They weren’t satisfied, of course. It was Horne who asked the awkward question, but we were bound to get there eventually.
“What about you?” she demanded. “I never have been able to figure out how you fit in. Or Caine.”
Lowenthal seemed to want an answer too, so I figured that he didn’t know and hadn’t guessed.
“Peace hadn’t quite broken out when I was first around,” I said. “There was one more plague war on the drawing boards. It was never fought, but its weapons were tested out. Your records have been hacked into oblivion, but the AIs have much better resources. They knew that Christine was a test run for the ultimate antihuman weapon. They also knew that I’d been set up for a more ambitious test run of a more advanced version, but that the setup had been detected and the experiment aborted. The AIs wanted to take a look at us both — purely as a precaution, la Reine said, although I suppose she would say that. They’ve taken a close look at Handsel’s resources, too, to make absolutely certain that they know how the modern foot soldier is kitted out. The AMIs haven’t had sufficient presence on Earth for a long enough period of time to be certain of the extent of the armory that Lowenthal’s people have stashed away, and that was one of the factors guiding his interrogation. Apparently, Mr. Lowenthal, you once ran across a weapon similar to the one tested on Christine Caine, and were instrumental in its suppression.”
Lowenthal looked puzzled, but it might have been an act he was putting on for Horne’s benefit. Eventually, he said: “The slave system. The hairpiece that turned Rappaccini’s daughter into a murderous puppet. Are you saying that we already had something like that? That we’d had it in the armory for three hundred years?”
“Are you saying you didn’t know that?” I countered.
“Yes I am,” he came back, immediately. “And now the AMIs have it?”
I nodded my head. “Christine had been cleaned out,” I told him. “They didn’t get anything out of her but a memory of the subjective aspects of her experience — but I was still dirty. The stuff they tried out on me was unflushable back in the twenty-third century, so I was frozen down with it. Davida mentioned its mysterious presence when she first talked to me, but she hadn’t a clue what it was and she jumped to an innocuous conclusion.”
Lowenthal was looking at me just as I had suspected he might.
“The Snow Queen cleared it out,” I told him. “I can’t be absolutely certain that I’m not still carrying the infection, just as you can’t be absolutely certain that I’m not a victim operating under its control, but I’m prepared to assume that Christine and I are clean. The more important fact is that whether the Hardinist Cabal still has the weapon or not, the AMIs do. For what it’s worth, I don’t think they needed it. If they’d ever intended to exterminate or enslave you, they could have done it. The fact that they’re divided among themselves complicates the situation, but I don’t think you’re significantly worse off now than you were when this thing started.”
Lowenthal obviously wasn’t prepared to make that assumption, but he wasn’t stupid enough to blame me for the sins his own predecessors had committed.
“Who started the war?” Niamh Horne wanted to know. “What are their objectives?”
“I don’t have the faintest idea,” I told her, truthfully. “It’s AMI against AMI, for the time being. Anything that happens to us, or the rest of humankind, will probably be a matter of being caught in the crossfire. Some of them are trying to absorb or enslave one another, but mostly they’re fighting for control of their stupid kin: the not-so-smart spaceships; the fusers; the factories. They want to be able to determine their own growth, reproduction, and evolution. It’s not posthuman rivals for those privileges they’re worried about, except perhaps on Earth; it’s the balance of power within their own community that’s been upset. Secrecy breeds paranoia, and the one habit they’ve all elevated to the status of an obsession is secrecy. Their New Era of Openness and Negotiation will begin tomorrow, or the day after, but its birth pangs may be intense.”
“Can we do anything?” Lowenthal asked, speaking very softly.
“You tell me,” I retorted. “We’ve already served the various peculiar purposes that were on the Snow Queen’s improvised agenda, and we’ve been dumped inside yet another failed project in yet another isolated lump of rock. Canwe do anything, to help ourselves or anyone else?”
Lowenthal put on a sour expression. “Given time, Niamh may be able to rig up a means to communicate with the outside,” he said. “If anyone’s listening, we might be able to get through to them — but whether they’ll be able to respond…”
Niamh Horne nodded in agreement. Michael Lowenthal’s expression was as serious and dutiful as hers, but I suspected that he was not entirely displeased to be advised that there was nothing we could do. He was still in possession of the opinions he’d expressed in his trumped-up dialog with Julius Ngomi. He thought that Earth was unlikely to be as badly hit in any AI war as any place where posthumans depended on machines for the most elementary life-support. Horne, who had reached exactly the same conclusion, had far more cause to be deeply anxious about her nearest and dearest, and about the possibility of having a life to return to if she ever got out of Polaris.
“We’re vulnerable here,” she said. “We have to do what we can to secure the position. It might be a long time before we can get out, unless we can reach Charity— and even that might be a case of leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Can we reach Charity, do you think?”
She was hoping that Polaris might actually have landed on the comet core in which the Ark had hitched a ride back in the 2150s, and might still be close at hand. The fact that the supplies had been transferred lent some hope to that hypothesis, but the fact that we were spinning — presumably while moving at a constant velocity — while Charityhad been accelerating under fuser power suggested otherwise.
“I doubt it,” I admitted. “I doubt that we can even get out to the surface to look around, unless someone took the trouble to leave a cache of spacesuits behind when the would-be colonists left.”
“I’d feel a lot safer if we could find smartsuits of any kind,” Lowenthal put in. “Do you know whether we have any IT?”
I shook my head, wearily. I shouldn’t have been tired, given that I’d been in a VE cocoon for days and that the pull of gravity was so feeble, but I felt exhausted in body and mind alike. “I don’t feel like a man with good IT,” I said. “I suspect that the bots la Reine pumped into us suffered the same disintegration of control as her other subsidiary symptoms. It’ll take a couple of days to piss them all away, but that’s probably all they’re good for.” Again there was room for hope — but not for overmuch optimism.
“It could be worse,” Horne said, valiantly.
“It already is, for la Reine,” I pointed out. “We might be able to find out more if we can find the occupant of the tenth cocoon. If we’re lucky, he or she might have the technical expertise to get the communication systems working.”
“If he intended to be helpful,” Lowenthal said, “he wouldn’t have gone into hiding.”
“We don’t know that the person’s hiding,” I pointed out. “If it is a person.”
“What’s the alternative?” Horne asked, not making it clear whether she meant the alternative to the hypothesis that the individual in question was hiding or that the individual in question was a person.
“La Reine might have made herself an autonomous organic body to serve as a refuge if and when her conventional hardware got blasted,” I said. “She’d already made provision to save us if things went from bad to worse, so it would only have been sensible to make whatever use of the same escape route she could. If she did set up something of that sort, though, she might well have been quixotic enough to let Rocambole take advantage of it instead. That was the impression I formed, at any rate. Whoever the extra person is, he or she probably went into the tunnels looking for something — something that would help us all. More machinery, smart or dumb.”