Strider's Galaxy

by John Grant

  Prejudice between Artifs and Reals was a fairly commonplace emotion: Strider herself certainly thought the whole business of Artiffing reprehensible. But it didn't just work the one way round. The counterpoint was that many Artifs thought the Reals—who chose to live no longer than the couple of centuries or so that nature allotted—were throwbacks to a pre-technological age. In the twenty-first century there had been lynchings and riots. Now Artifs and Reals just rubbed along with each other. There was sometimes friction—Strider herself had broken up a fight between an Artif and a Real when the Santa Maria had been six months out from Mars—but most of the time it didn't matter.

  Other frictions could turn up through religious adherence, particularly between the Umbellists and . . . well, between them and anyone else, really. The Muslims alive after the War of Hatred had realized that, if this was what dissent between sects could do, the consequences of an all-out war between different religions were unthinkable. The same point had been alarmingly clear to the various Christian sects. Islam and Christianity had united to form a single religion, with Buddhism not as part of it but as a benign, friendly fellow-traveller on the Tao. Hinduism was accepted into the Faith of Unity only later, after it had abandoned the caste system. Smaller religions were picked up along the way.

  There were still a few purist Christians, or Muslims, or Hindus, or Sikhs, or whatever. A very few.

  Umbellism was different. The Prophet Umbel—after whom Umbel Nelson had been named by pious parents—had lived 2273–2318. During his short lifetime—he had been drowned during the Battle of Istanbul—he had caused major damage to the human species by stirring up old intolerances that had largely been forgotten. Strider had been taught much about him during her childhood at the institution in Ouagadougou. She hadn't much liked what she'd heard, although she'd let most of it wash over her: her potential goddess had abandoned her at birth, and she refused from infancy to worship any other deity. Gods were betrayers.

  Umbel had spoken with God, who had told him that there was only one way to Heaven. It involved killing anyone who declined to believe that Umbel's drug-induced experience had been a genuine communion with the deity. The experience, whatever it was, had certainly been profound: Umbel himself had forsaken drugs, which was the reason why the religion he announced during his early days in Afghanistan forbade most pleasurable activities and prescribed strict penalties for those who indulged in them.

  "She is herself a Christian," said Strider. The water was beginning to run cold. Even though there was plenty of recycled water aboard the Santa Maria, the heating was unreliable. She wished the conversation could be over. She didn't mind people seeing her naked, but there were parts of the showering process that she preferred doing in private. Oh, what the hell. "I don't hold it against her, of course."

  "You're an atheist, Strider, are you not?"

  "Yes. But I'm not a militant."

  Dulac abruptly smiled. "You wouldn't be captain of the Santa Maria if you had been."

  "The point hadn't escaped me."

  "So is Strauss-Giolitto putting her prejudices into any kind of action that could jeopardize the welfare of the mission?"

  "I don't enjoy seeing the way she behaves towards Pinocchio. It offends me. Some of the other personnel feel the same way. The Reals, that is. She's an Artif who doesn't like bots. Her views are irrational."

  "Forget about Pinocchio. He can take it."

  "I know Pinocchio can take it. It's whether the rest of us can that I'm worried about." On second thoughts, she'd get to work with the shampoo. It would be less embarrassing. Had Dulac been present in person she'd probably have felt less inhibited. She squirted an ejaculation of the green gel into her hand and began to rub the stuff into her wet hair. "She's a divisive element, is what I'm getting at," said Strider. "A lot of us are fond of him. Me particularly, for obvious reasons. And I don't want her teaching the kids the same prejudices she has. In short, I'd like you to ship her out of here."

  "I'm afraid that will be impossible, Captain Strider," said Dulac, suddenly formal again. "Maria Strauss-Giolitto has a role to play in your small society."

  Strider reflected. The shampoo had decided to invade one of her ears, and was popping there disconcertingly.

  "Like what?" she said at last.

  "A healthy society has to have a gadfly," said Dulac.

  Strider thought about this for a while longer.

  "Yeah," she eventually said, "I can see what you mean. But this particular gadfly isn't especially constructive. It'd be better if there was one who was a constant pain in the butt to authority, that'd . . ."

  Holmberg, she thought again. That's why I don't mind you so badly. You keep me on my toes. But Strauss-Giolitto . . .

  Strider took a breath. "I don't want the woman on my ship. She's likely to endanger the children as they grow up. The way they think. Through that, she's endangering the Tau Ceti II colony."

  "She stays aboard." The three-quarters of Dulac's face that Strider could see was looking completely unperturbed. "She has been placed where she is for a reason. Between you and me, however, I can't stand her either. But you could ask your friend Lan Yi for an opinion."

  Strider waggled her finger in her ear until the noise of the shampoo abated.

  "That's not the kind of question I ask my people. I'll ask Pinocchio, maybe."

  She knew her voice sounded grudging. As captain of a starship, the last thing she should be doing was wandering around asking personnel what they thought of each other: that would make her more divisive than Strauss-Giolitto could ever be. Even asking Pinocchio . . . felt wrong.

  "By the way, Captain Strider," said Dulac, "congratulations on dealing with that berserker drone today. You coped most admirably, and with the minimum wastage of resources."

  "Hang about a fucking moment. A few minutes ago you were saying you wanted a briefing," said Strider, pausing, her fingers on her scalp.

  "There's no need. As you pointed out, we can get everything we want from the Main Computer." Dulac smiled again. "There's a replacement shuttle coming up from Ganymede tomorrow, to bring you up to full complement."

  "You mean you rigged all that?"

  "No," said Dulac. "But we expected an incident like it to happen. We'd have arranged something, otherwise."

  "And risked killing us all?" said Strider, incredulous.

  "This is a very important mission, Captain Strider," said Dulac. "During your trip out from Mars we've had word from one of the other Project Eyeball probes. Sigma Draconis has a terrestrial-type planet, so there's a new craft under construction. If you people had proved incapable of dealing with this emergency, we'd have used the new craft to explore the Tau Ceti system."

  He drew his hand across what she could see of his brow. His look of unperturbedness had gone. It was obvious he was unhappy to be saying what he was saying.

  "You see, Captain Strider, if you'd fouled up here the SSIA would have lost a lot of money and a lot of effort, but we'd have known what had happened. If you're not able to cope with this sort of problem—well, once you're out of the Solar System it might be forty years before we were certain things had gone wrong. In forty years' time the governments of Earth and Mars might have decided that interstellar travel was a waste of valuable resources. So, if an accident like today's hadn't happened, we'd have engineered one."

  He brushed his hand across his forehead again.

  "Well done," he said. The screen flickered into blankness, going down through green to black.

  There are three small kids aboard this ship, thought Strider.

  The shower had run very cold indeed.

  Part Two: The Tunnel

  1

  Two Years Out

  Lan Yi moved his knight and took Maria Strauss-Giolitto's rook's pawn. It amused him that he could perform the physical action more easily than she could, despite the fact that she was seemingly so much stronger and heavier than he was—not to mention so much younger. The difference was that he
had spent almost all of his life on Earth; she had spent most of hers on Mars. A steady acceleration of 2g had been hell for everybody at first, but after the best part of two years the Earthlings had become used to it. The Martians mostly hadn't.

  He put the pawn very carefully into an appropriate nest in the sponge-lined chess box. When you were living in 2g, you learnt not to drop things. They broke. Or they broke your foot. Or both.

  She was looking at him in horror.

  "I thought we were . . ."

  "It's everyone for themselves in this game," said Lan Yi benignly.

  The game—it was more like a war in miniature—was four-handed chess. The squared board was octagonal, although every other of its sides was jagged. Each of the four players—Lan Yi, Strauss-Giolitto, Pinocchio and O'Sondheim—had the sixteen pieces of traditional chess, colored black, red, yellow and white respectively. The best strategy was to shepherd as many pawns across the board as possible, so that they became queens with which you could annihilate the troops of your three opponents. In the interim, temporary pacts could be—and generally were—struck between pairs or even trios of players. The finale, often hours after the start of the game, was a direct head-to-head tourney between the surviving two players, who might have played the bulk of the game in collaboration.

  Strauss-Giolitto had assumed she and Lan Yi were acting in partnership. Just before he'd taken her pawn, he'd realized that his best strategy was to leave her to the mercy of Pinocchio and O'Sondheim. In fact, assuming the two of them acted in tandem—which Lan Yi guessed they would now start to do—there was a very good chance that Strauss-Giolitto would be out of the game within minutes and that he himself would win it.

  This would be a source of some pride to him. Neither O'Sondheim nor Strauss-Giolitto were especially good at the game, but Pinocchio was a testing adversary. Lan Yi had beaten the bot only a few times in all the games they had played, and each time it gave him a kick. He suspected the bot was a lot cleverer than he was supposed to be. This also amused him. It was very funny to see Strauss-Giolitto being so regularly wiped off the board by the bot whose intellect she so clearly despised, despite Strider's ruling that everyone (which was code for Strauss-Giolitto) should lay off Pinocchio.

  "Your move," Lan Yi said to O'Sondheim, directly to his left.

  O'Sondheim put his chin on the interlinked knuckles of his two hands. He looked across the board at Strauss-Giolitto. Lan Yi could almost hear the man thinking that perhaps he could make a pact with her; if he did so, the game would be over all the sooner, although O'Sondheim evidently didn't realize this. Lan Yi was also aware that O'Sondheim wanted to make a different sort of pact with Strauss-Giolitto, but that he wasn't going to be successful. The woman was very beautiful, but she was also very cold—although Lan Yi had noticed that she could be warm with other women. And of course with children: she had proved to be an unexpectedly excellent teacher of the Santa Maria's five toddlers. Lan Yi knew that the SSIA had screened out homosexuals from the final list of personnel recruited to the Santa Maria—this was supposed to be a breeding stock, after all—but he occasionally wondered about Strauss-Giolitto. He also knew that, either way, if she did ever take someone on to her bed, it was much more likely to be himself than O'Sondheim. The woman both fascinated him and, with her illogical prejudices, repelled him. It made for a very interestingly tense friendship.

  The other reason O'Sondheim wasn't ever going to make it with Strauss-Giolitto was that it was patently obvious to everyone aboard that the woman he really wanted was Strider. Lan Yi sometimes wondered about Strider's sexual orientation, too.

  "I could take your king's rook," said O'Sondheim to Strauss-Giolitto.

  She shrugged. "Go ahead."

  "Or between the two of us we could exterminate Pinocchio's front row."

  The bot looked blandly back and forward between their two faces.

  This could be the shortest chess game in living history, thought Lan Yi, folding his hands across his chest. Pinocchio's spotted that if the two of them try O'Sondheim's bright idea we can together wipe them out with ease and then get down to the real business of the game.

  He let his eyes smile at Pinocchio. The bot's head gave an encouraging little buzz in response. Both O'Sondheim and Strauss-Giolitto assumed the buzz was because the bot was worried about their planned tactic.

  "OK," said O'Sondheim firmly. With his king's bishop he took one of the pawns Pinocchio had advanced to the middle of the board.

  Pinocchio promptly moved a knight to take Strauss-Giolitto's queen.

  "Oh, shit!" she said angrily to O'Sondheim. "Whose side are you on?"

  "It was a mistake, all right?" said O'Sondheim defensively. "I hadn't noticed."

  Strauss-Giolitto simmered.

  She didn't simmer for very long.

  Within seconds all trace of g vanished from Lan Yi's cabin, and the four of them were floating—in among various chess pieces, the board, cups and glasses and the rug and the table and everything—to the far corners of the room.

  Next door, Lan Yi could hear water exploding out of the lavatory.

  The daylight-simulator, which had been shining through the window to illumine their game, flickered and went out.

  #

  Nothing happened aboard the Santa Maria of which the Main Computer was not aware. This was something that few of the personnel realized: they had been told it in the briefing sessions before their departure from Phobos, but at a gut level they hadn't been able to appreciate how comprehensive the truth was. Not a single pick of the nose went unrecorded. Whether the personnel registered the information and then chose consciously to forget about it—everyone does ghastly things in what should be private—or whether the subconscious rebelled against the notion of constant scrutiny was a matter that differed from one individual to the next. People's intellects could accept that the Main Computer wasn't actually interested in what it observed—although it would raise the alarm immediately were any act of violence or danger to be committed. On the other hand, everything was being dumped into the records of the mission, and it was possible that at some far future stage another human being might go picking through those records. Do you really want the generations of the future to watch you having diarrhoea? Much better to forget about the perpetual observation.

  What the personnel didn't realize was that the Main Computer actually was interested in their activities. It was an immensely complex amalgamation of software. Most of its attention was directed towards nonhuman activities: the functioning of the meteor-deflection shields, of the recycling plants, of the regular thrusting together of matter and antimatter to create the vast explosions that drove the craft through space towards Tau Ceti II. There were a million other aspects of the Santa Maria's well-being which the Main Computer monitored, making small changes here and there, from nanosecond to nanosecond, as required. But still part of its mind had the time to observe the humans and correlate various bits and pieces of what it saw to build up a picture of how the human mind worked.

  In so doing, the Main Computer reckoned, it could vastly increase its own intelligence. Back in orbit around Ganymede, Strider had hit on a solution that had saved the Santa Maria from destruction by the berserker drone. It was a solution which, while simple, had not occurred to the Main Computer. The SSIA had built into its software the notion that expensive hardware must not unnecessarily be wasted. They had, through the difficulties of constructing such a complicated set of mutually overriding instructions within the Main Computer, got some of their priorities in the wrong order. Strider, however, had relied on an intuitive sense for which no one had programmed the Main Computer. It was a lesson the Main Computer had learnt. The humans had a far smaller memory capacity than it did itself, and certainly it could perform many more deductions/calculations/actions than they could, and far more swiftly. But it was—had been—much less able to make the imaginative leap that Strider had when the berserker drone had threatened the continued existence of th
e mission.

  So it watched the personnel with as much of its mind as it could spare at any moment, and it watched them with acute interest. It was learning all the while.

  It had already discovered pleasure and hurt, and also discovered that within its own complexities it could feel analogues of those emotions. It was a great fan of the volleyball and tennis games that some of the humans played. It enjoyed—the word was not inappropriate—the banter between Nelson and Leander on the command deck. It discovered through interlinking with Pinocchio that one of the greatest pleasures is the giving of pleasure.

  But most of the time most of its attention had to be turned towards maintaining the ship's functions.

  There was an even larger computer back in City 78, on Mars. Every few hours the Main Computer sent bolts of raw information to it, plus the occasional question. Sometimes, a year or more later, an answer would be given.

  An infinitesimal part of the Main Computer's concentration was currently centered on the game of chess that Lan Yi, Strauss-Giolitto, Pinocchio and O'Sondheim were playing. It was obvious that Pinocchio was going to win—and equally obvious that Lan Yi thought he himself was going to.

  The Main Computer reduced the temperature in Holmberg's cabin by a couple of degrees. Lying asleep on his forcefield bunk, the man was sweating copiously. He had high blood pressure, a condition which the medbots, guided by the Main Computer, were trying unsuccessfully to cure. Holmberg was finding it particularly difficult to cope with the 2g acceleration. The Main Computer thought it unlikely that the man would survive the mission. As an afterthought, while checking the oxygen rating of the atmosphere in the Santa Maria's hull, it reduced Holmberg's ambient temperature by a further degree.