Kinder des Schicksals 4 (Xeelee 9): Resplendent

eyed him with a grudging respect. ’I suppose I can’t argue
with that. I didn’t ask to be here, though. Just you remember that.
So I know who you are. Who am I?’
    Futurity took a deep breath. ’You are Michael Poole.’
    Poole raised his hand, and turned it back and forth, studying it.
Then he stood up and without warning aimed a slap at Futurity’s
cheek. Poole’s fingers broke up into a cloud of pixels, and Futurity
felt nothing.
    ’No,’ Poole murmured. ’I guess you’re wrong. Michael Poole was a
human being. Whatever I am it isn’t that.’
    For a second Futurity couldn’t speak. He tried to hold himself
together against this barrage of shocks.
    To Futurity’s surprise, Poole said, ’Sorry. Perhaps you didn’t
deserve that.’
    Futurity shook his head. ’My needs don’t matter.’
    ’Oh, yes, they do. Everything goes belly-up if you forget that.’
He cast about the tetrahedral cell. ’What’s a man got to do to get a
malt whisky around here?… Oh. I forgot.’ He looked up into the
tetrahedron’s squat spire, and held out his hand, cupping it. In a
moment a glass appeared, containing a puddle of amber fluid. Poole
sipped it with satisfaction. Then he dipped his fingers in the drink,
and flicked droplets at Futurity. When they hit the acolyte’s
cassock, the droplets burst apart in little fragments of light.
’Consistency protocols,’ Poole murmured. ’How about that? Why am I
here, Futurity’s Dream? Why am I talking to you - why am I conscious
again?’
    Futurity said bluntly, ’I need your help.’
    Poole sat down, sipped his drink, and grunted. ’More of your
decadent dumb-ass theology?’
    ’Not theology,’ Futurity said evenly. ’A human life.’
    That seemed to snag Poole’s attention. But he said, ’How long this
time?’
    Futurity, briefed by the Hierocrat, knew exactly what he meant. ’A
little more than a thousand years.’
    Poole closed his eyes and massaged his temples. ’You bastards, ’
he said. ’I’m your Virtual Jesus. A simulacrum messiah. And I wasn’t
good enough. So you put me in memory store, a box where I couldn’t
even dream, and left me there for a thousand years. And now you’ve
dug me up again. Why? To crucify me on a wormhole mouth, like the
first Poole?’
    Futurity was growing irritated. ’I know nothing of Jesus, or
crucifying. But I always thought I understood Michael Poole.’
    ’How could you? He’s been dead twenty millennia.’
    Futurity said relentlessly, ’Then perhaps I misjudged his
character. We didn’t bring you back to harm you. We didn’t bring you
back for you at all. You’re here because somebody in trouble is
asking for your help. Maybe you should think about somebody other
than yourself, as Michael Poole surely would have done.’
    Poole shook his head. ’I don’t believe it. Are you trying to
manipulate me?’
    ’I wouldn’t dream of it, sir.’
    Poole sipped his unreal whisky. Then he sighed. ’So what’s the
problem?’

 
III
     
     
    Poole had no physical location as such; he ’was’ where he was
projected. It would have been possible for him to be manifested
aboard the Ask Politely by projection from the Ecclesia’s underground
caches. But Poole himself pressed for the data that defined him to be
downloaded into the ship’s own store, as otherwise lightspeed delays
would introduce a barrier between himself and this fragile woman who
was asking for his help.
    What Poole wanted, it seemed, Poole got.
    It took a day for the Ecclesiast authorities to agree transfer
protocols with Captain Tahget and his crew. Futurity, no specialist
in such matters, found this delay difficult to understand, but it
turned out that Poole’s definition was stored at the quantum level.
’And you can transfer quantum information, ’ Poole said, ’but you
can’t copy it. So your monks can’t make a backup of me, Futurity, any
more than they can of you. Kind of reassuring, isn’t it? And that’s
why the monks are twitchy.’ But Poole was furious that the
Ecclesiasts ensured that Tahget understood they owned the copyright
in him and would protect their ’intellectual property’ against
’piracy’. ’Copyright! In me! What do they think I am, a worm
genome?’
    Meanwhile, Captain Tahget was insulted by the very suggestion of
piracy, and he complained about the delays for which nobody was
compensating him, not to mention the risk of allowing the unstable
situation of a woman with a bomb aboard his ship to