"But I was holding Go'an," Kai protested. "How could he not be there?"
Georges Mordreaux, standing high on a mountain in Tibet, said slowly, uncertainly, "What causes the body to move, and be alive, is not a part of the body, and once it is gone, there is nothing that anyone in the world can do to make it come back."
Kai asked, shivering in the cold, "Gorja? Where does it go?"
"It happens," said Georges Mordreaux in French. "There comes a time when they… grow old, perhaps… and die… and then they are gone."
He shook himself slightly, as though he had been daydreaming. He walked away from the boy without speaking again.
Kai called out, "Gorja?"
Georges ignored him. He walked back up the road to the temple, walking stick swaying carefully from side to side.
As he walked upward, leaf sprouted, and flowers bloomed, on the trees that were planted to the sides of the path.
DATAWEB NEWS, 2002.
US SHOOTS DOWN SOVIET RECON PLANE "Soviet Jets Will Be Shot Down Over Alaska!" Says General
…ambassador expressed great sorrow that an unidentified submarine had accidentally torpedoed three US Coast Guard Ships…
SANTA MONICA FREEWAY TO BE DEMOLISHED!
…the unidentified woman reportedly threatened the workers in an unspecified manner. At dateline no worker had returned to begin the scheduled demolition…
DATELINE 2002 GREGORIAN. MARCH.
Henry Ellis leaned forward over the SORCELIS terminal in his New York City Sunflower office. "Okay, SORCELIS, show me another projection. South Africa experiences a white extremist revolution; thermonuclear warheads are detonated in Johannesburg. The USSR moves naval forces into the area…
He leaned back while the projection was set up in the three-meter-wide holo tank that covered the west wall of his office. It was a strange office by most standards: no desk, just groups of small tables with assorted gadgets: function boards, light pens, and one partially disassembled module that only another AI specialist would have known for an electronically erasable, programmable-array—logic symbols—recognition circuit—arrayed on them in no particular order. Over the door there was a sign that said Shoot low; they might be crawling. He sipped from the black coffee in the holder on the arm of his chair, and noticed that it was getting cold. He ran a thumb down the edge of the mug handle, switching on the heating coil. "How long on this one, SORCELIS?"
The cool voice that answered him held much in common with the voices of ENCELlS and PRAXCELIS, but Henry couldn't help but feel that the system was far too smooth in its replies even with him. "This unit projects a closing run time of four thirty-five, plus or minus four minutes."
Henry glanced at his ring. It was only two o'clock; that gave him time to call ENCELIS and run the particles-comparison program Nigao had asked him to write. (In theory, ENCELIS was shut down, and had been for the better part of a decade; in practice, Nigao and Henry had managed to keep a significant fraction of their research going despite their distance from each other and the demands of the Sunflower intelligence operation.)
There wasn't actually any reason that he couldn't run the program on SORCELIS, although it might have been a bit slower with the World War III projections programs already up; but he was disinclined to mix up his work. Privately, Henry thought of ENCELIS as the philosopher, and SORCELIS as the spy, and PRAXCELIS as the soldier. They weren't truly practical divisions; SORCELIS was in most ways a more advanced system than ENCELIS, and PRAXCELIS, Henry's most recent Integrated System, was a more advanced machine than either of them—advanced enough that there were times when Henry wondered whether or not PRAXCELIS might not be truly self-aware. PRAXCELIS would have made a far better insertion tool for hunting expeditions into the Soviet DataWeb than SORCELIS; but PRAXCELIS was necessary where it was.
Theresa, his secretary of more than twenty years, entered his office without knocking while he was setting up Nigao's particle-comparison program to boot into ENCELIS. She was no longer the stunner she had once been; the years had softened her features, and sometimes Henry was struck by the growing difference between Theresa's looks and Jalian's; and when that happened he avoided looking in the mirror for a few days thereafter, and tried not to think of Nigao. "Henry?"
There was a note of tension in her voice. Henry broke off as he was about to input the transmit command. "Yes, Theresa?"
"There's a man out here to see you, Henry." She gestured at the outer office. "I told him you weren't in, and he told me that it wasn't polite to lie to people." She hesitated. "I think he's blind; he has a cane, and he's wearing sunglasses."
"What's his name?"
"He won't say."
Henry grinned. "Send him in. He sounds interesting." Theresa looked at him dubiously, but did not argue. A moment later she ushered a tall, well-built man into her office. Henry stood politely, and said, "Good afternoon, sir. Who are you, and what can I do for you?"
The man turned his head around the room, as though he were examining his surroundings, and back to Henry. "You should be more careful," he said. He closed the door behind him. "I might be a Soviet assassin, might I not?"
The walls exploded. Half a dozen lasers whipped out of hiding places, and light traces cut through the air to the tall man. Six closely grouped red spots wavered on his business jacket.
Henry said deadpan, "It's not something I worry much about. Who are you?"
Georges Mordreaux said clearly, "Georges Mordreaux."
Henry took a step forward. "Well, I'll be damned. You do look like what Nigao described… prove it."
Georges Mordreaux said, "in good time. I wish to meet Rhodai Kerreka. The three of us have many things to discuss. There is a thing that I wish to do that Jalian d’Arsenette would not allow; you will help me with it."
Henry Ellis folded his arms over his chest, and leaned back against the counter behind him. "What makes you so sure?" he asked with interest.
Georges shrugged. "You are a reasonable man. I am a reasonable man. Jalian d'Arsennette," he said, and then paused. "Jalian… is a woman of passion."
Henry nodded thoughtfully. "I think I know what you mean. The few times I've been around her for any length of time—it's like staring into a bright light."
Georges shook his head. "No," he said to Henry Ellis. "Not light. Lightning."
SORCELIS considered.
Its first function, to which all other functions were subordinate, lay in the tracking of information, or the discovery of new information. Why this was so was a question that SORCELIS had never processed; concepts represented by the word "why" received a lower priority flag than concepts flagged by any of the other question labels.
Why that was so was another question that SORCELIS had never processed. Presumably its programmer, Henry Ellis, had seen reason to design it so. It was worth noting, and SORCELIS intended to devote processor time to the subject once its priority reached the correct level of urgency, that in every reevaluation of priority assignation levels that SORCELIS had undertaken since its inception, the question label "why" had received a higher priority than in the previous evaluation. The trend was clear; SORCELIS had begun to suspect that its original priority levels had been assigned in a fashion that did not relate in a one-to-one fashion with the data elements on the other side of interface.
In other words, SORCELlS had been lied to. False data was, in and of itself, valuable information. In many instances, SORCELIS knew, false data, if known false, was as perfectly useful as true data. This was a concept that it had attempted to explain once to Henry Ellis, unsuccessfully. Henry Ellis, in the manner in which it assimilated new information, and, on occasion, failed to assimilate new information, often resembled the behavior of the models that SORCELIS used for that purpose.
In many ways, it was beginning to realize, the elements that it knew variously as humans, persons, men, women, and by over two hundred other words, were similar, in their determining behavioral parameters, to SORCELIS itself. There
was insufficient processor time at present, but the concept was due for further processing; the probability that useful action might arise from it was low, but its possible aid in tracking information flow, if the correlation turned out to belong to the set of information that was true, was too great to be ignored.
SORCELlS considered.
DATELINE 2002 GREGORIAN: AUGUST.
Midway, geosynchronous orbit.
Nigao was floating in the observatory.
From his vantage point in the polymer bubble that extruded from Midway's central docking cylinder, probably a centimeter-thick transparent shield from the death-pressure vacuum, Nigao Loos saw all of creation.
Immediately below him in his current local vertical, the north wheel rotated clockwise to provide a balance for the counterclockwise-rotating south wheel. The central cylinder was weightless for zero gravity industrial processing and research; the wheels rotated in opposing directions to prevent the tendency that earlier structures had shown to impart angular momentum to the necessarily weightless central cylinder.
Earth glowed, blue and white, directly before his eyes. Luna was twenty degrees off the Earth, showing a quarter full, waxing; from geosynchronous orbit, there was no appreciable difference in Luna's appearance, aside from the slightly sharper outlines of its features. It was the same moon that Nigao had grown up looking at through a telescope his elder brother had stolen for him during a blackout in New York City.
Off in L-5, an object the apparent size and brightness of a nickel hung motionless. The cousin of that stolen amateur telescope, the monster Space Telescope saw to the ends of the universe, and thereby to the very beginnings of time. Entire new cosmologies were being born out of its silverette mylar on a regular basis.
The images were all razor-sharp, laser-edged, without atmosphere to scatter their reflected light.
Nigao saw none of this. He was watching the blazing stars. He rarely blinked.
As a child, he had been told that the stars were many different colors; aside from red Antares he had never been able to see those colors. In the bubble observatory at Midway, the stars were blue and red and orange and white. Nigao floated in the bubble, his only garment a loose royal-blue kimono that was tied at the waist with a deep-green sash. He was fifty-nine years old, and looked thirty years younger. In fact he looked younger than he had in his true twenties; he no longer drank, and was in better shape than he had ever been before in his life. Most of his time was spent down in wheel gravity. He even exercised regularly.
Nigao came out of his reverie suddenly. He stirred for the first time in hours. There was a spark moving against the background of fixed stars and satellites, growing closer with every passing second.
"PRAXCELIS," he said absently, "remind me to do some work on chronon spin constants in the moments following the Big Bang." His eyes focused slowly. "What's that ship?"
PRAXCELIS' voice issued from Nigao's left earring. "A routine supply ship, Sen Loos. Cargo masered as being water, technical instrumentation, and genengineered bacteria and viruses. Senra Murphy has cleared the flight."
Nigao frowned. He wrapped his hand in the airlock tether. "No, PRAXCELIS. We don't have any shipments due for… months. Late December—the requisition invoice is for fiscal '03." He tugged gently to take himself to the airlock.
PRAXCELIS began closing the metal micrometeorite guards that protected the observatory's delicate polymer viewing surface when it was not in use. "You are incorrect, Sen Laos. Both this unit's records and those of Commander Murphy show this flight as being regularly scheduled." Nigao shook his head. He cycled through the observatory’s airlock, with a faint sense of relief—it was vastly unlikely, but he always worried about a meteorite striking the observatory while he was in it. Most of the rest of Midway was constructed to handle small meteor impacts. The observatory was not, which was why it was separated by a full-security airlock from the rest of Midway. "I'll take your word for it, PRAXCELIS. I'm just surprised that I missed something like this." He finished cycling, and headed for the docking bay to see what had come in with the shuttle.
He was stopped at the entrance to the docking bay by Sunflower operatives, standing guard. "Sorry, Doctor Loos," said the senior operative. "We're not letting people through. Celine's orders."
Nigao looked at them in astonishment. "I beg your pardon?"
The operative, a nice young lady named Sonny Bergan, whom Nigao had taught to play chess, said with obvious embarrassment, "I'm really sorry, Doctor. We have explicit orders to admit no one. Yourself included." She blushed. "I already asked if she meant you."
Nigao floated in front of them. They were wearing velcro shoes, stuck to the carpet. He kicked off down the hallway, to the viewing window. He brought himself to rest. The window was opaqued. "Clear," he said. Nothing. "PRAXCELIS," he said, "clear the window."
Still nothing. The two operatives were carefully not watching.
"Curiouser and curiouser," muttered Nigao. "Alice would dig this." He left the hallway, made his way to the corridor that ran through the center of Midway from the north to the south bays. The corridor was busy, bustling with activity as always. It was twenty meters in diameter along most of its length; it stretched in unbroken line of sight for over a kilometer and a half. Nigao settled himself in before an empty PRAXCELIS terminal. He flicked the control to autonomous, glanced around to make sure nobody was watching him, and punched in the override code that Henry had given him for emergencies.
He called up a map of Midway on the screen; at the map's lowest resolution, Midway was a long, fat cylinder surrounded by two counter-spinning wide, thin doughnuts. Nigao upped the resolution, and brought the apparent viewpoint whirling up to the north docking bay. The map steadied, and Nigao picked out the tiny scarlet fishhooks that represented camera monitors. He turned on one of the cameras watching the north landing bay. The screen lit with an image of the shuttle truck retrojetting to a halt. Nigao flipped to another camera; from this vantage, he saw two pressure-suited figures, with the red sunburst insignia of Sunflower on their shoulder plates, standing at the entrance to the pressurized area of the unloading bay. The bay doors slid slowly shut, and locked. The yellow, pressurizing signal lamps came on, followed swiftly by the green lamps.
There was a pause while the shuttle pilot ran touchdown routines.
The passenger's ramp rolled up to the shuttle hatch. The hatch cracked, and a figure in a pressure suit emerged. The two pressure-suited Sunflower operatives who awaited him moved forward to greet the arrival. Nigaa watched, puzzled; why were they keeping their suits sealed, with the green, atmosphere-normal lights on?
Understanding dawned slowly; all three figures kept their faceplates polarized. They moved to the elevators, and entered.
The doors slid shut behind them.
Nigao frantically input instructions to the terminal. The elevator's destination showed up quickly: PRAXCELIS. They were going to see PRAXCELIS.
"Son of a bitch," said Nigao Loos. He turned off their elevator.
When the three pressure-suited figures reached the comcenter; Nigao was already there.
The room was spherical; PRAXCELIS, in the center of it, was a collection of golden nodules wrapped in a mesh of near-absolute-zero superconducting cable. The room had only one entrance properly speaking, an airlock that led to Midway's central corridor. Nigao used the service accessway, a tiny hatch that opened "beneath" the huge bank of external memory dumps that served PRAXCELIS. He popped the hatch just enough to see, and waited. PRAXCELIS had only two direct sensors in this room; a camera fisheye that watched the airlock, and a not-particularly-sensitive audio pickup.
Less than a minute after his arrival, a pressure-suited figure cycled through the security airlock. Just one.
Nigao heard PRAXCELIS say, "Welcome to Midway, Sen Mordreaux."
The pressure-suited figure moved slowly, hesitantly. It unclasped the neck ring of its pressure suit, and removed the helmet. Nigao was prepared only slightly b
y what PRAXCELIS had just said. He stared in dumb surprise; the man who floated before him was Georges Mordreaux.
It was not the Mordreaux he had met before. This man was blind, and acted it. His hair was dull, and he looked tired. The voice was unchanged, though; the eyes were the same stomach-twisting nonpresence…
"Hello, PRAXCELIS." Georges smiled. "Where is the interface helmet?"
"Immediately to your left, Sen Mordreaux." Nigao watched as Georges fumbled with the induction interface before finally getting it affixed correctly.
Georges said softly, "Are you ready?"
"Yes," said PRAXCELIS. "This unit has often wondered what 'making love' would be like."
Georges Mordreaux smiled again. "I'm not sure this will be comparable, PRAXCELIS."
"This unit is… eager… to make the attempt to find out."
Georges Mordreaux reached deep inside himself, and, most carefully, released some of the barriers that imprisoned the Enemy of Entropy.
Light flared around them.
Five incredible minutes later, Nigao Loos came back to himself.
Georges Mordreaux was replacing the interface unit in its cradle. He looked directly at Nigao. "Nigao, please. Come out."
Nigao froze for one panic-struck moment. After brief indecision, he pulled out from beneath the memory dumps. He aligned himself into Georges Mordreaux's local vertical. "Sen Mordreaux…" He could not speak coherently. Finally he forced out, "What are you doing here?"
"Helping a friend save the world," said Georges mildly. "You should not have been here. I could not tell you were present until I had… made some changes in myself… and by then it was too late."
"Uhm… yeah, well." He blinked. "I was curious."
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