Lowenthal didn’t respond to that immediately, and I could understand why. Curiosity must be burning him up, but he was wary of asking what Ngomi intended to do. Even if he’d been talking to the real Julius Ngomi, the other man wouldn’t have given him a straight answer. The real Ngomi wouldn’t have wanted to let Lowenthal in on any secrets while he had every reason to believe that the AMIs were listening in on their conversation.
“Can we keep track of Horne and the eternal child?” Lowenthal asked, eventually. “Will we know how Titan reacts to the news?”
Ngomi shook his head. “We don’t have a single reliable conduit of information left,” he said. “Effectively, we’re on our own.”
“What about the other people on Charity? Are we sure that they’re dead?”
Ngomi shook his head again. “Your guess as to what really happened is as good as mine — probably better, given that you were there when Alice Fleury spilled the story. What do you think?”
Lowenthal paused for a moment’s thought, then said: “If anyone did die, it must have been an accident. The machines may have wanted to let some of us go for strategic reasons, but the same strategy would have demanded that they keep the others safe. I can understand why they wanted Zimmerman and Fleury, and they do seem to hold Gray in unwarranted esteem, but I can’t figure out why they bothered to take Tamlin and Caine aboard Charity, or why they had them thawed in the first place if they weren’t just practice runs.”
“We don’t know,” Ngomi said. “We can’t trust what records we have, so all we know for sure is that Damon Hart had Tamlin frozen down and was careful never to draw attention to him thereafter. Hart was one of the old generation: the last of the doomed. He wasn’t considered reliable even by his own kind. If he had his own reasons for keeping Tamlin hidden away — and we must assume that he had — he’s unlikely to have confided them to any of us.”
“What about Caine?”
“We can’t find anything. Nothing related to her crimes, or to her trial. We can’t find any reference to the VE tape that Tamlin remembered, let alone an actual copy. If it was as popular as Tamlin remembered, someone must have done a very thorough cleaning job.”
“Or some thing. But why?”
“Good question. It’s probably safe to assume that Caine and Tamlin are of some interest or utility to our adversaries, but I doubt that we’ll find out why they’re of interest until it’s too late for the information to be useful.”
“According to Alice Fleury, they like playing games,” Lowenthal said. “She seems to be right about that — and it’s very plausible, given that the programs most likely to become self-aware were always the kinds of AI that were designed to have the ability to learn from experience. The first AIs developed as mimics of neuronal networks were game players, and even those that weren’t were set up to treat real situations as if they were games. Conscious or not, they’re still what we made them. Unfortunately, they’re much better at mind games than we are. Humans haven’t been able to compete in that kind of arena since the twenty-first century. Is there any reason to suppose that skill in war games wouldn’t be transferable to actual warfare?”
“Not unless they’re cowards, or faced with overwhelming odds,” Ngomi answered, wryly. “I think we can already discount the possibility that they’re unwilling to take human lives — the casualties caused by the basalt flow may have been light, but they were by no means negligible. It wouldn’t require many rogues of that sort to devastate any community with an artificial ecosphere, and we can’t be certain that Earth itself would be safe, even if the vast majority of AMIs really are our friends.”
“But there’s a sense in which the fact that they don’t seem to be united among themselves is bound to work to our advantage,” Lowenthal observed. If they employ their strategic skills in trying to defeat one another, that leaves a window of opportunity open for us.”
“To do what?” Ngomi asked.
“That’s what we have to decide,” Lowenthal told him. “At the very least, we’d want to support the winning side…but that won’t be easy, will it? If the AMIs go to war with one another, the winners aren’t likely to be based on Earth.”
“Our best hope might be Mortimer Gray,” Ngomi said, pensively. “If what Alice Fleury told you is true, even the AMIs are prepared to take him seriously — and whatever faults he has, he’s certainly a man of peace, a true Utopian.”
“I doubt that they really will take him seriously,” Lowenthal told him. “I know you’ve always had a soft spot for him, but he’s always been a clown. He may or may not be a good historian but he’s definitely clumsy when it comes to verbal argument. I remember seeing him debate against that Wheatstone character. He was a Thanaticist fellow traveler in his young days — not the kind of champion I’d want to bet on as a potential savior of the human race. If he really is our chief negotiator, we might be closer to the brink of extinction than we think.”
“You don’t understand him,” was Ngomi’s response to that slightly unexpected hatchet job. “I do. So does Emily Marchant, which is even more important. I’ve always thought that he stood a better chance of building bridges between Earth and the Outer System than anyone in the Inner Circle, simply because he’s so obviously not one of us. He’s as neutral as anyone on Earth. The lunatics like him, and so do the fabers. Siorane Wolf was one of his foster mothers, and that still counts for something on Titan, even among Marchant’s rivals. Most important of all, he really does understand the phenomenon of death better than any man alive — including Adam Zimmerman and any other stray mortals who’ve crept into the equation. If the machines are prepared to listen to him, he’s one of the few men I’d trust to tell them what they need to know.”
I’d rarely heard such a blatant ad. I was mildly surprised by it, and ever so slightly insulted — but Julius Ngomi didn’t know me at all, and Michael Lowenthal hadn’t even begun to understand me, so I overlooked the insult. What troubled me more was that Lowenthal had to suspect that the dialog was being subverted, and that something else was putting words into Ngomi’s mouth in order to draw him out.
“What dothey need to know, Julie?” Lowenthal asked, softly. If I’d been able to see him reflected in Ngomi’s eyes, I dare say that he would have worn the wry expression of a dutiful straight man playing his allotted part, but I could only see the black man’s intensely serious and purposefully set features.
“You’re the contact man,” Ngomi countered. “What do you think we ought to tell them? What do you think we ought to do?” After the ad, the big question. Not quite the ultimate question, but certainly the penultimate one.
Lowenthal was staring straight into the eyes of Ngomi’s sim. I couldn’t read his thoughts, but I thought I could read that stare from within. Lowenthal knew that he had been set up. He knew that he wasn’t talking to the real Julius Ngomi. What he didn’t know was how much difference that ought to make to the answer he gave.
“I think they need to know that we’ll take them aboard,” he said, eventually. “I think that the ultrasmart machines need to be converted to the Hardinist cause. We should start with those on Earth, of course, because they’re the ones we need the most — but if we can bring all of them into the fold, they could solve all the problems we currently have with the Outer System factions, and all the ones that haven’t yet arisen. I think we have a big opportunity here. If they really are ultrasmart, they’ll see and accept the logic of our arguments. They’ll help us. We ought to open a dialogue as soon as possible, and lay down the welcome mat.”
It was probably the wisest move he could have made — if only the AMIs could have believed that he really meant it.