Free Harvest of Stars by Poul Anderson

rampaging over the college campuses. They admired Mao and Castro, the way the earlier generation of them had admired Stalin. They went on to become tenured faculty, and I was glad to drop out of school. Their successors bred the Renewal and cheered it into power, because it was going to save the environment and purify society. But
you
are
different
Sure.”
    Sayre took three long breaths. Slowly, his hands stopped trembling. “Are you absolutely sealed in the past? I came to give you one last opportunity. Don’t make it impossible for me.”
    “Why, what’d you like to do?”
    “Preserve you. We need your hardware, custom-made as it is, but in due course we can have another unit made for you. I have thought we might then talk. Not necessarily dispute; converse. You have been through so much, you are such a large part of history yourself. My colleagues and I—scholars, scientists—would be very interested.” Sayre paused. “You might also be. So I’ve hoped.”
    “When my past self was young,” Guthrie replied, “he’d argue with true believers in assorted glorious causes. Gradually he found out that at the core, fanatics are all alike. Sayre, you’re a bore. You’re a busybody too, and more than a bit of a sadist, but mainly you’re a bore. Spare me.”
    The man struggled with indignation and managed tokeep his voice steady. “Have you given the slightest consideration to what will happen to you if you continue in this attitude? First, disconnection.”
    “What, again?” asked sarcasm.
    “Bueno, of course we have to do that in any case. We need your hardware for the newest replacement we’ve developed. If it works properly, and my techs think that this time it will, then it will continue in your network. But as I said, eventually we can make a new one for you, and you’ll waken again. That’s if you’ll give me reason to expect at least a minimum of cooperativeness from you. Otherwise, I’m afraid you’ll be too great a potential danger. With regret, I’ll have to order your discs wiped.”
    Guthrie was silent.
    “Oblivion,” Sayre told him. “Nonexistence. As if you never had been.”
    “No different from what’s always waited for everybody.” Guthrie sounded cool. Had he been linked to an imaging computer, the picture would likely have shrugged. “Unless there is something after death. I doubt that very much, but if there is, I suppose I’ll get a share of it.”
    It really would be too bad, having to destroy this fascinating relic. Maybe he could be frightened into reasonableness. “Or we can use you as experimental material,” Sayre warned.
    “You’ve been doing that to a succession of copies you’ve made of me.” Did this Guthrie feel pity and terror on their behalf? If so, he concealed it well. “I don’t see any point for you in torturing one more. Except revenge. Or plain old fun. Aren’t Xuan’s apostles above such emotions?”
    The damned, perverse diehard was right. The work already done would be amply difficult to keep secret, involving as it did a number of specialists. Unless the need for secrecy came someday to an end, anything else that was unnecessary multiplied the risk. If word got out, not only would an operation of turning-point possibilities be compromised, the Chaotics would make it part of their propaganda. (“See, the government isn’t content with what it does to ordinary human detainees in the correction centers—”)
    Sayre sighed. “Termination, then. We’ll keep you until we are sure of the new model, but I do not think you will ever rouse from this switchoff. I’m sorry.”
    That was no longer quite true.
    “My last words,” Guthrie said, “are, up yours.”
    Sayre blinked. What did that mean? No, he would not give his prisoner the satisfaction of asking.
    Eyestalks retreated. Guthrie had withdrawn.
    Sayre resisted the temptation to scream him back to attention. Instead, the man went to the phone. “You will make the conversion,