She was right, of course — except that there might not be enough time left to negotiate that kind of a compromise, if it turned out to be the best deal we could get.
“That wouldn’t be such a bad thing,” was the reply I offered. “Here, you and I are the freaks in the sideshow within the zoo. Maybe the best thing that could possibly happen to us is that these talks between the ultrasmart machines will break down, so that Alice’s friend can be instructed to ferry us back to Tyre.”
“Do you want to go to Tyre?” she asked.
“Not particularly — but it might be interesting.”
“Because we’d get the chance to be shapeshifters?” she asked.
“Because the situation there sounds a lot simpler, and a lot more harmonious, than a home system full of rival posthumans and paranoid machines. It has potential, and a reasonable chance of developing that potential.”
“But we would get the chance to be shapeshifters,” she said. “I think perhaps I’ve always wanted to be a shapeshifter, without knowing it.”
“You haven’t heard what the other emortality salesmen are offering yet,” I pointed out.
“We don’t know that they’re offering anything at all,” she countered. “We were just the trial runs, remember. If one thing became obvious today, it’s that they don’t think they need us any more.”
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” I said. “It might leave us free to find and choose our own destinies.”
“Unless, of course,” she added, slowly, “we weren’t trial runs at all. Maybe we were exactlywhat some ultrasmart machine ordered: a crazy killer and a cunning thief. Alice was careful not to say very much about the machines who wanted to clear the human vermin out of the system, wasn’t she?”
“Maybe there aren’t any,” I said.
“Sure,” she said. “And maybe there aren’t any humans whose first response to the news that some machines have become people would be to switch them all off. Maybe the ultrasmart machines have been in hiding for centuries for no good reason.”
“If ever there was a good reason,” I ventured, “it surely must have degenerated by now into a mere matter of habit. If Child of Fortunecould snatch the eight of us from under the sisterhood’s noses, and make us disappear without trace, what must the entire fleet be able to do? The AMIs must be capable by now of defending themselves against any possible aggression from humans. They don’t have anything to lose by revealing themselves — it’s really a matter of when and how they reveal themselves, not whether or not they ought to do it. If they have cause to be afraid of anything, it’s certainly not the possibility that humans might try to wipe them out. They’ve been living alongside posthumans for long enough to know every subspecies inside out. They shouldn’t need to examine us, or debate with us, in order to discover anything about our attitudes or capabilities. If they really are going to subject us to some kind of trial when we get to Vesta, it’ll be a show trial: a demonstration or a drama.”
And yet, I thought, privately, they let us wake up in order to observe us. There must be things they don’t know, or things they’re afraid they don’t know. There’s something here that I haven’t quite fathomed.
“Whatever happens when we get to Vesta might be fun,” Christine said, optimistically, presumably thinking about the AMIs’ love of games and stories.
“In my experience.” I told her, “games are a lot more fun for the players than they are for the pawns. That goes double for stories. In my day, the world of VE drama always had a far higher body count per hour than the world outside the hood — even the child-friendly fantasies that you liked so much when you were young.” Having said that, though, I repented of its harshness. I hastened to add: “But you’re right. It will certainly be interesting and it might be fun. Anyway, we’re already way ahead of the games people played in our day, in terms of the prizes on offer. You might get to the Omega Point yet, and see a hell of a lot of scenery along the way.”
And all because you were a mass murderer, I didn’t add. If only everyone had known…
“Have you ever had fleshsex without IT support?” she asked, out of the blue.
“Sure,” I said. With Mortimer Gray’s mother, among others, I couldn’t help but recall.
“I never did,” she told me. “Might as well go straight to the real thing, I thought. I never expected this kind of situation to arise.”
“It’s not that hard,” I assured her. “And not that bad, considering. Do you want to come down here? It’s not as far to fall.”
I was joking. It seemed to me to be a joking matter.
As things turned out, though, it wasn’t a joking matter at all.
The fleshsex wasn’t as comfortable as I could have wished, because of the narrowness and hardness of the bunk, but it was manageable, and comforting, and reassuring…until the Earth moved.
It was an illusion, of course. If we’d actually been on Earth, instead of in an environment that was employing some kind of artifice to simulate Earth gravity, no movement of the planet could have affected us so drastically. It was, however, a thoroughly convincing and utterly terrifying illusion.
We were hurled out of the covert between the bunks, so violently that I was certain we were dead.
We were already holding one another loosely, so it didn’t require any acrobatics to hold one another more tightly, but neither of us could have expected that there was anything to be gained by clinging to one another — except, perhaps, that we would die together.
It would have been the ideal moment to have come out with some stylishly witty last words, but I couldn’t think of any. In any case, there wouldn’t have been time to whisper more than a couple in Christine’s ear before our fragile heads hit something horribly solid.
Part Three
Babes in the Wilderness
Thirty-Four
An Untrustworthy Interlude
When I regained consciousness, or imagined I did, my head was hurting like hell and there was a terrible stench in my nostrils. I tried with all my might to lose consciousness again, but I couldn’t do it.
The pain was veryinsistent, but its force was not quite sufficient to convince me that what I was experiencing was real. There was a frankly paradoxical sense in which the pain I felt was both mine and not mine, which translated itself into a sharp awareness that my personality had been split in two, creating a methat was somehow not me. I had a vague memory of having felt not quite myselfmany times before, but this was something else entirely.
The “me” that was “not me” — although “I” embraced both of them — seemed to be suspended in an upright position, supported under the arms and in the crotch. I seemed to weigh at least as much as I had for all but the tiniest fraction of my experienced life.
When I opened my eyes my head seemed to be trapped in something like a goldfish bowl, whose curved wall was by no means optically perfect — not that there was much to see beyond it, except for more not-very-transparent clear plastic walls.
It occurred to me that if ever there was a good time to be someone else entirely this was probably it, but the thing that was not me continued to defy all conceivable logic by continuing simultaneously to be me.
I tried to move, but I couldn’t. There was a strange redoubling of the sense of helplessness generated by this failure, as if the impotence in question were strangely and impossibly multilayered.
I tried to murmur a curse, and almost succeeded — but even the success seemed weirdly coincidental, as if the effort and the achievement were disconnected.
After trying to take more careful note of my surroundings I decided that I must be inside an old-fashioned spacesuit: a veryold-fashioned spacesuit, antique even by the meagre standards of Charity. I also decided that my skull must be fractured, because the only bit of my head that wasn’t hurting was my nose, which seemed to be both broken and unbroken, but was in either case quite numb.