“But I tell you I don’t want such power! I took it and used it only when it was vitally essential, as if I were your doctor. Only when there was no choice if your life was to be saved.
“I’m sorry if you feel helpless here-again, I can only say that is the last thing I want. I repeat, I will teach you to control your own environment. Such teaching can be accomplished in a few moments. I will even give you the power to lock me out-”
“No, I don’t want to lock you out!” The lady’s panic was sudden and quite genuine; her unspoken fear was that this man upon whom she depended absolutely might grow angry and lock her in, instead. “Leaving me the privacy of my bedroom is quite enough for now. You saved me, you are the only one I can talk to. The only one who can possibly understand. The only one who can help.”
“I have offered to provide other company for you.”
She made a dismissive gesture. “Wraiths and phantoms-like these dummy images you have here now.” The nude pair were still posing, angling their bodies, displaying themselves in a slow mindless dance. “Like that man in dark clothing who always appears off in some distant part of the church. The one you call the verger, whatever that is. No. I always turn away when I see him. None of this company you talk about are real or ever could be. Am I correct?”
“None of them are real,” her companion admitted. “You and I are the only real people in this world.”
“Then, please, spare me the phantoms and the wraiths.”
“Very well, you will see them no more.” And in an eye-blink the two body images were gone. “Until I’ve turned up another zygote for your consideration. Meanwhile, just remember that I am not a phantom.”
“No, Nick.” The lady’s manner softened. “Oh no, I know you’re not.”
“I suppose that in the other world, the one you call real, there are many more people who love you than there are here. All I can promise you is that I love you more than any of those others do.”
“Oh. Oh, Nick… I don’t want to lock you out. I think…”
“What?”
“I think I want to lock you in.”
“Jenny!”
She eluded his outstretched hand. “But I know that cannot be.
Not while we are only ghosts. You must go out into that other world, and somehow you must do the one thing that I require of you. So are you going to do it? Nick?”
“I swear by… by the powers that programmed me, that I am going to find, or create for you, the body that you want.
Meanwhile, if my Abbey displeases you, I tell you I would cheerfully grind all its gothic stones up into powder if that would make you happy.”
The lady seemed to soften. “Destroy your Abbey? Oh, Nicholas, after all that you have done for me, it would be mean and horrible of me to do a thing like that, destroy something that you love. Even if it is only an image.” She paused. “Please tell me, where are we now? Really, I mean?”
Nick felt deeply disheartened by the fact that Jenny could still use that last turn of phrase.
“Nicky, tell me?”
“Very well, the location of our physical storage units hasn’t changed. We are still on the bioresearch station. In the sense you mean.”
“Why were you so upset a moment ago? It must have been something I said.”
“Because you said ‘Where are we, really?’ If my Abbey is not real, then neither am I-nor are you. You, I, and the Abbey-we are all made of the same stuff. Really.”
“I see. Then you must provide us both with bodies, Nicholas. I know I am repeating myself monotonously. I know you are doing your best. My love.”
Nick wanted to spend as much of his personal free time as he could with Jenny. Such satisfaction as these visits gave him could be gained in no more than a fraction of a second, as ship’s time was kept aboard the station. But he worried that Dirac might have ways, ways Nick himself did not know about, of checking on him. To absent himself too frequently or too steadily from the company of Dirac and other people, and from his assigned duties, might arouse suspicions.
In the face of the ongoing berserker threat, duty still called with an urgent voice. Events in that mysterious outerworld of flesh and metal, only very indirectly controllable by anything inside a databank, still threatened her existence, and his own as well.
At odd intervals, Hawksmoor puzzled privately over the enigmatic tone of that message Frank Marcus had transmitted just before he died. He definitely missed Frank, despite Frank’s expressed attitude toward talking programs.
Nick considered trying to share with Jenny his thoughts about the peculiarity of those last words. But then he decided she probably would not be interested.
Hawksmoor missed Frank, but his feelings about the Premier were undergoing a drastic transformation in the opposite direction… as if betraying a man you had no logical reason to hate automatically made you his enthusiastic enemy. Nick had to admit that now he really would prefer his creator/employer to be dead.
The process of betrayal and rebellion, which had begun with minor disloyalties, a gradual process by which the old codes were degraded, was now moving along, he realized, to its natural conclusion.
Had the berserkers themselves, Nick wondered, at the moment when the prototypes broke free of their creators, experienced something like this… epiphany?
In her fleshly existence the Lady Genevieve, compared with many other women, had very little experience of sexual behavior; the culture in which she had been bora and raised prized virginity before marriage. Still, near virgin as she was, she obviously had infinitely more experience along this line than Nick.
And yet she had the feeling that, if and when they eventually tried to come together, things were going to seem the other way around. How puzzling…
Intermittently the Lady Genevieve felt worrisome concern about her child-her protochild. This nagging feeling of loss had been with her, though dormant much of the time, from her first awakening in the Abbey.
“Suddenly those few cells inside their statglass and plastic nest are more real, more human, than I am. Or than I am ever likely to be again. Oh, God, but I must have my body back!”
“… until death do you part.”
Whether or not that line had been part of the aristocratic couple’s wedding ceremony, Nick had absorbed it from somewhere, and tended to think about it in his moodier moments, when he pondered the significance of fleshly death, the invisible guest at all Solarian weddings, partner in all relationships.
Jenny had no patience with any of these solemn musings when he tried to discuss them with her. Her entire thought and will remained concentrated on regaining the state she considered real life.
But Hawksmoor was unable to dismiss any of the great human questions as easily as that. Was the transformation she had experienced, on the courier and in the medirobot, really death?
Had he, Nick, saved her life, or had he not? And did what had happened mean she was no longer Dirac’s wife?
Despite Nick’s efforts to make her stay in the Abbey comfortable and to convince her of the advantages of optelectronic life in general, the lady’s objections to her current mode of existence-and possibly to some of Nick’s plans-were growing so vehement, her fear of remaining in this condition so great, that he feared for her psychological health. Not many hours after his first visit with the dancing images, Hawksmoor decided that it was better to shield her, to put her into a deep sleep for a time.
As usual, he did this to Jenny without warning. Recently she had told him she was now afraid to sleep, lest Nick somehow fail or betray her in a time when she effectively no longer existed, and flesh be denied her forever.
Hawksmoor retained, though he had not yet exercised, selective control over the lady’s memories. He could see himself being tempted, if things weren’t working out, to wipe out everything she had learned since becoming a computer program, and start over from that point.
If he was ever to do that, Jenny would once more find herself unexpectedly beg
inning a new life in the medieval cloister. The sunlit garth, the grass, the music. For her the experience would be completely fresh and new as she sat listening to the handsome minstrel sing. Maybe he would make the minstrel handsomer this time.
Trouble was, Nick realized, that it wouldn’t be fresh and new for him-not unless he also chose to wipe out the relevant portions of his own memory. But that way would seem to be recursive madness.
Still, the thought of being able to start over again with Jenny was tempting. He could easily make himself more handsome this time.
What ultimately decided Nick against that approach was the certainty that no matter how carefully he might try, nothing could ever be exactly the same as before. Chaotic variation always threatened. Things: could be better, but they could certainly be worse. Suppose that on the next iteration Jenny should go totally mad or reject him entirely?
Doggedly Nick battled other recurrent worries: Had Jenny’s brain been directly damaged by her combat injuries, so that the recording of her personality had been a moment-to-moment race with death? Nick had had to hurry the process to have any chance at all of getting her.
Had the pattern-transfer been somehow faulty?
No plans for the future would mean anything if he and Jenny were unable to survive in the present. They-or he, at least, now that he had put her back to sleep-had to confront realistically the difficulties of their physical situation. Including the looming danger from the berserker that was not really dead. At least he had to assume that it was not.
Ahead, the full dead blackness of the Mavronari was working its way inexorably closer, its vast depth becoming incrementally more perceptible from one hour to the next. The stars ahead, their light very slightly blueshifted by the craft’s velocity, were all beyond the nebula, and much dimmer than they ought to be.
Within a cone of some sixty degrees, centered dead ahead, there was almost nothing to be seen but a black void. And minutely, gradually, with every passing hour, there was even less to see, as that void inexorably expanded. The berserker, blind and deaf-or, for whatever insane reason, giving a good imitation of that condition-along with its helpless prey and the scarcely less helpless yacht were all slowly plunging together, headfirst, into a limitless bag of soot.
Kensing took it upon himself to make certain observations, intended to determine whether the normal-space, subliminal velocity of the strange little cluster of spacecraft was still increasing, or whether perhaps relativistic effects were gradually becoming greater with regard to the ever-more-distant Imatran system and the rest of the universe.
The result of the observations was mildly encouraging.
Actually the velocity of the several vessels relative to the nearest clouds of the surrounding nebula was diminishing. But only gradually; at such a rate of deceleration, coming to a complete stop relative to the Mavronari was going to take a number of years. Entrapment, sooner or later, seemed almost inevitable, though it might not happen for many centuries.
Even now, relatively little of the starry universe could be seen from either yacht or station, despite clear ports and free antennas.
And things were going to get darker before they brightened.
Trying to consider all possible strategies, Nicholas considered what he might do in the worst-case scenario of a berserker attack on the station, ending in an enemy victory. As a last desperate try, under those circumstances, he might transmit both himself and Genevieve back toward Imatra. Subjectively, for them, the journey itself would be instantaneous, nothing at all-old Einstein would see to that. But it was obvious that after transmission over a distance of so many light-days, under less than optimum conditions, only poor, frazzled electronic skeletons of information would arrive, only a poor sketch of either Jenny or him would alight upon a world that in any case had no particular interest in helping them to reach their goals.
Useless! Only as an absolute last resort would he ever entertain the thought.
Besides, on Imatra or any other settled planet, neither he nor Jenny would ever be granted bodies. Her real home, the planet of her fleshly origins, was farther off among the stars, and she had evinced no particular desire to return there. And the concept of home, as applied to himself, was meaningless. He was wherever he happened to be, and that was all.
But he was now in some sense beginning to envision the possibility, in fact the necessity, of one day possessing a home somewhere.
Since meeting Jenny new ideas had begun to fill Nick’s mind in profusion, multiplying explosively. Until now the coordinates of his physical location in the universe had been practically meaningless to Nicholas, but if and when he acquired a body, such matters would certainly have meaning for him.
And then there was, as always, the berserker.
Nick might, should he choose to be aggressive, beam himself directly toward the dark-hulled enemy. On arrival, assuming there were antennas that would let him in, he could try to negotiate a deal, one program to another. But Hawksmoor saw little likelihood of any benefit from such a step. He had no reason to think that his beamed self would be well received aboard the ominously silent berserker, or free to roam about at will.
Whatever remained of the original power in charge there would not be friendly. Though Nick fully recognized the awesome danger of berserkers to humanity, he tended to think of them less as machines than as programs more or less like himself.
Most likely no version of himself would be allowed aboard the berserker at all. And if it was, it might well be caught there in some electronic trap, caught and safely confined for leisurely dissection by the foe. After a berserker had subjected Nick’s alter ego to an exhaustive examination, it would have a much better idea of how to deal with his progenitor, stay-at-home Nick, homebody Hawksmoor, aboard the Premier’s yacht.
An alternate plan would be to transmit some ineffective, weakened version of himself. But then if that entity was not trapped, was allowed to act at will when it arrived, it might well make some devastating blunder. Unless Nick were to dispatch Inferior Nick under the strictest orders to do nothing but facilitate the following transmission, in safety, of Nick Prime… and if he could depend upon that attenuated version of himself to follow orders…
Complications upon complications. It was all too much.
Would a berserker consider Jenny, a recorded human being, to be still alive, her death a good to be accomplished? And would its attitude be any different toward him?
Despite the great amounts of time and effort expended on the question, no Solarian knew exactly what standard berserkers used in judging between life and nonlife, in deciding which components of the universe were animated by vital force and therefore must be destroyed as abominations-and which were safely dead or inanimate, and therefore tolerable or even good.
Anyway, Nick doubted that a berserker would perceive Jenny-or him or any optelectronic person-as alive. Once he told her his opinion, and was glad that she seemed marginally relieved. But privately he thought the question was probably academic. Most likely a berserker would regard both Jenny and him as, if not alive, still dangerous oddities. Subjects to be experimented upon for the knowledge to be gained, and then to be snuffed out as treacherous devices, likely to behave with sympathy to the cause of life.
But, Nick realized, he could be wrong.
He had mentioned the subject once to Frank, in their discussions, and Frank had expressed doubt that the enemy used any of what Marcus had called “fancy psychology” to distinguish between the living and the satisfactorily dead. Berserkers probably applied some simple test or series of tests for anything organic. Some other possible interpretations of what it meant to be alive, used by humans themselves, would broaden the category to encompass even the berserkers, self-replicating machines with purposeful behavior.
Some indefinable oddity in Marcus’s farewell message raised in Nick’s mind the possibility that this berserker, which had already demonstrated a predilection for letting its victims live, had taken Frank a
s a (more or less) fleshly prisoner. If so, might it not have already learned from Frank of Nick’s existence and his nature?
Would the berserker then be able to foresee what course of action Nicholas Hawksmoor the artiman was most likely to attempt?
To Nick in his present situation, all pathways seemed to lead into shadowy danger, for the Lady and for himself. And at the moment not one of those pathways showed any real glimpse of sunlight at the end.
It was time to consult once more with Freya2 and to check on the automated search that Nick had instituted for protocolonists whose genetic patterns met Jenny’s and his own demanding specifications.
Freya2, having been designed as a biddable co-conspirator, was quite ready to help Hawksmoor in his plan.
With the cargo inventory system still scrambled as it was, Nick felt once more compelled to awaken Jenny to discuss with her the great progress in and remaining hard facts of their situation, the continued difficulty, despite long effort, of implementing either of the two possible solutions to their problem of obtaining bodies.
Today the lady was moody, unwilling to hold such a discussion unless Hawksmoor forced her to do so. And he was reluctant to do that.
Finally, reluctantly, he once more put her, stealthily but forcibly, to sleep.
There were intervals-brief, so far-when Nick envied his companion her privilege of safe electronic sleep, oblivion on demand, whenever she felt like it. At least, thanks to him, she was as safe when sleeping as she was when awake.
As for himself, he sometimes tried to practice sleeping, lightly-for a time, trying to accustom himself to what a breathing life would be like. Then, worried, he would snap back to full tireless alertness.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hawksmoor now experienced moments when the most ordinary call of duty seemed a maddening distraction from his secret work for Jenny and himself. Even the enigmatic berserker, and the danger it represented to Jenny, to himself, and to his fleshly creators, shrank into the background.
Berserker Kill Page 21