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shock of your life.
"Son," he said, "it's good to see you again."
"Dad," I finally croaked. I put my head on his shoulder and shut my eyes tight
against the flow of tears.
I think 1 was a little irrational for a few minutes; it was a total state of
shock. I don't remember what was said, or who
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ey.txt said it, but sooner or later I noticed Prime standing off to one side,
observing us with approval.
"Welcome back!" he said brightly.
I nodded and looked around. Ragna and Oni were seated at the table along with
John and Zoya. Ragna smiled, his wide pink eyes gleaming. Zoya beamed at me.
John looked bored.
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192 John DeChancie PARADOX ALLEY 193
Another wonder so what?
Daria had been standing off to one side. She walked over and said, "So we
finally meet in the flesh."
"Come here, Daria darling," Sam said. They hugged.
I couldn't help keeping one arm around Sam, could not relinquish the feel of
his flesh, his corporeality. If I hadn't been used to having Sam's disembodied
personality around, me sight of him like this, reborn, reincarnate, would
probably have been enough to stop my heart. I would have died on everybody
right there.
As it was, I had trouble fully regaining my powers of speech.
"How... was it done?" I gasped at Prime.
"An artificial body is nothing miraculous," he said. "The problem lies merely
in effecting an adequate interface between it and the artificial brain that
controls it, which in this case is the Vlathusian Entelechy Matrix. You are
aware of the many resources on this planet. I simply used those needed to ac-
complish the job. And I think we were quite successful.
Wouldn't you agree, Sam?"
"I sure would." Sam slapped his chest. "Never felt better in my life." He
turned to me. "I'm told that this isn't your garden variety human body."
"No," Prime said. "It doesn't have some of the biochemi-
cal subtleties of a natural organism even science at its height can't
duplicate the genius of me Creator. For instance, Sam will never have another
son, nor any more progeny. But his body does have a number of advantages. Sam
will never grow old. He won't suffer illness "
"But I'm not immortal," Sam said.
"No," Prime said, walking over to us. "I offered to tell
Sam the body's estimated life span, but he didn't want to hear it."
"Even if it-were a million years, or only a week," Sam said, "I wouldn't want
to know. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend my second life counting down the
days. You can't live like that."
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"I understand and agree," Prime said.
I asked, "How did you get this body to look like his former one?"
"The imaging entailed using a number of sources but chief among them was a
three-dimensional photograph of you and Sam that was stored in the on-board
computer's auxiliary memory. Did you know it was there?"
I said, "Yeah, I do seem to remember having an old holo scanned into pixels
and stored away."
"Your memories of Sam also were useful," Prime added.
"Okay," I said, rather absurdly, as if we'd been talking about the weather. I
sat down and poured myself a cup of coffee. I couldn't keep my eyes off Sam,
who seated himself and took a sip from his cup.
He winked at me. "Who says you only go around once, eh?"
"Sam, did you have any choice in this?" I asked.
"Not in getting shanghaied out of the truck. When I came to, I found that I'd
been loaded into some weird kind of computer... I think." Sam looked to Prime
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for corroboration.
"It was a computer, in essence," Prime said.
"Anyway," Sam went on, "I was in contact with our host here, and he asked me
if I wanted to join the Culmination. I
said thanks, but no thanks. He said, okay, then how about a new body? I said,
sure, why not?"
I laughed. "Sure, why not."
"I was getting a little tired of being a trailer truck. I like this just
fine."
"I can't blame you. Your turning up missing like that gave me quite a scare,
though."
Prime had seated himself at the table. "Our apologies. But had I told you our
intentions, I doubt you would have believed me."
"You could have tried," I said.
"I did try," Prime said, "and would have succeeded if you hadn't left rather
abruptly."
Aside from pointing out about a half-dozen holes in
Prime's reasoning for instance, hadn't he ever heard of radio communication? I
had little to say to that. It seemed that in any given argument, Prime had a
subtle way of manip-
ulating the emotional tug-of-war so that he always wound up on solid ground,
leaving his adversary in quicksand. I couldn't figure exactly how he did it,
but you simply couldn't argue with him, and I didn't feel like going through
the motions
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194 John DeChancie PARADOX ALLEY 195
"Where have you guys been?" Sam was curious to know.
I looked around. "How long have we been gone?"
"About five days," Zoya said. "We were worried."
Daria filled them in while we breakfasted.
"So Carl finally got home," Sam said. "Well, good. And I
think Lori will be happy back there." He pushed his coffee cup away and sat
back. "Imagine," he said wistfully. "Earth, way back when. It must have been
something to see. Nineteen sixty-four. Let's see, that was almost seventy
years before I
was bom."
Daria changed the subject with: "I can't get over how much you two look [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]