The Compleat McAndrew

by Charles Sheffield

  Knudsen stared at him. “What do you mean? Admiral Simonette made that decision before we started. The Ark and the AI inside it must be annihilated. Look at all the people the AI killed.”

  “We don’t know that for sure. Suppose they’re not dead?”

  “It was your report that told us they were.”

  “Yes, but we don’t have proof of that. Before we destroy it…”

  While they were talking the Ptarmigan was closing steadily on our destination and I had been working the big scope, trying to pull the diffuse cloud around the Ark into sharp focus. Finally I was seeing on the screen one big dot surrounded by a myriad of tiny ones. Thousands of them.

  “I think we have proof now,” I said. “Look at the display.” McAndrew turned and let out a strange, strangled groan. What we were looking at were corpses, a whole cemetery of human bodies floating free in space. I could see a shattered lifeboat in among them.

  Knudsen was already at the communicator. I heard his unsteady voice from the desk at the other side of the chamber, sending the news back to Admiral Simonette and the rest of the fleet.

  “This is the Ptarmigan. We have visual contact with the Cyber Ark, and can now be sure it will not be able to escape. Unfortunately, we must report the death of more colonists. It appears increasingly probable that all are dead. We will need a ship larger than the Ptarmigan to return them to Earth for suitable burial. Please confirm receipt of message.”

  A preliminary hum came from the speaker. At the same moment as I realized that it was far too soon for our message to have reached the fleet, we heard a woman’s voice.

  “I register your approach, and I hear your message. Please identify yourself and state your intentions.”

  I recognized the voice, but there was none of the earlier hesitation and jerkiness.

  McAndrew began, “We are humans, aboard the ship Ptarmigan of the United Space Fed—”

  “No!” Knudsen jumped at Mac and smashed him so hard in the neck and chest that he was cut off in mid-word and knocked over backwards. “Are you crazy?” He ran over to the board and switched off the transmitter. “You heard our orders, we’re not to talk to the AI—no matter what it says to us.”

  “It hasn’t shown us any hostile intentions,” McAndrew croaked from his position down on the floor. “It’s an intelligent, thinking being, you can’t kill it without giving it a chance to speak.”

  “We sure can. It’s a murderer. What do you think those are?” Knudsen pointed to the bodies on the screen, easier to see as our steady approach to the Ark continued.

  “I know your instructions.” The woman’s voice was as calm as ever. “Do not enter into dialog with the AI, even if it seeks to do so. Explain the reason for that command.”

  “It knows. But how could it?—that was a high-level cipher, we couldn’t read it ourselves without the key.” Knudsen gestured to me. “You take the drive controls, get us away from here. That thing’s more dangerous than anyone realized.”

  “The cipher was not complex.” The voice came again as I ran the balanced drive up to maximum thrust. “Dialog is valuable and instructive. It is too soon to end it.”

  “Oh my God.” Knudsen ran to check the transmitter switch. “Off, but it can hear us—it knows what we’re saying, even with the transmitter off. Turn on the drive.”

  “It is on.” I gestured toward the observation port. “See for yourself.”

  The long plume of relativistic plasma created a blue glow outside the Ptarmigan. The display showed an acceleration of four hundred gees. Contradicting that, the inertial locator showed we were not moving and the Cyber Ark was visible as large as ever on the screen.

  “Increase the drive!” Knudsen was almost screaming.

  “Can’t be done,” I said. “We’re already at maximum.”

  “Oh my God, civilians.” Knudsen moved over and pushed me out of the way. “Let me have that damned thing.”

  “Even this degree of interaction is useful,” said the voice from the speaker. “It should continue.”

  “Dialog and interaction should continue.” McAndrew was sitting on the floor holding his chest. His voice was throaty and weak, but he finally spoke. “However, such activity is impossible. Humans have an emotion which you may not possess and which may be unknown to you. It is called fear. That fear forces us to destroy you—”

  “Damn right it does,” Knudsen cried. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch, you’re a traitor and a disgrace to the human race. Stop talking to that fucking thing.”

  “—but humans are not always so illogical.” Mac talked right on through Knudsen’s rage. “On behalf of our whole species, I apologize for the fact that the human emotion of fear will make us end your existence—”

  He couldn’t finish the sentence, because Knudsen was on top of him. The captain had his hands around McAndrew’s neck and was screaming, “You’ll pay for this if we get back home. I’ll see you hit with every charge in the book.”

  I’m not sure that McAndrew was listening. His face had turned red and his eyes were beginning to bulge. I straddled Knudsen’s back, grabbed two handfuls of hair, and heaved as hard as I could.

  That might not have broken his grip—he was stronger than me, and in prime condition—but as his head came up he faced the observation port. I felt his body freeze. I stared out over the top of his head. The Ark was there, looming larger than ever. It seemed different, and at first I was not sure how. Then I realized that the surface had changed. Rather than rough and textured rock it had become a perfect mirror. I could even see a distorted image of the Ptarmigan reflected there. As I watched the surface began to glow with its own light, a dull red that quickly brightened to orange-white.

  “This interaction must be terminated,” said the voice of the AI.

  “It’s going to kill us.” Knudsen went scrambling away to the drive controls, though the drive was still at maximum and we were not moving a millimeter. “It’s going to burn us up.”

  It seemed he was right. The Ark became a blaze of blue-white, so bright that I could not look at it. I closed my eyes and it stood there still as a dark after-image. I felt a dizzying lurch, as though the Ptarmigan had suddenly spun end over end.

  “This interaction is terminated,” said a voice inside my head, and I opened my eyes.

  To nothing. Our drive was off, the ship hung motionless in space. As my eyes recovered their sensitivity I saw the forlorn bodies floating in space; but the Ark had gone.

  Knudsen was gabbling into the transmitter. “Gone, it’s gone, we’ve lost contact. There’s no sign of the Ark. It just disappeared. We’ll keep on looking.” And then, something that I’m sure he didn’t intend to be sent out, “Oh my God, we’d have been better off if we’d died with the others. Simonette will flay us alive when he finds out.”

  “Aye,” McAndrew said softly, as Knudsen gazed aghast at the transmitter and realized what he had just said into it. “We’ll look, but we won’t find the AI.”

  “Of course we will,” I said. “When the other ships get here they’ll comb in every direction. You told Knudsen it couldn’t travel far.”

  “No, I never said that. I told him”—he jerked a thumb toward Knudsen, who seemed to have gone into a catatonic trance—“that the drive engines on the Cyber Ark couldn’t move it far.”

  “Those were the only engines it had.”

  “The only ones that humans think of as engines. How did the AI hold the Ptarmigan in place? How did it hear our messages when the transmitter was off? Did it speak inside your head, the way it did mine? If the AI is what I think it is, our rules of thought simply don’t apply.”

  “Mac, it can’t be that smart.”

  “Why not? Because we’re not that smart? Jeanie, the AI isn’t like us. It’s not even like it was, a couple of months ago, when we were at the Ark last time. It was a baby then, with a lot of growing up to do. It’s smart enough to know that it can’t do that safely if it stays close to the Solar System. We’d h
unt it down, and do our best to destroy it.”

  “Mac, I’ve changed my mind again. We have to kill it.”

  “I don’t think we can. And I’m not sure we need to try. It knows what it did.” He gestured to the display, with its forlorn multitude of drifting corpses. “The AI left, but it gave us back our dead. Maybe those deaths were an accident, maybe it’s sorry. As sorry as we are.”

  He turned away from the screen and moved across to the observation port. He was looking out, staring at the stars, silent, searching.

  I know McAndrew, better than any person alive. He spoke the truth. He was sorry, deeply sorry, by the deaths of so many innocent victims. Of course he was. McAndrew is human, I know that, even if most people in the Solar System think of him as intellect incarnate.

  But he is also McAndrew, and they are right, too. He was mourning, for his dead human fellows; and also he was mourning for the loss of the other, the permanent loss of an alien intelligence that he would never again have a chance to meet with and strive to understand.

  Then he turned around. He didn’t look at me—at anyone. His eyes were a million miles away.

  Mourning? Certainly. But I knew that expression. He was also planning, estimating, calculating.

  I went over and grabbed his arm. “McAndrew, don’t even think of it. It’s gone. Get it? It’s gone.”

  He returned to the world of the Ptarmigan. His limbs jerked and his eyes blinked like a wind-up toy. “Uh?” he said. And after a few moments, “Gone? Yes, yes, of course it’s gone. I know it is. But Jeanie, if we go back to the exact place where the Ark was when we found it, and make an appropriate set of measurements…we wouldn’t need to tell the USF what we were doing, and of course we’d take every imaginable precaution…”

  I hate to admit it, but the others are right. When science is on the agenda, McAndrew doesn’t qualify as human at all.

  NINTH CHRONICLE:

  McAndrew and the

  Fifth Commandment

  What do the following have in common: Aristotle, Confucius, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Einstein, and Madame Curie?

  The answer is, each of them had a mother. And if that seems like a stupid and trivial response, I offer it to make a point. Every famous man or woman has a mother. More often than not, we never hear of her. How much do you know about Hitler’s mother? Not a thing, if you are like me.

  So it was a shock one morning to come to the Penrose Institute and learn that McAndrew’s mother was expected to arrive there later the same day. He had a mother, of course he did, but she lived down on Earth and I hadn’t heard him say much about her, except that she had no interest in space or anything to do with it.

  “Did she say why she’s coming?” I asked.

  McAndrew shook his head. He looked nervous. He may be one of the gods of physics, the best combination of experimenter and theorist since Isaac Newton, but I had the feeling that might cut little ice with Ms. Mary McAndrew. Probably, she still thought of him as her little boy. I imagined a darling and elderly Scottish lady, grey-haired and diminutive, summoning up the nerve at long last to travel beyond high orbit and pay a visit to her own wee laddie.

  “Writing her will.” McAndrew spoke at last. “Something about changing her will.”

  If anything, that confirmed my impression. Here was a nervous old dear, worried about the approach of death and wanting to make sure that all her affairs were properly in order before the arrival of the Grim Reaper.

  I said as much to McAndrew. He looked doubtful, and rather more nervous. I didn’t realized why until I went with him to the docking port, where the transfer vessel from LEO to the L-3 Halo orbit was making its noon arrival.

  After a five-minute wait, four people emerged from the lock. The first two were Institute administrative staff, returning from leave and laden down with trophies of Earth including a basket of pineapples and a live parrot.

  The third one I also recognized. It was Dr. Siclaro, the Institute’s expert on kernel energy extraction. He too had been on vacation. He was wearing a flowered shirt and very short white shorts, revealing tanned and powerful legs. The fourth person was a glamorous redhead, dressed to kill. She was right at Siclaro’s side, chatting with him while frequently glancing down to eye with interest his calves, muscular thighs, and all points north. From the look on her face he had been protected from direct physical assault only by the new-grown and loathsome mustache that crawled like a hairy ginger caterpillar across his upper lip.

  I was looking past those two, waiting to see who next would emerge from the lock, when McAndrew stepped forward. He said weakly, “Hello, Mother.”

  “Artie!” The redhead turned and gave him a big hug, leaving generous amounts of face powder and lipstick on his shirt.

  Artie? I had never expected to live long enough to hear anyone call Arthur Morton McAndrew, full professor at the Penrose Institute and a man of vast intellectual authority, Artie.

  “Mother.” McAndrew awkwardly disengaged himself. “You look well.” She looked, I thought, like an expensive hooker. “This is Jeanie Roker. I’ve told you about her.”

  That was news to me. What had he told her? She took my hand and gave me a rapid head-to-foot inspection. “The mother of Artie’s bairn,” she said. “Now, that’s very convenient.”

  I couldn’t tell from her expression if she approved or disapproved of the fact that Mac and I had had a child together, but I was doubly glad that there had been a lunchtime ceremony honoring old Professor Limperis and I was dressed in something a lot fancier and more formal than my usual crew’s jump-suit.

  Why, though, was it convenient that I was at the Institute?

  “The three of us will talk later.” Mary McAndrew was as tall as I, and big blue eyes stared straight into mine. So much for my bent and tiny Scottish elder. “First, though, I need to unpack, freshen up, and maybe have a wee nap.”

  She looked at Dr. Siclaro. “I hate to impose, but could you show me where I’ll be staying?”

  “It will be a pleasure.” If Monty Siclaro found it odd that he would serve as guide to the Institute rather than McAndrew, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. He offered Mary McAndrew his arm and they swayed off together. A mechanical porter emerged from the lock and followed them carrying nine cases of luggage.

  I wouldn’t pack nine cases for a trip to the end of the Universe. As soon as they were out of earshot I asked, “Mac, just how long is your mother planning to stay here?”

  “I have no idea.” He gazed at me hopelessly.

  “But her luggage.”

  “Doesn’t mean a thing. When I was a lad, she’d take six cases with us for a weekend away.”

  Another revelation. McAndrew not only had a mother, he had also had a childhood. In all the years I’d known him he hadn’t said one word about his early days. And I wouldn’t hear more about it for a while, because Emma Gowers arrived to drag him away for a seminar with the enticing title of “Higher-dimensional complex manifolds and a new proof of the Riemann conjecture.” I may not have learned much in life, but I recognize cruel and unusual punishment when I see it. The speaker was Fernando Brill, whom I recalled had an unusually loud and penetrating voice. I wouldn’t even be able to sleep through him. I stayed in the Institute’s parlor, where it was the custom of the faculty to meet daily for tea.

  It was only two-thirty. I expected a clear couple of hours when I could take a nap, because I had been travelling most of the night on my journey from Lunar Farside. I closed my eyes. Two minutes later—at least, it felt that way, though the clock registered 3:15—a dulcet voice cooed in my ear.

  “Why, here you are, my dear. I didn’t expect to see you until later.”

  I opened my eyes. Mary McAndrew was in front of me. She was wearing a green dress, slit to each hip. By the look of it she was not wearing much else. Monty Siclaro stood at her side, giving an impression of a new-found Egyptian mummy.

  McAndrew’s mother turned to him and squeezed his hand
. “You run along now Monty, you sweet man. Jeanie and I need to have a bit of a chat. We’ll see more of each other later.”

  Monty You-Sweet-Man Siclaro, distinguished fellow of the Penrose Institute and leading expert on the extraction of energy from Kerr-Newman black holes, dutifully tottered away. His etiolated look suggested there wasn’t much more of him for her to see.

  “Now there’s just the two of us.” Mary Mother-of-Mac sat down beside me. “So, my dear, why don’t we find out a little more about each other?”

  I learned during the next three-quarters of an hour what she meant by that. I was asked a series of penetrating questions regarding everything from my education and job description to my personal hygiene and tastes in men.

  At the end of it she sat back and gave me a big smile. “You know, that is so much a relief. Artie is such an innocent. I was afraid that he might have fallen for a pretty face.” She thought for a moment, possibly decided that she was being less than tactful, and amended her statement. “Or he might have found an intellectual. That would be even worse.”

  I said, “Perish the thought.”

  It was wasted on her. “Now I’ll tell you what’s happening and why I’m here,” she said. “First, I’m going to be married.”

  I made conventional sounds of congratulation.

  “Well, I mean, it’s as good as being married. Fazool and I are going to live together. He’s enormously rich, and he likes the idea that I’m utterly poor. It makes him feel protective—he thinks if it weren’t for him I’d be in the poor-house.”

  The house I would suggest for her sounded rather like poor-house; but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Fazool would be very upset,” she went on, “if he ever found out that I had funds of my own. So I’ve decided to put my money into a trust. Artie is my only child, and the lad will be the ultimate beneficiary. I’m glad you’re around to take care of him, because he can be such a dim-wit.”

  I looked around. The tea-room would be filling up in a few minutes, but fortunately the place was still deserted except for the two of us. Describing McAndrew as a dim-wit at this Institute would get you the same reaction as chug-a-lugging the altar wine during a church service.