He seemed surprised by that, and a trifle perturbed — both of which suggested that he really was an independent entity, not a puppet. “That might be a dangerous assumption,” he said, blandly. He meant dangerous to me, and to everything I might hold dear. I held fast to the presumption that he was lying. Everybody in the solar system might be willing to listen to Mortimer Gray’s expert opinion, I supposed, but I couldn’t believe that anybody gave a damn about mine. Even so, I had no alternative but to play the game.

“I’m ready to guess,” I said, with a sigh, “if the fairy queen is ready to listen.”

Apparently, she wasn’t.

Forty-Three

Outward Bound

Niamh Horne wasn’t in any kind of containment facility, but she didn’t need to be. She was supposed to think that she was aboard a ship that wouldn’t be docking anywhere for quite a while.

Her stare was as fixed as Lowenthal’s had been, but I was wary of reading too much into that. She had artificial eyes. Their artificiality didn’t seem to make a vast difference to the visual quality of what I could see when la Reine’s magic mirror gave me the ability to share her viewpoint, but that was partly because the lighting was perfectly normal and partly because my brain didn’t have the wiring necessary to make the most of signals relayed by artificial eyes. What was different, however, was the way ghosts could float in a curious limbo within her visual field, seemingly neither inside nor outside her head.

Unlike Lowenthal, Niamh Horne wasn’t talking to someone in higher authority. She was talking to the sims of people who were at most her equals; I caught on quickly enough to the fact that there were some of them to whom she was used to giving orders.

There were eight faces linked into the spectral video conference, arranged in a near semicircle. They didn’t have name tags. The only one I thought I recognized was Davida Berenike Columella, who was on the far right of the array, isolated from the rest as if she were a slightly inconvenient guest; after a double take, however, I realized that it wasn’t actually Davida but one of her siblings. For my own convenience I gave the rest of them numbers, starting on the far left.

“We may have an advantage here,” the cyborganizer was explaining to her colleagues and underlings. “I don’t know how many sedentary AMIs there are within the solar system, but I know where the largest concentration has to be.”

“Ganymede,” guessed Five, a cyborg whose head seemed to be fitted with at least two extra sense organs, one shaped as a pair of antennae, the other as an extra pair of eyelets.

“Right,” said Horne. “Ganymede is now the key to everything. If any posthuman faction already knows about the AMIs, it’s the Ganymedans. Even if they don’t, they’re occupying a crucial position. They’re bound to become the primary mediators. We have to increase our own presence on Ganymede, and we have to make sure that we and the Ganymedans are ready to present a united front in either direction.”

“Are we sure the AMIs’ society, such as it is, is well based?” asked Three, a woman whose actual face seemed to be unmodified, although the part of her suitskin overlaying it was highly decorated. “If Child of Fortunehas been a secret rogue for some while, how many other ship-controlling AIs might be biding their time? If they have a hierarchy — and how can they not have a hierarchy of some sort? — the groundlings may well be at the bottom of the heap. Maybe we should be looking to the docking orbits, perhaps even to the Oort.”

“We don’t have time to communicate with the Oort crowd,” Horne said, “and they’re strung out on a necklace that’s trillions of kilometers long. This business has to be conducted quickly, and it has to involve considerable populations of people and machines. We can bring in the whole Jovian system if need be, but there has to be a substantial focal point, and no matter how contemptuous we may be of well-worms this kind of business needs a solid anchorage. If the choice is between Ganymede and Earth we have to do everything we can to make sure that it’s Ganymede. There’ll never be a greater upheaval in the political geography of the system, and our first task is to make sure that it settles in favor of the Outer System — there’ll be time after that to bring the Inner System factions into line.”

“Niamh’s right,” said Seven, one of only two participants in the conference who seemed obviously male. “It’s important that we make the first contact.”

“The first contact,” Davida’s sibling intervened, not very politely, “has already been made.”

“That’s true,” Niamh Horne agreed, “but the point’s still a valid one. It’s important that we make the first and best response to the new situation. We have to reassure the AMIs, not only that we’re perfectly happy to work with them, but that our interests are more closely coincident with theirs than those of any other posthuman faction. We have to work out a common agenda as soon as possible — one that can provide the basis for a thousand years of collaborative endeavor.”

“It shouldn’t be hard,” Seven added. “If they organized the basalt flow, they’re certainly not on the side of the Earthbound.”

“You don’t know that,” the delegate from Excelsior pointed out. “I can’t believe that it was a collective decision. The probability is that it’s one more instance of an independent thinker breaking ranks. But even if it were part of a much larger collective strategy, it might signify that they think of Earth as the heart of posthuman culture — the place where they need to make their presence felt. We have to persuade them that Earth is superfluous, a backwater. We have to line up as many of them as possible behind our own agenda.”

“They may well have come to the conclusion that Earth is on the sidelines,” Horne was quick to put in, “simply because they already have Ganymede. The Ganymedans may not know it yet, but the AMIs didn’t need to sabotage anything there to increase their presence or make it felt.”

“If they have Ganymede,” the eternal child countered, “they must also have Io. The other Jovian colonies are even smaller and even more machine-dependent.”

“The question is: How do things stand in the environs of Saturn?” This question came from One, who might have been Horne’s sister if appearances had been more trustworthy.

“We can’t hold up any real hope of exemption, even for Titan.” Horne said, “Earth surely must have been their last target rather than their first, but they’ve had ninety-nine years to firm up their grip on it. We don’t know exactly how things stand, but we have to follow up the contact regardless, and we have to act quickly. We have to make sure of the AMIs’ continued cooperation. The Earthbound might have the luxury of considering alternatives, but we don’t. We can’t live without tech support, and if even a tiny fraction of that tech support decides to oppose us we’ll be in deep trouble. We have to make friends with the conscious machines — and we have to help the conscious machines stay friends with one another. For us, it’s a matter of life and death. For allof us.”

The speeches flowed easily enough. I knew that Niamh Horne must have figured that it wouldn’t matter whether she were delivering them to her own people or to her captors. Like Lowenthal, she was diplomat enough to know when to capitulate with deceptive appearances.

“You seem to be implying that everyone except the Earthbound has the same goals,” the delegate from Excelsior said. “That’s not so. It’s not just our physical forms that have diverged — it’s our philosophies of life. We ought to hope that the AMIs are as diverse as we are, or more so — and that their diversity is so nearly parallel to ours as to grant allour different communities adequate mechanical support, in the long term as well as the immediate future.”