"We usually gather here for an hour or so before dinner," he said. "Can I get you a drink?"
"Coffee smells good." He led me to a table with samovars of coffee and tea and various bottles. There was beer and wine in a tub of ice. Nothing homemade and nothing cheap; a lot of it imported.
I gestured at the cluster of Armagnacs, single-malts, anejos. "What, you have a printing press grinding out ration cards?"
He smiled and shook his head, Ming two cups. "Nothing so legal." He set my cup down by the milk and sugar. "Marty said we could trust you enough to jack, so you'll know eventually." He studied my face. "We have our own nanoforge."
"Sure, you do."
"The Lord's mansion has many rooms," he said, "including a huge basement, in this case. We can go down and look at it later on."
"You're not kidding?"
He shook his head and sipped coffee. "No. It's an old machine, small, slow, and inefficient. An early prototype that was supposedly dismantled for parts."
"You're not afraid of making another big crater?"
"Not at all. Come sit over here." There was a picnic table with two pairs of black-box jacks. "Save a little time here." He handed me a green jack and took a red one. "One-way transfer."
I plugged in and then he did, and clicked a switch on and off.
I unjacked and looked at him, speechless. In one second, my entire world view was changed.
The Dakota explosion had been rigged. The nanoforge had been tested extensively in secret, and was safe. The Alliance coalition that developed it wanted to close off potentially successful lines of research. So after a few carefully composed papers-top-secret, but compromised-they cleared out North Dakota and Montana and supposedly tried to make a huge diamond out of a few kilos of carbon.
But the nanoforge wasn't even there. Just a huge quantity of deuterium and tritium, and an igniter. The giant H-bomb was buried, and shaped in such a way as to minimize pollution, while melting out a nice round glassy lake bed, large enough to be a good argument against trying to make your own nanoforge out of this and that.
"How do you know? Can you be sure it's true?"
His brow furrowed. "Maybe ... maybe it is just a story. Impossible to check by asking. The man who brought it into the chain, Julio Negroni, died a couple of weeks into the experiment, and the man he got it from, a cellmate in Raiford, was executed long ago."
"The cellmate was a scientist?"
"So he said. Murdered his wife and children in cold blood. Should be easy enough to check the news records, I guess around '22 or '23."
"Yeah. I can do that tonight." I went back to the serving table and poured a splash of rum into the coffee. It was too good a rum to waste that way, but desperate times call for desperate measures. I remember thinking that phrase. I didn't yet know quite how desperate the times were.
"Cheers." Mendez raised his cup as I sat back down. I tipped mine toward him.
A short woman with long flowing gray hair came over with a handset. "Dr. Class?" I nodded and took it. "It's a Dr. Harding."
"My mate," I explained to Mendez. "Just checking to make sure I got here."
Her face on the handset was the size of my thumbnail, but I could see she was clearly upset. "Julian-there's something going on."
"Something new?" I tried to make that sound like a joke, but could hear the shakiness in my voice.
"The Journal jury rejected the paper."
"Jesus. On what grounds?"
"The editor says they 'decline to discuss it' with anyone but Peter."
"So what does Peter – "
"He's not home!" A tiny hand fluttered up to knead her forehead. "He wasn't on the flight. The cottage in St. Thomas says he checked out last night. But somewhere between the cottage and the airport he ... I don't know..."
"Have you checked with the police on the island?"
"No ... no; that's the next step, of course. I'm panicking. I just wanted to, you know, hoped he had talked to you?"
"Do you want me to call them? You could – "
"No, I'll do it. And the airlines, too; double-check. I'll get back to you."
"Okay. Love you."
"Love you." She switched off.
Mendez had gone off to refresh his coffee. "What about this jury? Is she in trouble?"
"We both are. But it's an academic jury, the kind that decides whether a paper gets published."
"Sounds like you have a lot tied up in this paper. Both of you."
"Both of us and everybody else in the world." I picked up the red plug. "This is automatically oneway?"
"Right." He jacked in and then I did.
I wasn't as good at transmitting as he was, even though I was jacked ten days a month. It had been the same with Marty the day before: if you're used to two-way, you wait for feedback cues that never come. So with a lot of blind alleys and backtracking, it took about ten minutes to get everything across.
For some time he just looked at me, or maybe he was looking inward. "There is no question in your own mind. It's doom."
"That's right."
"Of course I have no way to evaluate your logic, this pseudo-operator theory. I take it that the technique itself is not universally accepted."
"True. But Peter got the same result independently."
He nodded slowly. "That's why Marty sounded so strange when he told me you were coming. He used some stilted language like 'vitally important.' He didn't want to say too much, but he wanted to warn me." He leaned forward. "So we're walking along Occam's razor now. The simplest explanation of these events is that you and Peter and Amelia were wrong. The world, the universe, is not going to end because of the Jupiter Project."
"True, but – "
"Let me carry this along for a moment. From your point of view, the simplest explanation is that somebody in a position of power wants your warning to be suppressed."
"That's right."
"Allow me the assumption that nobody on this jury would profit from the destruction of the universe. Then why, in God's name, would anyone who thought your argument had merit want to suppress it?"
"You were a Jesuit?"
"Franciscan. We run a close second in being pains in the ass."
"Well... I don't know any of the people on the review board, so I can only speculate about their motivations. Of course they don't want the universe to go belly-up. But they might well want to put a lid on it long enough to adjust their own careers-assuming all of them are involved in the Jupiter Project. If our conclusions are accepted, there are going to be a lot of scientists and engineers looking for work."
"Scientists would be that venal? I'm shocked."
"Sure. Or it could be a personal thing against Peter. He probably has more enemies than friends."
"Can you find out who was on the jury?"
"I couldn't; it was anonymous. Maybe Peter could wheedle it out of someone."
"And what do you make of his disappearance? Isn't it possible he saw some fatal flaw in the argument and decided to drop out of sight?" "Not impossible."
"You hope something bad happened to him." "Wow. It's almost as if you could read my mind." I sipped some coffee, now unpleasantly cool. "How much did I let slip there?"
He shrugged. "Not a lot."
"You'll know everything minutes after we jack two-way. I'm curious."
"You don't mask very well. But then you haven't had much practice."
"So what did you get?"
"Green-eyed monster. Sexual jealousy. One specific image, an embarrassing one."
"Embarrassing for you?"
He tilted his head to about ten degrees of irony. "Of course not. I was speaking conventionally." He laughed. "Sorry. I didn't mean to be patronizing. I don't suppose anything just physical would embarrass you, either."
"No. The other part is still hanging there, though. Unresolved."
"She's not jacked."
"No. She tried and it didn't take."
"Wasn't long ago?"
"Couple of months. May twentieth."
"And this, um, episode was after that?"
"Yeah. It's complicated."
He took the cue. "Let's go back to ground zero. What I got from you-assuming that you're right about the Jupiter Project-is that you and Marty, but Marty more than you, believe that we have to rid the world of war and aggression right now. Or the game is up."
"That's what Marty would say." I stood up. "Get some fresh coffee. You want something?"
"Splash of that rum. You're not as certain?"
"No ... yes and no." I concentrated on the drinks. "Let me read your mind, for a change. You think that there's no need for haste, once the Jupiter Project's deactivated."
"You think otherwise?"
"I don't know." I set the drinks down and Mendez touched his and nodded. "When I jacked with Marty I got a sense of urgency that was completely personal. He wants to see the thing well in process before he dies."
"He's not that old."
"No, sixty-some. But he's been obsessed with this since you guys were made; maybe before. And he knows it will take a while to get going." I searched for words; logician's words. "Marty's feelings aside, there's an objective rationale for urgency; the black-and-white one of scale: anything else we do or don't do is trivial if there's the slightest chance that this could come to pass."
He sniffed the rum. "The destruction of everything."
"That's right."
"Maybe you're too close to it, though," he said. "I mean, you're talking about a huge project here. It's not something that a Hitler or a Borgia could cook up in his backyard."
"In their own times, no. Now they could," I said. "You of all people should see how."
"Me of all people?"
"You've got a nanoforge in your basement. When you want it to make something, what do you do?"
"Ask it. We tell it what we want and it goes into its catalogue and tells us what raw materials we have to come up with."
"You can't ask it to make a duplicate of itself, though."
"They say no, it would melt down if you did. I'm not inclined to try."
"But that's just part of the programming, right? In theory, you could short-circuit it."
"Ah." He nodded slowly. "I see where you're heading."
"That's right. If you could get around that injunction, you could say, in effect, 'Re-create the Jupiter Project for me,' and if it had access to the raw materials, and the information, it could do it."
"As an extension of one person's will."
"That's right."
"My God." He drank the rum and set the glass down hard. "My God."
"Everything," I said. "A trillion galaxies disappear if one maniac says the right sequence of words."
"Marty has a lot of faith in the monsters he created," Mendez said, "to let us share this knowledge."
"Faith or desperation. Guess I got a mixture of both from him."
"You hungry?"
"What?"
"You want dinner now, or should we all jack first?"
"That's what I'm hungry for. Let's do it."
He stood up and brought his hands together in two explosive claps. "Big room," he shouted. "Marc, you stay out and keep watch." We followed everyone to a double door on the other side of the atrium. I wondered what I was getting myself into.
JULIAN WAS USED TO being ten people at once, but it was stressful and confusing at times, even with people you had grown close to. He didn't really know what to expect, linking with fifteen men and women he'd never met, who had been jacked together for twenty years. That would be alien territory even without Marty's pacifistic transformation. Julian had used his horizontal liaison to weakly link with other platoons, and it was always like breaking in on a family discussion.
Eight of these had been mechanics, at least, or pro-tomechanics. He was more nervous about the others, the assassins and murderers. More curious about them, too.
Maybe they could teach him something about living with memories.
The "big room" held a ring-shaped table surrounding a holo pit. "Most of us get together here for the news," Mendez said. "Movies, concerts, plays. Fun to have all the different points of view."
Julian wasn't sure about that. He'd mediated too many firestorms in his platoon, where one person came up with a strong opinion that divided the ten into two bickering camps. It took about a second to start, and sometimes an hour to sort out.
The walls were dark mahogany and the table and its chairs were fine-grained spruce. A slight whisper of linseed oil and furniture polish. In the pit, an image of a forest clearing, dappled sunlight on wildflowers.
There were twenty seats. Mendez offered Julian a chair and sat down next to him. "You might want to plug in first," he said, "let people come in one at a time and introduce themselves."
"Sure." Julian realized this had all been rehearsed. He stared at the wildflowers and plugged himself in.
Mendez was the first one, waving a silent hello. The link was strange, powerful in a way he'd never come close to experiencing. It was startling, like seeing the sea for the first time-and it was like a sea in a literal way; Mendez's consciousness floated in a seemingly endless expanse of shared memory and thought. And he was comfortable with it the way a fish is comfortable with the sea, moving through its invisibility.
Julian tried to communicate his reaction to Mendez, along with a sense of rising panic; he wasn't sure whether he could manage two such universes, let alone fifteen. Mendez said it actually gets easier with more, and then Cameron plugged in to prove it.
Cameron was an older man, who had been a professional soldier for eleven years when he volunteered for the project. He had gone to a sniper school in Georgia, and trained for long-distance murder with a variety of weapons. Mostly he had used the Mauser Fernschiesser, which could target people around a corner or even over the horizon. He had fifty-two kills, and separate grief for each of them, and a single large pang for the humanity he had lost with the first shot. He also remembered the exhilaration the kills had given him, at the time. He had fought in Colombia and Guatemala, and automatically made a connection with Julian's jungle days, absorbing and integrating them almost instantly.
Mendez was still there, too, and Julian was aware of his immediate connection with Cameron, casually sorting through what the soldier had taken from his new contact. That part was not so alien, except for the speed and completeness of it. And Julian could understand why the totality could become more clear as more people joined: all the information was already there, but parts of it were better focused now that Cameron's point of view had combined with Mendez's.
Now Tyler. She was one of the murderers, too, having remorselessly killed three people in one year for money, to support a drug habit. That was just before cash became obsolete in the States; she had been captured in a routine check when she tried to emigrate to a country that had both paper pesos and designer drugs. Her crimes were older than Julian was, and although she didn't deny legal or moral responsibility for them, they literally had been done by a different person. The DD doper who lured three pushers into bed and killed them there, as a favor for their boss, was just a vivid melodramatic memory, like a movie you saw a few hours ago. For the peaceful part of her day, Tyler was part of the Twenty, as they still called themselves in their minds, even though four had died; other times she worked as an arbitrageur, bartering and buying commodities in dozens of different countries, Alliance and Ngumi. With their own nanoforge, the Twenty could survive without wealth-but then if the machine asked for a cup of praseodymium, it was nice to have a few million rupees close to hand, so Tyler could buy it without having to go through a lot of tiresome paperwork.
The others came in more rapidly, or seemed to, once Julian got over the initial strangeness.
As each of the fifteen presented himself or herself, another part of the vast, but now not endless, structure became clear. When they all had logged in, the ocean was more like an inland sea, huge and complex, but thoro
ughly mapped and navigable.
And they sailed together for what seemed like hours, in a voyage of mutual exploration. The only one they had ever jacked with outside the Twenty was Marty, who was a sort of godfather figure, remote because he only jacked one-way with them now.
Julian was a vast treasure of quotidian detail. They were hungry for his impressions of New York, Washington, Dallas-every place in the country had been drastically changed by the social and technological revolution, the Universal Welfare State, that the nanoforge had wrought. Not to mention the endless Ngumi War.
The nine who had been soldiers were fascinated with what the soldierboy had become. In the pilot program they had been taken from, the primitive machines were little more than stick men with one laser finger. They could walk around and sit or lie down, and open a door if the latch was simple. They all knew from the news what the current machines were capable of doing, and in fact three of them were warboys, after a fashion. They couldn't go to the conventions, but they followed units and jacked into soldierboy crystals and strings. It was nothing like being jacked two-way with an actual mechanic, though.
Julian was embarrassed by their enthusiasm but could share their amused feedback at his embarrassment. He was familiar enough with that from his platoon.
A lot of it became more and more familiar-feeling as he grew used to the scale of it. It wasn't only that the Twenty had been together so long; they had also been around a long time. At thirty-two, Julian was the oldest in his platoon by several years; all together, they had less than three hundred years of experience. The aggregate age of the Twenty was well over a thousand, a lot of that time spent in mutual contemplation.
They weren't exactly a "group mind," but they were a lot closer to that state than Julian's platoon. They never argued, except for amusement. They were gentle and content. They were humane ... but were they quite human?
This was the question that had been in the back of Julian's mind from the time Marty first described the Twenty: maybe war is an inevitable product of human nature. Maybe to get rid of war, we have to become something other than human.
The others picked up on this worry and said no, we're still human in all the ways that count. Human nature does change, and the fact that we've developed tools to direct that change is quintessentially human. And it must be a nearly universal concomitant to technological growth everywhere in the universe; otherwise, there would be no universe. Unless we're the only technological intelligence in the universe, Julian pointed out; so far there's no evidence to the contrary. Maybe our own existence is evidence that we're the first creatures to evolve far enough to hit the reset button. Someone does have to be first.
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