It was almost too easy, though I wondered why the attacker had not gone for Marley first. Perhaps because he carried no armament?
Then we swept through the curtains and into the hall of the blind king of this world. Lehr leaned forward on his throne, chin set upon his hand in an attitude of thoughtful repose. “Welcome, de Vere,” he said, staring toward our little party at a height somewhat above my own angled head.
So, the great man did not know I was being carried wounded to be laid before his throne.
I tugged at Fishman to set me down. Deckard stepped forward to support me upright, that I might rise to meet the gaze of this shattered king, while Heminge made no subtle secret of covering one then another of our adversaries with his meson pistol. Only Marley held back, somewhere behind me, breathing louder than any of us.
“Captain,” I replied, in my best voice. “Once more I greet you. Your executive officer has suggested we speak as commander to commander.”
“My ship is broken,” he intoned. “My kingdom divided among my most loyal daughters.” Cordel winced but held her tongue at this. “My time is nearly finished, de Vere. What will you of me?”
“I must know, sir, to carry out my own duties. What secret did your ship carry?”
He stared a while, silent, almost unbreathing. Only the wind stirred, changing tone with the coming of night in the world beyond this shattered hull. I could hear Marley panting like some dog, though Deckard and Heminge were quiet enough. The moment grew close, some great truth waiting to emerge.
What had I been sent to kill?
“The mind,” Lehr finally said. “The mind. We were first sworn, then forsworn, de Vere. As you have been in turn.”
What was he getting at? “The biologicals . . . they affect mental templates?”
“
Minds
. Admiral Yankelov feared much and set us to testing in a faraway place. I broke my own ship, Captain, rather than return, for I could not carry out the mission which had been laid upon me.”
Yankelov, of the AIs. “Machine minds.”
“Exactly.
Broken Spear
was set to test a crew of machine minds. Could a warship be flown, and fought, without a fleshly hand at the helm? What do you think, de Vere?”
I thought that I did not like this line of reasoning. “And when my mission failed, when the minds grew fractious and independent, too powerful to be obedient, too disobedient to be entrusted with power, I was to terminate them.” He leaned forward, hands shaking, and somehow found my face once more with his blind stare. “But I could not. They had become my children. My daughters.”
And so I had been sent,
Six Degrees
beneath my feet, planet-buster in my hold, to make sure this plague of independence did not flow back into the Empire. No wonder they had emasculated the ships after the Yankelov Act. Starships with their weapons could not sail under the command of rebellious machines any more than they could sail under the command of rebellious men.
“I am sorry, sir.”
“Not so sorry as you think, de Vere.” Lehr shifted on his throne. “Ray Gun circles the skies, and Granny Rail walks the soil. Why do you think I have kept Cordel close, for all her disloyalties, and Fishman, who in the end is fit for little but screaming into the night?”
Behind me, Marley’s breathing changed. The good doctor stirred, moved toward some end I did not yet fathom. In that moment I was glad that it was Heminge who held the meson pistol.
“Because they are all who are left you of your crew,” I said. “It is clear enough.”
Lehr shook his head. “We would never survive here. Even if I had gotten an infant on Cordel, before all our gonads were cooked by that wicked star, what of it? Only the children of the mind could live here. They have built me a green world I soon go to, and they will outlive us to inherit this one.”
“I do not think so, sir. This cannot be.”
“But why do you question?” Lehr seemed surprised. “You are one of them.”
“What?” My ears buzzed, as if I had been struck on the head again.
Marley grabbed my shoulder. “Back to the ship, sir. You’ve had enough.”
I shook him off. “No. I will hear him out.”
“Sir—”
Lehr spoke again, loudly now as he rose on trembling legs. “I am king here. I know who passes my marches. Granny Rail’s spiders do not assault the meat, only the mind. They patrol for sports, escapists, invaders.” A hand rose, pale finger with cracked, black nail pointing in a shivering palsy toward my chest. “Much like yourselves. You, sir, are a machine.”
Leaning on Deckard, I rolled up my sleeve.
“Sir,” said Marley again, and his voice was desperate.
“No.” I took my knife from my belt, unfolded it, and set the tip against the skin of my inner forearm. The blade slid in with a slight stretching and a fiery bolt of pain. Blood welled. Dark blood, dark as Beaumont’s had been.
Black blood oozed out, smelling of oil, like the air of my ship.
“A test,” said Marley quietly. “Which you are now failing, my friend.”
I looked at him. He was smaller, paler than me. Deckard, Heminge, the late Beaumont, we all four were of a height, with space-dark skin and faces nearly the same. Marley was different. As for the rest of
Six Degrees
’ crew, they were . . .
I knew my ship to be filled with petty officers and ratings and lieutenants, to be more than just my command crew, but in that moment I could not recall a single face or name, just a shuffling crowd of uniforms.
“I never was,” I said to Marley. “Nothing was real until we came here, was it?”
He shook his head. “No, I—”
Heminge’s meson pistol blasted Marley into glittering pink fog. No one flinched except Cordel, perhaps the only true human left among us depending on where madness had deposited the good Lieutenant Fishman.
“Back to the ship, sir,” my security officer said brusquely, with a glance at Lehr. “The king has his appointment with the country of the green, and we have our mission.”
“Our own appointment,” I said sadly.
Lehr continued to fix his blind gaze upon me. I appealed to him, the one authority who understood. In some indirect sense, my own father. “Sir . . .” I shuffled forward, supported by Deckard, and let my face tip into his hands. They trembled, warm and tinged with honest sweat. He stroked my hair a moment, a blessing.
Then: “Go, de Vere. Find your own fate as I shall soon find mine.”
And so I went, followed by my unbreathing crew. The last I saw of Lehr, Cordel and Fishman were closed around him, angels fluttering to the aid of a dying god.
Six Degrees
was empty, of course. Though the companionways and cabins were where my memory had said they should be, they were unpeopled. Decorated, sets for a play that the actors had abandoned. The ship even smelled empty, except for the vague stench of my burned hair, which preceded our every step. How had we ever believed ourselves surrounded by men?
Down in the number one hold we found four coffins . . . or perhaps crates. Our names were stenciled on the lids, an accusation: Beaumont, de Vere, Deckard, Heminge.
“Marley flew us here, alone,” said Deckard into the echoing, oily silence. “He pulled us out, filled us with memory, thought, and faith, and here we are.”
That was true enough. I remembered meetings, back in Sector Control, though when I strained for details, they slipped away like eels in a recycling tank. They were memories of memories rather than the real thing.
Like being a copy of a real person. Was anything I knew true? “Why?” I asked, leaning ever more heavily on Deckard.
“A new generation of machines, I suppose,” Heminge said bitterly. “It all makes a sort of twisted sense. Recasting the lessons of Lehr and
Broken Spear
. Fitting enough to send us here in pursuit. Convenient enough to lose us here if need be. It worked for them.”
“So who was the sixth?”
“Sixth what?” asked Heminge.
“
Six Degrees
, this hollow ship is named. There were four of us, plus Marley the doctor and director of our little act. Who was the sixth?”
Deckard cleared his throat. “Lehr. Father and king to us all. He is our sixth.”
I turned this in my head. “Are we real . . . somewhere? Are we copies, of someone?” We must have been, I realized. Who would bother to create a Beaumont from nothing?
“I am my own man,” said Deckard. He grinned at my stare. “So to speak.”
Heminge stroked his coffin. “Do we bust the planet, or do we break the ship?”
“Or do we sail home and ask for an accounting?”
Deckard looked thoughtful. “Lehr’s green fields are out there somewhere.”
“In his mind.”
“But we are all creatures of mind. That is all we are.”
“Then go,” I told him.
Heminge handed Deckard the meson pistol, then took my weight against his shoulder. “Good luck, man. You might need it.”
We struggled to the bridge, where we waited until the engineer was gone, then sealed the hatches. On the viewscreens the world outside glittered in the pallid moonlight, stars glinting. Wind scrabbling at the hull.
Which parts were real?
“Anything could be true,” Heminge said, obviously sharing my thought. “Marley could have programmed the planet-buster to blow if we lifted without some escape code. The bomb could be a dummy. This entire ship could be a dummy, just like all those empty cabins, something big and bad waiting in orbit to blast us.”
“Anything could be true,” I agreed. “That is what it means to be human.”
I reached for the launch button, a great red roundel that glowed slightly. “To green fields beyond, then.”
Heminge nodded. “And long life to Lehr.”
Still feeling the set of my father’s hands upon my brow, I pressed the button, hoping like any man for the future.
Dust
Paul McAuley
H
ow everything changed: Six hours after the last transmission from Linval Palmer’s expedition had been received, his secretary requested an urgent meeting with Captain Bea Edvard. Linval Palmer had powered down to the surface of Hades in his reconditioned military lander with three fully tooled-up mercenaries and a gung-ho xenoarchaeologist. They’d landed safely in the scablands above the tunnel city and completed two grid searches, but soon after they’d set off to begin the third search, their uplink had cut out. Visual contact was out of the question because Hades was shrouded in a planet-wide dust storm. Sideways radar imaging had located the lander, and it was responding to remote interrogation, confirming that all of its systems were fully functional, but so far no one from the expedition had responded to the radio message Bea Edvard’s ship was broadcasting on a thirty-second loop.
Linval Palmer’s secretary, John-Jane Smith, wanted Bea to take the ship’s gig down to the surface at once. Using a palmer to project a three-dimensional image of the tunnel city constructed from multiple deep radar scans made by the string of satellites Linval Palmer had dumped in orbit around Hades, animating it to show that someone was moving about near the entrance to one of the tunnel systems. Telling Bea, “There is at least one person still alive. You must do your duty by him, Captain.”
John-Jane Smith was a neuter, a thin ageless person in a neat gray one-piece suit, with close-cropped white hair and piercing blue eyes. All intellect and no emotion, apart from its unswerving loyalty to its employer. Its voice was uninflected, as always, its gaze cold and unblinking as it stared at Bea through the multicolored labyrinth that hung in the air between them.
Bea had been expecting something like this. “My contract was to deliver your boss and his team into orbit around Hades. It specifically absolves me from responsibility for anything that happens after that.”
“I am familiar of course with every detail of your contract,” John-Jane Smith said coolly. “But there is clearly at least one survivor, and the law of distress requires you to rescue him.”
“I’ve received no distress call, the person in question isn’t responding to a clear request for information, and we don’t even know if the signal in question
is
a person. The resolution is too low. It might be a glitch, or an echo from some kind of atmospheric phenomenon. What I can do,” Bea said, “is send down a robot, have it take a look around the immediate landing area.”
But John-Jane Palmer wasn’t in the mood for compromise. “You agree that there is a possibility that Mr. Palmer and the others are alive.”
‘When we don’t know anything, anything is possible,” Bea said cautiously, believing that she knew where this was headed.
John-Jane Smith said, “If we are agreed that Mr. Palmer may be alive, you are obliged to attempt a rescue. You will take me and one of the bodyguards down to the surface in the ship’s gig. You may remain in the gig while we search for Mr. Palmer and the others. If we do not return after twenty-four hours, you can leave the surface and return to your ship. For this service you will receive a bonus equivalent to one half of your original fee.”