He imagined that it blew again, but that he felt no cold; in a moment the wind was sharp and clean in his nostrils and cool on his naked skin, but it did not make him shiver.
He went to the parapet. The balcony was situated in one of the higher reaches of the humanly-scaled fortress, with a view to the west. The shadow of the castle lay across the western inner bailey, the umbrous image of the fast-tower just touching the foot of the curtain-walls. As Sessine had ordered, there was nobody to be seen, and not even any wildlife visible. The sky, distant hills and the castle itself looked perfectly convincing.
He imagined himself on the fast-tower
/and was there, suddenly standing on a gaily painted wooden platform at the summit of the castle’s tallest tower, with only a flagpole and a snapping flag – his clan’s – above him. The view was better from here; he could see the ocean, far to the west. Just beyond the handrail the slates sloped away to the circular battlements.
He gripped the wooden rail of the platform, squeezing it until his fingers ached, then squatted and inspected the underside of the rail’s inverted U near where it met a stanchion. The red paint under the flat surface was convincingly bumpy, with little bubbles of smooth, solidified paint near the angle the rail described with the post. He put his thumbnail against one of the bubbles and pressed hard. When he took his thumb away again there was a little groove impressed on the hemisphere of paint.
He ducked quickly under the rail and launched himself into the air. He bounced once off the steeply raked tiles, winding himself and hurting his shoulder, cleared the crenellations of the tower’s battlements and hurtled towards the steeply pitched roof far below. The wind-roar screamed in his ears as the slates rose to meet him.
‘Oh, this is silly,’ he said, gasping against the storm of air.
He cancelled the injury in his shoulder and decided… to fly; the roof below slid to one side and he glided away, sweeping through the air above the castle.
Had he plummeted to his death upon that slated roof, it would have been also to another – almost immediate – rebirth in the same bed he had not long departed; just as in base-reality one had eight lives, so one had eight here. Choosing to end them meant that one would remain unconscious for the duration of the mourning period, and only be woken for a slowed-down real and subjective hour to converse with one’s bereaved relations and friends immediately before disposal. This was not a common option, but remained available for those whose depression or ennui extended beyond their deaths.
Flying was exactly as he remembered it from his childhood dreams; it required some sort of willed effort in the mind, like pedalling a cycle even though one’s legs did not move. If one ceased this dream-virtual effort, one sank slowly to earth. The harder one pedalled, the higher one flew. There was no fatigue and no fear, just wonder and exhilaration.
Sessine flew round the castle for some time, at first naked, then clothing himself with trousers, shirt and frock coat. He landed on the balcony outside the bedroom where he had awoken.
A light breakfast was waiting, on a table by the bed. At this point – in every other rebirth since that first one – he had eaten, then indulged in a full morning’s dalliance with a maid he remembered from his late childhood who had been the first woman he had lusted after, as well as one of the few with whom he had been unable to requite such regard. On this occasion, however, he cancelled the breakfast, his growing hunger, and the maid’s appearance. Nor would he spend the next few subjective months in the castle’s library, re-reading books, listening to music, watching films and recorded plays and operas and watching or taking part in discussions with recreated ancients, recreated historical incidents or virtual fictions.
He imagined an antique phone by the bedside. He lifted the receiver.
‘Hello?’ The voice was pleasant and sexless.
‘Enough,’ he said.
The castle vanished before he could replace the handset.
There was ample time before his funeral.
At that point – like all the dead, whether they were high or low, and Privileged or not – he would face the final proof of the crypt’s ferociously impartial judgment. As the saying had it: the crypt was deep and the human soul was shallow. And the shallower the soul, the less of it survived as any sort of independent entity within the data corpus; somebody whose only opinions were received opinions and whose originality quotient was effectively zero would dissolve almost entirely within the oceanic depths of the crypt’s precedent-saturated data streams and leave only a thin froth of memories and a brief description of the exact shape of their hollowness behind, the redundancy of their beings annihilated by the crypt’s abhorrence of over-duplication.
Should that personality ever be called back into existence in the base-level world, it could be recreated exactly from the crypt’s already existing database of sentience types.
It was believed that the certainty of such a verdict provided the incentive for people to improve themselves in a society which gave every appearance of being able to function quite adequately with almost no human input whatsoever.
Sessine, if not as one of the Privileged then as a man who had over the course of several lifetimes assiduously cultivated his own cultivation, was in practice if not in theory guaranteed a continued existence within the corpus as an individual.
Even had he been due solely for the compulsory incorporation that was the fate of lesser mortals when the moment came, there would still have been time for what he had in mind. The three days in physical reality before his funeral equated to over eighty years in the quickened medium of crypt-time; time enough for another life to be lived after death, and easily sufficient to encompass the investigation a dead man might wish to mount into the reason for his murder.
‘The data-set from the time of your death was recorded as a matter of course by your bioware and transmitted to the command car’s event-recorder as well as its own computer; the latter was destroyed along with the car when your murderer turned the car’s gun on the convoy and drew retaliatory fire. The event-recorder survived; it also squirted its primary function-suite state to the nearest convoy units when it realised the car was under attack and these read-cuts square with the data in the recorder itself, so we may comfortably assume your final memories are accurate.’
The construct of the clan Aerospace’s chief crypt-lawyer was configured to respond to its clients’ personalities; for Sessine this meant that it appeared as a tall, highly attractive woman in early middle-age who wore her long black hair tied back, used little make-up, dressed in late-twentieth-century corporate-male clothes and talked with quiet authority; Sessine found it almost amusing how perfectly such an image demanded and received his attention. No bullshit, no unnecessary gestures or expressions, no false buddiness, no flimflam and no attempts either to impress or ingratiate. Even his short attention span and low boredom threshold had been catered for; she spoke fast. And in the pauses, he could imagine her unclothed (though, as she was a separate entity within the crypt, such imagining no more made itself immediately actual than it would have had they both been real people in base-reality).
He supposed that a male construct might have worked almost as well, but he liked smart, quick-witted, self-assured women, and he despised the off-the-peg models of such constructs just because convention demanded they must exhibit some hint of vulnerability, some girlishness that was supposed to make him feel that despite such obvious capability and presence, this woman was some kind of sexual pushover, or not really his equal.
They were sitting in a vault room of the Bank of England, in Edwardian times. Their seats were constructed of gold ingots and cushioned with layers of big white five-pound notes; their table was a trolley normally used to transport bullion. Primitive electric lights flickered on the metal walls and reflected off further piles and stacks of gold bars. Sessine had salvaged the image from an early twenty-first-century VR fiction.
‘What do we have on the man who murdered me?’
‘He was called John Ilsdrun IV, second-lieutenant. Nothing anomalous in his background or recent behaviour. His implants had been doctored and, if he survives in usable form anywhere, it is not in the general body of the crypt. We’re running deeper checks on all his lives and contacts so far, but they’ll take subjective days to complete.’
‘And the message he received?’
‘A code within the gistics burst: “Veritas odium par it.” ‘
‘”Truth begets hatred.” How cryptic.’