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He held one of the overlarge loops at her belt to steer them lazily around inside the holo. “No one knows who the Shadows are,” he said. “Do you?”
“I … no, I don’t.”
“That’s because the Shadows don’t exist. Ask any of them. They don’t have meetings, pass messages or recruit. Things simply get done—a power blackout, kelpway shift—and something of Flattery’s is lost. Supplies circle him, but don’t land. Replacements don’t show …”
“That’s what I mean,” Beatriz said. “I want to know who does it, how do they know when to do it, and what happens.”
MacIntosh held her tether and they spun in a lazy spiral through the webworks. The illusion that played across the nets, the beach resort, was tailored for her, designed to help reduce her orientation stress.
He’s at home up here, she thought. She was aware then that up didn’t make the same sense now that it had a few hours ago.
“They call it ‘tossing the bottle.’ You throw something out to the waves, and it’s chance. But if you control the waves, or a little part of them, then it’s not chance anymore, it’s a sure thing. The Shadows’ nonsystem encourages every citizen to frustrate Flattery when they see the chance. Divert something this way—say, a subload of hydrogen generators—and go about your business and never do anything like that again. Someone out in the waves sees this diverted load of generators coming along, diverts it that way … and in blinks it’s headed upcoast to a settlement of Pioneers.”
He spiraled a finger across the space they shared and bull’s-eyed the palm of his other hand.
“Delivery.” He winked. “Flattery’s project loses and the people gain. No Shadows.” He smiled. “It’s brilliant. And everyone can play.”
“Yes …”
Again, her thoughts were with Ben. I wonder how long Ben’s been playing …
“The Zavatans, Rico and Ben …” MacIntosh hesitated, choosing his words, “they don’t want Flattery killed. They just want him removed. After all he’s done to them, they still don’t want to kill him, simply because he’s a human being. Do you know how incredible that is? Do you know how far you Pandorans have come from us?”
“Our enemies on Pandora have always been more vicious than ourselves,” she said. “Except for the kelp. The kelp has killed its share of humans over the years.”
“But who rattled its leash?” MacIntosh asked. “Who threw fire into its cage?’’
She closed her eyes again and breathed in slow, deep breaths.
“Are you OK?”
She breathed in and out again, slowly.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I look around this scene, and I know it’s manufactured, fiction, not real … but people are following us. There are lasgun barrels behind the rocks and plants. Out of the corner of my eye I keep seeing people scurrying for cover.”
He hugged her, and they finally kissed that kiss she’d been waiting for. This was no chap-lipped peck on the cheek, and it was just what she needed to bring her back to the world.
“I’ve wanted to do that,” she said. “But it seemed … out of place with all this death.” “Yes,” he said, “I’ve wanted it, too.” He brushed her lips with his fingertips.
“You know, you’re going to be jumpy for a while, maybe a long while. We’re going to go back out there in a few minutes and finish this matter with Captain Brood. He might think otherwise, but his men have already discovered how little they know about getting around up here. Then we’ll see what we can do about your friends groundside.”
“You don’t think they’re … dead?”
“No,” he said. “I don’t.”
“How do you know?”
“The kelp.”
Her face must have registered surprise, because he chuckled.
“You know how much the kelp interests me,” he said. “Since Flattery gave me Current Control, I’ve been able to experiment a little. It paid off.”
He kissed her again, then told her about the kelp communications system he’d devised, and his attempts to unify the kelp.
“Which kind of god would the kelp be?” he asked. “Merciful? Vengeful?”
“That’s not important now, is it?” she asked. “Brood’s a smart one. I won’t be able to think of anything else until he’s … neutralized.”
MacIntosh steered them into a holo of sky that unfolded throughout their webwork—360 degrees of sky and high clouds covered the latticework that cradled them in free-fall.
“I worry more about Flattery,” he said. “Brood’s small-time. Flattery’s got big things afoot, things big enough to crush anything in his path.”
“But he was a Chaplain/Psychiatrist,” Beatriz insisted. “He’s trained to be better than that.”
“He’s trained to cope with the necessary thing and to see to it that we all adjust,” he reminded her. “No romantic bullshit, just the straight facts. He’s programmed to see to it that we don’t unleash a monster intelligence upon the universe.”
“If he hasn’t adjusted and he hasn’t coped, why assume that he’ll take us all with him?”
“Simple,” MacIntosh said. When he smiled his face wrinkled all the way up his shaved head. “The number five Flattery hit the ‘destruct’ switch, you’ve read The Histories. That Flattery was a lot more likable than this one. We’re here now because the program had already come alive, had already anticipated his move and headed it off.”
“Maybe we can do it!” Beatriz tried to shake his shoulders but all she did was set them both gyrating through air. “You’re right, use the kelp to head him off!”
“Well, now that it knows Flattery’s out to get it, the program’s already inserted, wouldn’t you think?”
“Well …”
“I have another possibility, and it’s regarding Crista Galli.”
She felt a curiosity about Crista Galli that went beyond her newsworthiness. Ben saw something in Crista, something in her eyes that swept him up and further away from Beatriz. Even though things were finished between Ben and Beatriz, a woman who could do that—a younger woman who could do that interested her mightily.
“What’s that?”
She heard the rusty bitterness at the edge of her voice, the unnecessary snap of the words past her lips.
“I think the kelp’s beat us to it,” he said.
She looked up from her nestling spot at his neck to see his wide grin. “I think that Crista Galli is the kelp’s experiment in artificial intelligence. I think she’s manufactured, incomplete, and alive. It would be nice if we could keep her that way.”
A musical tone sounded from the messenger at his belt. He did not take his arms from around her shoulders, but voice-activated the device with a simple command.
“Speak.”
“Brood and two of his men sealed themselves off with the OMC. He says if you’re not there in five minutes he’s going to start scrambling some brains.”
Chapter 55
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight …
—Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach”
The Orbiter collared the Voidship’s nose in a flat wide ring of plasteel. The two cylindrical bodies spun in concert on their long axes. Soon the ring would slip away to remain in orbit around Pandora while its Voidship plied the dark folds of the universe. At the helm would be an OMC, a stripped-down human brain.
The Organic Mental Cores had a definite edge over the mechanical navigators, and this had been determined clearly a half-dozen centuries ago by experimenters at Moonbase. Navigation in all planes required subtleties of discrimination and symbol-generation that hardware never achieved. The disembodied, unencumbered brain took pleasure, or so they said, in plotting the impossible course. One goad worked on OMCs that had no effect on mechanical navigators—the OMC needed this job to stay alive.
The particular OMC that the techs were preparing for installation, the Alyssa Marsh number six, felt no pain or b
odily pleasure as the microlaser welded in the necessary hookups. She had been trained in astronavigation at Moonbase and had borne a child in the year after splashdown on Pandora. The story that she filtered back to Flattery had the child die in an earthquake, and Alyssa Marsh had launched herself into her kelp study project with a passion. Her body had been crushed in a kelp station accident, but Flattery saw to it that her silent brain lived on.
Soon she would be silent no more. Soon her brain would have a body that it could move—the Voidship Nietzsche. She would navigate knowing the differences between ability and desire, knowing the need for dreams. Right now she lay genderless behind a pair of locked hatches dreaming of a banquet where Flattery was the host and she was both the honored guest and the main dish.
Dwarf MacIntosh gathered his forces outside both hatches and tried once more to contact Captain Brood. There was no reply from the OMC chamber. Three of the four monitors inside were blacked out, but the one remaining showed an overhead view of the long, specialized fingers of a nerve tech probing the webwork that encased what remained of Alyssa Marsh.
“Hookup’s not scheduled until next week,” someone said. “What’s going on in there?”
A lasgun barrel appeared on the screen, pointed at the tech. The long, spidery fingers froze, then ascended from the surface of the brain toward the screen, then backed out of view.
“That fool better not touch off his lasgun in there,” somebody else drawled, “or we be stardust.”
