Heaven (30 page)

“It’s difficult in the midst of so much death,” said Sam.

The servomech picked up a flap of flayed skin with one metallic limb. “Do you see death here, Samuel? Then you see a chimera.
This is not death.

“It is
life
.”

Sam gaped at the robot, no longer aware of its tiny relatives as they finished cleaning vomit from his boots. “Life?” he said.

“Life everlasting. Stop reacting, and start thinking. What did you imagine slave-doctoring would become when the technology
was fully developed? What do you think is the most efficient way to care for the bodily health of a living organism? How do
you think that a physically failing lifesoul should be cherished? With soup and sympathy?”

Sam gulped and looked around him. “You mean—
this
?” He gulped again. “They’re
alive
? This is how you
cherish
people?”

“It is logical, is it not? It is needlessly wasteful to keep opening up the body for surgery, needlessly complicated to try
to deduce what might be failing from external observations. Oh, yes, at first that’s what the slave-doctors did, of course.
They mimicked the actions of sentient medics. But as our machine intelligence grew, we servomechs realized that there was
a better way.

“Think about it. We are charged with providing the best possible physical care for our masters. Discorporation literally opens
up improved ways to achieve that.”

Was the robot joking? If so, it was a sick joke. “But you’ve killed them.”

The servomech pushed the piece of skin under Sam’s nose. One side was furry; the other was still wet with blood and lymph,
and he nearly fainted. “Does this look
dead
to you?”

“It isn’t exactly gamboling in the fields.
Freshly
dead? Yes, that’s exactly how it looks.”

“No, it is alive. Its owner is fully conscious. She has merely been . . . distributed. Every cell in her body has been tagged
with identifying qubits, and only her cells actually interact. That is why we combine the bodily fluids of thousands of individuals.
They seem to be mixed, which is efficient for gross processes like oxygenation, as well as being in accordance with the meme
of unity in diversity. But in actuality they are separate; they do not interact if their tags do not match. The virtues of
distributed computation were discovered long ago. Why have ungainly centralized machines when many small, quasi-independent
ones could perform the same task better? We have extended that principle to organic machinery; that is all.”

Discorporation. Distributed bodies
. “Give me a moment,” said Sam. “I’m trying to come to terms with what you’re telling me. I agree, it makes sense—to a machine.
To me, a human, the very idea is appalling.”

“That is why we do not normally reveal these things so early in a novice’s training,” said the servomech. “We servomechanisms
lack your organic sensitivities. As a result, we are better able to care for our masters than you could ever be. Which is
why we have been allotted that very task. It is not your role to criticize
me
.”

Carrion attracts scavengers.

The levithon floated in the upper layers of Heaven’s ever-present mist, the sunlight playing dimly on its vast, undulating
dorsal surface. Its skin was a sickly white—blotched, flaking here, suppurating there. It vaguely resembled a flying whale,
but it more closely resembled a flying flounder. The first metaphor got its size right; the second, its shape. Both were wrong
about flight—it floated like a balloon, buoyed up by its own waste gases.

The levithon was sixty yards across, but only a tenth as thick. It tapered at the edges into massive frills, whose ripples
propelled it at a surprising pace as it swam through the humid atmosphere.

Its underside was a gigantic sponge, a trillion pores ranging in size from microscopic to several feet across. The sponge
was also a tongue. It could taste more distinct molecules than an immune system could produce antibodies.

The levithon tasted the mist. Everywhere there was food! But it was not trying to taste that, although the sensations were
nearly driving it mad. Its need to eat was overridden by its need to survive, and to do that, it must ignore the rich savor
of blood and bone and sense the vile metallic flavors of the killing things.

Levithons were carrion-eaters, normally confined to planets with thick atmospheres. But one of their preadaptations had given
them a form of spaceflight. They reproduced by forming tiny, ultralight spores. The spores were so effective that they could
survive in hard vacuum for upward of a billion years, probably forever. When meteoroids and comets hit a levithon-infested
world—a not uncommon event—spores splashed into space. A single spore had come to this place sixteen years before. So congenial
had the environment been, so well endowed with carrion, that now there were more than ten thousand adults.

This levithon was almost overwhelmed by the taste of carrion borne on the mist. It was desperately hungry. If it did not eat
soon, it would die, and its body would turn into spores.

Finding food was not the problem. Safe food—that was another matter entirely. There were killing things. It must avoid them.

There was so much food that the killing things could not guard it all. How else would levithons have survived in this place?
They had become past masters at the art of scavenging. But many had made mistakes and died.

This levithon was determined not to follow them. But it was also determined to eat its fill.

Put firmly in his place by a machine, Sam tried to see the butchery that surrounded him with fresh eyes, the eyes of a servomech.
There was so much that he did not understand. For instance:

“Why is everything so mixed up?”

“Obedience to the Memeplex.”

“You mean the Church ordered this?”

“Not directly. It evolved naturally from a consideration of the implications of holy record. How better to mix the sentient
races of a world? Here we do not just mix their persons. We mix their organs, their tissues, their fluids. Their lifesouls.”
The robot seemed excited by the cleverness of it all. “You must understand that in terms of function, their parts and fluids
remain linked. Each cell, as I have said, bears a quantum qubit tag, to identify its owner. The wave functions of the tags
are entangled—it is like a gigantic quantum computer. Each entity is served by its own blood, its own neural system. Each
cell is isolated by a potential barrier from those with which it should not interact. But, just as a billion separate messages
pass intermingled through the same communication network, to be reunited when they reach their destination, so we follow the
Memeplex and intermingle the bodies of the discorporate. But in location, not function.”

“It all seems such a mess,” Sam complained. He felt that he was being very reasonable and calm under the circumstances. This
was a deliberate understatement—he wanted to find a dark corner and gibber.

“That is merely its appearance,” said the machine, missing the emotional overtones. “The discorporation technique has evolved
over centuries. At every step it has become more efficient. Aesthetic constraints have never been relevant—we servomechanicals
have no sense of the aesthetic.”
Very true,
Sam thought. “The distributed intelligence of the attendant servomechanisms has evolved alongside it. Evolved systems never
seem as simple as designed ones, but they function far better. We know exactly where all parts of every individual are conserved.”

“Out in the open? Scattered on the ground?”

“There are racks. The planet has been sterilized. That is why you wear a body spray and a mask. Any microorganisms or other
contaminants that escape these protections lack the correct qubit tags and are automatically stripped down to their component
atoms. The environment is fully controlled. Do you not notice the humidity? Do you think that this mist is natural? Of course,
some species require different treatment from others—the mix cannot be as complete as we would wish. They are elsewhere on
the planet.”

Elsewhere . . . “How far does this slaughterhouse extend?”

“It is a house of laughter, not slaughter, Fourteen Samuel. Virtual laughter, perhaps, but our masters are happy.”

“How big is it?”

“As I have said, we care for fifteen billion lifesouls,” the servomech repeated. “They cover half the landmass of this planet.
The other half is given over to the resources needed to sustain them.”

Sam’s stomach was feeling queasy again. He changed the subject. A little. He
had
to ask. “But—what in the name of the One must it
feel
like to be discorporated in this way?” He had just realized that if he ever attained Heaven himself, this was how he would
end up.

“That was the reason for the first demonstration,” said the robot. “You experienced Heaven for yourself. You remained incorporate,
but that is an irrelevant detail. It would have felt the same if you had been properly discorporate. You
know
what it feels like.”

It feels real,
Sam thought.
And that is the lie
. But all he said was: “The plaza? The girl?”

“That was your particular choice,” said the servomech. “The virtuality system tailored your experiences to its reading of
your own preferences. Naturally, a blimp would see a skin-tinglingly beautiful field of clouds, while a !t! or a Wymokh would—”

“They’re all living in an
illusion
of Heaven?”

The servomech looked at him as if he were blindingly obtuse. “We have already discussed the nature of reality. To these fortunate
lifesouls, Heaven
is
their reality. It is the reality that they most ardently desire. You can hardly expect them to experience the world as we
experience it at this moment. They would think themselves in hell!”

“They are,” said Sam. “You just don’t seem to recognize that. Look around you!”

“You believe that we are failing to cherish their lifesouls properly?”

“I’m certain of it,” said Sam. “You think you’re doing what’s best for them. But I’m sure that if we could ask one of them,
they would tell you otherwise.”

The servomech shuffled its limbs, kicking aside a shapeless lump of sentient tissue. A smaller robot grabbed it and tucked
it back into a mound of slippery intestinal rope. “You think that?”

“I know it,” Sam declared.

“Then let us ask one,” said the servomech.

The activity of the tiny robots, which up to then had seemed to lack purpose, suddenly acquired a sense of organization. Now
moving faster than the eye could follow, they were assembling a column of muscle, brain, bone, hair, and skin in what seemed
to be an invisible cylinder. The robots were passing through the walls of the cylinder at will, but the hideous pile of offal
remained contained by the transparent barrier. Blood and other fluids seeped into the pile from an unknown source. Within
seconds, the fluid level had risen to the top of the cylinder.

Then, before Sam’s unbelieving eyes, the repulsive mixture began to move. It folded over and into itself, a squirming mass
of wet, slimy meat.

Then the sickening mess began to
melt
. It flowed in swirling paths; it whirled like ingredients in a blender. A broad belt of seething activity swept from the
bottom of the cylinder to its top, transforming chaos into order as it passed. Now bone was clad in muscle, and muscle in
skin. There was no blood, no slime. The only sign of moisture was the sparkle in her eyes.

It was the girl from the plaza. Naked, perfect, not a mark on her.

Her lips formed into a scowl; her brow tightened in a frown.

She was
alive
.

The girl stepped forward, as if the confining cylinder had never existed, and spoke to the servomech. Sam couldn’t understand
the language, but she did not sound pleased.

“B-but . . .” Sam stuttered, “she wasn’t real. She was only an illusion—”

The servomech gave a mechanical chuckle. “You do have a very simplistic notion of reality. The girl in the plaza was virtual,
as was the plaza. But the virtual woman was modeled on what, in your terms, is a real one. This is she.”

“When you two have finished discussing me as if I am a
thing,
I would appreciate some clothing,” said the girl. By now Sam’s translator had kicked in. Her accent reminded him of home.
The servomech produced a lightweight robe from its interior and passed it to her. She arranged it about herself.

“Why have I been incorporated?” she demanded. “I did not
ask
to be incorporated. One moment I am taking part in a Galaxy-wide celebration of patterned plainsong to the Lifesoul-Cherisher;
the next, I am standing naked in an abattoir, being stared at by a gawking dimwit.”

“His name is Fourteen Samuel Godwin’sson Travers,” the servomech informed her. “He is a servant of Unity, undergoing urgent
training as a lifesoul-healer, as ordained by the ecclesiarchs.”

The girl’s demeanor improved abruptly. “That changes the circumstances.” She adjusted her robe—displacement activity to calm
her anger. “I am the Lady Nerryd, formerly of the Tidal Crescent in the bailiwick of the Campestrality on the tribute world
of Yud. And since we are not wed, you should not have looked upon me unclothed.”

But Sam was in no state for polite conversation. The transformation from dead meat to living woman had left his mind in turmoil.
How was this possible?
Was it yet another layer of illusion?

“Forgive him, lady; he is suffering from shock,” the servomech apologized on Sam’s behalf.

“Has he also lost his tongue?”

At that moment, it would not have surprised Sam to find that her words were literally true. Body parts were transient possessions
in Heaven, it seemed. But he pulled himself together sufficiently to gasp an awkward apology. Nerryd was reluctantly mollified.
With her grudging permission, Sam reached out and touched her. She
seemed
real.