In which case the small, pretty woman standing a couple of yards away from me, elegantly smoking a tobacco cigarette, with her black hair hanging to her waist, and wearing a long black silk-satin shift and (unless my eyes deceived me)
absolutely nothing else
, was the only autonomous AI on Earth. A troubling thought, and it had troubled me ever since I’d met her.
The autonomous AI hadn’t noticed me yet. She was looking at her companion, Jonathan Wilde, the man who had come back. Wilde, as usual, was holding forth; as usual, waving his hands; as usual, smoking tobacco, a vile habit that seemed hardwired into him and Meg both. He was a tall man, sharp-featured, hook-nosed, loud-voiced. His accent had changed, but still rang strangely in my ears.
‘—never actually
met
him,’ he was saying, ‘but I did see him on television, and read some of what he put out during the Fall Revolution. I must say it’s a surprise to find him still remembered.’ He paused, flashing a quick, rueful smile. ‘Especially since I’m forgotten!’
People around him laughed. It was one of Wilde’s standing jokes that the ideas he—or rather, the human being of which he was a copy—had espoused back in the twenty-first century were now of interest only to antiquarians, and that his name was only a footnote in the history of the Space Movement. In some odd way, this very obscurity flattered his vanity.
As he stood there grinning he saw me. He stared at me, as if momentarily confused. Meg turned and saw me and gave me a welcoming smile. Wilde nodded slightly, and returned to his discourse. I didn’t know whether to feel slighted or relieved. As the first person he’d seen on his emergence from the wormhole, I had some importance in Wilde’s life … but I didn’t want him introducing me as such, and thus letting everyone present know where I was from.
Meg stepped over and caught my hands.
‘It’s good to see you again, Ellen.’
‘Yeah, you too,’ I said, and meant it. Her personality might be synthetic, but its appeal was genuine. I’d sometimes wondered what she saw in Wilde, whose fabled charm had never worked on me.
‘What brings you here?’ Meg asked.
‘You don’t make yourselves easy to find,’ I said lightly. ‘So I thought I’d take the opportunity.’
Meg smiled. ‘You’re a busy woman, Ellen. You want something.’
‘Oh, you know,’ I said. ‘Perhaps we can talk about it later?’
She was looking up at me, a small frown on her smooth brow.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Things should quiet down, soon.’
I laughed. ‘You mean, like when Wilde’s spoken to everybody?’ ‘Something like that.’ She drew me to a nearby seat, just outside the huddle, and I sat down with her. ‘This is all a bit exhausting,’ she said absently. She stroked one bare foot with the other, and stubbed out her cigarette. The monkey hopped from my shoulder and clutched the edge of the ashtray, its big eyes entreating me. I shook my head at it. It bared its teeth, then turned away from me and let Meg play with it.
Wilde’s voice, carrying:
‘—this whole thing: turning his sayings into a scripture, and him into a martyred prophet—it’s almost the only irrationality you people have left! I think he would have
laughed
!’ And with that Wilde’s laugh boomed, and those around him joined in, hesitantly. The conversation broke up over the next few minutes, and Wilde ambled over and sat down beside me. The three of us were perched as if on a log in an eddied swirl. Around us people partied on; now and again someone would drift over, see no response signalled, and turn away. Some left, but most hung around, tactfully out of earshot.
We exchanged greetings and then Wilde leaned away from me and sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Meg.
‘Well, Ellen,’ he said. ‘You got us where you want us.’ He lit a cigarette and accepted a shot of vodka. He looked down at his glass. ‘This has already had several other drinks in it,’ he observed. ‘Nice thing about vodka, of course, is it doesn’t matter. Any taste is an improvement. I’m drunk already. So if there’s anything you forgot to ask us, in the debriefing—’
‘Interrogation.’ I always hated the old statist euphemisms.
‘—go right ahead. Now’s your chance.’ He swayed farther back and looked at me with a defiant grin.
‘You know what I want, Wilde,’ I said heavily. I was a bit drunk myself, and more than a little tired. Gravity gets you down (and space sucks, but that’s life). ‘Don’t ask me to spell it out.’
He leaned forward. I could smell the smoke and spirits on his breath.
‘Oh, I know better than that,’ he said. ‘The same old question. Well, it’s the same old answer: no. There is no way, no fucking
way
I’m going to give
you people
what you are so carefully not asking for.’
‘Why not?’
Always the same question, which always got the same answer:
‘I won’t let you lot get your hands on the place.’
I felt my fists clench at my sides, and slowly relaxed them.
‘We don’t
want
the wretched place!’
‘Hah!’ said Wilde, with open disbelief. ‘Whatever. It won’t be me who gives you the means to take it.’
It would have to be somebody else who did, then, I thought. I kept my voice steady, and quiet.
‘Not even to fight the Outwarders?’
‘You don’t need it to fight the Outwarders.’
‘Isn’t that for us to judge?’
Wilde nodded. ‘Sure. You make your judgements, and I’ll make mine.’
I wanted to shake the answer out of him. I would have had no compunction about it. As far as I was concerned, he wasn’t a human being, just a clever copy of one.
I also, paradoxically, wished I
could
regard him as a fellow human, as a neighbour. This just served to increase my frustration. If I could have taken Wilde into my confidence, and let him know just how how bad, how fast, things were going, he might very well have agreed to tell me all I needed to know. But the Division trusted him even less than he trusted us. Telling him the full truth might trigger things far, far worse. Wilde and Meg had both been in the hands of the enemy, were quite literally products of the enemy, and even now we weren’t one hundred percent confident that they were—or were only—what they claimed, and seemed, to be. I thought for a moment of what it might be like if we ever had to treat them as an outbreak and hit them with an orbital zap. There would be no warning, no evacuation, no lastminute work for the ecologists.
The monkey-thing bounded from Meg’s lap to mine. I let it scurry up my arm and nestle on my shoulder, and smoothed out the lap of my skirt. I looked up.
‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s up to you.’ I shrugged, the false animal’s false fur brushing my cheek. ‘You do what seems best.’ I stood up and smiled at them both.
For a moment Wilde looked nonplussed. I hoped he’d be so thrown off balance by my lack of persistence that he would change his mind. But the ploy didn’t work. I would have to go for the second option: more difficult, more perilous and, if anything, less likely to succeed.
‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘See you around.’
In hell, probably.
I leaned over the guardrail around the roof of the Casa Azores and looked down. The ground was a thousand metres below. I felt no vertigo. I’ve climbed taller trees. There were lights along the beach, bobbing boats in front of the beach, then a breakwater; and beyond that, blue-green fields of algae, fish-farms and kelp plantations and ocean thermal-energy converters, all the way to the horizon. Airships—whether on night-work or recreation I didn’t know—drifted like silvery bubbles above them. The building itself, although in the middle of all this thermal power, drew its electricity from a different source. Technically the whole structure was a Carson Tower, powered by cooled air from the top falling down a central shaft and turning turbines on the way.
It was cold on the roof. I turned away from the downward view, wrapped the bolero jacket around my shoulders, and looked at the sky. Once my irises had adjusted, I could see Jupiter, among the clutter of orbital factories, mirrors, lightsails, satellites, and habitats. With binoculars, I could have seen Callisto, Io, Europa—and the ring. It was as good a symbol as any of the forces we were up against.
Our enemies, by some process which even after two centuries was, as we say,
not well understood
, had disintegrated Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, to leave that ring of hurrying debris and worrying machinery. And—originally within the ring, but now well outside it—was something even more impressive and threatening: a sixteen-hundred-metre-wide gap in space-time, a wormhole gate to the stars.
Two centuries ago, the Outwarders—people like ourselves, who scant years earlier had been arguing politics with us in the sweaty confines of primitive space habitats—had become very much not like us: post-human, and superhuman. Men Like Gods, like. The Ring was their work, as was the Gate.
After these triumphs, nemesis. Their fast minds hit some limit in processing-speed, or attained enlightenment, or perhaps simply wandered. Most of them distintegrated, others drifted into the Jovian atmosphere, where they re-established some kind of contact with reality.
Their only contact with us, a few years later, was a burst of radio-borne information viruses which failed to take over, but managed to crash, every computer in the Solar System. The dark twenty-second century settled down like drizzle.
Humanity struggled through the Fall, the Green Death, and the Crash,
and came out of the dark century with a deep disapproval of the capitalist system (which brought the Fall), for the Greens (who brought the Death), and for the Outwarders (who brought the Crash, and whose viral programs still radiated, making electronic computation and communication hazardous at best).
The capitalist system was abolished, the Greens became extinct, and the Outwarders—
The Outwarders had still to be dealt with.
I checked that I was alone on the roof. The chill, fluted funnels of the Carson process sighed in their endless breath, their beaded condensation quivering into driblets. I moved around in their shadow, and sighted on, not low-looming Jupiter, but the Moon. I squatted, spreading the dress carelessly, and reached up and scratched the monkey’s head and whispered in its ear.
The monkey began to melt into the jacket’s shoulder, and then dress and jacket together flowed like mercury, and reshaped themselves into a ten-foot-wide dish aerial within which I crouched, my head covered by a fine net that spun itself up from where the collar had been. A needle-thin rod grew swiftly to the aerial’s focus. Threads of wire spooled out across the deck, seeking power sources, finding one in seconds. The transformed smart-suit hummed around me.
‘It’s still no,’ I said. ‘Going for the second option.’
‘Tight-beam message sent,’ said the suit. ‘Acknowledged by Lagrange relay.’
And that was that. The recipients of the message would know what I meant by ‘the second option.’ Nobody else would. My mission was confined to more than radio silence; the whole reason I’d come here myself was that we couldn’t even trust word-of-mouth. The narrow-beamed radio message would be picked up and passed on by laser, which had the advantage that the Jovians could neither interfere with nor overhear it. It would be bounced to our ship, the
Terrible Beauty
, which was at this moment on the other side of the Earth, and sent on to the Division’s base on Callisto. There would be a bare acknowledgement from Callisto, in a matter of hours. I was not going to wait around for it, not like this. I stood up and told the suit to resume its previous shape. When the dress was restored I gave it an unnecessary but celebratory twirl, and spun straight into somebody’s arms. As I stumbled back a pace I saw that I’d bumped into Stephan Vrij, the photographer.
We stood looking at each other for a moment.
‘The things you see when you don’t have your camera,’ I said.
‘I didn’t follow you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I was just looking around. Last
part of my job for the evening. It’s amazing the crazy things people do up here, after a party.’
‘Can you forget this?’ I asked.
‘OK,’ he said. He looked away.
‘Then I’ll promise to forget you.’ I reached out and caught his hand. ‘Come on. I’ve had a lot of drinks, and you’ve had none, right?’
‘Yes,’ he said, looking a bit puzzled as I tugged at his hand and set off determinedly towards the elevator shaft. I grinned down at him.
‘What better way to start the night?’
‘You have a point there,’ he said.
‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘I rather hope
you
…’
Laughing, we went to his room.
When you are among another people, or another people is among you, and you lust after their strange flesh, go you and take your pleasure in them, and have sons and daughters by them, and your people shall live long upon the lands and your children shall fill the skies.