22

Lieserl walked into the dining saloon of the Great Britain.

She hesitated, uncertain, in the low doorway. She was stunned by the antique beauty of the place: by its fine pillars and plasterwork, the mirrors glimmering on the walls. She was the last to arrive for this strange dinner; there were six people — three men and three women — already seated, facing each other at the center of one of the long tables. The only light came from candles (real candles, or Virtuals?) set on the table between them. As the people talked, their faces, and the fine cutlery and glass, shone in the flickering, golden light; shadows stretched across the rest of the old saloon, turning it into a place of mystery — even romance.

One of the men turned as she came in. He rose, pushing back his chair, and walked toward her, smiling. His blue eyes were bright in a dark face.

She felt an odd, absurd, flutter of nervousness in her throat; she raised her hand to her mouth, and felt the coarseness of her flesh, the lines etched deep there. This was her first genuine human interaction in five million years… But how ludicrous to suffer adolescent nerves like this! She was an AI, geologically old, yet within mere subjective days of returning to the company of humans she had become immersed once more in the complex, impossibly difficult world of human interactions.

She felt a sudden, intense, nostalgic desire to return to the clean, bright interior of the Sun. All those millennia, orbiting the core with the photino birds, seemed like a long, fantastic dream to her now: an interval within this, the true human reality…

The man reached out and touched her arm. His flesh was firm, warm.

She cried out and stumbled backwards.

Five faces, bright with candlelight, turned toward her, and the conversation died.

No one had touched Lieserl in megayears.

The man leaned toward her, his blue eyes bright and mischievous. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t resist that. I’m Mark Bassett Friar Armonk Wu.”

She straightened herself up, primly, and glared at him. The sudden touch had left a trembling, deep in her stomach, and she was sure a flush was spreading over her cheeks, despite her age of physical-sixty. She was vividly aware — too aware, distractingly so — of Mark’s presence beside her.

He took her arm again, more delicately, and escorted her toward the dinner party. “I won’t startle you again, I promise. And I’m the only Virtual here other than you, of course.”

“These Virtual illusions are just too damn good sometimes,” she said. Her voice sounded feathery — weak, she thought. It was going to take her a long time to forgive Mark Wu for that trick.

He led her to a seat and pulled it out for her — so that was Virtual, too — and she sat with the rest.

The woman opposite her leaned forward and smiled. Lieserl saw a square, strong face, tired eyes, a thatch of grizzled hair. “I’m Louise Ye Armonk,” she said. “You’re welcome here, Lieserl.”

“Ah,” Lieserl said. “Louise. The leader.”

One of the men — grotesquely blind, bald, wrapped in a blanket — allowed his head to rock back on its spindle of a neck, and bellowed laughter.

Louise looked weary. “Lieserl, meet Garry Uvarov… You’ve spoken with him before.”

Louise introduced the rest: Morrow, a spindly, reticent man who, with Uvarov, had supervised her downloading through the maser link from the Interface carcass (now abandoned) inside the Sun; and two tiny, young-looking women with strange names — Spinner-of-Rope, Trapper-of-Frogs — their bare flesh startlingly out of place in the formal surroundings of the saloon. Their faces were painted with vivid, intimidating splashes of scarlet, and patches of their scalps were shaven bare. The older-looking one of the pair wore glinting spectacles and carried a crude arrowhead on a thong tied around her neck.

Lieserl was still new enough to all this to be intensely aware of her own appearance. Her hands cast soft shadows, and her brooch — of intertwined snakes and ladders — glittered in the candlelight. Looking out from the twin caverns of her eyes, she saw how the flickering of the light was reflected, with remarkable accuracy, on the blurred outlines of her own face; she knew she must look quite authentic to the others.

She smiled at Louise Ye Armonk. “You’ve invested a great deal of processing power in me.”

Louise looked a little defensive; she pulled back slightly from the table. “We can afford it. The Northern’s on idle. We’ve plenty of spare capacity.”

“I wasn’t criticizing. I was thanking you. I can see you’re trying to make me welcome.”

Mark, sitting beside Lieserl, leaned toward her. “Don’t mind Louise. She’s always been as prickly as a porcupine…”

Spinner-of-Rope, the girl with the spectacles, said: “A what?”

“…and that’s why I divorced her.”

“I divorced him,” Louise Ye Armonk said. “And still couldn’t get rid of him.”

“Anyway,” Mark said to Lieserl, “maybe you should reserve your thanks until you’ve seen the food.”

The meal was served by autonomic ’bots. A ’bot — presumably a Virtual — served Mark and Lieserl.

The meal was what Louise Ye Armonk called “traditional British” — just what somebody called “Brunel” would once have enjoyed, on an occasion like this, she said. Lieserl stared at the plates of simulated animal flesh doubtfully. Still, she enjoyed the wine, and the sensation of fresh fruit; with discreet subvocal commands she allowed herself to become mildly drunk.

The conversation flowed well enough, but seemed a little stilted, stale to Lieserl.

During the meal, Trapper-of-Frogs leaned toward her. “Lieserl…”

“Yes?”

“Why are you so old?”

Uvarov, the crippled surgeon, threw back his head and bellowed out his ghastly laughter once more. Trapper looked confused, even distressed. Watching Uvarov, Lieserl felt herself start to incubate a deep, powerful dislike.

She smiled at Trapper, deliberately. “It’s all right, dear.” She spread her hands, flexing the thin webbing between thumb and forefinger, immersing herself in the new reality of the sensation. “It’s just that this is how I remember myself. I chose this Virtual shell because it reflects how I still feel inside, I suppose.”

“It’s how you were before you were loaded into the Sun?” Spinner-of-Rope asked.

“Yes… although by the time I reached my downloading I was quite a bit older than my aspect now. You see, they actually let me die of old age… I was the first person in a long time to do so.”

She began to tell them of how that had felt — of the blights of age, of rheumy eyes and failing bladders and muscles like pieces of old cloth — but Spinner-of Rope held her hand up. Spinner smiled, her eyes large behind her glasses. “We know, Lieserl. We’ll take you to the forest sometime; we’ll tell you all about it.”

The meal finished with coffee and brandy, served by the discreet ’bots. Lieserl didn’t much care for the brandy, but she loved the flavor of the coffee. Virtual or not.

Mark nodded at her appreciation. “The coffee’s authenticity is no accident. I spent years getting its flavor right. After I got stranded in this Virtual form I spent longer on replicating the sensations of coffee than anything.” His blue eyes were bright. “Anything, except maybe those of sex…”

Disconcerted, Lieserl dropped her eyes.

Mark’s provocative remark made her think, however. Sex. Perhaps that was the element missing from this gathering of antique semi-immortals. Some had been preserved better than others — and some, like Spinner-of-Rope, were even genuinely (almost) young — but there was no sexual tension here. These people simply weren’t aware of each other as human animals.