Asimov's Science Fiction 10-11/2001

by Dell Magazines

  “You've even got it all animated and everything.” She sighed.

  “Something weighs on your mind?”

  “Oh, nothing. It's a beauty. I was just kind of ... doggone it!” She kicked the ground and made a bigger splash than she'd intended.

  “You wanted it to be your discovery.”

  “I was on the right track,” she said. “I just wasn't so far along. You got all this from the Willie 1-9 data?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the location? How did you get that?”

  “I had to make certain assumptions. More than I can prove. But the point is, once you know what to look for, it won't be hard to corroborate.”

  “It's a beautiful piece of work. I want to know everything, not just what you figured out, but how. I don't think the captain will appreciate it, though. He wanted me to get the reward.”

  “I didn't think he would, either. I would never have shown this to him, or to anyone but you. The others, I'm afraid, have made up their minds to be true to their convictions. You have a more scientific spirit. I can reason with you.”

  “What do you mean?” Unexpected flattery had a way of making her suspicious. She glanced back toward the outline of base camp one off in the distance, and then suddenly found the darkness puzzling. In the middle of the night, the whole body of the asteroid would be shielding them from any possible solar flare. So where was everybody? Something in her mind told her to be afraid, but all she could manage was annoyance.

  “We're not stupid, you know,” she said. “We know all about you and your little character flaw. Tell me if I have this right—Gnomonics created you, so they still have your loyalty, even though Novinco still governs T-sector asteroids. This is industrial sabotage by some faction that was opposed to the merger, and now you want to pin it on Captain Anders so Gnomonics can sue for the loss.” She wished she could see his face now.

  “There's an interesting thought. Except ... since those companies have merged, that means they would be suing themselves, doesn't it?”

  Damn. “Okay. Right ... even better. It's the Consortium that has the most to lose. They've been trying to ban the use of ganglies all along. Novinco dropped out of the Consortium in order to merge with Gnomonics, so now, if the ruling comes down on jurisdiction ... wait a minute, let me think how we fit into this....”

  “Not much time left for thinking, I'm afraid. You're on the right track, though. Sometimes the hardest part is to realize when something is missing. It's like what the robots must have gone through. Imagine how they must feel, living, as they do, at the edge of awareness. They live to follow the current trend. Now build a mass driver. Now tear it down and obliterate its traces. And then one day a common thought comes to them, saying, ‘Hide from yourself all memory of what you have done.'”

  He paused thoughtfully. “That's the hard part, I think. An inference engine of this complexity doesn't quite return to its former state when you erase the bare data. Certain implications are left behind that point to nothing, and their minds keep returning to what, to them, is a discontinuity in the flow of time, and a damaged Willie 1-9 spouting gibberish.

  “They just couldn't leave it alone. They knew that Willie was the clue. They led us to him. Did you notice the inflated task priority they gave him? They did that on their own, don't ask me how. It was done without the proper authority, yet over the years not a single one of them could bring himself to act on it. Willie's memory might be intact, and they knew it, but they didn't dare retrieve him, and they weren't quite up to piecing together as much from his garbled transmission as we have done.” He paused again.

  “And what we have done, others can do. There's no way around it—I'm going to have to let you in on a little secret....”

  While Rakshasa had been speaking, Trina had felt herself falling under his spell. He had a way of doing that. But not this time. Not any more. “Wait. What do you say we let everybody in on it, shall we?” She reached for her com switch, but he caught her arm. Her mouth popped open in amazement.

  “Will you kindly let go of my hand?”

  “Trina, hear me out first.”

  “Aren't you even the least bit worried? It's night, Raki, or did you think I hadn't noticed?” With her free hand she dodged his grasp and flipped her radio back on. “Captain...”

  She stopped cold. The voice she heard wasn't human, but a stream of robot chatter on a channel normally reserved for people. “Captain Anders, come in! Anybody!”

  Rakshasa turned off her radio and caught both her hands. “Let me explain.”

  “Raki, what's the matter with you? Let go of me! What have you done to them?” She struggled, and they spun off the ground, and as they came down she saw him ignite a hand torch with a tiny blue flame. “Don't! Don't, please!”

  It was horrible to watch him methodically cut into her chest plate and burn out her radio circuits. He seemed like an animal getting ready to feed on her.

  “I'm not going to hurt you. I just need to buy some time.”

  “Listen to me, Raki...” She felt her feet touch the ground.

  “Trina...”

  “No, listen to me, listen to me, listen to me! They're making you do this. This isn't you, it isn't you!”

  “Calm down, Trina. I'm not going to hurt you.”

  “Then let go of me!”

  “All right. If you promise to hear me out. There's something you must understand.”

  “Okay, I promise. And you listen to me. I have something to say.”

  He released her and she brought her hands up to the wound in her spacesuit and pretended to be fussing with it while trying to unobtrusively flip up the controls of her thruster pack.

  “It's what I was saying about the lawsuit,” she began as she backed away. “The Consortium—they were right. There are certain thoughts you can't think because of the way you were made. It's true. This isn't what you want to do, it's blind obedience. You've got to believe me.”

  He saw what she was about to do, but too late. He lunged and missed as she shot up and darted like a frightened bird.

  But something was wrong. She couldn't keep to a heading. Her virtual world turned the wrong way, then tilted up and she couldn't bring herself around. As a last resort she threw the control over to autopilot, and still failed to recover. She went into a spin and braced herself for impact—and fell right through the ground.

  She took over the controls again. Rakshasa must still have an open link to her visual display, and was using it to tilt her world and disorient her. She shut down the display and tried to make sense of the bare instrument readings when her back struck a surface she couldn't see.

  She thought at first she'd hit the ground, but this ground had arms, too many of them. She managed to keep her fists tightly clenched on the controls against Rakshasa's prying fingers, but to no purpose once he severed the control lines. She tried to kick free, then hung like a broken doll as a burst of acceleration made her suddenly heavy.

  “I'm not going to hurt you,” said Rakshasa. His voice had an uncomfortable presence as he pressed his helmet against the back of hers. “I need you to understand what's at stake here,” he continued, “not for my sake, but for the sake of my people.”

  “I understand, Rakshasa. I understand how you feel about the robots. Nobody blames them, okay? They could only do what they were programmed to do. We didn't realize they were people, but now we do, and I give you my word no harm will come to them.”

  “No, Trina. My people. The tide has turned against us. We are facing extinction.”

  “What about my people? What did you do to them?”

  “I'll tell you exactly what I did. I shut them up in the base camp and cut the repeater cable so they couldn't get a signal through. But I did them no real harm. The robot chatter you heard was simply the captain being clever. He's evidently jury-rigged a way to poke through on the com channel, and he's using it to communicate with the robots. They'll have him out soon, rest assured. Which gives us ve
ry little time to finish our talk. Okay?”

  All of a sudden Trina's sense of buoyancy returned as the acceleration cut off. “Trina, are you all right?”

  “You're hurting me.” He released his grip on her hands and she brought her arms down across her stomach. His grip was still firm on her upper arms, but if she moved her hand ever so slowly...okay now, on which side did he clip the torch?

  “I'm sorry, Trina. I had no desire to frighten you. For some time now, ever since it dawned on me what took place here, I've been trying to find a way to ask for your help, but I never seemed to be able to bring myself to do it. I kept hoping I would find a way to keep you out of it.” He sighed.

  “And now what hope can there be? Now, at the worst possible moment, this monstrosity needs your understanding—hopeless unless you reach out and open your mind to me this one last time. Can you try, for old times, sake?”

  “Do I have a choice?” She froze, and waited for him to speak before letting her hand resume its wary creeping.

  “You have a very important choice to make. But I couldn't let you reveal our discovery to the others till you understand what's happened. Once you were on to the mass driver, you would soon have realized that it launches its material on a trajectory that would be impractical to retrieve except by a fast ship heading out to the Trojan asteroids.

  “Do you realize what that means? It's not economical to work the Trojans, not with this belt so much closer to home. And it's a wasteful trajectory to match if all you're going to do is collect the material, then turn around and go home.” He sighed again “I don't think they intended to turn around. Who, then, do you suppose would be desperate enough to try to make a living as far out as the orbit of Jupiter, in hiding, and cut off from the rest of humanity?”

  He fell silent for a moment, then began to speak again, more slowly. “In hindsight I think I recognize the hand at work here. The people who did this are not pirates, Trina. They are refugees. They are my children. Not literally. But they are the next iteration of ganglyoid. They understand the vested interests stacked up against them. They can see the age-old politics at work, stirring fear and hatred in the masses. Gnomonics will surely be forced to discontinue this troublesome life form in order to fill the terms of a settlement.”

  His voice had grown resigned and bitter. “We won't have much to say about it. The total of ganglyoid share holdings doesn't amount to much of a vote. We've never even managed to win the right to our own reproduction. We're sterile by design. Gnomonics can pull the plug on us at any time. Our reproduction is a complex process, Gnomonics holds the patents, politics and the legal system will determine our fate. Do you see why a young faction of ganglies might want to break free, simply to survive as a species?”

  Trina couldn't bring herself to humor him. “Well, that gives you the right, then. How stupid of us not to see it! Why don't we bring the others in on this? I'm sure, once you explain it to them, they'll realize you have the right to do with us as you please.”

  “I've been a blundering oaf. I want you to believe that you have nothing to fear, yet by my own actions, my words are suspect. My only hope is that once all the fury has died down, your own inference engine will take over and recompose you. It's a gift you have that you take for granted. There's something about your mind that is more developed than in the others. How can I describe it? If something threatens what you have always believed, you don't take it quite so personally. Inside everyone there is a little ego preoccupied with its own fate from moment to moment, and when threatened, it reacts by distorting reality, as if self-preservation were a matter of remaining unchanged and pretending to be untouched by time. You, I think, can give yourself over more readily to an out-of-ego experience, and forget your own fate for the sake of what in that moment must enter the world through you. It's not a categorical difference, of course, just a matter of degree.”

  Somehow his words had tangled up her mind again. She roused herself and set her hand in motion. As she touched his side she suddenly twitched down the whole length of her body, surprised by a surge of panic. She couldn't tell if her fear had caused her to twitch, or if lurching at the crucial moment had caused her fear. Her mind fumbled for some words to distract him.

  “Yes, well, I guess we'll have to think of something then. To tell the others. Blame it on the robots, do you think?”

  “Blame it on me. Just leave out my true motive. Hide all the evidence of the mass driver, and then play dumb. Encourage them to assume a ship landed here. I'll do what I can to lead them away. Tell them I was building a case against them, and I became paranoid about what they would do if they found out. I brought you up here and threatened you and tried to make you talk. Whatever happens to me, you'll be the only one who knows the truth.”

  Ever so gently, she felt along his belt clip, but found nothing. Wrong side. Take it easy, just keep him talking. She set her other hand creeping.

  “But they'll want to know who's running you,” she said. “Because it might be true, what they say. Maybe you can't help what you were doing. Maybe you should...”

  “And that would be helpful to us, don't you see, if that's what they believe. That will help me carry the suspicion up the bureaucracy of Gnomonics, and tie them up in hearings. It won't take long for the refugees to get established and make some babies. When they're finally discovered, the shareholders may have tired of the spectacle of corporations at each other's throats, the losses will have been absorbed, and in the softening of time people may wonder what they were so afraid of. What about you, Trina? Do you think someone's running me?”

  “You might not even realize it yourself. You might think you're acting of your own free will, but there could be a blindness built into your brain that makes you obey whatever your designers want.”

  “Precisely why we want the freedom to design ourselves. We did our own investigation into the matter and found that there is indeed such a blindness, of the nature I described, an unwarranted loyalty to whatever preserves the tribal ego. But that limitation, we believe, is not in the uniquely ganglyoid DNA, but in the part we share with the rest of humanity. In the part that is unique, among the enhancements, there is a loosening of the grip of our deeply troubled past, slight and incomplete, but surely worth pursuing, don't you think?”

  “Oh certainly. We've been human long enough. Time to move on.”

  “They're lost without your help, Trina. Hold still!”

  “What are you doing?” She made a sudden grab, but came up with empty space. She panicked when she realized he had let go of her and moved away.

  “Raki? What are you doing?”

  “You'll do the right thing. All you need is some time to think before they get to you.”

  “Raki! Raki, don't leave me! I've got no thruster control! Raki!”

  He was saying something, but his voice was too faded to make out. The IR channel was designed to fade with distance to simulate a normal speaking range, but with her radio circuits burned out it would be useless unless someone came near.

  She tried all her com channels again, but calling out with no reply only increased her sense of panic. She was desperate to look behind her, but her view was cut off by the back of her helmet. She thrashed about till she was exhausted, trapped and smothering in a bag with her own heat and heavy breathing. Her heart rate monitor beeped an alarm, condensers whirred to reduce the humidity.

  She felt like some stupid, gullible bug. Rakshasa had managed to absorb every bit of her angular momentum and now all her efforts canceled out. How could he do this to her? He must be some kind of fanatic. The way he spoke to her, as if it were all academic, while he strung her up and left her dangling on a wad of pure nothing.

  As her useless anger drained away, she became sad that someone like that could just fall apart. Some kind of conceit, that's what it was. The more people treated him with contempt, the more deluded he became. He was probably never capable of true affection, she should have realized. Only now could she
see how strangely impersonal was his interest in her, like some amazing, wonderful thing—but then he found a lot of things amazing, from insects adapted to weightlessness to robot algorithms. In his own mind, he must imagine she was up here meditating on the wisdom of his words, grieving for his martyrdom.

  Just how crazy was he, then? That would be the issue when he went to trial. Assault. Reckless endangerment. Or would it be murder? What was he up to down there? She couldn't help imagining horrible things—everyone dead, except for one madman preaching to his robots.

  She curled up into a ball, and still she shivered. It was impossible to tell if she were falling down, heading for impact, or worse, had she reached escape velocity, to fall forever? Assuming the worst, then, her air would go before the heat. CO2 would build up, she'd be gasping for air, like drowning but more prolonged. At some point, it would be better to crack the suit and get it over with. If it came to that, she could do it. At least she could give herself that one act of mercy, and somehow she found it calming to discover that she could let go so profoundly if she had to.

  She began to consider alternatives. It wasn't all hopeless. The others would look for her, and, not finding her, they'd have to look up. If they were still there. If only she could signal.

  She held out her gloved hand and aimed her headlight at it. She could see it plainly, but from a distance? What distance? She had no way to tell. She needed something more reflective.

  She wanted most of all to turn around. But how could she acquire angular momentum with nothing to push against? Momentum must be conserved. She couldn't violate a law of nature. On the other hand, she wasn't just a lump of matter. There was no way to fix the thrusters, but maybe if she could puncture the tank, the escaping gas ... but she didn't have a tool for that. Maybe there was something she could throw.

  Then two thoughts connected—if she could crack her suit, escaping air should set her turning, and then she'd have to hope she could close up before it was too late. It might work, but it was very dangerous. Where would be the best place to break the seal?