by Allen Steele
He was sitting outside when the doorbell rang. “Can you get that, sweetheart?” he called, barely looking away from the pad open before him on the patio table. “It’s probably the pizza I ordered.”
Elaine was in the living room, gently rocking Curt in her arms. “All right, I’ll get it,” she replied, then gently laid the baby in his wicker bassinet before walking over to the front door.
Curt barely stirred, for which Roger was grateful. A couple of weeks earlier, he’d received the neck injections that had introduced Anni nanites to his cranium; fortunately, Curt hadn’t inherited his father’s resistance to neurological nanosurgery. Nonetheless, while the hair-fine neural network gradually developed within the lobes of his brain, the slightest motion of his head was likely to spark a headache. The fact that he was sleeping soundly was an indication that his Anni was nearly complete. Of course, the fact that Elaine had just finished breast-feeding him probably helped a bit as well.
Simon Wright was on the other side of the door, sitting in the gyrochair that lately had become his sole means of mobility, an oxygen line running from his nose to a tank on the back. He said nothing as Elaine stepped aside to let him in, but waited while she carried out the pretense of accepting a pizza from a deliveryman and paying for it. Simon lived on the East Tier’s ocean level, just a quick elevator ride from the Newtons’. When they started to become suspicious of Victor Corvo’s motives, they’d worked out protocols for visiting each other’s condos without attracting notice. It was entirely possible that he might have arranged for electronic surveillance of their apartments as well as their workplace; the less he knew what they were saying behind his back, the better.
“I take it the meeting didn’t go well,” Simon said as he rolled out on the terrace.
“No … no, it didn’t.” Roger waited another moment while his wife made sure that the baby was sleeping soundly, then she followed Simon out onto the balcony, sliding shut the glass door behind her. “In fact, I’d say we’re in worse shape than we were before.”
“We should have never brought him in as a partner.” Elaine crossed the balcony to take a seat next to her husband. Small and petite, with long chestnut hair and soulful gray eyes, she was a contrast to the tall, blond athlete whom she’d married. “I didn’t like him from the start, and—”
“We’ve been through this before.” Roger was tired of reiterating arguments they’d had already. “We needed a higher level of R-and-D funding than we could’ve received from government or university grants, and Victor was recommended to me.”
“Don’t … blame yourself.” Simon’s voice was an asthmatic wheeze. He was noticeably pale, his skin nearly as white as what remained of his hair; Roger wondered at the effort it must have taken for him just to get in his chair and leave his condo. “I heard that … Corvo was a venture capitalist who … was willing to invest in technology. I figured that he might … put us over the top and that’s why I … suggested that we go to him.” A scowl beneath the nose clip of his oxygen line. “Didn’t know he … had other ambitions.”
“Look, it’s both our faults.” Roger leaned back in his chair. “We knew a long time ago that his interest in artificial life isn’t the same as ours. We want to create replacement bodies, he wants to make a slave race. But we figured that we could gamble a little by making a Faustian bargain with him, then go public with the medical applications—hopefully with you as the living example—while taking measures to make sure that Victor doesn’t get his way.”
A taut smile appeared on Simon’s face. “I’m hoping you’re … on the right track. Starting to run … out of time here.”
“Don’t worry, Simon.” Elaine reached forward to gently grasp the back of his hand. “I’ve nearly finished the redesign for the cerebral-support unit. Even if your body gives out before the otho is ready, we’ll be able to sustain your brain indefinitely … even give you a certain measure of mobility.”
Simon nodded gratefully. This had been the plan all along, even before Corvo had become involved. The objective of Roger and Elaine’s research, which they’d been doing ever since they met at the University of Chicago where Roger Newton had been Simon Wright’s brightest student, was the development of a fully functional artificial human to whom a person’s consciousness could be transferred upon the death of his natural body. A kind of immortality, really. When Simon became terminally ill, with no possible cure, it was agreed that he would become the willing test subject for the first orthogenic transhuman organism.
They feared that Simon might die before the otho was ready, so Elaine had turned some of her attention to a side project, the development of a cyborg whose form Simon would temporarily occupy. Cerebral support units had lately been introduced to preserve human brains after the death of the body, but they were little more than wetware interfaces; the minds sealed within them could do nothing more than see what was going on around them and answer questions. For Elaine, this was a form of living death, but for Simon there was potential for something far greater. As a preliminary stage toward a new life as an otho, he was going to test their work by first becoming a cyborg.
Elaine looked at Roger again. “So what did Victor say to you today that’s making you hit the panic button?”
“He … didn’t tell you already?” Simon asked.
“No. I wanted to wait until we were all here together.” Roger slowly let out his breath. “Victor sees a potential military application in this … namely, replacement bodies for soldiers killed in combat. His idea is to have othos on standby in medical facilities not far from the battlefield. When a soldier is mortally wounded, he or she would be brought to the facility and have his mind scanned into the new body and—”
“I don’t see the problem with that.” Elaine shook her head. “I mean, we don’t have wars very often anymore, but when we do, they’re bloody as hell. It’s just as important to save the life of a soldier as it is to save a civilian.”
“It is, but that’s not Victor’s idea. He doesn’t want to simply save a soldier’s life, but to do it quickly enough so that he or she can be sent straight back into combat. No attrition rate … just send in the same troops again and again and again.”
Simon stared at him. “Horrifying.”
“At the very least, highly unethical.” Elaine idly watched the lights of boats moving in and out of the lagoon. “It’s bad enough that he sees potential in creating a slave race. This would mean creating cannon fodder as well, with soldiers condemned to die over and over again.”
“Not just that,” Roger said, “but othos will be superior in many ways to humans. Carbon-fiber skeleton, infrared night vision, auditory channels more sensitive to higher frequencies…” He reached for the pitcher of ice water he’d set out on the table. “No country wouldn’t consider possessing that kind of capability. If they could replace troops as fast as they were killed, they’d never lose a war…”
“… because the wars would never end,” Elaine finished.
Roger nodded as he poured a glass of water and offered it to Simon. “But Victor doesn’t see this. All he sees is the money he’d get from military contracts.”
“You mean … how much money we’d earn … don’t you?” Simon shook his head at the offered glass.
“That’s the interesting part.” Roger took the water back and had a sip. “All during our conversation, he kept referring to the company with the singular ‘I’—‘I’ll approach the contractors,’ ‘I’ll own the patents,’ and so forth. As if the three of us don’t exist.”
“Perhaps we don’t.” Elaine’s voice was so soft as to be nearly a whisper. “Not so far as his plans for the future are concerned.”
“You don’t think … he’d go that far … do you?” Simon asked.
Roger didn’t answer at once. Resting the glass on the table, he folded his hands together and silently regarded them for a few moments. “I hate to say it,” he said at last, “but I think he would. He knows he can’t count on you
being around very much longer, but as for Elaine and me…” He shook his head. “There’ve been rumors that Victor has some … well, let’s call them what they are: criminal associations. People in the underworld he’s called on in the past to do dirty work for him.”
“I’ve heard the same thing,” Elaine said. “He’s been seen with former members of Starry Messenger, for instance.”
“If it becomes convenient for us to disappear,” Roger said, “then I have little doubt that he’d have no qualms about arranging for us to mysteriously vanish.” He looked through the balcony windows at the bassinet. “Curt, too.”
No one spoke for a minute. The three of them gazed at one another, realizing the danger they were in. “So what … do we do?” Simon asked. “Abandon the project?”
There was no mistaking the quiver in his voice at the prospect of having to face death when an alternative was so close at hand. Roger smiled and shook his head. “No, we’re not going to do that … not while we have a choice.”
“And that is?”
“We disappear … but under our terms.” He turned in his chair to gaze toward the east. “And there’s where we’ll go.”
While they’d been speaking, the Moon had risen over the Atlantic, three-quarters full and shining brightly upon the dark waters. Roger pointed to it. “I’ve been looking around, and I’ve found a perfect site. An energy research lab in the Tycho crater that was abandoned half finished when the company that owned it went bankrupt. It has both surface and underground facilities, and—”
“What are you saying?” Elaine asked. “That we pack up and move to the Moon?” Roger nodded. “And, of course, Victor will never find out.”
“Not if we work fast, he won’t.” Pushing back his chair, Roger stood up from the table. “His private shuttle lifted off from LaGuardia just a couple of hours after our meeting. By now, he should be boarding the next beamship for Mars.” He began pacing back and forth across the balcony. “Another interesting rumor about Victor … he’s got an aresian mistress whom he’s recently made pregnant. He doesn’t intend to marry her, but he’s also afraid that if he dumps her, she’ll use her pregnancy to take him for everything he’s worth. So—”
“What does that have … to do with us?” Simon asked.
“I checked the schedule for return flights from Mars. There’s none for the next nine months. Victor’s outbound flight is the last one for the current launch window. After that, Mars’s orbit takes it on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, and so nothing will be launched from Mars to Earth during that time. This gives us a window of opportunity.”
“To do what? Run away to the Moon and disappear?” A skeptical look from Elaine. “He’ll just track us down.”
“No, he won’t.” Roger walked behind her and gently laid his hands on her shoulders. “Not if he thinks we’re dead.”
III
Roger Newton was the scion of a wealthy North American States family that traced its British lineage back to Sir Isaac Newton’s family. While he and Elaine had done well from the biotech patents developed by the small research company they’d started with Simon Wright, it wasn’t necessary for them to live off their work; his family already had a sizable estate. So when Roger decided a few years earlier that he needed a hobby as a diversion from his research into artificial life, there was enough money in the bank for him to buy a new toy: a spaceship.
The craft he’d purchased was a secondhand racing yacht, the kind used for competition regattas. Christened the Cornet by its original owners, it was a hundred feet long and shaped like an elongated teardrop, with a round bombardier window at its broad bow and the exhaust bell of its magnetoplasma main engine at its tapered stern. Ducted maneuvering thrusters along the titanium-alloy hull allowed for precision steering, while recessed rungs enabled it to be coupled to a beamsail for interplanetary travel.
Although the Cornet had tripod landing gear, it was meant for emergencies only. The yacht was principally designed for races in which a small fleet of spacecraft would launch from Earth’s orbit, fly at top speed to the Moon or a near-Earth asteroid, circle it, then race back home to aerobrake in the upper atmosphere before returning to the starting point, where the winner would be determined by minimum elapsed time. So the Cornet seldom touched down on a planetary surface; when it did, it was usually the Moon, where the little craft would make a tail-first landing at a spaceport maintenance field. Its engine, while powerful enough for racing, didn’t have sufficient thrust to achieve Earth escape velocity.
The Cornet could be operated by a single individual. Indeed, shortly after purchasing the craft, Roger took the mandatory flight instruction courses and earned his spacecraft master pilot’s license. Although regatta rules normally called for a crew of four, a safety precaution that serious competitors considered a nuisance, Roger came to realize that he enjoyed the fact that the ship had accommodations for four. He’d twice entered the Cornet in lunar races, with Elaine as first mate and experienced spacers as crew, and both times he’d come in near the end of the pack. That was enough to convince him that he preferred leisurely weekend jaunts around near-Earth space to the white-knuckle challenge of trying to beat another ship to the finish line. He kept the Cornet but quietly decided that, from now on, it would only be used for the occasional pleasure cruise with family and friends.
Six months after the furtive meeting at Roger and Elaine’s condo, the Newton family and Simon Wright disembarked from the Ecuador skytower at Station Aztec, the doughnut-shaped geosynchronous habitat that marked the endpoint of space elevator ascents from the South American Federation. It was unusual for Roger and Elaine to take the long way to orbit; they usually preferred catching a commercial shuttle from New York or Boston. Curt was still too young for high-g liftoffs, though, and Simon had become too frail, so this time they’d taken the elevator to Aztec, where Roger already reserved a skiff to transport them the rest of the way to the Cornet’s slip at the Highgate anchorage.
Those who spotted them getting off the elevator would later report a curious thing; along with nine-month-old Curt, Roger, Elaine, and Simon were accompanied by what appeared to be a large, saucer-shaped drone, one capable of carrying two nylon duffel bags in the station’s low gravity. Robots were not uncommon on Aztec, but no one had ever seen one quite like this. When an IPF customs agent questioned them about it, Elaine told him it was the prototype of an all-purpose service drone she and her husband were testing. People watched the machine carrying their bags through the station’s low-g corridors and told each other that they’d like to see something like that come on the market; a flying ’bot with claw manipulators could be useful around the house. No one had the faintest suspicion it could be anything else.
An hour later, the skiff hard-docked with the Cornet, which was moored at the same anchorage as other regatta yachts. At Roger’s request, Highgate personnel had already pressurized the fuel tanks with argon. While Elaine began warming up the engine’s magnetic superconductors and ion cyclotron and Simon stowed the drone, Roger put on his vacuum suit and went out through the airlock. The ostensible purpose of his spacewalk was a routine preflight inspection, but while he was on the side of the Cornet facing away from the rest of the anchorage, he strapped a large, foil-wrapped bundle to the hull near the stern. He took a moment to switch on an attached radio receiver and conduct a quick test with Simon, and then returned to the airlock. No one saw what he did.
Once he’d removed his suit and stowed it away, Roger pulled himself to the command deck, where Elaine and Simon were already strapped in. No longer asleep, baby Curt watched in fascination from his mother’s arms as his father filed a flight plan with Highgate traffic control. Just a simple, two-day jaunt to the Moon and back, no landing intended, return destination the same as the departure point.
It was identical to nearly every trip Roger and Elaine had taken with the Cornet since they’d retired from regatta racing. The traffic control officer filed the flight plan, relayed a
copy to lunar trafco at Port Copernicus, and bade the pilot a pleasant trip. A few minutes later, the yacht detached its mooring lines and slowly backed out of its slip along the docking spar. Once it was far enough away from the station, the little teardrop-shaped craft performed a ninety-degree starboard turn and fired its main engine. Within seconds, it vanished from sight.
This was the last time anyone saw the Cornet.
IV
Lunar night lay heavy upon Tycho.
Earth was three-quarters full above the rim, but shed little more than tepid light; the towering crater walls and central peak flung a carpet of shadows across the rock-strewn floor. Even at the construction site on the crater’s east side, the spotlights had been extinguished, the robots temporarily stilled.
The dozen Grag ’bots who’d been constantly working day and night for the last five months had done so without direct human supervision. Nothing except machines had set foot in the crater since the half-finished energy research lab was purchased a month earlier by an obscure New York biotech firm. The robots were leased from a lunar construction company and brought to this place by the same unmanned hoppers that had carried in construction equipment and pallets of building materials. A Grag 320-A had overseen the refurbishment of the abandoned site, making sure the other robots accurately and efficiently carried out instructions transmitted from Earth.
With no need for shift changes or union-mandated rest breaks, the robots—no two of which were exactly alike, each designed for specialized tasks—had tirelessly labored for 3,367 hours, 29 minutes, and 18 seconds before the Grag 320-A received, via a long-baseline antenna buried just beneath the lunar regolith, a brief message from a spacecraft in low orbit above the Moon. Following orders, the supervisor robot ordered all the other Grags to cease work at once and shut down the tripod-mounted spotlights.