Bear, Greg - Heads

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HEADS

Greg Bear, 1990

Two hundred years in the future, the Moon is emerging from an age of

innocence. Once pioneers, the easiest motto for these Lunar families is Cut

the politics. They think they are safe from the sophistication and corruption

of political intrigue.

William Pierce is searching for absolute zero. No scientist has yet succeeded,

and William is almost there... His wife Rho has bought 410 heads,

cryogenically frozen centuries before in the hope of resurrection. She thinks

she can read them for information.

There are dangers.

William doesn't quite understand that his experiments could distort space and

time. Rho doesn't realise that her heads will bring interference from a new

and deadly faction, the devotedly religious Logologists.

Cut the politics. But they can't. And the politics of this society could

destroy much, much more than Rho and William's work ...

Greg Bear is a compelling, story-teller, creating his fiction from state-of-

the-art science, real characters and a powerful imagination. His set-pieces

are famed, being awesome in scale and undeniably moving. Like the classic SF

writers, Bear's work truly evokes the sense of wonder. He is today's leading

science fiction author.

Order and cold, heat and politics. The imposition of wrong order: anger,

death, suicide and destruction. I lost loved ones, lost my illusions and went

through mental and physical hell, but what still haunts my dreams, thirty

years after, are the great silvery refrigerators four storeys tall hang

motionless in the dark void of the Ice Pit; the force disorder pumps with

their constant sucking soundlessness; the dissolving ghost of my sister, Rho;

and William Pierce's expression when he faced his lifetime goal, in the Quiet

...

I believe that Rho and William are dead, but I will never be sure. I am even

less sure about the four hundred and ten heads.

Fifty metres beneath the cinereous regolith of Ocean Procellarum, in the

geographic centre of the extensive and largely empty Sandoval territories, the

Ice Pit was a volcanic burp in the Moon's ancient past, a natural bubble

almost ninety metres wide that had once been filled with the aqueous seep of a

nearby ice fall.

The Ice Pit had been a lucrative water mine, one of the biggest pure water

deposits on the Moon, but it had long since tapped out.

Loath to put family members out of work, my family, the binding multiple of

Sandoval, had kept it as a money-losing farm station. It supported three dozen

occupants in a space that had once housed three hundred. It was sorely

neglected, poorly managed, and worst of all for a lunar establishment, its

alleys and warrens were dirty. The void itself was empty and unused, its

water-conserving atmosphere of nitrogen long since leaked away and its bottom

littered with rubble from quakes.

In this unlikely place, my brother-in-law William Pierce had proposed seeking

absolute zero, the universal ultimate in order, peace and quiet. In asking for

the use of the Ice Pit, William had claimed, he would be turning a sow's ear

into a scientific silk purse. In return, Sandoval BM would boast a major

scientific project, elevating its status within the Triple, and therefore its

financial standing. The Ice Pit Station would have a real purpose beyond

providing living space for several dozen idle ice miners masquerading as

farmers. And William would have something uniquely his own, something truly

challenging.

Rho, my sister, supported her husband by using all her considerable energy and

charm - and her standing with my grandfather, in whose eyes she could do no

wrong.

Despite Grandfather's approval, the idea was subjected to rigorous examination

by the Sandoval syndics - the financiers and entrepreneurs, as well as the

scientists and engineers, many of whom had worked with William and knew his

extraordinary gifts. Rho skilfully navigated his proposal through the maze of

scrutiny and criticism.

By a five-four decision of the syndics, with much protest from the financiers

and grudging acceptance from the scientists, William's project was approved.

Thomas Sandoval-Rice, the BM's director and chief syndic, gave his own

approval reluctantly, but give it he did. He must have seen some use for a

high-risk, high-profile research project; times were hard, and prestige could

be crucial even for a top-five family.

Thomas decided to use the project as a training ground for promising young

family members. Rho spoke up on my behalf, without my knowledge, and I found

myself assigned to a position far above what my age and experience deserved:

the new station's chief financial manager and requisitions officer.

I was compelled by family loyalties - and the pleas of my sister - to cut

loose from formal schooling at the Tranquil and move to the Ice Pit Station.

At first I was less than enthusiastic. I felt my calling to be liberal arts

rather than finance and management; I had, in family eyes, frittered away my

education studying history, philosophy and the terrestrial classics. But I had

a fair aptitude for the technical sciences less aptitude for the theoretical -

and had taken a minor in family finances. I felt I could handle the task, if

only to show my elders what a liberal mentality could accomplish.

Ostensibly I was in charge of William and his project, answerable to the

syndics and financial directors alone; but of course, William quickly

established his own pecking order. I was twenty years old at the time;

William, thirty-two.

Inside the void, foamed rock was sprayed to insulate and seal in a breathable

atmosphere. I oversaw the general clean-up, refitting of already existing

warrens and alleys, and investment in a relatively spartan laboratory.

Large refrigerators stored at the station since the end of ice mining were

moved into the void, providing far more cooling capacity than William actually

needed for his work.

Vibration is heat. The generators that powered the Ice Pit laboratory lay on

the surface, their noise and reverberation isolated from the refrigerators and

William's equipment and laboratory. What vibration remained was damped by

suspension in an intricate network of steel springs and field levitation

absorbers.

The Ice Pit's heat radiators also lay near the surface, sunk six metres deep

in the shadow of open trenches, never seeing the sun, faces turned towards the

all-absorbing blackness of space.

Three years had passed since the conversion. Again and again, William had

failed to meet his goal. His demands for equipment had become more

extravagant, more expensive, and more often than not, rejected. He had become

reclusive, subject to even wider mood swings.

I met William at the beginning of the alley that led to the Ice Pit, in the

main lift hollow. We usually saw each other only in passing as he whistled

through the cold rock alleys between home and the laboratory. He carried a box

of drinker files and two coils of copper tubing and looked comparatively

happy.

William was a swarthy stick of a man, two metres tall, black eyes deep-set,

long narrow chin, lips thin, brows and hair dark as space, with a deep shadow

on his jaw. He was seldom calm or quiet, except when working; he could be rude

and abrasive. Set loose in a meeting, or conversing on the lunar corn net, he

sometimes seemed contentious to the point of self-destruction, yet still the

people closest to him loved and respected him. Some of the Sandoval engineers

considered William a genius with tools and machines, and on those rare

occasions when I was privileged to see his musician's hands prodding and

persuading, seducing all instrumentality, designing as if by willing consensus

of all the material parts, I could only agree; but I loved him much less than

I respected him.

In her own idiosyncratic way, Rho was crazy about him; but then, she was just

as driven as William. It was a miracle their vectors added.

We matched step. 'Rho's back from Earth. She's flying in from Port Yin,' I

said.

'Got her message,' William said, bouncing to touch the rock roof three metres

overhead. His glove brought down a few lazy drifts of foamed rock. 'Got to get

the arbeiters to spray that.' He used a distracted tone that betrayed no real

intent to follow through. 'I've finally straightened out the QL, Micko. The

interpreter's making sense. My problems are solved.'

'You always say that before some new effect cuts you down.' We had come to the

large, circular, white ceramic door that marked the entrance to the Ice Pit

and stopped at the white line that William had crudely painted there, three

years ago. The line could be crossed only on his invitation.

The hatch opened. Warm air poured into the corridor; the Ice Pit was always

warmer than ambient, being filled with so much equipment. Still, the warm air

smelled cold; a contradiction I had never been able to resolve.

'I've licked the final source of external radiation,' William said. 'Some

terrestrial metal doped with twentieth-century fallout.' He zipped his hand

away. 'Replaced it with lunar steel. And the QL is really tied in. I'm getting

straight answers out of it - as straight as quantum logic can give. Leave me

my illusions.'

'Sorry,' I said. He shrugged magnanimously. 'I'd like to see it in action.'

He stopped, screwed up his face in irritation, then slumped a bit. 'I'm sorry,

Mickey. I've been a real wart. You fought for it, you got it for me, you

deserve to see it. Come on.'

I followed William over the line and across the forty-metre-long, two-metre-

wide wire and girder bridge into the Ice Pit.

William walked ahead of me, between the force disorder pumps. I stopped to

look at the ovoid bronze toruses mounted on each side of the bridge. They

reminded me of abstract sculptures, and they were among the most sensitive and

difficult of William's tools, always active, even when not connected to

William's samples.

Passing between the pumps, I felt a twitch in my interior, as if my body were

a large ear listening to something it could barely discern: an elusive,

sucking silence. William looked back at me and grinned sympathetically.

'Spooky feeling, hm?'

'I hate it,' I said.

'So do I, but it's sweet music, Micko. Sweet music indeed.' Beyond the pumps

and connected to the bridge by a short, narrow walkway, hung the Cavity,

enclosed in a steel Faraday cage. Here, within a metre-wide sphere of perfect

orbit-fused quartz, the quartz covered with a mirror coating of niobium, were

eight thumb-sized ceramic cells, each containing approximately a thousand

atoms of copper. Each cell was surrounded by its own superconducting

electromagnet. These were the mesoscopic samples, large enough to experience

the macroscopic qualities of temperature, small enough to lie within the

microscopic realm of quantum forces. They were never allowed to reach a

temperature greater than one-millionth Kelvin.

The laboratory lay at the end of the bridge, a hundred square metres of

enclosed work space made of thin shaped steel framing covered by black plastic

wall. Suspended by vibration-damping cords and springs and field levitation

from the high dome of the Ice Pit, three of the four cylindrical refrigerators

surrounded the laboratory like the pillars of a tropical temple, overgrown by

a jungle of pipes and cables. Waste heat was conveyed through the rubble net

at the top of the void and through the foamed rock roof beyond by fle3dble

tubes; the buried radiators on the surface then shed that heat into space.

The fourth and final and largest refrigerator lay directly above the Cavity,

sealed to the upper surface of the quartz sphere. From a distance the

refrigerator and the Cavity might have resembled a squat, old-fashioned

mercury thermometer, with the Cavity serving as bulb.

The T-shaped laboratory had four rooms, two in the neck of the T, one

extending on each side to make the wings. William led me through the

laboratory door - actually a fle3dble curtain - into the first room, which was

filled with a small metal table and chair, a disassembled nano-works arbeiter,

and cabinets of cubes and disks. In the second room, the QL thinker occupied a

central platform about half a metre on a side. On the wall to the left of the

table were a manual control board - seldom used now - and two windows

overlooking the Cavity. The second room was quiet, cool, a bit like a cloister

cell.

Almost from the beginning of the project, William had maintained to the

syndics - through Rho and myself; we never let him appear in person - that his

equipment could not be perfectly tuned by even the most skilled human

operators, or by the most complicated of computer controllers. All of his

failures, he said in his blackest moods, were due to this problem: the

inability of macroscopic controllers to be in sync with the quantum qualities

of the samples.

What he - what the project - needed was a quantum logic thinker. Yet these

were being manufactured only on Earth, and they were not being exported.

Because so few were manufactured, the black market of the Triple had none to

offer, and the costs of purchasing, avoiding Earth authorities and shipping to

the Moon were vast. Rho and I could not convince the syndics to make such a

purchase. William had seemed to blame me personally.

Our break came with news of an older-model QL thinker being offered for sale

by an Asian industrial consortium. William had determined that this so-called

obsolete thinker would suit our needs - it was suspiciously cheap, however,

and almost certainly out of date. That didn't bother William.

The syndics had approved this request, to everybody's surprise, I think. It

might have been Thomas's final gift and test for William - any more expensive

requisitions without at least the prospect of a success and the Ice Pit would

be closed.

Rho had gone to Earth to strike a deal with the Asian consortium. The thinker

had been packaged, shipped, and had arrived six weeks before. I had not heard

from her between the time of the purchase and her message from Port Yin that

she had returned to the Moon. She had spent four weeks extra on Earth, and I

was more than a little curious to find out what she had been doing there.

William leaned over the platform and patted the QL proudly. 'It's running

almost everything now,' he said. 'If we succeed, the QL will take a large

share of the credit.' The QL itself covered perhaps a third of the platform's

surface. Beneath the platform lay the QL's separate power supplies; by Triple

common law, all thinkers were equipped with supplies capable of lasting a full

year without outside replenishment.

'Who'll get the Nobel, you or the QL?' I asked. I bent to the QL's level to

peer at its white cylindrical container. William shook his head.

'Nobody off Earth has ever gotten a Nobel, anyway,' he said. 'Surely I get

some credit for telling the QL about the problem.' I felt the most affection

for my brother-in-law when he reacted positively to my acidulous humour.

'What about this?' I asked, touching the interpreter lightly with a finger.

Connected to the QL by fist-thick optical cables, covering another half of the

platform, the interpreter was a thinker in itself. It addressed the QL's

abstruse contemplations and rendered them, as closely as possible, in language

humans could understand.

'A marvel all by itself.'

'Tell me about it,' I said.

'You didn't study the files,' William chided.

'I was too busy fighting with the syndics to study,' I said. 'Besides, you

know theory's never been my greatest strength.'

William knelt behind the opposite side of the table, his expression

contemplative, reverent. 'Did you read about Huang-Yi Hsu?'

'Tell me,' I said patiently.

He sighed. 'You paid for it out of ignorance, Mickey. I could have misled you

grievously.'

'I trust you, William.'

He accepted that with generous dubiety. 'Huang-Yi Hsu invented post-Boolean

three-state logic before 2010. Nobody paid much attention to it until 2030. He

was dead by then; had committed suicide rather than submit to Beijing's Rule

of Seven. Brilliant man, but I think a true anomaly in human thought. Then a

few physicists in the University of Washington's Cramer Lab Group discovered

they could put Hsu's work to use solving problems in quantum logic. Post-

Boolean and quantum logic were made for each other. By 2060, the first QL

thinker had been built, but nobody thought it was successful.

'Fortunately, it was against the law by then to turn off activated thinkers

without a court order, but nobody could talk to this one. Its grasp of human

languages was inadequate; it couldn't follow their logic. It was a mind in

limbo, Mickey; brilliant but totally alien. So it sat in a room at Stanford

University's Thinker Development Center for five years before Roger Atkins -

you know about Roger Atkins?' 'William,' I warned.

'Before Atkins found the common ground for any functional real logic, the Holy

Grail of language and thought ... his CAL interpreter. Comprehensible All

Logics. Which lets us talk to the QL. He died a year later.' William sighed.

'Swan song. So this,' he patted the interpreter, a flat grey box about fifteen

centimetres square and nine high, 'lets us talk to this.' He patted the QL.

'Why hasn't anybody used a QL as a controller before?' I asked.

'Because even with the interpreter, the QL - this QL at any rate - is a

monster to work with,' he said. He tapped the display button and a prismatic

series of bars and interlacing graphs appeared over the thinker. 'That's why

it was so cheap. It has no priorities, no real sense of needs or goals. it

thinks, but it may not solve. Quantum logic can outline the centre of a

problem before it understands the principles and questions, and then, from our

point of view, everything ends in confusion. More often than not, it comes up

with a solution to a problem not yet stated. It does virtually everything but

linear, time's arrow ratiocination. Half of its efforts are meaningless to

goal-oriented beings like ourselves, but I can't prune those efforts, because

somewhere in them lies the solution to my problems, even if I haven't stated

the problem or am not aware that I have a problem. A post Boolean

intelligence. It functions in time and space, yet ignores their restrictions.

it's completely in tune with the logic of the Planck-Wheeler continuum, and

that's where the solution to my problem lies.'

'So when's your test?

'Three weeks. Or sooner, if there aren't any more interruptions.'

'Am I invited?'

'All doubters, front row seats,' he said. 'Call me when Rho gets in. Tell her

I've got it.'

My office lay along a north warren, in an insulated cylindrical chamber that

had once been a liquid water tank. It was much larger than I needed, cavernous

in fact, and my bed, desk, slate files and other furnishings occupied one

small section of about five metres square near the door. I entered, set myself

down in a wide air-cushion seat, called up the Triple Exchange - monetary

rates within the Greater Planets economic sphere of Earth, Moon and Mars - and

began my daily check on the Sandoval Trust. I could usually gauge the Ice

Pit's annual operating expenses by such auguries.

Rho's shuttle landed at Pad Four an hour later. I was engrossed in trust

investment performances; she buzzed my line second. William was not answering

his.

'Micko, congratulate me! I've got something wonderful,' she said.

'A new terrestrial virus we can't set for,' I said.

'Mickey. This is serious.'

'William says to tell you he's very very close.'

'All right. That's good. Now listen.'

'Where are you?'

'In the personnel lift. Listen.'

'Yes.'

'How much extra cooling capacity does William have?'

'You don't know?'

'Mickey ...'

'About eight billion calories. Cold is no problem here. You know that.'

'I have a load of twenty cubic metres coming in. Average density like fatty

water, I assume. What would that be, point nine? It's packed in liquid

nitrogen at sb4 K. Keeping it colder would be much better, especially if we

decide on long-term storage ...'

'What is it? Smuggled nano machines to liberate lunar industry?'

'You wish. Nothing quite so dangerous. Forty stainless steel Dewar containers,

quite old, vacuum insulated.' 'Anything William would be interested in?' 'I

doubt it. Can he spare the extra capacity now?' 'He's never used it before,

even when he was close, very close. But he's in no mood for-'

'Meet me at home, then we'll go to the Ice Pit and tell him.'

'You mean ask.'

'I mean tell,' Rho said.

The Pierce-Sandoval home was two alleys south of my office, not far from the

farms, off a nice double-width heated mining bore with smooth white walls of

foamed rock. I palmed their home doorplate a half-hour later, allowing her

time to freshen from the Copernicus trip, never a luxury run.

Rho came out of the bathnook in lunar cotton terry and turban, zaftig by lunar

standards, shook out her long red hair, and waved a brochure at me as I

entered.

'Have you ever heard of the StarTime Preservation Society?' she asked, handing

me the ancient glossy folio.

'Paper,' I said, hefting the folio carefully. 'Heavy paper.' 'They had boxes

full of these on Earth,' she said. 'Stacked up in a dusty office comer.

Leftovers from their platinum time. Have you heard of it?'

'No,' I said, looking through the brochure. Men and women in cold suits; glass

tanks filled with mysterious raist; bare rooms blue with cold. A painting of

the future as seen from the early twenty-first century; the Moon, oddly

enough, glass domes and open-air architecture. 'Resurrection in a time of

accomplishment, human maturity and wonder...'

'Corpsicles,' Rho explained when I cast her a blank look.

'Oh,' I said.

'Society capacity of three hundred and seventy; they took in fifty extra

before close of term in 2064.'

'Four hundred and twenty bodies?' I asked.

'Heads only. Voluntarily harvested individuals. Each paid half a million

terrestrial US dollars. Four hundred and ten survivals, well within the

guarantees.'

'You mean, they were revived?'

'No,' she said disdainfully. 'Nobody's ever brought back a corpsicle. You know

that. Four hundred and ten theoretically revivable. We can't bring them back,

but Cailetet BM has complete facilities for brain scan and storage ..

'So I've heard - for live individuals.'

She waved that off. 'And doesn't Onnes BM have new solvers for the groups of

human mental languages? You study their requests from the central banks, their

portfolios. Don't they?'

'I've heard something to that effect.'

'If they do, and if we can work a deal between the three BMs, just give me a

couple of weeks, and I can read those heads. I can tell you what their

memories are, what they were thinking. Without hurting a single frozen neuron.

We can do it before anyone on Earth - or anywhere else.'

I looked at her with less than brotherly respect. 'Dust,' I said.

'Flip your own dust, Micko. I'm serious. The heads are coming. I've signed

Sandoval to store them.'

'You signed a BM contract?'

'I'm allowed.'

'Who says? Christ, Rho, you haven't talked with anybody ---'

'It will be the biggest anthropological coup in lunar history. Four hundred

and ten terrestrial heads ...

'Dead meat!' I said.

'Expertly stored in deep cold. Minor decay at most. 'Nobody wants corpiscles,

Rho-,

'I had to bid against four other anthropologists, three from Mars and one from

the minor planets.'

'Bid?'

'I won,' she said.

'You don't have that authority,, I said.

'Yes I do. Under family preservation charter. Look it up- 'All family members

and legal heirs and - etc., etc. - free hand to make reasonable expenditures

to preserve Sandoval records and heritage; to preserve the reputations and

fortunes of all established heirs.''

She had lost me. 'What?'

Her look of triumph was carnivorous.

'Robert and Emilia Sandoval,' she said. 'They died on Earth. Remember? They

were members of StarTime.'

My jaw dropped. Robert and Emilia Sandoval, our great-grandparents, the first

man and woman to make love on the Moon-; nine months later, they became the

first parents on the Moon, giving birth to our grandmother, Deirdre. In their

late middle age, they had returned to Earth, to Oregon in the old United

States, leaving their child on the Moon.

'They joined the StarTime Preservation Society. Lots of famous people did,'

she said.

'So ... ? I asked, waiting for my astonishment to peak.

'They're in this batch. Guaranteed by the society.'

'Oh, Rhosalind,' I said, as if she had just told me someone had died. I felt

an incredulous hollow sense of doom. 'They're coming back?'

'Don't worry,' she said. 'Nobody knows but the society trustees and me, and

now you.'

'Great-Grandpa and Grandma,' I said.

Rho smiled the kind of smile that had always made me want to hit her. 'Isn't

it wonderful?'

William came from an unbound lunar family, the Pierces of Copernicus Research

Centre Three. A lunar family even then was not just those born of a single

mother and father, but tight associations of sponsored settlers working their

way across the lunar surface in new-dug warrens, adding children and living

space as they burrowed. Individuals usually kept their own surnames, or added

surnames, but claimed allegiance to the central family, even when all the

members of the central family had died, as sometimes happened.

As with our own family, the Sandovals, the Pierces were among the original

fifteen families established on the Moon in 2019. The Pierces were an odd lot,

unofficial histories tell us - aloof and unwilling to pull together with the

newer settlers. The original families - called primes spread out across the

Moon, forming and breaking alliances, eventually coming together, under

pressure from Earth, into the financial associations later called binding

multiples. The Pierces did not bind with any of the nascent multiples, though

they formed loose alliances with other families.

The unbound families did not flourish. The Pierces lost influence, despite

being primes. Their final disgrace was cooperation with terrestrial

governments during the Split, when Earth severed ties with the Moon to punish

us for our presumptuous independence. Thereafter, for decades, the Pierces and

their kind were social outcasts.

By contrast, the allied superfamilies handily survived the crisis.

The Pierces, and most unbound families like them, driven by destitution and

resentment, contracted their services in 2094 to the Franco-Polish

technological station at Copernicus. They became part of the Copernicus

binding multiple of nine families and finally joined the mainstream economy of

the Post-Split Moon.

Still, the Pierces' descendants faced real prejudice in lunar society. They

became known as a wild, churlish lot, and kept to themselves in and around the

Copernicus station.

These difficulties had obviously affected William as a child, and made him

something of an enigma.

When my sister met William at a Copernicus mixer barn dance, courted him (he

was too shy and vulnerable to court her in turn) and finally asked him to join

the Sandoval BM as her husband, he had to face the close scrutiny of dozens of

dubious family members.

William lacked the almost instinctive urge to unity of a BM-bred child; in an

age of rugged individuals tightly fitted into even more rugged and demanding

multiples, he was a loner, quick-tempered yet inclined to sentimentality,

loyal Yet critical, brilliant but prone to choosing tasks so difficult he

seemed doomed to always fail.

Yet in those tense months, with Rho's constant coaching, he put on a brilliant

performance, adopting a humble and Pleasant attitude. He was accepted into the

Sandoval Binding Multiple.

Rho was something of a lunar princess. Biologically of the Sandoval line ,

great-grandchild of Robert and Emilia Sandoval, her future was the concern of

far too many, and she developed a closeted attitude of defiance. That she

should reach out for the hand of someone like Pierce was both expected,

considering her character and upbringing, and shocking.

But old prejudices had softened considerably. Despite the doubts Of Rho's very

protective 'aunts' and 'uncles', and the strains of initiation and marriage,

and despite his occasional reversion to prickly form, William was quickly

recognized as a valuable adjunct to our family. He was a brilliant designer

and theoretician. For four years he contributed substantially to many of our

scientific endeavours, yet adjunct he was, playing a subservient role that

must have deeply galled him.

I was fifteen when Rho and William married, and nineteen when he formally

broke through this more or less obsequious mask to ask for the Ice Pit. I had

never quite understood their attraction for each other; lunar princess drawn

to son of outcast family. But one thing was certain: whatever William did to

strain Rho's affections, she could return with interest.

I walked to the Ice Pit with Rho after an hour of helping her prepare her

case.

She was absolutely correct; as Sandovals, we had a duty to preserve the

reputation and heirs of the Sandoval BM, and even by an advocate's logic, that

would include the founders of our core family.

That we were also taking in four hundred and eight outsiders was quite another

matter... But as Rho pointed out, the society could hardly sell individuals.

Surely nobody would think it a bad idea, bringing such a wealth of potential

information to the Moon. Tired old Earth didn't want it; just more corpsicles

on a world plagued by them. Anonymous heads, harvested in the early twenty-

first century, declared dead, stateless, very nearly outside the law, without

rights except under the protection of their money and their declining

foundation.

The StarTime Preservation Society was actually not selling anything or anyone.

They were transferring members, chattels and responsibilities to Sandoval BM

pending dissolution of the original society; in short, they were finally,

after one hundred and ten years, going cold blue belly up. Bankruptcy was the

old term; pernicious exhaustion of means and resources was the new. Well and

good; they had guaranteed to their charter members only sixty-one years

(inclusive) of tender loving care. After that, they might just as well be out

in the warm.

'The societies set up in 2020 and 2030 are declaring exhaustion at the rate of

two and three a year now,' Rhosalind said. 'Only one has actually buried dead

meat. Most have been bought out by information entrepreneurs and

universities.'

'Somebody hopes to make a profit?' I asked.

'Don't be noisy, Micko,' she said, by which she meant incapable of converting

information to useful knowledge. 'These aren't just dead people; they're huge

libraries. Their memories are theoretically intact; at least, as intact as

death and disease allow them to be. There's maybe a five per cent degradation;

we can use natural languages algorithms to check and reduce that to maybe

three per cent.' 'Very noisy,' I said.

'Nonsense. That's usable recall. Your memories of your seventh birthday have

degraded by fifty per cent.'

I tried to remember my seventh birthday; nothing came to mind. 'Why? What

happened on my seventh birthday?' 'Not important, Mickey,' Rho said.

'So who wants that sort of information? It's out of date, it's noisy, it's

going to be hard to prove provenance ... much less check it out for accuracy.'

She stopped, brow cloudy, clearly upset. 'You're resisting me on this, aren't

you?'

'Rho, I'm in charge of project finances. I have to ask dumb questions. What

value are these heads to us, even if we can extract information? And' - I held

up my hand, about to make a major point - 'what if extraction of information

is intrusive? We can't dissect these heads - you've assumed the contracts.'

'I called Cailetet from Tampa, Florida, last week. They say the chance of

recovery of neural patterns and states from frozen heads is about eighty per

cent, using non-intrusive methods. No nano injections. Lamb shift tweaking.

They can Pinpoint every molecule in every head from outside the containers.'

However outlandish Rho's schemes, she always did a certain amount of planning.

I leaned my head to one side and lifted my hands, giving up - 'All right,' I

said. 'It's fascinating. The possibilities are-'

'Luminous,' Rho finished for me.

'But who will buy historical information?'

'These are some of the finest minds of the twentieth century,' Rho said. 'We

could sell shares in future accomplishments.'

'If they're revivable.' We were coming up to the white line and the big

porcelain hatch to the Ice Pit. 'They're currently not very active and not

very creative,' I commented.

'Do you doubt we'll be able to revive them someday? Maybe in ten or twenty

years?'

I shook my head dubiously. 'They talked revival a century ago. High-quality

surgical nano wasn't enough to do the trick. You can make a complex machine

shine like a gem, fix it up so that everything fits, but if you don't know

where to kick it... Long time passing, no eyelids cracking to light of a new

day.'

Rho palmed the hatch guard. William took his own sweet time answering. 'I'm an

optimist,' she said. 'I always have been.'

'Rho, you've come when I'm busy,' William said over the COM.

'Oh, for Christ's sake, William. I'm your wife and I've been gone for three

months.' She wasn't irritated; her tone was playfully piqued. The hatch

opened, and again I caught the smell of cold in the outrush of warm.

'The heads are ancient,' I said, stepping over the threshold behind her.

'They'll need retraining, re-everything. They're probably elderly,

infle3dble... But those are hardly major handicaps when you consider that,

right now, they're dead.' She shrugged this off and walked briskly across the

steel bridge. She'd once told me that William, in his more tense and

frustrated moments, enjoyed making love on the bridge. I wondered about

harmonics. 'Where's the staff' she asked.

'William told me to let them go. He said we didn't need them with the QL in

control.' We had been working for the past three years with a team of young

technicians chosen from several other families around Procellarum. William had

informed me two days after the QL's installation that these ten colleagues

were no longer needed. He was coldly blunt about it, and he made no dust about

the fact that I was the one who would have to arrange for their severance.

His logic was strong; the QL would not need additional human support, and we

could use the BM exchange for other purchases. Despite my instincts that this

was bad manners between families, I could not stand alone against William; I

had served the notices and tried to take or divert the brunt of the anger.

Rho cringed as she sidled between the double toruses of the disorder pumps,

whether in reaction to her husband's efficiency or the pumps' effect on her

body. She glanced over her shoulder sympathetically. 'Poor Micko.'

William opened the door, threw out his arms in a peremptory fashion, and

enfolded Rho.

I love my sister. I do not know whether it was some perverse jealousy or a

sincere desire for her well-being that motivated my feeling of unease whenever

I saw William embrace her.

'I've got something for us,' Rho said, looking up at him with high-energy,

complete-equality adoration.

'Oh,' William said, eyes already wary. 'What?'

I lay in bed, unable to get the noiseless suck of the pumps out of my

thoughts, purged from my body. After a restless time I began to slide into my

usual lunar doze; made a halfawake comparison between seeing William embrace

Rho and feeling the pumps embrace me; thought of William's reaction to Rho's

news; smiled a little; slept.

William had not been pleased. An unnecessary intrusion; Yes there was excess

cooling capacity; yes his arbeiters had the time to construct a secure

facility for the heads in the Ice Pit; but he did not need the extra stress

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HEADSGregBear,1990Twohundredyearsinthefuture,theMoonisemergingfromanageofinnocence.Oncepioneers,theeasiestmottofortheseLunarfamiliesisCutthepolitics.Theythinktheyaresafefromthesophisticationandcorruptionofpoliticalintrigue.WilliamPierceissearchingforabsolutezero.Noscientisthasyetsucceeded,andWilliam...

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Bear, Greg - Heads

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