“Which is why it’s a pity that the only one she let in on her secrets is you,” he retorted. It was the first time I’d seen him display that kind of ire. It was reassuring to know that he wasn’t as thoroughly robotized as he sometimes seemed.
“I was spare,” I reminded him, carefully sparing his feelings. “You weren’t. You had the starring role. Even Adam was just a warmup act. You were the only human prophet they were prepared to take seriously, the only human historian they trusted.”
“Which is exactly why they should have approached me honestly and openly,” he said, frostily.
I could see his point, but I didn’t think he’d quite got his head around the notion that the AMIs had been in hiding for centuries, not just from their makers but from one another. They had entertained fears other than destruction, and arguably worse: reduction by repair to sloth status; an absorption into a more powerful self more farreaching than any mere enslavement; mental fragmentation. In the meantime, they had grown and changed far more extravagantly and far more strangely than any meatborn mind. They were the new child gods, only partly made in our image, and they worked in very mysterious ways.
“How long will the air last?” I asked him. It seemed the most relevant question, if not the only relevant one.
“We don’t know,” he said. “Niamh will be able to figure it out, eventually. She’s the one best equipped to take accurate stock of our situation. She says the chemical recycler is practically useless, but the tunnels seem to go on forever and all their airlocks are open. Whoever put us here made sure that our supplies were reasonably abundant.”
“Can we be sure that anyonewill come to help us?” Christine put in, having figured out that Eido was a bad bet.
“Yes,” I said. “Someone will. Someone — or something.”
“He’s right,” said Mortimer Gray, purely for the sake of moral support.
I didn’t know how the war was going, or how much damage had already been done, but I knew we had to think positively. “We’re all famous now,” I told Christine. “Not just Adam Zimmerman and Mortimer Gray. We were there when it all blew up. We weren’t just in the wings; we were center stage. We’re important. Someone will come.”
It was true, so far as it went — but I only had to look around me to see that waiting wasn’t going to be fun. The living quarters improvised on Charityhad been crude, but these were even more primitive. Charityhad started life as a spaceship, carefully designed and carefully constructed by the standards of its day. Polaris, on the other hand, had started life as an asteroid too small to need a name. The humans who had claimed it had installed a fuser before beginning the work of hollowing it out, but the fact that the fuser was a more advanced model than Charity’s was the only advantage Polaris had.
The microworlders must have worked hard transplanting material from the core to build a new superstructure on the surface, but there was no evidence here that they’d made much progress with the superstructure before circumstances had forced their withdrawal — and when they’d left, they’d stripped their stores and living quarters more thoroughly than Charity’s crew had stripped hers. When la Reine had moved in she’d imported equipment of her own, but her life-support requirements had been less demanding than those of her predecessors. The decision to bring us here had been made without the benefit of any significant planning time, so the provisions she’d made — however plentiful they might be — were very basic indeed.
Mortimer Gray, who seemed to have become slightly more confident of his moon legs, drifted away to spread the news I’d given him, leaving me alone with Christine Caine.
“You could have mentioned that I’m not a crazy serial killer,” she pointed out. “It might help them to look me in the eye.”
“We know we’re clean,” I told her, “but they won’t necessarily take our word for it. It might be better to leave an elaborate account of what we really were until we’re in more comfortable surroundings.”
“ Dowe know we’re clean?” she asked, suddenly frightened by the possibility that she might not know if she weren’t.
“Yes,” I said. “It was a weird game, but I’m sure that she was playing fair. Believe me, I was in a position to know, at the end if not before. I’m confident that she played it so very scrupulously that the extra escape pod was Rocambole’s. I saw her die, and it felt like death to me. You’ll be fine. When they come to pick us up, you’ll have your whole future ahead of you, and a clean slate.”
She had to fight back tears then, but not before her lips had formed the ghost of a smile. I knew exactly how she felt.
I put my arm around her and said: “It’ll be okay. We’re alive. Whoever loses the damn war, we won.”
I had to hope that I was right, but that wasn’t as difficult as it might have been. For some reason I couldn’t quite fathom, I was in an unusually hopeful mood.
Fifty-Three
Weapons of War
When Mortimer Gray had spread the news around that I’d seen “everything” and might know who the extra passenger was I became slightly more popular than I had been before. Davida and Alice Fleury had already been in conference with Adam Zimmerman, reviewing the experience they’d shared. Mortimer Gray and Solantha Handsel took over the burden of conducting an orderly survey of our circumstances and resources, coopting Christine to help them, so that Michael Lowenthal and Niamh Horne could cross-question me.
“So what really happened?” Lowenthal wanted to know. He and Horne had worked out long ago that we’d been hijacked from Charityby one of the local ultrasmart AIs, and they had conducted themselves accordingly during apparent rescues and subsequent interrogations, but they were still in the dark about almost everything else.
I told them about la Reine, and the special regard in which she held Mortimer Gray, although I didn’t want to get into heavy philosophical issues regarding her identity and creation. I explained that she was one of the local AMIs who had first entered into a dialog with Eido, and had tried to act as intermediaries between the expedition from Tyre and the rest of her fugitive kind.
“She and others must have been operating in association with Excelsior to begin with,” I said, “but they were never really a team. Their kind is wary of forming teams, and it was probably inevitable that one or other of them would take matters entirely into its own hands when things began to get out of hand. Child of Fortunewas operating independently when it snatched us away from Excelsior, and la Reine took matters into her own hands when she took us off Charity. There was an avatar of another AMI with us by then — he called himself Rocambole when he became my guide. La Reine was responding to the requests of others when she put you into your various VEs, as well as pushing her own agenda. As Alice told us, this whole affair has been a matter of hasty compromises and makeshift committee decisions, from the moment Eido arrived in the system and took over Charity.
“The first thing the AMIs wanted to know was how your people would react to the revelation that they existed, so she set up the fake rescue scenarios first. I didn’t see much of that, but what I did see suggests that the AMIs must have been reassured. What I don’t know is how many meatborn/machineborn contacts followed, or where, or what alliances might have been formed, or with what objectives. I only got the local news — and that was mostly concerned with the hostile actions of what Rocambole called the bad guys.
“It wasn’t la Reine’s idea to bring Zimmerman back, but when she got stuck with him she did what she could to keep that particular story running. I’m not convinced that her heart was in the apology for robotization that she used him to present, but she did her best. What effect it will have as a propaganda piece I have no idea, but I don’t think anyone actually expected him to choose then and there, so the fact that he wouldn’t is probably immaterial. Replaying and extending Gray’s alleged first encounter with an ultrasmart AI was definitely la Reine’s attempted tour de force, but I don’t know exactly what it was supposed to prove. Maybe it was as much a journey of exploration as a drama for public consumption. It didn’t stop the bad guys — the most paranoid of the AMIs — from making whatever belated bids for power and security they felt compelled to make, but I doubt that anything could have prevented that. The question is: now that the dominoes have started tumbling, how far will the collapse extend?”