Nacci chuckled in evil delight as a thought hit her. “The trap would be more effective if it was killing his fellow countrymen. He would care even more about them than the deaths of Normies say in Somalia.”
“An excellent suggestion,” remarked Oleg with a grudging nod in her direction. “Yes, something that is killing or puts a lot of American lives at risk.”
“A terrorist attack, like 9/11?” Ruggiero suggested.
“I have a better idea,” Clarke announced, sitting up straight and turning to Wu. “How about starting up a little war? We know he’ll respond to that, based on the events in the Middle East. A nice conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China.”
Cecily nodded. “Yes, that idea has merit.”
If Wu was at all disturbed or surprised by the suggestion, he gave no sign of it. He faced Clarke squarely. “What exactly do you propose?”
Clarke’s smile was enigmatic. “Let’s start with the South China Sea, shall we?”
TEN
The planet Mars
Coprates Chasma
Kamtol Nursery (from Llana of Gathol)
Thursday, 9:28 p.m. LMST
February
Day 83
Paul paced back and forth nervously from one end of the underground room to the other, his hands clasped behind his back, his head hunched forward. Every so often, he would pause and glance at the LCD monitor sitting on the workbench, looking for some sign of activity on it. When he confirmed that it was still blank, he resumed the pacing.
Capie leaned back in a seat fashioned from native rock, waiting silently and patiently.
Finally, when even she grew tired of watching her husband wear himself out, she said, “Dear, don’t you know by now that babies have their own schedules?”
Paul hesitated for a moment but kept walking. “This is not quite the same thing,” he grunted irritably.
“Dear, all babies are like this,” Capie said in a reasonable tone, “be they organic or digital. Patience, please.”
Daneel 1 floated back through the doorway and into the room.
“Nothing yet?” he asked, wearing a tentative smile on his holographic face above his black cube.
“No, nothing,” snapped Paul, with a scowl. “I’m thinking something went wrong with the personality transfer matrix.”
The matrix, a software program designed to filter the elements of intelligence from the mindset of a Scottie, was designed to allow the creation of a minimal personality, in essence, planting a newborn baby into the CPU of a new computer. In theory, the new baby would develop into a totally different person, one quite different from Daneel. In fact, Paul’s primary goal with this type of matrix was to allow the creation of a female Scottie, with all the so-called instincts of the feminine version of a flesh and blood woman.
Daneel 1 had been chosen as the software “donor” to the new Scottie and the process had actually been completed hours previously. And, to improve the chances that it would work, they were using the same PC machine that Daneel 1 had been created in, before being transferred into the superior hardware that he possessed now.
“You’re too impatient, CR,” Capie said with a knowing smile. “Call it a mother’s instinct, if you will, but I know, without a shade of a doubt, that this is going to work. Trust me.”
Paul grunted but had no other response as he continued pacing back and forth.
Ω
“There!” Daneel 21 practically squealed, watching the LCD screen. “I saw a dot of light, dead center of the screen!”
Paul lunged forward, taking hold of both sides of the LCD monitor and studying the display carefully. “Are you sure?” he challenged.
“I saw it too,” Daneel 1 assured him, with a sigh of relief. “It was quick. Maybe only on for a half second.”
“What color was it?” Paul asked cautiously, as he released the screen and rocked back on his heels.
“White,” Daneel 1 replied, with a growing smile. “Isn’t that what happened during my gestation?”
“It was indeed,” replied Capie, with a knowing grin on her face. “It was indeed. See? It’s going to be all right, CR. And it’s going to be a girl too.”
Paul spun and looked at his wife in surprise. “And how the devil would you know that?”
Capie chuckled in reply. “Please! I just know it. What a silly question.”
Three days later, a baby girl Scottie was “born” and Daneel 21 was assigned as her nanny.
The Armsteads, after much deliberation, decided that Capie would, from this point forth, choose all of the girl Scottie names while Paul would continue to select the boy names. Capie picked the name Jocasta for the newborn, after the Marvel Comics Avengers superhero. Paul wholeheartedly approved.
Ω
With the Ascraeus Mons caldera ‘highway’ open, the Daneels had established a steady stream of traffic back and forth to Earth for a variety of supplies, including all of the discrete components needed to continue manufacturing of the new Scotties. This saved a considerable amount of time, not having to develop assembly lines for such mundane items as resistors and the like. Why reinvent the wheel, after all, when such components were readily available in practically unlimited quantities from any supplier on Earth?
At the same time, Capie was able to acquire perishable groceries on a regular schedule. Items such as milk, butter, cheese, eggs, bread (and chocolates) were added back into their diets once again. And pizza, Paul’s favorite meal, became a regular weekly staple.
The creation of more Daneel clones proceeded apace, the numbers swiftly building.
And, with access now to Earth, Paul purchased forty eight ‘hot’ desktop PC models, installing them in the nursery rooms. Within a few days, a new Scottie progenitor (a boy this time) was born. Paul named him Harlie (from David Gerrold’s book When H.A.R.L.I.E. was One). The next Scottie, a girl, acquired a day later, was named Vicki (from the TV series, Small Wonder).
Paul was insufferably pleased with himself, spending hours each day in the nursery, cooing at the babies and telling them science fiction stories. His plans were working out extremely well! Indeed, they were ahead of schedule!
Ω
Day 94
“Paul, I’ve got a problem,” Capie announced mournfully a few days later as she slammed down her pencil on the counter-top and slumped into a chair next to the laboratory work bench.
They were in the Thuvia Lab (Thuvia, Maid of Mars) where Paul was giving her a hand with pre-clinical development of the MBE drug. Specifically, they were conducting a few experiments, exploring a variety of concepts for developing the right antigens. Unfortunately, the work was going exceedingly slow.
“You mean we’ve got a problem,” Paul corrected her. “I take it that the internet searches the Daneels have been doing for you didn’t turn up anything?”
“No, they did not,” Capie dolefully admitted, brushing a stray strand of hair from her forehead. “There is no option here that I can see. I have to go back to Earth. Do what you did in San Jose. Namely track down the experts in the field and interview their avatars.”
“Can’t you let the Scotties do that for you?” Paul asked as he lowered himself into the chair beside Capie’s. “They’ll have an easier time getting around on Earth than you will.”
But she was shaking her head. “It would take too long that way. Too many round trips to Mars and back, just to bring me a snippet or two of information at a time. No, I need to go there, do the avatar interviews in person. Much faster that way.”
Paul nodded, suddenly gloomy.
“There’s something else I want to try when I get there,” Capie added gingerly, looking at Paul pointedly. “I want to try calling up a SI, a super-intelligence. I would like to know why we can’t do that anymore.”
“Because we left Earth, right?”
“That’s the theory. But why is Earth important for that spell to work?” she asked with a long face. “Anyway, I want to put it to
the test. I wish I’d thought of it when we were there for Christmas but I had other things on my mind back then.”
He smiled, reaching over to squeeze her hand gently. “So, when do you want to go?”
She leaned back in her chair, seriously considering the question. “In the morning. I would like to take a dozen Daneels with me, to help with all the leg work.” She sighed. “I won’t lie to you. It might take some time to find the answers I need.”
“I understand,” Paul replied, adding his own sigh to hers. “Please keep in touch. I’d like nightly reports, please. And—”
“Yes, I know. Stay out of the capital cities.”
“You read my mind.”
Ω
Capie locked the hotel door of Room 408 behind her and kicked off her shoes. It had been an incredibly long day and she was looking forward to climbing under the sheets in a nice comfortable bed for a decent night’s sleep.
The trip from Mars to Earth had been exhausting enough. But she didn’t have the luxury of just dropping straight down to the United States, at least, not from orbit. A detour had been needed through some remote location and she had needed a place to store the spacesuit as well. Daneel 7 had picked the North Pole, which had the virtue of being about as remote as you could get in the northern hemisphere. The spacesuit had been tucked away securely, well hidden in a glacier.
From the Pole, only a few additional portal hops had been needed to get her here, to the Rochester Marriott in Minnesota. Only a stone’s throw, as it were, from the Mayo Clinic. She was even too tired to eat anything. That would have to wait until tomorrow morning, after a good night’s sleep. After breakfast, she would then begin the process of hunting down the right doctors, going where they lived and getting close enough to create their avatars for some extensive and in depth questioning.
She collapsed in one of the room’s soft chairs, leaning back and closing her eyes. Daneel 7 and the other eleven Scotties that had come with her were in the room next door. Since they were, in essence, more machine than ‘human’ they didn’t need quite as much rest or sleep. Instead, they would be making extensive use of the hotel internet facilities during the night, looking up the information she would need for tomorrow.
In the meantime, her curiosity was getting the better of her. Before she changed clothes and crawled under the covers, she was dying to know if she could access a SI or super-intelligence now that she was back on Earth. One corner of her mind argued that it would only take a minute and then she would know the answer.
Opening her eyes again, she snapped her fingers and half held her breath. “Tia, have you got a minute?”
The familiar ball of smoke appeared, swiftly growing in size, dissolving into the holographic image of the Queen of Fairies, standing in the middle of the small room. The individual bowed to Capie. “Nice to see you again, my dear. Are you having a fun time on Mars?”
Capie breathed a jubilant sigh of relief. “So! You still exist after all!”
Tia snorted in amusement. “Of course.”
Capie leaned forward, her fatigue temporarily forgotten. “So why can’t I call on you anyplace but on Earth?”
The question seemed to amuse the holographic personality considerably and she chuckled. “Ah, you haven’t figured that out yet? Do you not know the source of our knowledge, from where we come? Think, youngster, think! What are we, Merlin and myself and all the others like us? What is our source of existence?”
As tired as she was, Capie blinked in surprise and considered the question. The SI’s had a source? That made sense, in a way. They had to come from somewhere, right?
In a flash, the answer came to her.
“You’re a creature of Earth,” she declared with sudden conviction.
“Not the planet, no,” argued Tia. “The people.”
Capie nodded. “That’s what I meant. There was a book I read once, by Keith Laumer. Oh, what was the title!? Yes, The Infinite Cage! That was it! About a telepath that could access the thoughts, the personalities of all the people of Earth. Everything they knew, all at his fingertips! That’s what you and Merlin are, right!”
Tia nodded, an amused smile still on her face. “Ipsum,” she replied, in Latin.
Capie chuckled. “It makes so much more sense now! No wonder we couldn’t contact any SI while on Mars or in space! ‘Beam me up, Scotty, there’s no intelligent life there, right!’ Geez! Wait until I tell Paul!” But then her mirth died down, transforming itself into gleeful satisfaction and determination.
“That’s good. Very good,” she pronounced. “Tomorrow, I’ll have access to not only the avatars of some very professional medical experts but also to you and a bunch of other SI’s. You are going to help me figure this MBE drug problem out. There has to be a solution and you’re going to help me find it!” She grinned wildly. “This is going to work out just fine!”
Ω
Just three days later, she was back on Mars, Paul greeting her in the living room of the Coprates Chasma house with a vigorous kiss and a huge hug.
“Welcome back!” he proclaimed, setting her back down on her feet again. “I missed you, can you tell? Tell me about the trip. Did you find what you were looking for?”
“Relax, CR,” she pleaded, catching her breath after that wonderful kiss. “Yes, I did. And do I have a story to tell you…!”
ELEVEN
One mile north of Beting Serupai (James Shoal)
South China Sea
Aboard the fishing trawler, PKFB85
Friday, 5:21 a.m. MYT
March
“Khalid!” shouted Captain Iman bin Akim of the Malaysian fishing trawler PKFB85, as he dropped down the ladder from the pilothouse and onto the ship’s working deck forward of the aft superstructure. “Mind the port beam! And watch the warp!” He stood on the deck, watching the deck hand move slowly to the port side to check the equipment.
The PKFB85 was a fairly small and practically ancient vessel, dating all the way back to shortly after World War II. It was only fourteen meters long with a beam of four meters and a gross weight of less than fifty tons. As such, it had been in the captain’s family for three generations now. Iman’s grandfather had acquired it in a deal with a Malaysian merchant company, the details of which his grandfather had never explained.
Not that it mattered to Iman. It was his ship now, after his father had passed away five years previously. But the open question now was how long Iman could keep it.
Fishing off of the west coast of Sarawak, Malaysia was not the successful enterprise that it had been in his grandfather’s day, nor even in his father’s. There were many reasons for the decline in the business, ranging from increased costs in supplies and labor, to competition and to overfishing of the traditional areas in the South China Sea. As it stood, Iman was barely making ends meet this season. If the trends kept up, then it might well be the last profitable season he would ever have. Next year…well, next year was shaping up to be a pretty bad one. The trawler needed extensive repairs. Both net winches were giving him a lot of trouble. Like many other items of equipment on the trawler, they were long overdue for replacement. And, if the truth be known, such expensive replacements were simply out of the question.
If the situation did not improve and soon, he could lose the trawler, possibly as early as next year. Then he and his wife would have to find other employment, a difficult task considering the state of the current economy. He might be able to get a job on one of the big commercial trawlers. After all, Iman had decades of experience with fishing beam trawlers. True, there seemed to be a lack of such jobs here on the coast of Sarawak but he had heard that the fishing off the west coast of the Malaysian peninsula was still doing fairly well. Too bad that he couldn’t afford to move his operations seven hundred miles west.
Daylight was breaking to the east behind him. From the calm state of the seas, it would likely be another hot muggy day here just north of the equator. The seagulls trailing the ship were thicker than us
ual too, but he ignored their raucous cries. Iman glanced back up at the port beam where the warp ran through the block, then followed the cable back into the sea near the stern of the ship. His experienced eye told him that the tension and position was returning to normal.
“Ship!” yelled the pilot, Syamri, the short dark-skinned native positioned in the pilothouse above him.
Syamri’s warning cry puzzled Iman. The South China Seas crawled with ships of all sizes and types. There was not a day that went by that a dozen or more weren’t seen passing through the area. Yet Syamri must have seen something unusual.
“Where away?” he shouted back.
“Broad on the starboard bow! Looks like a warship!”
Now that was bad news indeed. Warships in these waters were few and far between. Worse, if it was a Chinese warship, which was a distinct possibility, it could be very bad news indeed.
The last time Iman had looked at his chart, his ship was a few miles south of the Chinese exclusion zone. The idiot Chinese were claiming the vast majority of the South China Seas for their restricted use. And like most of the Malaysian fisherman, Iman had no desire to tangle with them so he normally made it a point to avoid fishing in the disputed territory. But it was possible that with the drift of the current and the push of the wind, his ship might have crossed the line.
Iman vaulted up the ladder to the pilothouse, grabbed up the binoculars from the wall peg and searched the horizon. It was indeed a Chinese warship and, what was worse, it was headed straight at him, with a bone in its teeth.
His blood suddenly turned to ice water. The warship had a forward deck gun and it was manned and—it was pointing directly at him! Even as he watched, a puff of smoke exploded out the end!
“Hard a port!” he yelled at Syamri, before leaning out the side of the pilothouse. “Release the warps!” he screamed at Khalid.
The Genie and the Engineer 3: Ravages of War Page 10