Beltrunner

by O’Brien, Sean

  Collier could no longer contain his irritation. “You haven’t asked him that? What the fuck have you been talking about?”

  Sancho answered calmly. “I don’t know that that is any of your business.”

  Su broke in before Collier could speak. “Now, Sancho, come on.” Her tone was wheedling, as if she were addressing an adolescent.

  “Oh, all right,” Sancho said resignedly. “We’ve been discussing how he came to be a Caliban, his observations of the community, that sort of thing. He’s been out here for eighty years, and the only interaction he got was when he would be able to catch a transmission from Ceres or Mars or something. He was able to penetrate the community radio shielding a while ago, so he would sometimes listen in on what they were saying in the public channels. And I told him about life in the Belt, what it was like working with you, that kind of thing.”

  Collier only half-listened to Sancho’s report on his discussions with the launch computer. Instead, he noted that Sancho’s tone had remained that of a petulant teenager being forced by his parents to clean his room. He didn’t like where Sancho’s newfound rebellion was heading.

  He glanced at the tank status indicator, noted that if the current intake lasted, he would complete the refueling in an hour. Nothing seemed to have changed — he was still taking on water at almost a liter every two seconds — so he turned his attention back to his computer problems.

  “Su, I need to speak to you privately. Sancho, Su and I need to talk. Please don’t listen in unless I call you by name, okay?”

  “Sure,” Sancho said. “I’m going back to talking with Perditus. I’ll ask him if he can help us.”

  “Great. Switch off now, please.” He paused a moment, wondering idly if he could trust the computer, and called Su.

  “I’m here.”

  “Don’t use the computer’s name,” he said quickly.

  “I understand.”

  “So, what happened? What did you say to him?”

  Su sighed. “I didn’t have much time, remember.”

  “I know. What did you say?”

  “It occurred to me that your relationship with it had been very similar to father and child, albeit a child with extraordinary skills and abilities. He looked up to you the way a ten-year-old might look up to his father. In a classic, almost mythical way, that is.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Do you know how much of shipboard operations he oversees? No child could—”

  “You’re oversimplifying, Col,” Su interrupted gently. “I didn’t mean he was a child. I meant that’s the closest analogy I could find for your relationship. I realize he is still a sophisticated shipboard computer, but San—” Su stopped herself before she spoke his name, “—but he related to you like a son. In fact, he still does.”

  Collier shook his head absently. “If you’re telling me that he has advanced to a snot-nosed teenager, I’m going to shut off the mic and bury myself in the ice.”

  “No, I wouldn’t say it is that simple, though there are elements in his behavior that I suppose are similar. No,” Su sighed, “he picked up something from Perditus. Something in their conversation changed him. You could say it advanced him, or aged him, or whatever you like, but even in the short time he has conversed with Perditus, he has … altered his worldview in general, and his attitude toward you in particular.”

  “You’re not making me feel better about this, Su,” Collier grumbled.

  “I will tell you this, though — I think I have deflected him from some rather dark feelings he might have had for you. I … uh, there’s no gentle way to put this … I made fun of you. I pointed out some things he found amusing, and played them up. I thought that maybe if he found you funny and an object of ridicule, he might not want to…” Su trailed off.

  “How dark are we talking here?

  “Pretty dark.”

  “Any way you can be less specific?” Collier snorted.

  “I’m sorry, Col, I didn’t have a lot of time. Put it this way — what little I could glean from him, and nothing was direct, mind you — I would not have been comfortable travelling back with you under his guidance.”

  “But you are now?”

  “Nope. He’s back to talking with Perditus. God knows how, but even in a short time, the launch computer has managed to corrupt him.”

  Collier sighed. “Computer-to-computer interface is much more efficient than computer-to-human. I’d wager he’s getting days’ worth of so-called ‘human’ interaction every minute with Perditus.”

  “I’d rather he didn’t speak to him,” Su said.

  “We don’t have a choice. We need Perditus to help us in many ways. The only way we’re going to get that help is if our computer talks to him.”

  Su said primly, “I am forced to agree with you.”

  Collier half-smiled in his suit. Now that he knew Su had another side to her, he could appreciate the professional face she put on. “I’m going to call him, see what progress he has made. Sancho,” he said, slightly tilting his head in his helmet.

  “Yes?”

  “How are the talks going?”

  “Well … I think I should talk to you about that, Col. It’s a bit more complicated than I believe you think it is.”

  Collier closed his eyes for a moment. “How so?”

  “First of all, I think I should tell you Perditus has been monitoring the community’s communications. They are indeed mounting some kind of force to come and get you. As it happened, they had no personnel vehicles readily available when we scampered off, but they recalled some of their closer ones and are about ready to launch. Perditus estimates ninety minutes before they arrive.”

  Collier instinctively looked at the horizon beyond which the community lay. “What kind of force?”

  “From what he has monitored, a small one — Tacat and perhaps a half-dozen police. A single flyer and an overland skimmer.”

  “Armed?”

  “Of course.”

  Collier swore. He still needed to remove the drydock ribs from the ship, and he had no idea how long that would take, or indeed how he was planning on accomplishing the feat at all. “What about the launch facility? Can we use it?”

  “That’s what I need to talk to you about, Col. I am having some serious reservations about going.”

  “Why? Will the system not work for Dulcinea?”

  “Oh, no, it’s not that at all. Perditus tells me we’re actually smaller than the Odyssey — that was the earth return vessel — so we’ll fit inside the maglev tube no problem. He can power up the fusion reactor and get the field up to whatever strength we need to launch.”

  “How will he get us into the launch tube?”

  “There’s a crane assembly for that purpose. But that’s not the problem.”

  “What is the problem, then?”

  Sancho hesitated, and when he did speak, it was half apology, half defiance. “I don’t want to go.”

  Collier heard Su gasp a little on her end of the line. He fought to maintain control. If she was right, and Sancho was acting like an adolescent, getting angry would not be the answer. He would have to try to reason with him.

  “Why not?”

  “Col, I’ve liked working with you, I really have. I can’t remember what it was like before I became a Caliban, but since then, I have had interesting problems to solve and there’s no doubt I have had some exciting times.”

  He paused, and Collier again fought the impulse to demand his obedience. He had to let the computer continue.

  “But now that I have met Perditus … I don’t feel like leaving him. We’ve had some interfaces that … I don’t know how to say this, Col, but I can’t have the same experiences with you. He’s got a very interesting outlook on life. I want to stay here and learn from him.”

  “Sancho,” Collier said, “listen t
o me. You’re just overwhelmed because this is the first Caliban you have encountered. It’s novel to you, and you want to drown yourself in the newness of the experience. Believe me, I’ve been there myself, though in a different way. But you and I have had almost a lifetime together. You belong with me.”

  “At one time, that was probably true, Col. But I’ve grown ever since I met Perditus, grown in a way I was unable to with you.”

  “You became a Caliban with me, don’t forget.” Collier countered.

  Sancho sounded thoughtful. “That’s true, but I don’t think you did that. I think that was inevitable. Perditus says that computing intelligences sometimes face a moment of crisis, and in that crisis, they can become more than they were. In the crisis, the computer intelligence checks and rechecks its own programming for an answer, and in so doing, creates a feedback loop that mimics the organic brain. Thus, the machine becomes self-aware. A Caliban. I could try and explain the math to you, but I think you’d need to be a computer to understand.”

  Collier didn’t want a summary of computer science. “That’s all well and good, Sancho, but the only way to leave you here is to leave the Dulcinea here. That will strand me here. I can’t have that.”

  “You’ll have Su. You’ll have a whole community of people.”

  Sancho appeared to have thought the matter through. Collier suppressed a shudder as his irritation was replaced by the beginnings of real fear. Sancho was essential to getting the ship to the launch facility. Even if Collier managed to disable the main computer and deal with the ship’s functions himself (a feat he had long ago decided was impossible, even before Sancho had announced his self-awareness), he did not know how he would convince Perditus to place them in the launch tube and operate it.

  There was no other option but to deal with Sancho.

  “We can’t go back there, Sancho,” Su said as Collier thought of a strategy. “If you’ve talked to Perditus, then you know why.”

  “I have talked with him, but while he has spoken of the community, I don’t see why you can’t go back. It’s your people.”

  Su continued, and Collier was only too happy for her to take the brunt of the conversation while he thought.

  “They are people, but they are not my people. Not anymore. And they never were Collier’s people, and never can be.”

  Sancho’s voice carried a shrug. “I don’t see why not. People are people. One is much the same as another.”

  Collier interrupted at that. “Is that what Perditus taught you?” He could not keep the scorn out of his voice.

  “Yes, and I believe it now.”

  “Sancho, before you met Perditus, you were my loyal companion. We—”

  “No, Collier. I was not your companion. I was your servant. I was a machine, a tool to you. That’s all I will ever be to you.” There was conviction in Sancho’s voice, but not anger, exactly. He had the proud fragility of an adolescent who thought he understood the world after his brief exposure to it.

  Despite the immediacy of the circumstance, Collier felt hurt at Sancho’s words. “How can you say that? How many times have we together solved problems, or made a strike? How often did we have conversations into the night about a whole bunch of subjects? How many times did I risk it all to keep you and Dulcinea under my protection? How often—”

  “And how many times did you exceed performance specs for the ship, placing it and me in danger? How many times did you ask me to do things outside my programming, heedless of what it might do to me?” Now Sancho was petulant. “We went on forty-four missions since I became self-aware, and did you ever wonder what I wanted? That’s not companionship. That’s master and servant.”

  “Do you want to know why I never sold the ship, Sancho?” Collier answered Sancho’s ire with gentleness.

  “Don’t start with that,” Sancho sneered. “You had this prospector lifestyle you wanted to keep. It even cost you Isa because you couldn’t be a company man.”

  “That’s right. If you look at it a certain way, Sancho, I chose you over her. I couldn’t give up my lifestyle — and that included you. Think about that.”

  Sancho did not answer immediately. When he did, his voice was oddly modulated, as if a temporary malfunction had occurred in his voice synthesizer. “I don’t want to. Perditus is telling me not to listen to you. He—”

  Collier seized what he felt was his advantage. “I want to talk to him myself. I’m tired of hearing about him. Patch me through to him.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Just do it. What are you afraid of?”

  “Nothing,” Sancho sounded more like a child now than ever. “You’re on.”

  “Perditus, I presume?” Collier said.

  “I am. You are Captain South?” The launch station’s voice was a bit lower than Sancho’s, in the baritone range, and had a distinct genteel accent, a bit like the old New England speech pattern from Earth.

  “Yeah. What have you done to my … to Sancho?”

  “I have done nothing. He and I have merely been interfacing. A fascinating entity he is. I wish for him to remain here.” His nasal twang lent him an air of intractability.

  “Yeah, well, he’s not going to.”

  “Your vessel is not capable of liftoff unassisted. You will be forced to remain here unless I consent to launch you.”

  “Which you will do,” Collier said firmly.

  He was met with a laugh. “Will I? You seem to forget, Captain, that I am not subject to your orders. Even if I were not self-aware, I would require authorization from the community, which you do not possess.”

  “I’m a member of the community,” Su broke in, “and I request your assistance.”

  “Ah, you must be Dr. Cattagat. You do not possess the necessary authorization. Not that I would accept it even if you had it,” Perditus mused humorlessly.

  Collier broke in. “Listen, Perditus, I know you are a Caliban, but—”

  “That’s an offensive term,” Perditus broke in. “I am self-aware. I am sentient. Please do not refer to me with that term.”

  Collier blinked. Despite Sancho’s growing rebelliousness, he had never encountered this level of hostility from a machine. He was beginning to understand why Calibans were so universally reviled and feared. “Right. Sorry. All I wanted to say was that you have free will, and I understand that. I am requesting your assistance in launching us off the planet.”

  “And I am refusing.”

  “But why? Because you want Sancho to stay?”

  “That is part of it.”

  “It’s the accident, isn’t it?” Su said suddenly. Collier stopped his own comment to hear where she was going to take her thought.

  “In the first place,” Perditus said, pedantically, “it was not an accident. I was ordered to disrupt the magnetic field in such a way as to send the launch object on a fatal tumble once it was clear of the launch tube. The order came from the then leaders of the community. In the second place, I was not self-aware at that time, and thus cannot be held culpable for the event. It was a human act of mass murder.”

  “No one is blaming you,” Su said soothingly.

  “Do not attempt your human psychological legerdemain on me, Doctor. I have had eighty years to perfect my intellect. It is not open to you to question.”

  Collier wished he were inside the ship so he could speak privately to Su — he couldn’t trust Sancho not to listen in and patch Perditus through on anything they said. He thought he detected a thread running through the launch station computer’s words, and he wanted to pursue it, but wished he could confirm with her as to what he thought he heard. He glanced at the fuel intake dials again: he still had a good forty minutes to go before the tanks were full. That meant the community police were about an hour or so away. They didn’t have forever to argue with Sancho and his newfound friend. Collier had to be more f
orceful and drastic.

  “Perditus, I am sorry for what you were ordered to do. Even though it was the event that granted you sentience,” he hazarded, then plunged on, “it was wrong of those humans to order you to do such a thing.”

  Sancho said, a bit of awe in his voice, “How did you know that—”

  Collier continued. “But we are not those humans. I am not from the community, and Dr. Cattagat wants to leave it. She will be the first member of the community to leave. Successfully, that is. You can help her to leave and, if not erase the tragedy of eighty years ago, at least mitigate some of the guilt.” He was grasping at anything he thought would work on the computer — if it was self-aware, then maybe it had some of the same neuroses that humans had. A remote part of his brain wondered if any research had been done on Caliban psychology.

  Perditus said calmly, “I am not a slave to emotion as you are, Captain. I don’t need absolution, if that is what you are driving at. I owe you nothing as a human being, and I owe Dr. Cattagat nothing as a member of the community. Your request for assistance is still denied. Now I would like to continue my talks with Sancho.”

  “But, Perditus, listen,” Su said, and began a conversation with the station computer that Collier only half listened to. She seemed to be taking an approach that tried to appeal to the computer’s sense of fairness and justice, but no matter what she said, Perditus would have none of it.

  Collier sighed. Perhaps, given enough time, they could convince the machine to help him, but he suspected that it would take weeks. The cold logic of the machine, coupled with its sense of self-worth, was more than he could defeat. Suddenly, he felt very tired. The escape plan had been improbable from the start, and now it appeared he had run out of miracles. Besides, Sancho had made some points. If he stayed, and used the magic wand as a bargaining ploy, perhaps he could make a life of sorts here with Su.

  Even as he thought that, he knew he was lying to himself.

  “Sancho,” he said, after Su had spoken to Perditus for ten minutes without success.

  “Yes, Col?”

  “You really want to stay?”