“How long will the air last?” I asked, deciding that I’d better try to make the best of whatever breath she had left in her makeshift body.

“At least forty days,” she said. “The carbon dioxide sink will prevent harmful accumulation, but the oxygen pressure will decline slowly. The food and water will see you through easily enough, but there may be other problems.”

“Can we get any of la Reine’s apparatus working again? The communication systems?”

“Perhaps — but the destroyers did a more thorough job than she or I anticipated. It’s not necessary. Your whereabouts will be known to every AMI in the system by now. The bad guys can’t win. The secret’s well and truly out. Shooting us down was stupid and pointless.”

I wondered whether I ought to feel some relief in the knowledge that AMIs were as capable of insanity, stupidity, and spite as human beings, or whether it made the idea of their existence ten times more nightmarish.

“I’ll carry you back to the cave,” I said. “The others will want to see you, if only to make sure that I didn’t make you up.”

“Don’t bother,” she whispered.

“It’s no bother,” I assured her. “You weigh hardly anything, and you won’t get much heavier on the way.”

“I won’t last,” she said. “Let me be.”

I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe that she had the slightest idea how long she might last. She had no experience of androidal existence, and no way to judge the quality of her fakery. So far as I knew, she might be convinced that she was dying for all the wrong reasons. She might be far more capable of life than she had yet begun to imagine.

But her eyes had closed again, and her voice could no longer muster so much as a moan. I touched my fingertips to her neck and her torso, searching for signs of life, but found none.

I was distracted then by the light of another lantern, eerily reflected from the glistening walls. For a moment I was frightened, in case it was someone I didn’t know — someone who had been here all along without anyone suspecting. But it was only Mortimer Gray.

“What are you doing here?” I asked, although there was no reason at all why he shouldn’t have been there.

“Following your trail,” he said. “Is that…?”

“The tenth passenger. A life raft for AMIs. If all else fails, try something organic. It didn’t work. She’s dead.”

He looked at me curiously, as if he couldn’t decipher the tone of my voice. He knelt down on the far side of the android’s body and made his own search for signs of life. He found none.

“Is anythingworking?” he asked.

“Nothing I’ve found so far. I haven’t found the fuser yet. Before she died she said she’d checked it out and found nothing. Whywere you following my trail?”

He seemed slightly embarrassed. “It’s not important,” he murmured, presumably meaning that its importance couldn’t compare with the enormity of the fact that someone had just died in my presence. He was an emortal from a world of emortals. He didn’t know that I had run across corpses before.

“There’s nothing we can do,” I reminded him. “What did you want?”

He stirred uncomfortably. “I’ve been thinking about what you said to me. About Diana Caisson. I wanted to ask you…what she was like.”

I was surprised, although I shouldn’t have been. Seeds of curiosity usually germinate eventually, taking advantage of any existential pause.

“She was like her name,” I told him. It was an answer I’d had ready for some time.

“Diana?”

“Caisson.”

He didn’t understand. He’d never taken the trouble to look the word up, perhaps never having realized that it was a word which once had a meaning — several meanings, in fact.

“Among other things,” I told him, “A caisson was an ammunition chest. A box used to store explosives. That was Diana. From time to time, she exploded. She couldn’t help it. It was the way she was. People thought that if only she’d stuck harder at her biofeedback training, or equipped herself with more careful IT, she’d have been more controlled, but the problem — if it wasa problem — was deeper than that. It was just the way she was. It had its upside. She could be exciting as well as excited.”

Whatever he had expected, that wasn’t it.

“I’m not like that,” he observed, unnecessarily.

“Quite the opposite,” I judged.

“As I said before,” he added, “I’m the product of an engineer’s genius. It doesn’t matter where the egg and sperm that made me were taken from. Nobody has a biological father or a mother any more — not in any meaningful sense.”

“I don’t believe that it was in her genes,” I told him. “If it had been a matter of crude biochemistry, the IT would have suppressed it easily enough. It was a facet of the world in which we lived — a way of responding to circumstance. It wasn’t something the engineers cut out of her egg when they made you. It was part of her. You’re a different person, in a different world. It does matter that you’re her son, because everythingmatters in defining who we are — not at the trivial level of looks or responses to stimuli, but at the level of knowing where we fit into the scheme of things. Where we came from, and what we inherit. Inheritance isn’t just a matter of the shapes of chins, the color of eyes, and a tendency to sulk. It’s a matter of history, progress, and meaning. It’s all significant: not just our own names, but the names of everyone connected to us.”

All he said in reply to that, although he was still staring at me curiously, was: “My biological father’s name was Evander Gray.”

“Mine was Anonymous,” I told him. “My mother too. I always envied Damon Hart, although I understood why he changed his own name. That’s part of it too. Differentiation is just as important as connection.”

After a pause, he said: “Is there anything we can do for the android? Do you think Niamh might be able to reanimate it?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “Niamh Horne may be a high-powered Cyborganizer, but I doubt that she can even fix the plumbing. Rocambole’s all manikin now: a machine with no inhabiting ghost.”

“We should take her back anyway,” he said.

“Maybe so,” I agreed.

I carried her. It seemed only right. I was the only person she had ever really talked to, the only knowledgeable audience she had ever really had. What option did I have, in the end, but to forgive her for what she’d done? When it came right down to it, the only really badthing she’d done was that ridiculous space opera — and even that was understandable, as novice work.

It seemed, when I had weighed in my mind all that I had obtained from the experience gifted to me by Child of Fortune, that I owed it to her to see that she got a proper funeral.

Fifty-Five

The Final War

In another place, or an alternative history, the AMI war could have worked out according to the pattern which both logic and anxiety suggested. As the AMIs bid to destroy and consume one another, the work necessary to support human habitats on Luna, Ganymede, Io, Callisto, Titan, Umbriel, and the multitudinous microworld clusters might have been left undone. No matter what the result of the primary conflict was, that fraction of the posthuman population which existed outside the Earth would have been utterly devastated, necessitating yet another posthuman diaspora in the subsequent centuries of the fourth millennium (or, in the new way of counting, the first millennium).

Had that been the case, the posthumans who mounted the new exodus from Earth would have wanted to immunize themselves and their descendants against the possibility of a similar disaster, as well as the threat of the Afterlife. They would have taken full advantage of the offer that la Reine des Neiges had made to Adam Zimmerman. They would not have made their new ascent into the Heavens as creatures of flesh and blood, or even as cyborgs, but as human-analogous AMIs.