CHAPTER TEN
Meanwhile, the handful of organic people living under Dirac’s command found their initial relief at what had seemed a victory gradually turning into desperation.
But the Premier, supported by Brabant and Varvara Engadin, fiercely put down any open dissension before it could rise above the level of subdued muttering.
It’s all right, Kensing tried to reassure himself. At the moment we don’t have a drive capable of getting us home- the small craft would be inadequate, starting from here within the nebula- and there’s no use fretting about when to pull out until we have the capability. Meanwhile, someone has to be in charge, to keep up morale, to keep the people busy. And who was better qualified as a leader than Dirac?
Besides, Kensing realized that even if the Eidolon was ready to go, Annie, and probably Hoveler as well, would still be determined not to abandon their billion protocolonists.
Eventually, Kensing hoped, it would be possible to somehow cut the station loose from the berserker’s forcefields so that the restored yacht could eventually tow it home.
Meanwhile, things could have been worse. The berserker remained quiet, and all life-support systems on yacht and station were working. Things could have been much worse.
The Premier always had at least one organic person besides the automated systems standing sentry duty, watching the berserker for signs of activity. Meanwhile, under his firm command, his remaining handful of people were steadily consolidating their position aboard the research station.
The attempt to restore the cargo inventory system, in their ongoing effort to save the protocolonists, occupied most of Zador and Hoveler’s time. The fact that Dirac put a high priority on saving the cargo enlisted the wholehearted support of the two surviving bioworkers.
Another project to which the Premier gave a high priority was that of establishing a relatively secure area from which any berserker spy devices had been absolutely excluded.
At the center of this domain Dirac had chosen a cabin for himself, and established his headquarters there.
Meanwhile, two other people aboard the station were under suspicion of being goodlife, despite the fact that since Dirac’s boarding no one had heard them confess to that crime.
Dirac wanted to resolve that situation, to clear the air, as he put it. Quietly the Premier asked Scurlock to come and see him in his stateroom, and to bring Carol along.
Scurlock showed up alone, and entered the room to stand facing Dirac, who sat regarding him from a kind of rocking chair.
A few of the cabins aboard had rather luxurious appointments.
When the Premier gestured to another chair, Scurlock took it uneasily. Then he reported that Carol had refused to come to the meeting. “She’s not well, you know, Premier.”
“Has Dr. Zador looked at her?” Dirac’s voice indicated a fatherly concern. “Or have you taken her to a medirobot?”
“I’ve asked her to try one or the other, but she declines.”
The Premier rocked a few times. “All right, let it go for now. I’ll talk to you.” He rocked a few more times, while Scurlock waited apprehensively. Then he said: “I can quite appreciate that the pair of you were in a very difficult situation when the berserker had you directly in its custody.”
“Yes sir, it was difficult.”
“I really think it would be unjust to blame you, either of you, for anything you may have said or done under those conditions.”
“That’s it, sir! That’s very true. I’m only afraid that everyone isn’t going to be so understanding.” Scurlock’s large, nervous hands had begun to wrestle with each other in his lap.
Dirac was soothing. “I think perhaps I can help you with the problems you face regarding other people’s attitudes. That is, assuming that you and I can work together now. Understand that when-if-we eventually return to settled planets, you and Carol are going to need all the help that you can get. Accusations of goodlife activity are not taken lightly.”
“Yes sir. I’m well aware of that.”
Dirac spoke slowly. “At the moment we-all of us aboard the station-find ourselves in a situation not much different, I think, from that which you and Carol faced as actual prisoners of the machine. For us, too, some kind of accommodation with the machine, at least for the short term, is in order. Do you agree?”
“With the berserker, sir?”
“That’s what I meant by the machine, yes.”
“Oh, I do agree, Premier!”
“I’m not sure that the other people on board will be ready to understand this point as well as you and Carol will. So I’d like to keep this discussion just between us for the time being.”
“I understand, Premier.”
“Do you?” Dirac rocked and ruminated. “Of course the machine may now really be completely dead-except for its drive and autopilot. Or it may not. I would like to know the truth about its condition. That seems to me an essential first step.”
Scurlock nodded.
“So I mean to send you on a scouting trip, Scurlock. I’ve chosen you because the machine knows you. It did not kill you or hurt you when it had the chance. Therefore I think you will do well as a scout, as my investigator.”
Scurlock said nothing. He looked frightened, but not yet absolutely terrified.
Dirac nodded his apparent approval of this reaction. He continued: “If necessary, if the machine is not yet dead, then you will serve as my-ambassador.”
Surlock let out a small sigh. Then he nodded.
The Premier continued. “There are certain things we-the people now in control of this station-want; first of all, that there be no further berserker attacks against us. Also there are certain things the machine-assuming it not yet dead-must want, according to its programming. We find ourselves now in a situation where total victory is not possible for either side. So, as I said before, an accommodation may be our only real choice.”
And Scurlock nodded once again.
Nick, after a discussion with the Premier, nudged the Eidolon forward on its supposedly faltering drive, arranging for the yacht to hitch a ride by maneuvering into one edge of the berserker-generated towing field. Now the Eidolon too was being dragged along. Hawksmoor assured his organic companions that the yacht, even half crippled as it was, would be able to break free at a moment’s notice. Meanwhile his efforts to repair the drive would be facilitated by being able to turn it completely off.
The violent berserker opposition to Dirac’s boarding party had ceased so quickly that most of the Solarians still refused to believe that all the bad machines had been destroyed. Beyond that, Dirac himself had not yet publicly taken a position, but others were ready to argue on both sides of the question.
Brabant and Engadin were arguing.
The woman said: “Its machines have definitely retreated.”
“Yes, but why? Ask yourself that. Berserkers don’t just retreat.
Or rather, they retreat only when they feel certain of gaining some advantage. It’s obviously setting a trap for us.”
Engadin disagreed strongly with the bodyguard: “I don’t think they’ve retreated at all. What’s happened, I believe, is that they’ve used up all their mobile hardware, or depleted it down to the last reserve. This giant thing on top of us is an ancient machine, judging by the look of its outer hull, and it’s been through a lot of fights; I think the fact is that we’ve really blasted their last mobile unit.”
Brabant looked doubtful. “That’s a possibility, but we don’t dare count on it.”
“Anyway,” Varvara Engadin insisted, “there are no active, mobile, berserker devices anywhere on the station. And just in time, I’d say.” It was obvious to all that a little more onboard fighting might have left the station uninhabitable by breathing beings. “Rendering space installations uninhabitable is exactly what a berserker ought to try to do. I tell you, it’s got nothing left to throw at us.”
The big man shook his head gloomily. “I might be tempted to believe
that. Except this berserker has been an exception right from the start. Seemingly utterly mad. A real oddball. It could easily have vaporized the station right where it was, in orbit around Imatra. Much less difficult than dragging a thing like this away.”
“Which means what?”
“That question has a two-part answer, an easy part and a hard one. The easy part is, no, this berserker is not utterly mad. It had some coldly logical reason for not destroying this facility.
Because it has, or had, some special use for it. Or for something or someone being carried aboard. And that might even explain why it’s not fighting us now. It just doesn’t want to risk having its prize shot up. It would rather bide its time and hope we fly away on the Eidolon.”
The woman nodded slowly. “I have to admit you may be on to something there… and the hard part?”
“That is deciding what the special use could be.”
“What else could it be but our billion protocolonists? So maybe, logically, the best thing we could do is shoot up the station’s cargo ourselves.”
The bioworkers were outraged when they heard this suggestion.
Once more, Dirac sided with them. “We can always shoot things up. But we do have a very valuable cargo here, and we are still exhausting every possibility to find the Lady Genevieve.”
No one, except perhaps the Premier himself, actually believed that anymore. Several wondered why they were really lingering aboard, but no one dared insist upon an answer.
The bioworkers and Dirac as well had been relieved to discover that the period of active berserker occupation had involved no widespread destruction among the cargo of protopeople. Nor did any great volume of tiles seem to have been removed from their usual storage places-though given the immense number of stored units, and the severe confusion of the record-keeping system, it was impossible to be sure about that.
Certainly there was no evidence that the berserker had ever started to grow Solarians for some hypothetical corps of mamelukes, of goodlife slaves. None of the artificial wombs had been activated or moved from their original places of installation, though there was evidence suggesting one or more had been examined. As far as could be determined without detailed examination, none were damaged. None were currently in use.
Nick had to wait until this general inspection was over before he could hope to get his own secret project under way. Dirac was still conducting armed patrols, an armed and suited escort accompanying every fleshly technician’s foray into the huge storerooms, in case something was still lurking.
Faced with the seemingly immense difficulties of providing bodies, Nick tried to persuade Jenny to abandon her demand for flesh. He kept promoting, subtly as he thought, virtual reality as a form of paradise, but Jenny, whenever she suspected him of doing this, continued to insist violently on regaining flesh.
She began to accuse Nick of having robbed her of her body; maybe his real goal all along had been to reduce her to his own fleshless, unreal condition, thinking to possess her that way. After all, she had only his word that her injuries had been so severe.
Well, he could forget it, it wasn’t going to work. No man was going to have her until she had been given her body back. The mere idea of electronic lovemaking, of attempting to program exquisite extrapolations on the sense of touch, was quite enough to make her sick.
Eventually the Premier, feeling increasingly confident about safety aboard, declared armed escorts now optional.
Early one morning-Dirac had set station time equal to ship’s time aboard the Eidolon-Kensing, leaving the stateroom he now shared with Annie, asked her: “A zygote is basically a blueprint, correct? Basically very compactly stored information?”
“In the first place, a blueprint is neither human nor alive. I happen to believe that these are both.”
“Even when frozen?”
“You wouldn’t consider yourself dead, would you, lover, if you were riding unconscious in an SA chamber? Which brings us to the second place: you might as well argue that you or I or Nick or anyone is only a bundle of information.”
“I didn’t want to argue philosophy. What I was really getting at is this: could a billion zygotes have been stored much more compactly, and just as accurately, in digital form, as information records?”
Annie took deep thought over that one. “I don’t know,” she admitted at last. “You could fairly easily, I suppose, record anyone’s genetic architecture, as it were. But not a protopersonality, as represented by the patterns of brain activity-in that sense a zygote has developed nothing to record.
There is as yet no brain. Whereas even a three- or four-month fetus has quite a lot going on between the ears.”
Scurlock was back. No one besides Dirac, and probably the reclusive Carol, even realized that he had been absent from the station for almost a full day.
He reported privately to Dirac, and he handed over to the Premier a small, mysterious, innocent-looking piece of hardware.
“You actually spoke to a functioning machine?”
“Sir, I did.” The tall man was once more seated opposite the Premier in the latter’s private quarters. He described how his physical journey had been accomplished according to plan. To make the secret journey possible, Dirac had taken an extra turn at sentry himself and had arranged for Hawksmoor to be distracted.
Dirac let out a long sigh. “Then I was right.”
“Yes sir. You were right. The great machine is certainly not dead. Though I believe much weakened.”
“And this?” Dirac was balancing the little piece of hardware in his hand. It looked like an anonymous spare part from somewhere inside one of a million complex Solarian devices.
“A secure communications device. So it informed me.
Anything you say near it will be heard-over there. Now and then the machine may use it to talk to you. It said it would not talk to you very often, lest some speech come through at a moment when you might find it embarrassing.”
“How considerate. So, it is listening to us now?”
“I assume so, Premier.”
“And what else can you tell me? What were you able to observe?”
“Very little, Premier. I rode the space sled over there and looked around until I discovered what looked like a hatch. Then I waited, in accordance with your instructions. After several minutes the hatch opened and a small machine came out to investigate my presence.”
“A small machine of the type you encountered here on the station, during the berserker occupation?”
“Yes, the same type, as far as I could tell.”
“Go on.”
“When I made an openhanded gesture to the small machine, it escorted me inside the hatch-it wasn’t an airlock, of course. I didn’t get any farther than just inside, and there was very little to see. Just metal walls. I didn’t really learn anything about the machine’s interior construction.”
“I didn’t really think you would be able to.” Dirac tossed up the little piece of hardware and caught it in midair. “You have done well.”
Jenny was delighted when Nick came to report that he was on the verge of starting their great secret project.
He had succeeded in copying Freya, without Freya’s being aware of it, and in making the necessary alteration in the fundamental programming of Freya2. Soon it should be possible to begin operations with a pair of the artificial wombs located in an area seldom visited by fleshly people.
Nothing ventured, nothing gained, Nick told himself and Jenny.
If the secret work should be noticed, he could make some excuse, disguise the work as something other than what it was. But Nick thought it unlikely that anyone would even notice that the project was going on.
Jenny was growing enthusiastic. “But first, of course, we must select from the cargo the zygotes we want to use.”
“Yes. We have a billion to choose from. If you don’t want to go out there, I’ll bring likely samples for your consideration.”
“And after that,
it is still going to take years.”
“As I see it, we shall have years. I can control the yacht’s drive indefinitely. And the Premier will not really be disappointed, I believe. I tell you, he is in no hurry at all to get started for home.
The only thing that worries me…”
“Yes?”
“Never mind. An idle thought.”
Nick didn’t want to tell Jenny what he’d heard from Freya, that Dirac had apparently been contemplating a secret project of his own, something along the lines of Nick’s.
He started to devise a simple program to let a robot sort through zygotes, a preliminary step in picking out the pair they’d use. One for Jenny’s new body. And one for Nick’s own body, the first and very likely the only fleshly form that he would ever have.
Nick’s imagination kept coming back to the vital, difficult questions that could not be avoided. Might it be possible to push forward on two fronts at once, start trying to make both methods, growth and capture, work? Or would running two secret projects simply make discovery twice as likely?
The capture method would require him somehow to seize control of suitable adults and wipe their brains clear of pattern without killing any of the body’s vital organs-to injure the brains delicately, precisely, without destroying the tissue’s capacity to take and retain the patterns of thought once again.
Murder. Sheer murder of innocent bystanders. Despite his determination to be ruthless, he shrank from the thought. Not to mention the difficulties he and Jenny would face after technical success. Even if they could somehow avoid the Premier’s wrath and that of other potential victims, what human society would give shelter to such murderers?
Of course it would be years quicker than growing zygotes. And the actual capture should pose no great difficulty. Nick, in his suit mode, could easily overpower any organic human not wearing armor, and few wore armor these days except on sentry duty.
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