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"Damn."
The human body cannot perceive magnetic field except at enormous strengths.
Still, Benjamin felt a pulse of electricity jitter through him as all the
lights went out. Immediately afterward his skin itched in quick, darting
waves. Then it was all over, the familiar night sky returning, constellations
embodying human legends stretched across a comforting black. Yet as he gazed
up, the distant fuzzy blue-white of the Eater hung like a threat among the
myriad stars one of them, celestial, not like anything a primate born in
moist chemistry could comprehend.
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He breathed in the almost liquid density of tropical air and let it out with a
sigh. Magnetic fields could not directly harm beings who were, after all,
packages of long organic molecules in dilute solutions, capable of standing
erect and studying stars.
Maybe there was some small comfort in that bare fact.
He walked down the hill toward the Center with
Amy and Kingsley. Cries came up toward them.
Somewhere a window shattered.
It was a while before he noticed that the gray veils were gone for him. But he
knew that they would return whenever he thought of her.
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"Not overly surprising," Kingsley said as he unwound into one of the massage
chairs
Benjamin had in his office.
For Charming
came the memory.
"What?" Benjamin was still a bit foggy. Even
Arno's anger after the attack "Why didn't you guys warn me?" had not
shaken him into paying much attention. Understandable, even in an ordinary
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time.
But in this on-rolling calamity, ordinary sensibilities had to be put aside.
Kingsley firmly told himself that he could not take the time to be the
sympathetic friend, letting time heal wounds. There was no time
not for anyone.
"That she seems so like Channing," Kingsley said as mildly as he could.
"Oh. She& is Channing."
"An interesting philosophical issue, but not my point."
"All the Channing I've got left."
5
422
"Quite." An emotional truth, and there was the nub of the problem. How to put
this? Directly, perhaps? Always risky, but he owed Benjamin that.
"The essential of this issue is whether she can be relied upon to perform as
would the Channing we knew."
"Know," Benjamin corrected without looking up from the floor.
"Old friend, there are sophomore distinctions to be made here that have
ramifications on policy."
Benjamin gave a dry chuckle. "I sense a lecture coming on."
"A short one, I hope. Asking for an objective understanding of an interior
experience is a contradiction. Objectivity is a direction along which
understanding can travel, starting with the utterly subjective, but there is
no true, final destination along that axis."
"So we can't know if she's 'really' Channing?"
Benjamin said caustically. "Fine. So be it. I'll take what I can get."
"We can expect her to be a quite good&
simulation."
"It's all of her there is."
"Yes." This was a damnable situation, but he had promised Arno that he would
try to deal with the problem. Far better a friend than the team of mind
managers Arno had recruited. How to proceed?
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Retreat to the technical? Perhaps. At least he would feel better himself on
some safe ground for a moment. .
"The data-processing issue is no longer a major roadblock, after all,"
Kingsley said, probably a bit too brightly. "Estimates I've seen hold that the
total memory of a hundred-year-old person could be about 10 bits a
pentabit, the experts label it. That
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may be transmitted by optical fiber in a few minutes.
Microwaves, somewhat longer."
"Ah." Benjamin's lined face said quite eloquently that he did not like this
way of thinking of the woman he loved. Quite right, but there it was.
"So they may have what was that awful word they used? 'harvested' quite a
lot of her, even given the difficulties with her physical deterioration."
Benjamin said, "I never thought it could be like this. Maybe a thing like a
computer program, accessing memory files, a robot& that's what I
imagined."
"The computer johnnies are advancing relentlessly. Quite left me behind long
ago."
"Look." He leaned forward earnestly. "She's still the woman who was an
astronaut. She's reliable."
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