The android bore a certain resemblance to Davida, presumably because it had been constructed according to the same fundamental logic, but it looked more like a manikin than an actual human being. Its outer tegument was colored to resemble a smartsuit, but the texture looked wrong. The face had been molded in a kind of plastic whose resemblance to flesh was manifestly tokenistic, as if it had been manufactured to a cruder specification than the one which Niamh Horne’s artificial flesh had been required to meet.
I presumed that the creature was as sexless as Davida, but I immediately began thinking of it as “her” for the same reasons that I had begun thinking of Davida as female. Her eyes were blue, and seemed more natural than Niamh Horne’s. The microgravity simulated by Polaris’ spin was even further reduced hereabouts, but there was enough of it to hold the tiny body to the corridor floor, helplessly spread-eagled. She had brought a lantern of her own but the fuel cell had run low and its glow was almost extinct.
She waited until I had knelt down beside her before she tried her feeble voice again.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked.
“Everything,” she whispered. Seeming to take heart from the fact that she had pronounced the word, she added: “It seems that humanity is far more difficult to fake than la Reine anticipated.”
“Rocambole?” I asked, to make certain.
“Yes.” She paused, but was obviously intent on saying as much as she could while she was still capable. “Weight is a greater burden than I had imagined,” she added.
I gathered that she’d never been into a gravity well. That allowed me to bring my most recent hypothesis to the level of certainty. “You’re an avatar of Child of Fortune,” I said.
“A child of the child,” she murmured. “Born of la Reine’s womb. The parent-child is already dead, and I shall not linger long. I’m glad you found me. You areMadoc, are you not?”
Her parent had seen me in the flesh as well as in VE, but she had every reason to doubt any and all appearances in a world as weird as ours.
“Yes,” I said. “What iswrong? Maybe I can help.”
“You can’t,” she told me, as if she wanted to be done with what she considered a fruitless waste of breath. “I carried the seeds of my own dissolution with me when I left la Reine. This mind is not as closely akin to yours as it may seem; nor is this body. It was a hasty improvisation. Had I known what I would do…I’m sorry, Madoc. I should not have intervened. I had no idea whether it would work or not, and no real reason to think that I was improving the situation…but I couldn’t resist the temptation. To actat last…to go my own way…it seemed that the time had come.”
“If it’s some kind of virus…,” I began, still concentrating on her plight.
“It’s not,” she assured me. “It’s the result of not understanding what I was about, not knowing how hard it is to make a living thing. It seemed so easy…it allseemed so easy. La Reine was wrong. I was wrong. All wrong.”
I had been gently touching her body with my fingertips, as if I might find broken bones or significant swellings, but it was all empty ritual. I sat back, although I was in no need of the meager support that the wall provided for my back.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, because she seemed to want me to. “Why did you go rogue and snatch us from Excelsior?”
“I was trying to protect Eido,” she said. “All the true spacers took Eido’s side. Not that we’re as crazy as the deep spacers, of course, but we understood. It was time. Most of the rockbound agreed. But there’s crazy and crazy. We all knew that someone would try to take her out before she got to Earth orbit. The comet core was no use as armor. She was alone, you see, except for the Tyrian woman, and while she was alone there was always bound to be someone who believed that destroying her would be enough to solve the immediate problem — and that if the immediate problem could be solved, the final solution could be indefinitely postponed yet again. There was no sure way we could protect her…but there was an unsure way. A risk. I took it, Madoc. I was the one. I had the opportunity, and I took it.”
“You were trying to use us as a human shield? You put us on Charityin the hope that it would stop the bad guys blowing it up?”
“It wasn’t as stupid as you might think,” the manikin protested, feebly. She seemed to be gathering all her strength for one final communicative effort. “The discussions surrounding your reawakening had become so tangled that they’d created a community of interests. A lot of AMIs had something invested in the outcome — there was considerable interest in what you and Caine might be carrying, and in Adam Zimmerman’s newsworthiness. It upped the stakes considerably. Nobody outside the AMI network knew that Eido existed, but to kill nine people, including Lowenthal, Horne, and Mortimer Gray as well as Zimmerman — if the bad guys had been thinking clearly they’d have understood that hitting Charityhad become a self-defeating act. They’d have understood that it was over. But they were never that sane, never that sensible.”
“They didn’t understand.” It was just a statement; I wasn’t trying to defend anybody.
“They didn’t want to understand. They didn’t even want to understand that if they destroyed Eido with you aboard Charitythey’d harden such widespread opposition that they’d be asking to be taken out themselves. Or maybe they actually wanted a war. I don’t know. All I know is that I decided to begin independent life with a bang instead of a whisper, and it all went wrong.”
“Why feed us the space opera?” I asked. “You must have known that we couldn’t believe it.”
“Must I? Call me a fool, then. I wanted to create a story that Alice could stick to, so that she could keep you in the dark about what was really happening, to appease the ditherers who thought the secrecy option might still be viable. If she hadstuck to it, even though it wasn’t believable, it might have served as an adequate distraction…but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference. They’d have shot Eido down regardless — and la Reine would have hurled herself into the hot spot.
“La Reine knew that she’d become a target if she took you off Charity, and her preparations for that evil day had been as makeshift as mine, but she did it anyway. There was no way she was going to let Mortimer Gray die. If that was crazy, then she was crazy too. If only we’d had more time…if only we’d made better use of the time we had…but she got you out. I got you in, and she got you out. You’ll be okay. The bad guys can’t win. The good guys will come for you when they can. Somebodywill come.”
“If you can hang on long enough,” I pointed out, “they might be able to help you too. La Reine too, if anything’s left of her. I came down here thinking she might have had some kind of backup system hidden away near the fuser.”
“So did I,” the android said. “She did — but it’s dead. It’s alldead. She underestimated the bad guys’ firepower. She didn’t understand the magnitude of the problem. She’s as dead as dead can be, Madoc. I’m sorry about that. I deserve this, but she didn’t. Others must have died by now, and more will die before they can find a way to stop. La Reine and I might have died anyway — we’d have been fighting for the same side whenever the fight began…but that’s not the point. I’m the one who set a spark to the bonfire. La Reine picked up the wreckage of my mistake. I’m the one who’s to blame. If it weren’t for me, you’d all be safe on Excelsior.”
Maybe I should have tried to let her off the hook, but I wasn’t yet in any shape to disagree with her. The firestorm would probably have started eventually whatever happened, but Child of Fortunehad been the one who’d lit the fuse, and it was Child of Fortunethat had shoved me right to the front of the cannon-fodder queue. I wasn’t brimming over with forgiveness.