Threshold

by Janet Morris

  "As the Forat girl's elopement. Yeah, that's possible. But it may draw enough attention away from that to allow Beni Forat to come to an accommodation with Cummings, out of the spotlight."

  "Since you've thought this through, I have no further objections."

  Croft stood up.

  So did Remson. "I wish I could use the modeler data. It's unequivocal."

  "What," said Croft as he led the way to the elevator, "did the modeled Ali say about your plan?"

  "Well, it's just a model, of course. . . ." Remson closed his eyes for a moment, remembering. "It cried, sir. It cried big tears."

  "Heavens, no wonder you're so sure it's human," said Croft in a hushed voice as the elevator opened to take them downstairs.

  Below, they took an understreet tube to the conference hall. There was another crowd outside it.

  In the meeting room were only a few people. One of them was Beni Forat. Another, in the gallery, was Richard the Second.

  Remson's jaws began to ache as he left Mickey to his duties and went to find Ali-7.

  When he entered the room where his people were keeping the Medinan bodyguard, the Ali looked up at him with those trusting, limpid eyes and said, "Now, Remson?"

  "Now, All." He nearly cried himself. This bodyguard had more courage than Remson would have had, were their roles reversed.

  Vince had explained to the Ali why he should have full human status, and they'd discussed it in terms of acting for the sake of generations to come. Terms the Ali could understand.

  Now there was no last minute doubt in the bodyguard's eyes, just trust and commitment and a sadness that proved he understood that, from here, there was no going back.

  "Then let's do it." Ali-7 got up, smoothed his tan shirt and pants, and walked toward the door through which Remson had come.

  Two of Vince's boys got up to follow. He forestalled them with a handsign. Ali-7 deserved all the respect that Remson could give him.

  He was walking into a room where one side would say he was a human being and the other side would argue that he was not, that he was barely equivalent to an animal, and had no more rights than a machine would have.

  And if Remson's side won the day, all the Alis would be totally disenfranchised from that moment on. If Remson and Mickey didn't win, Ali-7 and his cohorts, Ali-4 and Ali-5, faced immediate execution and all of their ilk would bear the brunt of Medinan fury and resentment.

  The Medinans were very vengeful. And they didn't like to be embarrassed.

  Vince Remson wouldn't have changed places with Ali-7 for anything in the world.

  The Ali looked back: "Something wrong, Remson? Are you coming?"

  "Nothing's wrong. I'm coming." Vince Remson had started this. He had to finish it.

  In the small meeting room, Beni Forat glared at the Ali with knives in his eyes all through the UNE experts' testimony.

  Ali-7 sat off to one side, an exhibit, not a player in this drama. The Flangers had shown as much animation as the Ali did.

  Remson began to lose heart. Didn't the Ali realize he should let a little emotion show, at least indicate that he was following the proceedings with concern and interest?

  The Flangers, the big chimp-faced marsupials, had sat like stones, and in the end the ruling had gone against them: They would be the next race on whom mankind performed medical experiments.

  If the Ali didn't do something, he might be the test case that kept the Medinan bodyguard class enslaved for eternity.

  Once a ruling was made, there was a precedent. If the precedent was in the Medinans' favor, it was going to be twice as hard for the Alis to make another try for human status.

  Remson found that his fists ached, so tightly were they balled in his lap.

  Three human experts spoke in the Alis' favor; three AI expert systems displayed data that showed the Alis response curve in all measurable areas: physical, mental, emotional.

  In all of those, the Alis' curves and the human standard curves were comparable. The IQ tests hadn't gone as well, because the Alis were untutored except in basic skills necessary to performing their functions.

  When the human experts and their AIs had finished, the Medinans began their arguments:

  "Please dim the lights for my visual presentation," said Beni Forat, striding to the podium in a swirl of robes.

  When Remson realized what the mullah was planning, he squeezed his eyes shut.

  But he couldn't keep them shut. Neither could Ali-7.

  Behind the mullah, vid began to roll: pictures of Alis throwing themselves onto their masters to protect them with their bodies; pictures of Alis performing ritual suicide beside masters who'd died of old age. Pictures of "malfunctioning Alis": men run amok. Pictures of purported genetic bioengineering that produced the first Alis (Artificial Living Individuals).

  When the propaganda vid was done, Remson was shaking with rage.

  The lights came up.

  In their brightness stood Ali-7. And he was weeping.

  The Ali took one step toward the Medinan. Security people rushed in.

  The Ali raised one hand. It said, "Father Forat, we wish only to serve you. But to serve you as men. Are we not men? Do we not feel as men? Die as men? Suffer as men? Love as men? Often we have asked ourselves such questions. And now, someone has said, 'Perhaps, yes. Perhaps you are men.' And in my heart, I know it is true. We are still your children. We are still your servants. Only let us serve you as men, and die as men, with as much dignity as a man when he dies, no more. It would make us so proud if you would say we were men."

  Remson wiped his own eyes.

  He couldn't see Beni Forat clearly. But he thought he heard someone in a row behind him whisper, "Look at it. It's crying."

  And then Remson knew it was going to be all right. The UNE couldn't walk away from such eloquence. They were going to win this one for the Ali and all the rest of the Alis, no matter what Beni Forat had up his sleeve.

  When Beni Forat began demanding that the UNE and the Ali himself prove that the Medinan bodyguards had souls, because souls were what differentiated men from beasts, Remson was sure.

  You might be able to exhort your followers to murder other men by saying those soulless unbelievers weren't men at all, but these weren't Forat's followers.

  And if there was a person in this room possessed of a soul, it was the mild-mannered, self-effacing bodyguard with the tears of anguish on his face.

  CHAPTER 23

  Right Place, Wrong Time

  Even with all the extras South had wormed out of Sling during STARBIRD's retrofit, the X-99A was still a one-man testbed. There was no way his passenger, Keebler, could be anywhere near comfortable anyplace on board.

  Maybe that wasn't such a bad thing, South kept telling himself, whenever Keebler started getting on his nerves. Which was about every ten minutes.

  "Can't y' get any more speed outta this bucket o' bolts, sonny?" Keebler demanded, sticking his head over South's seatback, his huge bulk wedging itself into the tight confines of the flight deck.

  "Nope," Joe South lied. "Sorry." Sling had given him a torque boost; he just wasn't anxious to try it with a passenger aboard, even Keebler. And part of his mission was to keep Keebler out of trouble for as long as possible. So far as South was concerned, this was a shakedown cruise for the retrofit that Sling had done, and he wasn't going to be hurried through it. He was keeping an eye on his power plant's temperature. When he was content that it was functioning A-OK, then maybe he'd push the envelope a little.

  But not without his suit sealed tight and not with this fool on his back.

  South was wearing one of his Extravehicular Mobility Units, visor up; Keebler was squeezed into the spare suit. Otherwise, they couldn't have talked to each other at all.

  Sling had flat told Keebler that there was no way to make Keebler's contemporary suit electronics and South's ancient ones talk to one another. South could have kissed the aftermarketeer.

  Then Keebler had balked—
righteously enough—about not having personal life support. It was against the law, it turned out, not to equip a passenger with a helmet and a spacesuit. But giving Keebler one of STARBIRD's suits meant that South couldn't get away from Keebler just by slapping his visor down, playing dumb, and shrugging his shoulders once or twice during the trip: incommunicado just wouldn't wash; he had to listen to the crazy old fart.

  And so did Birdy. South had designated Keebler's suit as Input B and told Birdy to ignore any commands coming from it, but that didn't mean he wasn't keeping a running record of what went on in here.

  If the scavenger named Keebler got any crazy ideas about clubbing South senseless and taking over the ship, Birdy had her orders: Blow the atmosphere, disconnect the flight deck manual controls and the bunk system as well, and return to the Threshold docking bay after using the in-suit physiology package to sedate the scavenger.

  More prepared for trouble than that, South couldn't be. But there was all kinds of trouble.

  Keebler had this knack for rubbing you the wrong way, especially when you were a teeny bit sensitive about being a few hundred years behind the times.

  "By the time we get to Spacedock Seven, sonny, I'll have died o' old age and that there ball will've taken so many meteorite hits, it'll be worthless."

  "Don't call me 'sonny,' " South said for the umpteenth time and slapped his visor down. It wasn't just a nonverbal punctuation, something he did for emphasis. He was going to lose his temper if he wasn't careful. With his visor down, his suit's AI kicked in: the physiology package clucked and went to work on his blood chemistries. About the time that the scummy taste in his mouth cleared up, the cooling package had his body temperature back down where it should be.

  No use getting all hot and bothered about the scavenger. That wasn't why South was here.

  In the suit, it was easy to screen out Keebler's annoying chatter: he just dumped the com channel and brought up Birdy's instead. He had a ship to fly.

  Birdy was having a ball. The X in X-99A stood for exploration as well as experimental, and to Birdy, everything man-made out here was worth cataloguing.

  His sector map was getting a serious update. On his visor, South pulled down a quadranted display with a central punch window so that he could watch his flight deck in realtime; while in the lower left he could see the Threshold complex and every ship and unmanned spacecraft they'd passed on the way out here.

  And one of them was right on their tail, he noticed.

  "Birdy, can we identify that vehicle?"

  Birdy said no, almost wistfully.

  South wondered how come, and then put it down to the incompatibility of STARBIRD's equipment with so much of this modern stuff. But they had Sling's general hailing frequency package, and South knew from experience that if one of their ships wanted to talk to you, it could.

  "How about giving me a comparison of our vector and its?" Anything was better than talking to Keebler. And if Director Lowe had put a tail on him, somebody to make sure he was doing his job correctly, South's feelings were going to be hurt. More than hurt. If she could spare a ship to shadow him, that ship could have taken Keebler on this joyride, so what did she need him for?

  He was beginning to get uncomfortable enough to start sweating again when Birdy put up the two plots and they weren't the same at all.

  "Where's it going, Birdy?"

  "Spacedock One," said Birdy, as if she'd been doing it all her life.

  "Let's see all the spacedocks, with my ETA at Seven."

  Smooth as silk, up came the data he'd asked for. Whatever the quality of the tinkering that Sling had done, the astrogation data he'd fed into Birdy was turning out to be real helpful.

  "Okay, back to regular rearward scan."

  There was more traffic back there now. There was probably lots of traffic out here, all the time.

  South was feeling somewhat better, enough better to try toggling his suit system through some forward scans to see if he could migrate Birdy's data upgrades into it.

  Sure thing, he could get Spacedock One through Seven, clearly annotated, on his suit's heads-up display without Birdy's help.

  Terrific. Sling was probably worth however much South had paid him.

  He started using his synthetic apertures to give him closeups of the various spacedocks and their traffic. He and his suit system and Birdy were going to be negotiating some pretty tight—

  Keebler's hand came down on his shoulder and South actually jumped. His gloved hand caught the old guy's arm and he nearly pulled Keebler into his lap.

  His visor came up because South voice-commanded it just before he started half-yelling: "You crazy old son of a bitch. What do you think you're—"

  "Sonny," said the flabby face of the scavenger, contorted with pain. "I didn't know whether you'd had a heart attack in there or what. Y' wanna let go o' me?"

  "Yeah, yeah. Don't do that again." He pushed as he let go and the scavenger retreated.

  But not far. "Y' know, sonny, we're about t' make hist'ry. You should be treatin' me with a li'l more respeck. When y' get out there an' y' see that ball, an' y' start seein' other things . . . other places . . . well, then y'll understand."

  "Other things? Other places?" South had had just about enough of this fool. He didn't need this kind of talk to spook him. He rotated his command couch a quarter-turn so that he could face his antagonist. "I don't know what you heard, buddy, but you're not going to scare me with your 'superior alien civilization' bullshit! I'm just hauling your ass there to cover—" Then he remembered that he hadn't told anybody about his dreams. Nobody'd even bothered to take South's data dump on his X-3 flyby. And he was obviously overreacting.

  South shut his mouth.

  The scavenger was looking at him oddly from out of that huge, broad face that seemed to be squeezed into its helmet. "That's okay, sonny. I know what's it's like t' know nobody's takin' you serious."

  "I'm seriously not letting you out of this ship when we get out there," South snapped back, embarrassed and angry. His suit was whirring at him to seal it so that it could do its work on him. He ignored it. "Even if you could maneuver in that suit without a training session, it's so small on you it might not be airtight. If you've strained something to just the edge of survivability, and it rips out there . . ." He made an imaginary checkmark on a nonexistent clipboard. "One less scavenger."

  "Lookit, son—Captain South. I got this box, see, that yer friend made fer me. You got any objections to flyin' close up—say fifty yards 'r better—parkin', and then lettin' me see if this box does what it's supposed t' do?"

  "What's it supposed to do?" South asked innocently.

  "Open 'er up. If she opens, maybe we can fly right into her, if you've got the balls."

  "Last time I looked, I had no complaints." That lady director had told him this guy was crazy, and was a handful to boot. "There's not enough room to fly into that thing from what I was told— Never mind. We'll see when we get there, okay?"

  "Okay. Good enough, fer now. You cooperate with me, sonny, and I'm gonna cut y' in on the biggest find of the cent'ry."

  "I thought I was that, for about three minutes," South said bitterly, and rotated his chair around. He had to keep an eye on his instruments somehow, and if he couldn't use his voice, that meant the flight panels.

  Birdy shouldn't have to do all this on her own.

  "Yeah, I figured y' fer a Relic the first time I saw you."

  "The hell you did." They were coming into what Birdy thought was the outer com range of the spacedocks. She was sending a standard encoded beacon that was supposed to get them a clearance.

  Sling had explained the procedures. They were all AI functions, nothing he had to worry about unless he wanted to do something that wasn't preplanned and precleared with Spacedock Flight Control and the Stalk's Port Authority.

  South was beginning to feel extraneous, watching Birdy flash go-codes at him as she got them.

  "I did so," said the querulous voice
of the scavenger, and South, for the first time, realized the old guy was probably as lonely as he was. Out beachcombing the sea of space, just about, for years at a time: it could make you a little garrulous, a little abrasive, when you came back.

  "What's it like," South said to change the subject, "scavenging a white hole?"

  "Y'know, back when you were in school, the universe was a whole different place. Now it's . . . gettin' crowded. A man's gotta hump some to find any peace an' quiet. White holes is nice. Y' find yerself one, if nobody else's claimed it, and whatever comes out's yours. All y' got t' worry about is the spacetime displacement and the stresses."

  "Huh?"

  "Y' don't wanna fall in. Y' c'n fall in a hole, even if it's white. Y' get in, y'll never live t' get out. Not in anywhere near the shape or form or time y' started."

  "I'll remember that." Time you started? "So if the stresses are so intense, how do you protect yourself?"

  "You're from before zero-point power plants and asymptotic rectifiers. There's an energy sea, underlying everything we know about. Think of a sea sponge: what you can see's spacetime like what we walk around in; what you can't see's filled with your energy sea that keeps it all from collapsing. Y' can get around lots o' problems, like time lag in communicatin' and travelin', by knowin' how t' git in an' out o' the energy sea where y' want. That's how come the kind of spacetime kamikaze job you had don't exist no more. That's how come this kind of ship is obsolete."

  "Has this lecture got a point, or are you just tweaking my knowledge base?" South bristled whenever somebody talked about STARBIRD being obsolete. "We're getting you out here in one piece, me and my obsolete ship. I don't see that you'd save all that much time in—"

  "Jesus!" said the scavenger.

  "What the—?"

  Something flashed by them so fast and so close that Birdy had to veer the X-99A sharply to avoid a possible collision. South could still see it in his forward realtime viewscreen. He began pulling up magnified views of the speeding spacecraft.

  "It's that ship that wouldn't talk to us," he said to Birdy through gritted teeth, forgetting all about Keebler.