Pointing to the boy, Noa said, “That is my brother, Kenji.” Her thumb caressed the place her missing fingers would have been. She bowed her head, touched the globe, and it went dark. She touched another globe, and it flickered to life, casting her profile in sharp relief. Like him, she’d taken a shower. She also must have cut her hair. It was now tight against her head and paradoxically looked thicker than before. The angle of the light emphasized the indentations of the scars on her cheek and forehead, but also her high cheekbones, her full lips, her wide eyes, and the overall smoothness of her dark skin—the way the bluish light caressed it, it looked almost like velvet.
“The older woman at the center, that is Eliza,” Noa said, pointing at the new holo. James followed her finger. In the holo, there was a man and a woman who both appeared to be about sixty, if they weren’t augmented. Around them stood eight younger men and women. There was something restrained in their expressions. They weren’t smiling as brightly as the people in the other holo.
“That is her late husband and children. It must have been taken about twenty years after the colony was founded.” Her brow furrowed. “Eliza had twelve kids … the original settlers favored big families.”
James stared at the globe. Sometimes a cold or flu swept across Earth. He’d even caught one that had kept him flat on his back for a week while the nanos cleaned him up, but he’d never known anyone who’d died in an epidemic. “There are eight in this holo … ”
“Yes,” Noa said. “Four more died in another epidemic. Her husband died, too. I think it must have been shortly after this holo was made—he was maybe forty-seven?”
“Forty-seven … but they look so much older than that in this holo.”
Noa shrugged. “Life was hard then.” She shook her head. “It was some sort of virus. Caused a disease like meningitis. He wouldn’t take a nano-treatment. Eliza and the children that survived did.” Noa’s brow furrowed. “I think that is when she started to reject the Luddeccean philosophy. She bought a lot of land after the virus wiped out half of the first, second, and third wave settlers. Sold it and used it to send her kids to Sol System for school. Three didn’t come back. The other—her last daughter—died a few years back.”
James drew closer to Noa. “Why didn’t Eliza leave?”
Noa sighed. “Probably because her descendants wouldn’t approve of 6T9.”
“You don’t seem to approve, either.” As he said the words, he thought he felt a gust of cold air sweep the room.
Gazing at the holo, Noa sighed, the light of the globe shining in her eyes. “I don’t normally approve of sex ‘bots, or animatronics, no. People become addicted to them, forget that they’re not human, give love and affection to machines that don’t care one way or another, and that are expensive and energy hogs to boot.”
“6T9 seems to care about Eliza … ” His voice trailed off. He wasn’t sure why he was playing devil’s advocate. And where was the cold air coming from? He looked over his shoulder at an air vent—but it wasn’t on.
Noa frowned. “It’s his programming to mimic emotions. It’s his programming to care about her feelings and her well being. But it isn’t real … ‘bots don’t care about anything, not really, not their owners or even themselves. He’d wipe his memory and shut himself down if he realized he was endangering her.”
James thought of contemplating leaving Noa to her fate in the forest. “You make ‘bots sound better than humans.”
Noa raised her eyes to his. “No, they’re not—they’re just programmed that way. To be afraid, to want to live, to want to avoid pain, and to do the right thing anyway, that is far more than any ‘bot can do or be.”
James felt as though gravity had lessened and the chill in the room had dissipated.
Noa looked down. “People who think they love ‘bots … well, real love is compromise and sacrifice and not always easy, but it makes you better because you have to be a better person. And having a person who loves you back … they’re doing more than following a script.” She looked away quickly. His eyes slipped down her body. She wore a pair of light coral silk pajamas. Designed for life near the equator, the top had no sleeves. The color contrasted sharply with her dark skin and it might have looked enticing on the Noa in his memory, but it made the hard angles of her emaciated body stand out even more. She wrapped her arms around herself again. James wanted to put an arm around her, but didn’t.
Noa sighed, walked over to the couch, and flopped down. “But in Eliza’s case … I don’t know.” Leaning her head against the back of the sofa, she put a hand on her forehead.
James sat down beside her. Leaning back as she was, he retrieved some data on sex ‘bots from his data archives. In the twenty-first century, there were some people who thought that sex ‘bots would replace fellow humans as the sexual partners of choice. The thinking went that their appearance could be perfect and their personalities could be “perfect” as well. But with nano technology and improvements in surgery, almost anyone could have the appearance they desired, at least until they reached an advanced age like Eliza’s, when systems broke down too fast for technology to keep up. The “perfect” personality varied with the individual, and ‘bots were limited in that regard, as Noa put it, to “scripts” that got old.
“Everyone deserves the chance to be loved,” Noa said, snapping him from his reverie. “Here on Luddeccea, it’s hard for older women. Love and sex are for marriage and children. It’s not uncommon for men past one hundred to marry girls in their twenties, or women with frozen eggs in their sixties who can still carry a baby to term.” Her brow furrowed. “When Eliza’s first husband died, she was too old, and didn’t have frozen eggs. She worked so hard to put her remaining kids through school away from this system, and her business was here and she was alone … I think … ” She shrugged. “There are extenuating circumstances, I suppose.”
Leaning back, James rolled his head toward her. Noa had curled into a ball at the corner of the couch. She closed her eyes. “I’m so hungry,” she said softly. “Do you have any of those soybeans you filched from the bar on you?”
“I gave those to Carl Sagan,” James said.
“Damn,” Noa said.
James tripped over a memory of himself as a young man staying at his grandparent’s condo in London. As his grandparents had retired, his grandfather had said, “Help yourself to anything if you’re hungry.”
He looked down at the pajamas Eliza had provided for him. “Noa,” he said. “Do you think Eliza would really mind if you helped yourself to some food?”
Noa was silent. James looked up and found her eyes wide, her lips parted. With his augmented vision he just barely made out the black H on her wrist. “No,” she said. “No, she wouldn’t mind.” She didn’t move from her seat. She looked distressed—and she was silent, which proved it. His mind was a maze of unanswered questions and locked doors, but his unknown couldn’t be worse than her known.
“Let me go make you something,” James said. He had fuzzy memories of cooking elaborate meals—he didn’t think he could recreate them. But following instructions on the back of a soup packet seemed possible. And he wouldn’t mind a snack himself.
Noa’s mouth dropped open again. Shaking her head, she looked away. “Sure, yes, thanks, that would be great.”
James left her there and padded into the kitchen. He found the small remainder of the admittedly excellent soup tucked in the refrigeration unit, still in a pot. Putting the pot on the gas stove, he struggled to turn it on—the electric spark would not light. And then he noticed a box of old-fashioned matches sitting off to the side. His eyebrows lifted. He looked at the stove and shook his head. The electronic spark must have been disabled with the ethernet shut down. He struck a match, turned on the gas, and watched the flame leap to life. Shaking out the match, he almost sighed. Welcome to 1984 … and then, at memory of that particular year, and the novel by Orwell of the same name, he almost smiled wryly. But of course the smile didn’t come
.
Self-consciously touching the corner of his lips, he found a large spoon and begin to stir the pot as the soup slowly heated. Some of the soup splattered on his arm and he rolled up his sleeves. As the soup warmed, he began to notice the markings on the arm exposed to the steam becoming more prominent. Dropping the spoon, he pulled his hand away. He heard a shuffling noise, and turned to see Carl Sagan standing on his hind legs sniffing at the air, staring at James. He hastily rolled down his sleeves again.
Noa caressed the tiny hologlobe she’d found on the end table next to the couch. It fit easily in her palm and her fingers left streaks in the dusty surface. Light flickered from within the globe. James re-entered the room, bowls of soup in hand, and Carl Sagan followed in his wake. Perhaps enchanted by the fragrance of the soup, the werfle’s bewhiskered nose twitched as he sniffed.
“That looks to be old,” James said as the picture in the hologlobe emerged like a scene rising out of fog. It was one of the old globes that only had one holo in them, too. You could tell by the way the colors were muted. “What is it?” James asked.
Noa shook her head and put it on the coffee table in front of the couch, her mouth watering at the smell of soup.
As she took her first slurp, the sound in the globe crackled. “I met Jun at a transport station in Nigeria.” The ‘smoke’ in the globe solidified and a man and woman appeared. The man looked East Asian; the woman was African in appearance with skin as dark as Noa’s. She wore a Japanese yukata, but the bright yellow, blue, and geometric-patterned garment appeared to be cut from traditional Nigerian cloth. They both had sparkling augments in their temples smaller than modern ones, without all the external drives for app insertion.
Noa smiled. “That’s my great-great-great grandmother and grandfather! Eliza never knew them.” Her head tilted. “I wonder why Eliza has this?”
Noa traced the phantom figure of the man in the holo with a finger. He was visibly ethnically Japanese, with a slightly hooked nose, almond-shaped eyes, slender chin and slight frame. “Both our families were purist groups,” her great, great, something grandfather said.
The image of Noa’s grandmother within the globe shook her head. “Purist groups, they’re like religious sects, they always urge women to have a lot of babies. Controlling women’s fertility is how they maintain their existence. But ever since I was a little girl, I knew that wasn’t what I wanted. I didn’t want to be in any of the careers that were slightly acceptable to girls—I wanted to build rocket ships!”
Noa’s smile faded. She could see why Eliza might have this. Purist groups, religious sects … her own home planet. It was true, she supposed. If Noa’s own parents hadn’t been outsiders here, that would have been her life. As it was, she’d still felt the pressure to conform to that lifestyle. Nice girls didn’t “borrow” antigrav bikes, hop onto freight cars, or spend years mastering martial arts. Nice girls were demure, modest and let the men in their lives take the risks while they tended the home fires. Maybe her risk-taking personality as a kid was just a counterbalance to that pressure? To prove to herself that she could be brave and fierce? And maybe the reason why she’d wanted to be a pilot, and then later, part of command, was because it was the furthest from the status in Luddeccean society she could imagine being? She put her spoon down. Maybe, if she hadn’t been from Luddeccea, she would have been happy with some other career; maybe she could have been perfectly content as an engineer, or one of the Fleet’s analysts. But the risk-taking had altered her brain chemistry, wired her for risks … she had hated being First Officer.
The voices in the holo changed to static. Picking it up and surveying the bottom, James said, “A penny for your thoughts?”
Noa blinked up at him.
Catching her gaze, he added, “It’s a very old expression. It means … ”
“I know what it means,” Noa said with a wave of her hand. Her brow furrowed. “Not that I know what a penny is … ” Her eyes slid to the side.
“It was a unit of currency that … ” James’s voice drifted off. “Actually, I’m not interested in reciting the history of the penny. I’m wondering what you’re thinking and if it will somehow get me into trouble.”
Noa laughed and swallowed another spoonful of soup. “I was actually just thinking about every damn report I’ve had to do on blue-green algae.”
James said in a cautious voice, “Sounds harmless enough.” His eyes slid to hers. “It is harmless, isn’t it?”
“I can’t begin to tell you how harmless it is, except for the kind that excreted hydrochloric acid.”
James’s eyebrows shot up. Noa waved a hand. “No, it was great, actually. The discovery of that algae was the only time anything interesting happened. The Republic’s Committee on the Search for Sentient Space-going Races is so obsessed that even blue-green algae has to go through fourteen different tests for sentience on the off chance that it could be a hive-mind organism.”
James’s brows constricted. “It could be … ”
Swallowing a spoonful of soup, Noa groaned. “But it’s not! It hasn’t been. I’ve cataloged over 100 species since I became First Officer aboard the Sugihara.”
“I thought you were a pilot, not a scientist?”
Noa dropped her spoon. “I’m not a scientist, but I’m good at whipping up reports—” She raised her fingers to make air quotes. “—in plain Basic.” Dropping her hands, she said, “I hate it. And then getting the sign-offs from the Fleet and the inter-Republic agencies … it’s such a pain in the ass, and it has to go to someone who is meticulous, organized, and charming.” She harrumphed.
As she finished her soup, she spouted off about all the stupid, redundant things she had to do to obtain authorization for a Fleet ship even to enter the atmosphere of a planet with blue-green algae. Talking was better than nightmares and thinking about contingency plans if Eliza didn’t come through. But by the time she was almost, but not-quite-done with her rant, she leaned back and realized aloud, “I’m boring even myself!” She looked over at James. “You’re cursing the fact that this is all going down in your holographic memory, aren’t you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “Not out loud.”
She laughed softly and closed her eyes, and leaned her head back, just for a moment.
When she opened her eyes, it was still dark, but she heard the pterys outside announcing the imminent rise of the sun within the hour. There was a light streaming from the hallway, beyond the living room, backlighting 6T9’s half-clothed form and Eliza’s bent frame. Eliza had one hand on the ‘bot; the other was wrapped around a cane.
“I’ve made up my mind,” Eliza said. “I won’t lend you the money.”
Noa sat up with a start. During the night her feet had somehow managed to find their way onto James’s lap. She might have flushed with embarrassment, but Eliza’s words had chilled her to the bone. James was sitting up in his seat, leaning forward, wide-eyed.
“But I will pay you to book two flights of passage.”
“What?” said Noa, wondering if she had wandered into another bad dream.
“One for me,” Eliza said nervously. “One for 6T9.”
“Oh, where are we going?” said 6T9, looking back and forth between the humans, a slight smile on his lips.
“That’s impossible,” Noa protested, swinging her legs off the couch and standing up.
James stood up beside her. “Eliza,” James said, “Noa hasn’t told me her plans for procuring the ship we need—but I know they will be very dangerous. You do not have the physical strength.”
Noa remembered nearly falling down the stairs last night at Ghost’s place, and struggling to climb up the ladder from the safe room. Maybe she didn’t have the physical strength, either.
“6T9 will be my strength,” Eliza said, patting his arm. “He will carry me if necessary.”
“I am programmed to sweep her off her feet, literally and figuratively,” 6T9 said with a proud smile.
“6T9 will be an ene
rgy hog,” Noa said. That was the other reason AIs and ‘bots never took hold. They consumed massive amounts of power.
“I’ll keep him in sleep mode when he’s not needed!” Eliza said.
Noa took a deep breath. “Eliza, if you get hurt, you’ll endanger the whole mission, everyone on it, and everyone on Luddeccea.”
Eliza looked down, and her knuckles went white.
“If we pull this off, we’ll get help here in a few months,” Noa whispered. If they could get past the gauntlet of the Local Guard above Luddeccea Prime, if they could coax the Ark to light speed, and if they could reach the Kanakah Cloud and activate the Fleet’s time gate …
Eliza looked up suddenly. “I’m going,” she whispered. “I gave my life for this colony, and my children’s and husband’s lives for their philosophy.” Her wrinkled face crumpled further. “I’m being selfish now … ” She took a deep breath and stood taller. She nodded. “If I’m badly hurt while trying to take the ship, you can leave me behind.”
“And me, too,” said 6T9. He pulled Eliza’s hand to his stomach and gazed down at her. “I won’t leave you.”
Eliza beamed up at him. “I know. That’s why I won’t leave you behind, either.”
Noa resisted the urge to growl. Eliza was anthropomorphizing him and it was going to cost them a whole lot of trouble. 6T9 would be useless aboard the ship, he wasn’t the brightest ‘bot on the assembly line.
Eliza’s eyes flashed toward her. “I can offer you more than just my money. You can use my hover, and my time, and I’ll do anything you ask … but I’m leaving this place, and 6T9 is coming with me.” She drew herself up to her full height— diminished though it was. “Take it or leave it.”
Rogue Stars Page 20