“I can understand that.”
“One more thing. None of us could accept the news, when he had the stroke. I mean, he was still a young man, hardly past seventy. We assumed he’d be around at least fifty more years. But his own vitality must have burned him out.”
“He’ll be back among us all soon enough,” said Santoliquido.
“As a persona, yes. That’s not quite the same as having Uncle Paul striding through the rooms booming out orders.”
“Time will tell about that. It’ll take a strong man to hold him down, Mark.”
“You’re expecting Paul to take over his host?”
“I’m not expecting anything, officially. I’m merely a bureaucrat, and it’s not my business to expect. Come. I’ll take you to see your uncle.”
“And Risa’s three possible personae,” Kaufmann reminded him.
“Those too,” said Santoliquido.
Kaufmann followed him from the office into a private drop-shaft that moved so serenely he was unaware of motion; even the tug of gravity was absent. Here in this monstrous house of death and rebirth Kaufmann always felt ill at ease and badly orientated. He had no real notion of the contents of the infinity of offices on these hundred forty floors, nor did he even know how deep into bedrock the structure extended, what possible maze of stories lay out of sight. Within this too conspicuous edifice were filed the personae of the notable dead, some eighty million of them that had died since the introduction of the Scheffing process as a commercial fact. Yet the storage even of eighty million personae, Kaufmann knew, could be accomplished in modest space. There were many rooms in this building where persona recordings were made, and other rooms in which the transplants took place, but a great deal of the building’s volume was unaccountable to him.
He did not know where in the tower Santoliquido had taken him now, whether toward the soaring summit or deep into the bowels. He merely followed, through silent passageways agleam with living light.
The Scheffing Institute was a quasipublic corporation, closely regulated by the Government, its administrators chosen by Congress, its board of directors containing a specified quota of Government appointees. Its schedule of fees and services was subject to Federal supervision. In effect, the Institute was a public utility of death, and rebirth. No common stock was available for purchase; its frequently issued debt securities were offered only to municipal and institutional investors; its profits, which were great, went primarily into renewed research, once amortization payments were made. Important as the Institute was, its existence impinged only marginally on the lives of most of Earth’s nine billion people. Merely a minority could afford the costs of escaping oblivion. There was a stiff fee for registration; the fee payable each time one recorded one’s persona was not small; a registrant was expected, though not required, to make a new recording at least once every six months. The cost of receiving a persona transplant was formidable—more than the average man could hope to earn in a lifetime. In theory, anyone who had the money and was certifiably stable could receive a new persona each year of his adult life, superimposed above the earlier ones. But in practice most people were content with two or three transplants, if they could afford that many. No one, to Kaufmann’s knowledge, had ever taken more than nine. Though he could well afford any number of additional identities himself, he had not applied for a new one in more than a decade. He found three quite enough—not counting the youthful indiscretion that had had to be erased.
It was anything but cheap to erase a persona, also. The Institute turned its profit at every stage of the process.
Kaufmann followed Santoliquido into the vestibule of the main storage vault. It was a long, low-roofed tunnel whose far end was plugged by a security door almost comical in its paranoid massiveness. Through apertures in the glossy blank roof came colored lights of scanners: a blue ray, a green, a turquoise, a pale yellow.
“What are they checking?” Kaufmann asked.
“Everything imaginable. Your blood type’s going on tape, your retinal pattern, your DNA-RNA, and several other matters too intimate to mention. If you ever came through here bent on larceny, you’d be picked up within minutes after you left the building.”
“What if the scanners get through and find I’m too disreputable to admit?”
“It’ll be unpleasant.”
Kaufmann envisioned a cage of pressure tape springing from the ceiling and trapping him. Whirling blades slashing him into hamburger. A trapdoor opening to hurl him to limbo. But in fact the colored lights vanished, and with solemn ponderousness the great door began to open. Santoliquido nodded. They stepped out onto the grand concourse of the main storage vault.
It was a room perhaps a thousand feet high and three hundred feet wide from wall to wall. At the very top, far above his head, Kaufmann saw banks of light-globes affixed to the fabric of the building; but only a fraction of that light made its way down to the midlevel on which they stood, and below him were levels of Stygian bleakness. Motes of dust hovered in the vast central cavity of the room. Along the walls were ladders, catwalks, a spiderweb of metal pathways. Staring across the gulf, Kaufmann made out racks of shelves, paneled urns, shadows in the darkness. All this has been done for effect, he told himself. Surely the Institute could afford better lighting, if it wanted it.
“Come,” said Santoliquido.
They moved along the tier. Silent figures in white smocks traversed private paths on other levels, and robots with blunt heads rolled on soundless treads from tier to tier, inserting something here, withdrawing there. Santoliquido paused in front of a sealed bank of urns and dialed a computer code. The bank opened. Reaching in, he withdrew a shining coppery casket some six inches wide, four inches long, two inches high.
“In this,” he said, “is the persona of Paul Kaufmann.”
Kaufmann took it from him and examined it with more awe than he cared to reveal.
“May I open it?”
“Go ahead.”
“I don’t see how—ah. There.” He pressed a projecting lever and the casket’s top rose. Within lay a tightly coiled reel of black tape, smaller across than Kaufmann’s palm, and a stack of data flakes. “This?” he said. “This is Uncle Paul?”
“His memories. His experiences. His aggressions. His frailties. The women he loved, the men he hated. His business coups. His childhood ailments. The graduation speech; the cramped muscle; the wedding night. All there. This was recorded in December. It takes him from childhood to the edge of the grave.”
“Suppose I reached over the balcony and hurled all this down there,” Kaufmann said. “The flakes would scatter. The tape would be ruined. That would be the end of Uncle Paul, wouldn’t it?”
“Why do you think so?” Santoliquido asked. “Your uncle was here every six months for more than thirty years. We have many replicas on file of what you hold in your hand.”
Kaufmann gasped. “You keep the old ones after a re-recording?”
“Naturally. We have an extensive library of your uncle’s personae. You have the latest one, the most complete; but if anything happened to it, we could make use of the last but one, which would lack only six months of his life experience. And so on backward. Of course, we always use the most recent recording for transplant purposes. The rest are kept as emergencies, a redundancy control, so to speak.”
“I never knew that!”
“We don’t make a point of announcing it.”
“So you have sixty-odd recordings of Uncle Paul in this building! And a couple of dozen of me! And—”
“Not in this building, necessarily,” said Santoliquido. “We have many storage vaults, Mark, well decentralized. We guard against calamities. We have to.”
Kaufmann considered that. It had never occurred to him that such surrogate recordings existed, or even that there might be supplementary soul banks elsewhere, but both were logical enough. An implication struck him.
“If there are duplicates,” he said slowly, “then it should be p
ossible to transplant one man’s persona into more than one recipient at the same time, yes? You could give Uncle Paul to Roditis, and Uncle Paul minus the last six months to someone else, and so on.”
“Technically possible. But wholly unethical and unlawful. We keep the reserves as reserves. They’ve never been used that way and never will.” Santoliquido looked agitated at the possibility. “Never.”
Kaufmann nodded. The intensity of Santoliquido’s reply unsettled him. He closed the casket and handed it back.
“Now do you believe he’s dead?” Santoliquido asked.
“Well, of course, I’ve got no evidence that the tape in this box has anything to do with Uncle Paul.”
“Would you like to sample it?”
“Me? Are you proposing a temporary transplant?”
“I’ll give you thirty seconds of Uncle Paul,” Santoliquido offered. “Just as if you were shopping for a new persona. Then you can decide for yourself whether he’s on that tape. Come along. In here.”
They entered a cubicle with dark translucent walls. It contained a reclining seat, a console of equipment, a row of jeweled scanners. Santoliquido removed the tape from the box and clipped it into the grips of one of the scanners. He beckoned Kaufmann to the reclining seat.
They were in a sampling booth now. This apparatus was used strictly for checking and testing. What Kaufmann would experience was not in any way a transplant, not even a temporary; Santoliquido was just going to tune him in on the recorded thought waves of his late uncle and let him swim in them for half a minute.
Kaufmann watched, chilled and apprehensive, as Santoliquido adjusted his scanners and placed cold electrodes against his forehead. The plump man looked somber too; he had already tasted this experience, thought Kaufmann, and obviously it had been no pleasure for him. An amber warning light went on. Santoliquido tugged at a knife-switch.
Mark Kaufmann winced as his uncle came flooding into his brain.
It was a torrent, an avalanche, a cascade. Uncle Paul swept through his synapses with violent impact. A tide of raw sensuality came first; then a sudden stab of gastric pain; then a set of precise, instantaneous, all-encompassing calculations for the purchase, lease-back, and depreciation of a four-square-mile area in Shanghai’s northern suburbs. On top of that came an overlay of family scheming, a nest of intricate and poisonous interpretations of taut relationships. In the first ten seconds of contact with his uncle’s soul, Kaufmann thought his mind would burn out. In the second ten seconds he struggled for equilibrium like a man caught in rough surf and dashed again and again to the sand. In the third ten seconds he found that equilibrium, gaining purchase of sorts and discovering a strength within himself that he had not suspected. He realized that he could meet his dead uncle as an equal. The old man had the advantage of greater age, but not really of greater force; the Kaufmann genes had traveled from uncle to nephew in a knight’s move of inheritance, and for all the unshackled power of Paul’s furious mind, Mark knew that he could handle it indefinitely, if he had to.
The contact broke.
Kaufmann’s eyes opened. He slipped the electrodes free and put his hands to his temples. Phantom calculations danced through his skull—the old man’s arbitrage schemes, realty enterprises, testamentary codicils, percentage plans, all whirled together in a wild dance of dollars.
“Well?” Santoliquido asked. “Do you know your uncle better now?”
“The ruthless old bastard!” Kaufmann said in admiration. “The wonderful pirate! What a tragedy that he’s gone!”
“He’ll be back.”
“Yes. Yes.” Kaufmann clutched the arms of the chair. “I’d give anything to have him myself,” he said in a low voice. “I’m the one best qualified to have him. Paul and I were a superb team, these last few years. Think how much better we’d be, working together in one mind!”
“I hope you’re joking, Mark.”
“Not really. Paul and I belong together. I know, I know, it’s against the law to transplant a persona to so close a relative.”
“Don’t forget that your uncle directly requested in his will that he not be transplanted to any member of his own family.”
“As though he didn’t know about the law,” said Kaufmann.
“Or as though he expected that someone like you would circumvent it.”
Kaufmann flushed. “But what are you going to do with him? Give him to Roditis? Put those two together and they’ll steal the universe!”
“Roditis can handle your uncle’s persona,” said Santoliquido. “He’s got the strong personality that’s necessary. What we must guard against is giving Paul to someone who’ll be overwhelmed. The host must always remain in command. Roditis would.”
“But he’s got no scruples. He’s nothing but an unprincipled buccaneer. And Paul was a principled buccaneer. Bring them into harmony and—”
“No decision has been taken,” Santoliquido said brusquely. “Do you wish to inspect the three potential personae your daughter has selected?”
“Yes,” Kaufmann murmured. “I might as well.”
Santoliquido opened an information line and uttered a request. Moments later three persona caskets clattered out of a delivery slot. Santoliquido inserted Paul Kaufmann’s casket in the same slot and sent it on its way back to storage. Then, turning, he said, “All these three young women died violently before the age of thirty. All three were quite beautiful, I understand. Risa had certain very specific anatomical and sexual qualifications, which of course we were able to meet, since the range of available personae is so great. To preserve the privacy of the dead, I’ll call these three simply X, Y, and Z. Thirty seconds of each should be enough to gratify your curiosity. Have you ever sampled a female persona before, Mark?”
“You know I’ve never done anything like that.”
“Of course. Of course. Well, it’s an amusing novelty. I often think our prejudice against transsexual transplants is foolish. If a man could incorporate at least one female persona, or a woman at least one male one, there’d be far less anguish in this world. But I suppose we’re not yet ready for that radical a step. And I suppose few people are really eager to allow their personae to come to life in a body of alien sex. Oh, they’d like to try it for a few days, but as for making it permanent—” As he spoke, Santoliquido was deftly inserting one of Risa’s choices into the scanning equipment. Once more the electrodes touched Kaufmann’s skull. He felt vaguely uncertain about doing this, but then he reflected that his exhibitionistic daughter would certainly not mind his peeking into her personae, and also that he had already spied on his daughter in many matters nearly as intimate.
The apparatus hummed.
“This is X,” said Santoliquido. “Killed last year in a power-ski accident at St. Moritz, age twenty-four.”
In the thirty seconds that followed, Mark Kaufmann learned a great many surprising things. He discovered what it was like to have breasts; he sampled the sensations of the penetrated instead of those of the penetrator; he felt the ebb and flow of feminine biology impinge on him; he scented a new perfume of flesh; he experienced the texture of his own smooth female body. He also generated an instant and electric dislike for the personality of the unknown X.
Giving him no pause for evaluation, Santoliquido said, “And now Y. Drowned off Macao last summer, age twenty-eight.”
More of the same: the slow throb of the flesh, the lazy tremor of vaginality. In his brief contact with the mind of the dead girl, Kaufmann ran imaginary hands over silken imaginary thighs, yawned, stretched, yearned for pleasure. This was a more relaxed spirit than X’s; in that first persona there had tingled some disturbing undercurrent, some sort of hunger for an unclear vengeance, while in this girl was merely a generalized appetite for gratification, far less intense, far less vivid. Her recorded soul winked and guttered and was gone.
“Z,” said Santoliquido. “Twenty-six years old. Pushed or jumped, eighty stories up.”
Pushed, Kaufmann decided, after
only an instant of contact with Z. This girl had not had the vitality to commit suicide. She was placid, passive, soft within and without. Now that the novelty of peering into female souls had worn off, Kaufmann found himself swiftly bored by this one. She was a void, a hollowness, and the thirty seconds dragged abysmally.
“You may find yourself slightly impotent tonight,” Santoliquido was saying. “I suppose I should have warned you. There’s a kind of sexual confusion that sets in after you’ve done some transsexual sampling. But it wears off in a day or so. How did you find it, being female?”
“Interesting. Not very appealing, though.”
“Well, of course, these were young, shallow girls. I could find you female personae that would give you a real jolt of character. But the outward manifestations are unusual, aren’t they? You never dreamed it was like that, so different, to belong to the other sex?”
“I’m glad to have had the opportunity. I can’t say I’m impressed by any of my daughter’s choices.”
“Which would you prefer her to take? She’s going to pick one, you know.”
Kaufmann nodded. “Z was nothing but a cow. Risa would be as bored with her company as I was. Y was neutral, good-natured, most likely fun in bed. And X was utterly hateful. Vicious, nasty, selfish, hardly human. Risa wouldn’t want a bitch like that in her head. I suppose that Y is the least of the three evils.”
“She’s going to pick X,” said Santoliquido.
“Did she tell you that?”
“She didn’t. But X is the obvious one. She’s got the right combination for Risa—strength of character and voluptuousness. Why did you hate her so?”
“I don’t know. I can’t find any particular reason. Just an absence of sympathy. Looking back, I can’t pinpoint any single ugly thought from her, but yet I know I loathed her.”
“A pity,” said Santoliquido. “From Tuesday on, she’ll be living in Risa, unless I miss my guess. Do you want to withdraw your consent for the transplant?”