated from the boob tube, leaping off the pages of pulpy romance novels, made tactile and personal … They say that when the Web started, the heaviest single use was for porn. Same here. Only now it walks and talks back to you. It can do whatever you want.

Wait a sec.

It’s the phone. I pick up in time to hear Nell pass the call to my real self.

Pal’s half-paralyzed face fills the little display, surrounded by wish sensors to command his magic wheelchair. He wants me to come over.

My rig sounds grumpy and tired. He won’t do another imprint.

“I’ve got three dits running around on errands,” he tells Pal. “One will drop by, if time allows.”

Three? The green won’t be up to handling Pal. And gray number one has to see Ritu Maharal about her murdered dad. There’s a chance he may even meet and question the real Vic Kaolin — something worth telling Clara about, when she gets back from her war.

So it’s up to me. If Wammaker lets me escape early, I’ll go listen to Pal’s latest wild-eyed theory or scheme. Crum. I can already feel my short “life” getting used up.

Top floor, where rooftop heliports give quick access to rich clients. Where illustrious producers serve fine coffee and fancy hors d’oeuvres, even to visiting grays! Here, elegant shops let you hire first-rate actors to play convincing roles in bodies molded to resemble anyone across time. There’s a penalty when a ditto doesn’t resemble its rig, but it’s small when no fraud is involved. Not that producers refuse a little fraud, now and then.

Wealthy clients also come here to arrange extravaganzas. Once, someone hired Clara’s reserve infantry platoon, off-duty, to be extras in a bloody rendition of Caligula’s final orgy-slaughter. She snuck me in to watch the performance from behind a purple curtain. The reenactment was vivid, lurid, and maybe even educational in its attention to historical detail. The swordfights were superb. Clara’s golem died especially well.

Still, I didn’t care for the show.

“I’m glad you feel that way,” she agreed. In fact, not one member of her outfit inloaded memories from that evening’s brutal carnage. It kind of makes you proud of our boys and girls in khaki.

I’m still more than twenty meters from the elegant portico of Wammaker’s when a cowled figure catches my eye, gesturing from the shadows.

“Mr. Morris. Good of you to come.”

Taking a step closer, I recognize the ditto under the hood. Maestra’s executive assistant, her face a conservative gray tone, perfectly matching her attire.

“Will you come with me, please?”

She beckons and I follow … away from Wammaker’s. “Our meeting concerns sensitive topics, better discussed elsewhere,” she explains, handing me a cowled robe like her own. “Please put this on.”

If I were real, I might worry. Could the maestra be planning some ornate revenge for my breezy behavior toward her earlier? But then, so what? I’m just a ditto.

I put the robe on and follow.

A small service elevator takes us down, back to the low-rent floors of the old mall. Doors open and my guide heads straight for a nondescript storefront with opaque windows, bearing the name RENEWAL ASSOCIATES. I follow her into a realm of hanging fabrics that shimmer with piezoluminescence, wafting in tailored breezes. Some effort’s even gone to growing indoor plants that provide a welcoming atmosphere. Mostly simple ferns and ficus. But your eye is meant to be drawn elsewhere, to holo posters of Gineen and her best affiliates — women and men whose copies offer sybaritic pleasures to those weary of mere sex.

Off the waiting room stand shaded booths where clients may consult privately with special advisers. Still, it’s not as elegant as Wammaker’s. The maestra must be branching out.

“Please wait,” the assistant says, pointing to a straightback wooden chair … no doubt a precious antique, and uncomfortable as well. I stand again as soon as she departs. My golem blanks have relax-a-stilt joints. Sitting is redundant.

Of course I’ll be kept waiting, so I pull out a cheap reading plaque and dial up the Journal of Antisocial Proclivities. Since Ritu Maharal proclaimed that her father was murdered, I thought about looking up homicide. (I wonder how gray number one is doing right now. Have I reached any conclusions yet?) But after passing through Studio Neo, my thoughts wander toward another problem. Decadence.

Are the new puritans right? Is golemtech hardening our hearts?

Clara calls this place a “soul-callus.”

“Today we can wallow in depravity without paying for it in disease or hangovers,” she said only last week. “The oldest profession’s been updated for a new age, without prisons, prudity, or any need for empathy. What a deal.”

Me, I’m usually less cynical. Life is better in lots of ways. Wealthier. More tolerant. No one cares what shade of brown your real skin is.

But my grays do vary a bit from one another and this one feels a dour suspicion that Clara may be right.

Blinking, I notice that the reading plaque already glows with a selected journal article. It must’ve done an iris-dilation interest scan while I pondered gloomy thoughts. (Who says dittos don’t have a subconscious?)

Sublimation of the Immortality Impulse:

A Return to Necromancy?

Ouch. What a title for a scientific paper! Not my usual cuppa tea. Still it’s intriguing. I wonder …

“Mr. Morris?”

It’s the assistant. I expected to be snubbed longer than that. Maybe Wammaker really is worried about something this time.

Looking up, I notice the assistant’s gray dittobody has blue eyes.

“The maestra will see you now.”