“I can’t do much about those, even if I replaced them with glass,” Osroqui said. “He can’t blink anymore, and that kind of thing always gives a stiff away. I don’t think we need a hat. Hey, does his kind wear veils?”
“No, they don’t.” Jacobs thought a moment. “Glass, you said. Hmmm. Glasses.”
“Glasses?” Osroqui asked.
“Something you see in old Terran movies. Humans used to wear glass lenses in frames over their eyes to correct vision problems. We could make ones with really thick lenses; then you couldn’t see if Chaylaifa was blinking or not. We could tell Kethrommon it was some Rhuum thing. Measure his head for me, will you, Osroqui? I’ll make a call.”
The time for the meeting arrived. The rest of the Rhuum party was only slightly surprised to find Chaylaifa, Nasu, and Fehlorah already in place at the conference table, but they took their seats in the gallery without incident.
Kethrommon entered to find things much the same as the day before, except that Jacobs and Trudy were standing by Chaylaifa’s side, and that the Rhuum ambassador was wearing… something… over his eyes.
“Mr. Jacobs?” the Bloxx began, somewhat puzzled. “Why are you sitting over there today? Do you propose to speak for the Rhuum?”
“With your indulgence, m’lord,” Jacobs began, “I do, in a way. The ambassador has asked me to translate his native tongue into Anglish for him in order to spare us farther, ah, difficulties.”
“I see.” Kethrommon reached into his cloak and dropped Chaylaifa’s blaster onto the table. It clattered. There was something like a gasp from the gallery. “I received this last night,” he said. “Did the ambassador grasp the import?”
Jacobs put his head very near Chaylaifa’s lips, waited a moment, and then straightened. “He did, m’lord. He begs a moment while he very carefully phrases what he wishes to say next, realizing that you need not grant him this boon.”
Kethrommon paused, then nodded. “Very well. What is it?”
Jacobs bent, paused, and straightened again. “He wishes to ask again the question which he so poorly and insultingly put to you yesterday because of his clumsiness with the language. He begs to know if he may ask this question again, here and now, or do you wish to kill him right away? He humbly awaits your answer.”
Kethrommon was silent for a long minute. “He may ask the question,” the Bloxx representative finally said, his jaw set.
Jacobs put his head next to Chaylaifa’s mouth. “The ambassador wished to know, Sir Kethrommon, which of your warrior gods acted through your father to sire you. You exhibit the most honorable traits of many of them, and the ambassador would like to know so he, too, may honor him.”
Kethrommon blinked. “Is that what he—never mind. Please tell the ambassador that I have the honor to have as my patron the god Anox-Maieth, the warrior spirit of the northern provinces; my father’s family is of those lands. Please thank the ambassador for his interest.” The Bloxx picked up the blaster and rather casually put it into the pocket in his cloak. “I think we should begin the meeting now.”
“The ambassador is eager as ever to begin,” Jacobs said.
Jacobs and Trudy were standing at the viewport in the departure lounge, hand in hand. They watched as the Rhuum yacht sprang away from the side of the hotel and, on thrusters, maneuvered into proper position for its sprint for home.
“Ahem,” said Lieutenant Hrock-Leff. “I thought I might join you for the departure. All is well?”
Jacobs nodded to him. “All is very well. Lieutenant. And you?”
“A bit more prosperous than I was, as are certain members of my squad. We thank you.”
“You’re all entirely welcome.” Jacobs turned back to the viewport as the lieutenant came to stand with him and Trudy.
“They are satisfied?” Hrock-Leff asked. “I still cannot believe it has worked.”
“Everything’s fine,” Jacobs answered. “Chaylaifa went aboard on a medical stretcher. The poor sha is completely exhausted. He will have a fatal heart attack on the way home—a regrettable consequence of his strenuous efforts to bring about the first trade treaty with the Bloxx. The ship’s doctor is a family confidant; he’ll keep silent and no one else will know. Chaylaifa will be buried in space, according to tradition. Nasu and Fehlorah will inherit Chaylaifa’s import business. They’ll be well taken care of.”
Trudy nodded. “They ought to be. Rhuum has struck the first major agreement with a race that’s sure to be a major player in this part of the galaxy.”
“And we nailed it for them,” Jacobs said, with great satisfaction. “Despite everything.”
“I hope Nasu and Fehlorah will be all right,” Trudy said.
“They’ve been through quite an ordeal.”
“They’re the widowed spouses of a hero of the Rhuum Industrial Organization,” said Jacobs. “They’ll be treated right, don’t worry. They won’t be single for long, either—not with that bankroll. They’ll find a new sha, or Nasu will take Fehlorah if she turns out to be sha herself.”
“I wonder how we managed to fool Sir Kethrommon, though?” Lieutenant Hrock-Leff wondered. “He is not stupid.”
“He isn’t,” Jacobs said with a grin, “and we didn’t.
Kethrommon realized that Chaylaifa was dead the moment he saw him. However, he decided to trust me—or, more accurately, he decided to trust Trudy, who was standing right there, after all, and so had to be privy to what was going on. Kethrommon played along and quickly realized that we were showing a way—the only way—out of the jungle. He took it, bless his heart.”
“You were sure of him?” Hrock-Leff asked.
“Reasonably sure. I figured Kethrommon wouldn’t expose us, as long as we didn’t implicate him in our cover-up or deal unfairly with him in the talks—that is, as long as we didn’t put his personal honor into question, and we never did. No, the whole charade with Chaylaifa’s body was for the benefit of the Rhuum party. They’ll go home now and tell everyone how wonderful the regrettably departed Chaylaifa was at the talks. His finest moment coming right at the end, and all that.”
The Rhuum yacht was nothing more than a pinpoint of winking light in the far distance. Suddenly, it vanished.
“There they go,” Trudy said. “Safe home, Nasu and Fehlorah.”
“Indeed,” Hrock-Leff said, nodding. “Well, I feel a bit let down, to tell you the truth. This case provided more excitement than I usually see in my work. Actually, I found it rather exhilarating.”
“Really?” Jacobs asked, as the three turned and left the lounge. “Well, stick around. Lieutenant. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”
Soft In the World, And Bright
M. Shayne Bell
This is how it began: I stumbled. But it wasn’t just a stumble. I knew that. My right leg “felt” tingly—no, “felt” as if tiny pinpricks of my mind’s awareness about my knee were disappearing, as if the knee itself were disappearing atom by atom in a sudden rush.
Mary! I shouted the thought in my mind, but she didn’t answer, and I could not access her virtual reality in my mind to find her. I was shut out of it. But she could stop this—she was the artificial intelligence networked through my nerves and my brain to give me my body. I thought maybe that’s why she didn’t answer me. Maybe she was trying to stop my body from disintegrating from my consciousness and she couldn’t answer me because it took all of her efforts.
I had stopped walking and was standing in the middle of a broad flight of stairs leading down to breakfast, and people were staring. I looked across at the handrail against the wall and took a step toward it with my left leg. I could walk with it. My left leg worked. I dragged my right leg along and got to the handrail and the bottom of the stairs and a table, where I sat and rubbed my knee. My hands could feel my knee, but my knee couldn’t feel my hands on it.
Mary, I thought. What’s happening?
But she didn’t answer, and a golden robot with its ruby, multifaceted eyes stood nex
t to my table to take my order and I couldn’t think what to tell it.
“Are you all right, Mr. Addison?” it asked.
It knew me because it was linked to the hotel’s central intelligence, which knew all about me: that I was actually no more than a brain in a body that wouldn’t work without the AI they put inside me after I broke my neck and we found out that I was allergic to the neural-regeneration drugs, that I couldn’t actually feel anything, it was the AI giving my mind the illusion of feeling, that I couldn’t breathe on my own, or speak, or control my urination, or be a man among other men who can walk and breathe and hold their urine, and that every eight years I had to have the AI replaced because the programs would become corrupted, and it was Mary’s eighth year and they would erase her out of my mind and I didn’t want her to go because I loved her.
I put my hands on the table. “I’m fine,” I said to the robot.
“Might I suggest the buffet this morning?”
I couldn’t walk to a buffet. “Please bring me some coffee,” I said, “and fruit.”
“Grapefruit?”
I nodded.
It left, and I still couldn’t feel my knee, and I wouldn’t put my hands on it. Mary, I thought. Talk to me, Mary. Are you all right?
But she didn’t send a word to my mind. I was sitting in Swan Court, next to the hotel’s artificial lagoon by its artificial sea, and the artificial breeze off the water smelled like the sea, and I knew the sea smelled like this because Mary and I had run along a beach once in the early morning and I had felt the sand on my feet, and the spray from the waves on my skin, and I knew Mary was making me feel all of that, but I didn’t care because Mary was with me in my mind and we were happy with the sun coming up over the sea.
“Your coffee, sir.” The robot put it down in front of me. “Your grapefruit, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“Would you like anything else?”
“No.”
“Shall I call the swans for you?”
I looked up at the robot and wanted it to go and leave me alone. “The swans?” I said.
The robot looked out over the water, and three swans swam toward us. I wondered how the robot had called them, and then I thought they were probably not real swans, but robots, and it had called them through the central intelligence with a thought. They were graceful and lovely, and the robot left but the swans didn’t.
I spooned sugar into the coffee and stirred it and lifted the cup and took a drink—and the coffee burned my lips, but my hands hadn’t felt the heat of it in the cup though they had felt the cup, and I put the cup down but my hand started shaking and made coffee spill onto the white tablecloth and I touched my lips but only my lips could feel the touch now, and my hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
I put them in my lap.
And knew then what would happen. I didn’t want to go through it, not again, not a third time. I didn’t want to be in my mind when they killed another AI that I had lived with and loved—when they killed Mary this time. Mary, I thought, we’ll try to fix whatever’s wrong. We fixed the last set of problems you had two weeks ago. We’ll fix this. I don’t know if you can hear my thoughts, but I won’t let them erase you.
I looked up and the swans were swimming away, and the robot was serving food to a man and a woman and a little girl sitting three tables from me. I raised one of my shaking hands, and the robot looked at me.
“Help me,” I said in a whisper, knowing it could hear me and call help with its thoughts, and we wouldn’t have to disturb the people around us for a while yet.
They came to me quickly, two medical robots, and they were kind and gentle. They spoke to me in low voices, telling me what they were going to do, that they would help me walk out of the restaurant to a service elevator, that they could carry me and were prepared with a respirator should I need one on the way. I listened to them and wondered about their lives. Did they love each other? I knew that they could love, and that I could love them. I had loved three AIs. There are people who, if they heard me talk of love, would think that contact with artificial intelligences had corrupted my mind, not the other way around. But it was not the outward physical that I loved, after all. It was the inward quality of soul.
The robots carried me to the hospital, and along the way I lost my body. When they hooked me to machines that monitored my vital signs and made me breathe and took care of my bodily functions and dripped water in my veins so I wouldn’t dehydrate, I couldn’t feel it I couldn’t feel the air in my lungs or my chest move up and down, or the rough cotton sheets against my bare skin. They kept me room dark so it wouldn’t hurt my eyes, but even so, I could see the bank of monitors that told me or anyone who cared to look that my lungs were breathing and my heart beating. It is a curious thing to be forced to lie absolutely still and watch the functions of your body be displayed digitally in bright green lines and know that they are going on but not feel them.
And they had put electrodes on my head above the implant that held Mary. Her monitor showed a steady, positive green line. Normal. Agitated, probably. Low. But normal. Mary, I thought. We’ll find a way to help you.
I hoped that what I was telling her was true, that we could find a way to help her. I wondered what she was thinking or doing and whether she knew that I would try to save her again. The theory was that the complexity of maintaining her own existence while making my body work and feeding my mind the illusion of sensation would eventually overwhelm her basic algorithms, a process estimated to take a minimum of eight years, after which she could crash catastrophically at any moment, and die, and take me with her if help couldn’t reach me in time.
But the theory didn’t factor in love.
Mary and I could meet in virtual reality. I could close my eyes and go to her as a man in a room in the virtual reality implant and be with her. Mary always took the form of a woman with me. She was never a man, like my first AI, or sometimes a man and sometimes a woman like the second.
She was always just Mary. And she was beautiful.
I’m an artist, she told me one day, sitting next to me in the virtual-reality room, and her eyes sparkled. She was excited, breathless. I believed in her art: my body had never been more lean and tight, more sensitive, more orgasmic, more alive to the sudden brush of sunlight through clouds, or the clean feel of a glass tabletop, of the stirrings of the wind in the hair on my arms than it had been with Mary.
Come outside, she said, and she stood and took my hand.
Outside? I asked, because there had never been an outside before. I stood and she turned me around, and there was a door now: dark oak, weathered, a little barred window the shape of a knight’s shield at just the height of my eyes, and I could see blue sky out of it By the door was a stone table, and on the table a rose. I walked to the table and picked up the rose, and the thorns pricked my skin. It smelled as beautiful as any rose I had ever smelled. What have you done? I asked.
And she opened the door and we walked out onto a mountainside in Spain: Andalusia, the Moorish country west of Gibraltar, the forests in the mountains, and the dry plain below us with black-robed riders galloping black horses across it far away, and the deep blue of the Atlantic, and across the straits, Africa. It was a place I loved, and she knew it because I loved it, and here it was in detail I had forgotten or which had never been. The mountains were starker, more jagged, more romantic. There were no cities. No roads. No other people, till we found that when we connected to the net our AI friends could visit us. I looked behind us, and the room we had walked out of had become part of a little white stucco Spanish house with a dull-red tile roof and a weathered water jar by the door.
Do you like this? she asked me.
Did I like it? I remembered her asking that question while I lay without the sensation of my body in the hospital bed. Mary’s Spain was startling, but serene. The house she built in my mind became a home for us.
Toward noon, I felt a sudden rushing in my mind like the coming of a w
ind. My head felt expanded, immense, vast, and I knew that some greater artificial intelligence had entered me.
Which meant a human doctor was coming to talk to me.
I couldn’t imagine the days before AIs, the horror of life for people paralyzed like me, when you couldn’t speak, when nothing could take out your thoughts and make them become words. When all you could do is listen and wait and wait and wait.
Hello, I thought.
Hello, William Addison.
Who are you?
I’m Hotel Andromeda.
But I knew that wasn’t, perhaps, accurate. The hotel’s central intelligence ran so many programs, was responsible for so much, that what was in me was only a small part of her vast mind. So should I call you Andromeda or Hotel or both? I asked.
The AI laughed in my mind, and I heard the doctor walk in the room. I couldn’t turn my head to see her. But she leaned over and put her face above mine so I could see her when she talked to me, and she smiled. She had an old, care-worn face. I could tell from the way she was holding her arms that she must have been holding on to mine, but I couldn’t feel her touch.
“I’m sorry for the trouble you’ve had here,” she said. “But this isn’t your first rime to go through this, is it? You know what we have to do, and that the procedure to make you well will take some time.”
You don’t understand, I thought, and Andromeda played my thoughts as words through a speaker at the head of my bed. I don’t want to go through that procedure again.
“What?”
I want to try to save Mar—the artificial intelligence in me. I don’t want her to die.
“Dying, as you call it, is part of the process of an AI’s life, Mr. Addison. It accepted all this. It won’t feel pain the way you feel pain.”
Not physical pain, at least, I thought. But she will feel the pain of ending, of parting. I want her programs searched for errors and the errors fixed and Mary put back inside of me.
“Mary, is it?”
The doctor moved out of my line of vision, and I heard her opening a drawer in a cabinet I couldn’t see.
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