Sepoy
Tom Purdom
A DF Books NERDs Release
Copyright (C)1992 Tom Purdom
First published in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, December 1992
There had been a time, near the end of the twentieth century, when very few people would have believed anything like the Tucfra Hegemony would ever be necessary. Then the global temperature had risen almost 50 percent faster than those unpleasant forecaster types had said it might, the tides had washed away beaches from the Riviera to the Great Barrier Reef, Londoners had discovered they couldn't get through an English May without an air conditioner, and it had seemed a little matter like the exact amount of fumes and radiation each city or province could dump into the atmosphere might be a causede guerre after all. When the tucfra ship had orbited Earth in 2044, three small wars had already gone nuclear, the United States was lurching toward its second devolution, the Austro-Hungarian Economic Bloc was exchanging threatening faxes with the Russo-Turkish Defense Pact, and humanity had only been saved from a global plague, brought on by an attempt to use biological weapons, by a notably ruthless decision by the last prime minister of the Republic of India.
Intellectually, Jason Jardanel was willing to admit—in the privacy of his own thoughts, anyway—that the Hegemony had probably kept his fellow humans from wiping out every vestige of organized society on their planet. When he was confronted with the kind of suggestion he had just heard, however, he reacted like every upright, thoroughly conventional citizen of the New England Confederation was supposed to react.
“I'm a human,” Jason told the woman lying beside him. “I'm not a tucfra. I'm not a seep. I'm a human.”
The words hadn't come out that way, of course. She had caught Jason by surprise, while he had been languidly contemplating the ceiling of his bedroom, and he could still become almost unintelligible when a surge of emotion went racing through his psyche and he forgot to shape each syllable with extreme care. In the sentences Marcia Woodbine had actually heard, “human” had sounded more likehammen , “tucfra” liketafre , “not a seep” likenaughtahhsip . Earlier Marcia had lifted Jason out of his wheelchair. Later she would cradle his skinny, flabby body in her arms and lift him out of bed.
He had thought she was just another one of those women who improved their opinions of themselves by dispensing sexual charity. They seemed to come along every year or two and he never turned them down if they were reasonably presentable. There had even been one or two he had liked.
“They thought you would feel that way,” Marcia Woodbine said. “They told me I could tell you this was an offer that should stay open for some time. Your records apparently indicate you've got just the kind of intelligence they need the most—the ability to think very fast when you're confronted with practical problems.”
Jason stared at the ceiling. Twenty minutes ago, when he had opened his eyes between gasps, he had seen her, astride, towering above him, her breasts swinging from side to side, her face, with the close cut black hair, looking like it belonged on a Greek vase. There had been a young violinist in a North Pacific chamber orchestra, five years ago, who had looked like that. Jason had played a video of the chamber version of Sallinen'sShadows eight times just so he could look at her. He had never quite admitted to himself, at the time, that he had played it for that reason, but he had.
“They said I should also make it clear they would have to pick the body type they give you. It's apparently very important you look a certain way for the kind of jobs they have in mind.”
It was a subtle approach, but Marcia couldn't quite pull it off. Jason could have picked up the tension in her voice if he had been listening to her through a concrete wall.That's the offer we're making you , Marcia was saying.You can have a real body. You can walk around. You can pursue women. You just have to serve us. You just have to take the oath. To Us .
“I'm also supposed to tell you some of the things they have in mind will be dangerous. They're not offering you a picnic.”
“I think you had better go,” Jason said.
This time every syllable he fabricated would have earned him a happy shout of praise from the speech therapy program he had worked with when he was five. The pace he was speaking at, on the other hand, would have given most people apoplexy. Jason had never walked along an icy street but he had long ago learned that strong feelings affected him the same way slippery walks affected pedestrians. He could only handle them by creeping along syllable by syllable.
“I ... would ... ap ... pre ... ci ... ate ... it ... if ... you ... would ... take ... me ... out ... of ... this ... bed ... and ... go.”
* * * *
Two minutes after the door closed behind her, Jason was sitting in front of his desk with his wheelchair plugged into his information system. He had been working when Marcia had rung his bell and the work still had to be finished before the end of the day.
There were people Jason knew who would be happy to argue that he already had a functioning body. Some of the more radical techies would even have claimed the artificial physique he already possessed was bigger and more powerful than the best merely organic body the tucfra could grow in their medical centers. Every important item in Jason's apartment—the refrigerator, the cooking units, the doors, everything—was linked to a dual-input interface that would respond to two types of instructions: voice commands and signals from the control panel built into the right arm of his wheelchair. The personal service unit in his bedroom had even been outfitted with attachments that could handle most of his routine dressing and undressing. Jason spent 23 percent of his income on a personal service agency that sent two people around once a day, but he could sit here in his room alone, manipulating the devices that were linked to his computer, and do most of the things he needed to do without any help from anyone.
The speakers on his entertainment system could respond to the subtlest variations in bow pressure a violinist could transmit to the human ear. The entire ten by twelve wall on his left could be converted into a high-resolution screen. His communications equipment connected him to a net that could provide him with companions and entertainments that could be located anywhere in the world. He had received so many calls from his friends last week that he had been forced to set up a privacy block just so he could have some time to himself.
What difference could a new body make?
The image on Jason's primary screen was the score of a string quartet by M.K. Sun, a composer who had written over a hundred and twenty quartets during the thirty years she had been an active producer. The first great Oriental composer to write in traditional Western forms, Sun had been a successor to the Japanese, Chinese, and Korean performers whose violins and cellos had been such a notable presence on the world's concert stages since the last decades of the twentieth century. Jason's employers, the Hartford Quartet, played a selection from Sun's output at almost every concert on their schedule. They relied on Jason to search Sun's catalog, analyze the available data on the audience they were going to be playing for, and come up with a selection that fitted the audience profile. For over six years now Jason had been planning the quartet's programs, making their travel arrangements, arranging alternate programs when one of them became sick, and even handling their fund raising.
“Scroll,” Jason said. “Tempo—moderato 105. Execute.”
The score scrolled across the screen at about the tempo Jason's four employers would probably play it. His brain turned the notes into a musical daydream that was probably a good approximation of the way they would interpret it. Sun was noted for the elegant surface polish of her compositions but that external sheen always covered a structure that was as complex as anything Bach had ever produced. She had, in effect, treated the string quartet as if it was a traditional Oriental art form such as haiku or Chinese brush painting.
A light glowed under a loudspeaker. The voice of his apartment building's security system superimposed itself on the music dancing in his head. “Jason Jardanel has a visitor. Name—William Patros, Department of Internal Security. Message: I'd like to talk to you for a few minutes, Mr. Jardanel, if it isn't inconvenient.”
Patros had a round, youthful face and one of those medium-sized bodies that seem to have a lot of shoulder. His companion was named Jeanette O'Keefe and she was taller and older.
“We have some questions about the woman who just left here, Mr. Jardanel. Is there any chance she said something that indicates she may be employed by an organization that may be associated with the tucfra? We already have a number of indications that she is, but we'd naturally like to accumulate all the direct testimony we can put in our files.”
Jason let his head slump to one side. His right hand rose off the arm of his chair and he let it wander around aimlessly for several seconds, as if he had started to make a gesture and lost control. There were times, Jason had long ago learned, when his condition had its uses.
“You think ... Marcia ... may be ... a seep?”
“It would probably be more accurate to say we know she is.”
“I'm afraid this was a ... purely social ... visit. I don't think she said anything at all about ... poli ... tics.”
“Is this the first time she's visited you like this?”
Jason's mouth shaped itself into a twisted smile. “It's the first time she's been here alone.”
“We have reason to think she sometimes makes people offers—that she often functions as a recruiter.”
One of the software packages stored in Jason's electronic files was a counseling program designed for people with his “difficulties.” He was well aware, thanks to the time he had spent with the program, that people with his condition had a natural tendency to be accommodating. When you were totally dependent on others, an abrasive personality was not a survival characteristic. Now, looking up at Patros's face, Jason had to fight the reflex that encouraged him to give his visitors whatever they wanted.
His mouth twisted into another smile. “I don't think she thought I was the right ... physical type.”
“What did she offer you?” Jeanette O'Keefe said. “A new body?”
O'Keefe had been leaning against the wall on which Jason had hung his little collection of antique instruments, with her head only half a nod from a twentieth century replica of a wooden Baroque flute. She slid into the conversation without making the slightest shift in her position.
“Marcia Woodbine came here ... like many women ... because she wanted to be ... kind. There are ... women ... who seem to ... respond ... that way.”
“And you're in the habit of accepting their kindness?”
“She is very ... attractive.”
“Recruiting for seeps is illegal in our Confederation, Mr. Jardanel. So is failure to report it.”
It was a statement that was so obvious Jason might have smiled if he had heard anyone else throw it into a conversation. There was probably no political unit on Earth in which the wordseep could arouse so much hostility.
In the nineteenth century, a few thousand British subjects had ruled millions of Indians by working through soldiers and civil servants recruited from among the Indians themselves. In the twenty-first century, a couple of thousand aliens managed eight billion human beings with the aid of several million human agents. In the Indian section of the British Empire, British officers had commanded regiments of Indian soldiers who had been called sepoys. In the world of the Tucfra Hegemony, the tucfra were the real power behind the UN “peace force,” the UN civil service, and an army of “consultants,” spies, and secret agents who had infiltrated every society on the globe. The New England Confederation had been forced to accept the presence of a tucfra embassy—but its flag was a globe guarded by a rattlesnake, and its laws and attitudes matched the sentiments expressed by the flag.
“We enjoyed a ... purely social ... afternoon. I'm afraid I can't help you with your ... investigation.”
“If she didn't offer you a new body yet,” O'Keefe said, “she will. It's one of the major bribes they use to gain recruits. They've probably had their eye on you for years.”
“I'm a human being. Ahm nawht ... a ... seep.”
“A new body can be a very hard incentive to resist, Mr. Jardanel,” Patros said.
“I've ... become ... fonder ... of this one than you might think. It has its ... defects ... but it's mine.”
It wasn't the best sally he had ever come up with, but Patros smiled anyway. “There are studies,” Jason said, “of the way ... people with disabilities ... react to changes in their situation. It isn't ... cut and dried. People have committed ... suicide ... after ... beneficial ... changes. Big changes involve ... alterations ... in your self-image ... in your relations to others.”
“The tucfra seem to have other ideas,” O'Keefe said. “Whole body replacement technology is the one medical procedure they seem to be absolutely determined to keep out of our hands. Every human researcher who's ever tried to develop the technology has either been co-opted by them or sidetracked in some other way. It's the most important reward they have to offer collaborators, and they know it. The British imperialists used to keep the poorest people in their society living in the worst kind of poverty so they could recruit them into their armies. The tucfra spread viruses that turn people like you into cripples and then keep us from developing the only technology that will help you so they can offer a bribe very few people can bring themselves to refuse.”
“I'm not ... interested ... in becoming a seep. I might like a new body but that doesn't mean I will do ... anything ... to get it.”
O'Keefe pushed herself away from the wall. She closed the space between them with three long, easy-going strides. Jason raised his head and found himself looking up at a taut, angry face that looked just like all the indignant masks he had seen on a thousand news videos.
“We expect loyal citizens to cooperate with the authorities, Mr. Jardanel,” O'Keefe said. “The people we are opposing have voluntarily terminated their membership in the human race. There is no reason why anytrue human should be unwilling to help us deal with them.”
Jason had been eleven when his parents had made him stop watching the adventures of Captain Rhena Krishmikari and her sidekick, Lieutenant John White. Most boys that age had watched the other show and identified with Major Khan Singh and his sidekick, curvy Special Agent Dori Chang. Even then Jason had been the kind who would rather watch a woman when it came time for the lead to jump out of a helicopter or shoot it out with a South American dictator who was testing new bacteriological weapons in his underground torture chamber. He had already known that, for him, there was no point inidentifying with anyone, male or female, who did things like that.
The first time his father had caught him, his parents had disconnected his TV control for two hours. The next time it had been disconnected for two days.
They had been even firmer, a year later, when he had searched the library for information on the controversy over his disease and discovered that the official position of the New England Confederation could be shattered by any kid with a keyboard who had the guts to ask the right questions. It had taken him less than ninety minutes to decide that the virus that had poisoned his major motor nerves had been developed by a human government, several years before the arrival of the tucfra, and spread by human carelessness. He had even located three different studies—by epidemiologists from three different countries—that proved that the virus had traveled from the Arabian desert to the regions that had the strongest commercial ties with the Saudi regime. He had spent five happy minutes savoring one more proof that adults were just as dumb as his thirteen-year-old ego had known they were—and then his mother had entered the room, and he had seen the terror in her eyes when she had realized he was looking at a map that showed the areas with the highest incidence of the disease were Singapore and the metropolitan concentrations that surrounded Tokyo and Los Angeles.
There was no legal way the government of the New England Confederation could keep him from any information he really wanted. Legally, he could just phone the library and the database software would routinely transmit any video or written document anyone on Earth had filed in an information system. This was New England, after all—a republic which was carrying on the best traditions of the human race, as they had been embodied in the Constitution of the United States of America. And even if the library wouldn't cooperate with his request—how could you keep a kid from pressing the right buttons on his TV and picking up the stuff that came pouring down from the UN satellites?
The answer could be seen in the way Jason turned away from O'Keefe's face as she bent over him—and the way O'Keefe reached out, without any hesitation, confident he wouldn't object, and turned his head back toward her eyes. A republic didn't need censorship laws when it had private citizens who were willing to write S's on people's cheeks with well-directed lasers—or apply plastique and napalm to the homes of parents who didn't exercise proper supervision of their children. Jason's father had regularly “donated” 5 percent of his income to the COH—the Children of Humanity. He had even run little errands for the COH when he had to travel out of the Confederation on business. Jason's mother had understood, without anyone telling her in so many words, that the amateur chamber music groups she organized were only supposed to play music that had been written by composers who were “certifiably human.”
At one point, O'Keefe went up to Jason's desk and removed the cartridge interface that translated his slurred vocalizations into signals his computer could react to. She stared at it thoughtfully, glanced across the room to make sure Jason had seen her, and then replaced it in its slot.
Jason hadn't looked at the clock when Patros and O'Keefe had entered his apartment, but he knew Marcia had left him a little after four. By five thirty, they had been harassing him for over an hour. There had been no blows and no overt threats, but what difference did that make? There were a thousand ways in which O'Keefe and her buddies in the COH could turn him into a helpless lump of misery. For the few seconds O'Keefe had been holding the interface cartridge in her hand, he had been totally isolated from most of the systems he would need in any emergency in which he couldn't use a keyboard.
“All we need is a single statement from you,” Patros said. “If Woodbine didn't do it this time, then she'll do it sooner or later. We can't do anything legally without a state...
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