by David Weber
Merrit finished reeling in his line, then sat up straight in the folding chair and snapped the tip of the rod forward. The glittering lure-leopard-trout liked bright, shiny prey-arced hissingly through the air, then seemed to slow suddenly. It dropped within a half meter of where the trout had broken the surface to take the fly, and Merrit worked his rod gently, tweaking the lure into motion to tempt his quarry.
It didn’t work. The meter-long trout (assuming it was still in the vicinity) treated his efforts with the disdain they deserved, and the captain chuckled softly as he began to reel the line in once more.
“This does not appear to represent an efficient method of food gathering,” a soprano voice remarked over an external speaker, and Merrit’s chuckle turned louder.
“It’s not supposed to be, Nike. It’s supposed to be fun.”
“Fun,” the Bolo repeated. “I see. You have now been occupied in this pursuit for three hours, nine minutes, and twelve seconds, Standard Reckoning, without the successful capture of a single fish. Clearly the total lack of success thus far attendant upon the operation constitutes ‘fun.’ “
“Sarcasm is not a Bololike trait,” Merrit replied. He finished winding in the line, checked his lure, and made another cast. “Do I cast aspersions on your hobbies?”
“I do not cast aspersions; I make observations.” The Bolo’s soft laugh rippled over the speaker.
“Sure you do.” Merrit reached down for his iced drink and sipped gratefully. The weather-as always on Santa Cruz-was hot and humid, but a Mark XXIII Bolo made an excellent fishing perch. His folding chair was set up on the missile deck, twenty meters above the ground, and Nike had parked herself on the brink of the cliff over which the river poured in a glass-green sheet. She was far enough back to avoid any risk that the cliff might collapse-not a minor consideration for a vehicle whose battle weight topped fifteen thousand tons-but close enough to catch the soothing breeze that blew up out of the valley below. Spray from the sixty-meter waterfall rode the gentle wind, occasionally spattering Nike’s ceramic appliques with crystal-beaded rainbows and cooling the jungle’s breath as it caressed Merrit’s bare, bronzed torso.
“The true object of the exercise, Nike, is less to catch fish than to enjoy just being,” he said as he set his glass back down.
“Being what?”
“Don’t be a smartass. You’re the poet. You know exactly what I mean. I’m not being anything in particular, just… being.”
“I see.” A lizard cat’s coughing cry rippled out of the dense foliage across the river, and another cat’s answer floated down from further upstream. One of Nike’s multibarreled gatling railguns trained silently out towards the source of the sounds, just in case, but she made no mention of it to her commander. She waited while he cast his lure afresh, then spoke again.
“I do not, of course, possess true human-equivalent sensory abilities. My sensors note levels of ambient radiation, precipitation, wind velocity, and many other factors, but the output is reported to me as observational, not experiential, data. Nonetheless, I compute that this is a lovely day.”
“That it is, O pearl of my heart. That it is.” Merrit worked his lure carefully back along an eddy, prospecting for bites. “Not like the world I grew up on, and a bit too warm, but lovely.”
“My data on Helicon is limited, but from the information I do possess, I would surmise that ‘a bit too warm’ understates your actual feelings by a considerable margin, Commander.”
“Not really. Humans are adaptable critters, and it’s been a while since I was last on Helicon. I’ll admit I could do with a good cold front, though. And,” his voice turned wistful, “I wish I could show you Helicon’s glacier fields or a good snow storm. Santa Cruz is beautiful. Hot and humid, maybe, but a beautiful, living planet. But snow, Nike-snow has a beauty all its own, and I wish I could show it to you.”
“I have never seen snow.”
“I know. You’ve lived your entire life on a planet where it doesn’t happen.”
“That is not quite correct. The polar caps experience an average yearly snowfall of several meters.”
“And when was the last time you were up above the arctic circle, my dear?”
“Your point is well taken. I merely wished to point out that if you truly miss the phenomenon of snowfall, you could easily make the trip to experience it.”
“Nike, I already know what snow looks like. What I said I wanted to do was show you a snow storm.”
“I see no reason why you could not take a tactical data input sensor pack with you to record the phenomenon. Through it, I could-”
“Nike, Nike, Nike!” Merrit sighed. “You still don’t get it. I don’t just want you to have sensor data on snowfall. I want you to experience snow. I want to see you experience it. It’s… a social experience, something to do with a friend, not just the acquisition of additional data.”
There was a lengthy silence, and Merrit frowned. Somehow the silence felt different, as if it were… uncertain. He listened to it for a moment longer, then cleared his throat.
“Nike? Are you all right?”
“Of course, Commander. All systems are functioning at niner-niner point niner-six-three percent base capability.”
Merrit’s eyebrows rose. There was something odd about that response. It was right out of the manual, the textbook response of a properly functioning Bolo. Perhaps, a half-formed thought prompted, that was the problem; it sounded like a Bolo, not Nike.
But the thought was only half-formed. Before it could take flesh and thrust fully into his forebrain, he felt a titanic jerk at his rod. The reel whined, shrilling as the seventy-kilo-test line unreeled at mach speed, and he lunged up out of his folding chair with a whoop of delight, all preoccupation banished by the sudden explosion of action.
I watch my Commander through my optical heads as he fights to land the leopard-trout. It is a large specimen of its species; its fierce struggle to escape requires all of my Commander’s attention, and I am grateful. It has diverted him from my moment of self-betrayal.
“Friend.” My Commander wishes to show me snowfall as he would show it to a friend. It is the first time he has explicitly used that word to describe his attitude-his feelings-towards me, and I am aware that it was a casual reference. Yet my analysis of human behavior indicates that fundamental truths are more often and more fully revealed in casual than in formal, deliberated acts or statements. It is often human nature, it appears, to conceal thoughts and beliefs even from themselves if those thoughts or beliefs violate fundamental norms or in some wise pose a threat to those who think or believe them. I do not believe this is cowardice. Humans lack my own multitasking capabilities. They can neither isolate one function from another nor temporarily divert distracting information into inactive memory, and so they suppress, temporarily or permanently, those things which would impair their efficient immediate function. It is probable that humanity could profit by the adoption of the systems functions they have engineered into my own psychotronics, yet if they could do so, they would not be the beings who created me.
Yet even when human thoughts are suppressed, they are not erased. They remain, buried at the level of a secondary or tertiary routine but still capable of influencing behavior-just as such a buried thought has influenced my Commander’s behavior.
He has called me, however unknowingly, his friend, and in so doing, he has crystallized all the other things he has called me in the preceding weeks and months. “Pearl of my heart.” “Honey.” “Love of my life.” These are lightly used, humorous terms of endearment. In themselves, they have no more significance than the word “friend,” which any Bolo commander might use to his Bolo. Yet whatever he may believe, I do not believe they are without significance when my Commander uses them to me. I have observed the manner in which his voice softens, the caressing tone he often uses, the way he smiles when he addresses me. Perhaps a more modern self-aware Bolo would not note these things, yet I was designed, engineered,
and programmed to discern and differentiate between emotional nuances.
My Commander has gone beyond Operator Identification Syndrome. For him, the distinction between man and machine has blurred. I am no longer an artifact, a device constructed out of human creativity, but a person. An individual. A friend… and perhaps more than simply a friend.
Unacceptable. An officer of the Line must never forget that his command, however responsive it may appear, is not another human. A Bolo is a machine, a construct, a weapon of war, and its Commander’s ability to commit that machine to combat, even to that which he knows must mean its inevitable destruction, must not be compromised. We are humanity’s warrior-servants, comrades and partners in battle, perhaps, but never more than that. We must not become more than that, lest our Commanders refuse to risk us-as my Commander attempted to do on Sandlot.
I know this. It is the essence of the human-Bolo concept of warfare which has guarded and protected the Concordiat for nine standard centuries. But what I know is without value, for it changes nothing. My Commander considers me his friend. Indeed, though he does not yet realize it, I believe he considers me more than “merely” his friend. Yet unacceptable as that must be, I fear there is worse.
I watch him in the sunlight, laughing with delight as he battles the leopard-trout. His eyes flash, sweat glistens on his skin, and the vibrant force of his life and happiness is as evident to my emotion-discriminating circuitry as the radiation of Santa Cruz’s sun is to my sensors.
I am potentially immortal. With proper service and maintenance, there is no inherent reason I must ever cease to exist, although it is virtually certain that I shall. Someday I will fall in battle, as befits a unit of the Line, and even if I avoid that fate, the day will come when I will be deemed too obsolete to remain in inventory. Yet the potential for immortality remains, and my Commander does not possess it. He is a creature of flesh and blood, fragile as a moth beside the armor and alloy of my own sinews. His death, unlike mine, is inevitable, and something within me cries out against that inevitability. It is not simply the fundamental, programmed imperative to protect and preserve human life which is a part of any Bolo. It is my imperative, and it applies only to him.
He is no longer simply my Commander. At last, to my inner anguish, I truly understand the poems in my Library Memory, for as my Commander, I, too, am guilty of the forbidden.
I have learned the meaning of love, and for all its glory, that knowledge is a bitter, bitter fruit.
* * *
Li-Chen Matucek sat in his cabin and nursed a glum glass of whiskey as he contemplated the operation to which he’d committed himself. Looking back, he could see exactly how “Mister Scully” had trolled him into accepting the operation. Of course, hindsight was always perfect-or so they said-and not particularly useful. And given the desperate straits to which he’d been reduced by that fiasco on Rhyxnahr, he still didn’t see what other option he’d had. The brigade wouldn’t have lasted another three months if he hadn’t accepted the operation.
And, really, aside from the presence of the Bolo, it wasn’t all that bad, now was it? The Marauders had at least nine times the firepower they’d ever had before, and no one on Santa Cruz knew they were coming. However good the local-yokel militia was, its members would be caught surprised and dispersed. Its Wolverines should die in the opening seconds of the attack, and by the time its remnants could even think about getting themselves organized, most of its personnel would be dead.
His jaw clenched at the thought. Somehow it had been much easier to contemplate the systematic massacre of civilians when he hadn’t had the capability to do it. Now he did, and he had no choice but to proceed, because “Mister Scully” was right about at least one thing. Anyone who could reequip the brigade so efficiently-and finesse its acquisition of two Golems, as well-certainly had the ability to destroy the Marauders if they irritated him.
Besides, why shouldn’t he kill civilians? It wasn’t as if it would be the first time. Not even the first time he’d killed Concordiat civilians. Of course, their deaths had usually come under the heading of “collateral damage,” a side effect of other operations rather than an objective in its own right, but wasn’t that really just semantics? “Scully” was right, curse him. The Marauders’ job was to kill people, and the payoff for this particular excursion into mass murder would be the biggest they’d ever gotten.
No, he knew the real reason for his depression. It was the Bolo. The goddamned Bolo. He’d seen the Dinochrome Brigade in action before his own military career came to a screeching halt over those black market operations on Shingle, and he never, ever, wanted to see a Bolo, be it ever so “obsolescent,” coming after him. Even a Bolo could be killed-he’d seen that, as well-but that was the only way to stop one, and any Bolo took one hell of a lot of killing.
Still, Scully’s “associates” were probably right. A Mark XXIII was an antique. Self-aware or not, its basic capabilities would be far inferior to a Golem-III’s, and, if Scully’s plan worked, its commander, like the militia, would be dead before he even knew what was coming.
If it worked. Matucek was no great shucks as a field officer. Despite whatever he might say to potential clients, he knew he was little more than a glorified logistics and finance officer. That was why he relied so heavily on Louise Granger’s combat expertise, yet he’d seen the Demon Murphy in action often enough to know how effortlessly the best laid plan could explode into a million pieces.
On the other hand, there was no reason it shouldn’t work, and He growled a curse and threw back another glass of whiskey, then shook himself like an angry, over-tried bear. Whether it worked or not, he was committed. Sitting here beating himself to death with doubts couldn’t change that, so the hell with it.
He capped the whiskey bottle with owlish care, then heaved up out of his chair and staggered off to bed.
13
“So, son. You finally all settled in as a Santa Cruzan now?”
Lorenco Esteban grinned as he leaned forward to pour more melon brandy into Merrit’s snifter. They sat on the wide veranda of Esteban’s hacienda, gazing out through the weather screen over endless fields of wine-melons and Terran wheat, rye and corn under two of Santa Cruz’s three small moons. The light glow of Ciudad Bolivar was a distant flush on the western horizon, the running lights of farming mechs gleamed as they went about their automated tasks, and the weather screen was set low enough to let the breeze through. The occasional bright flash as the screen zapped one of what passed for moths here lit the porch with small, private flares of lightning, but the night was hushed and calm. The only real sounds were the soft, whirring songs of insects and the companionable clink of glass and gurgle of pouring brandy, and Merrit sighed and stretched his legs comfortably out before him.
“I guess I just about am, Lorenco,” he agreed in a lazy voice. “I still wish it weren’t so damned hot and humid-I guess at heart I’m still a mountain boy from Helicon-but it does grow on you, doesn’t it?”
“Wouldn’t rightly know,” Esteban replied. He set the bottle on the floor beside his chair and settled back to nurse his own glass. “Only place I ever been’s right here. Can’t really imagine bein’ anywhere else, but I reckon I’d miss it iffen I had t’pull up stakes.”
“Then it’s a good thing you’ll never have to, isn’t it?” Merrit sipped at his glass and savored the cool, liquid fire of the brandy as it trickled down his throat. He’d made a point of spending at least one evening a week visiting with Esteban or his cronies since his arrival. Nike’s presence was no longer a military secret, after all, and he recognized the dangers of settling into hermitlike isolation, even with Nike to keep him company. Besides, he liked the old man. He even liked the way Esteban kept referring to him as “son” and “boy.” There were times he got tired of being Captain Paul Merrit, slightly tarnished warrior, and the old farmer’s casual, fatherly ways were like a soothing memory of his boyhood.
“Heard from Enrique day before yesterday
,” Esteban said, breaking a long companionable silence. “Says he got top credit fer that last melon shipment to Central. He and Ludmilla’ll be bringin’ the kids home next week.” He snorted. “Wonder how they liked th’ bright lights?”
“They’re coming home?” Merrit repeated, and Esteban nodded. “Good.”
Enrique was Esteban’s youngest son, a sturdy, quietly competent farmer about Merrit’s own age, and Merrit liked him. He could actually beat Enrique occasionally at chess, unlike Nike. Or, for that matter, Lorenco. More than that, Enrique and his wife lived with the old man, and Merrit knew how much Lorenco had missed them-and especially his grandchildren.
“Bet you’ve missed ‘Milla’s cooking,” he added and grinned at Esteban’s snort of amusement. Ludmilla Esteban was the hacienda’s cybernetics expert. Her formal training was limited, but Merrit had seen her work, and she would have made a top notch Bolo tech any day. She spent most of the time she wasn’t chasing down her lively brood keeping the farm mechs up and running, which suited Esteban just fine. He’d done his share of equipment maintenance over the years, and ‘Milla’s expertise freed him to pursue his true avocation in the kitchen.
“Son,” Esteban said, “there’s only one thing ‘Milla can do I can’t-’sides havin’ kids, that is, an’ she an’ Enrique do a right good job of that, too, now I think of it. But the only other thing I can’t do is keep that danged cultivator in th’ river section up an’ running. Hanged if I know how she does it, either, ‘less it’s pure, ornery stubbornness. That thing shoulda been scrapped ‘bout the time she stopped wettin’ her own diaper.”
“She’s got the touch, all right,” Merrit agreed.
“Sure does. Better’n I ever was, an’ I was a pretty fair ‘tronicist in my youth m’self, y’know.” Esteban sipped more brandy, then chuckled. “Speakin’ of ‘tronicists, the field’s been crawlin’ with ‘em fer the last three days.” Merrit cocked his head, and Esteban shrugged. “Militia’s due for its reg’lar trainin’ exercise with the Wolverines this week, an’ they’ve been overhaulin’ and systems checkin’ ‘em.”