by Larry Niven
Joan seemed to flinch. “It would have been hard to keep it from her.”
Cadzie frowned. “And she was acting strange when I talked to her about them.” As the implications sank in, he felt his throat tighten. Hoarsely, he asked, “How did you do it?”
“It was gradual,” Jennifer said. “It got more complicated after a while.”
Joanie said. “Cassandra’s firewalls are a joke. Hacking her was the best game we had, and our parents never noticed. Later we added a board to her primary preferences. She knows things she won’t tell anyone but those with the key passwords. It didn’t take much, she just doesn’t respond to questions about intelligent nonhumans. As you just found out.”
Now he was reeling. “Oh my god. Do you have any idea how much damage you may have done?”
“I’m starting to wonder, yes.” A little-girl’s voice.
“I have to tell Camelot. They need to know. Carlos needs to know now.”
“Cadzie.” Desperation was creeping into her voice. “I trusted you. I’ve betrayed a secret that will probably get me expelled from Surf’s Up. I may not be forgiven. You have to give me something.”
“What?”
“Let me tell Surf’s Up first. Dad will help me. Give me that much.”
He paused, thinking. How much of an emergency was this? Aaron made his skin crawl, and Joan wasn’t a lot better, but . . “Aaron?”
“Two days,” Aaron said.
Cadzie looked thoughtful, then nodded slowly. “All right. Landing Day is day after tomorrow. You talk to Zack and Carlos about the cthulhus then. And you and Jennifer explain to the council exactly what you did to Cassandra and why you did it. Maybe they’ll decide not to share that information with the general colony. I don’t know.”
He looked through the binoculars again. Two last man-sized squid-shapes were crawling over the lip of the dam.
“Cadzie. Please. You don’t understand.” She gripped his shoulder. He stared at her hand until she dropped it.
“Help me,” he said. “Make me understand.”
“Our grandparents wanted this,” she said. “Needed this. Wanted their own world. And got it. We . . you . . never asked for this. Just found that our parents had made the decision for you. Talked about Earth as ‘home’ while making sure you knew there was no way back.”
“So?”
“So Earth isn’t ours. And Avalon isn’t ours. Your parents make it clear to us every chance they get that they are the heroes of Avalon. They pretend to know everything, decide everything, control everything.”
“You wanted something that was yours.”
For the first time since her childhood, he watched her eyes water. “Yes. You . . you’re almost one of us. Can’t you understand?”
“I understand,” he replied. “I understand that you may have done more damage than you can possibly realize. But you know more about computers and AI than I do! You know what interfering with the prime programming can do, and you did that. Is anything Cassandra tells us reliable?”
“We got through the mainland wars all right,” Jennifer said. “Cassandra was very reliable, and the new boards were already in place then.”
“She didn’t warn you about the bees, did she, Aaron?”
Aaron glared. Jennifer said, “Cadzie, Cassandra’s all right, she just can’t tell some people anything about nonhuman intelligence.”
“Such as an approaching spacecraft?”
“Well, that might cause a conflicting orders dilemma because of all these requirements about who to tell this or not tell that. That’s how you got in the loop. By agreement, Carlos couldn’t tell you before he told Aaron. Carlos resolved that by getting you to act as messenger, no big deal, but Cassandra can’t resolve conflicting orders that easily. Especially if one of the conflicts is in the prime programming.” Jennifer spoke with a confidence Cadzie didn’t think she had. “Cassandra is reliable. Really. Look, we won the mainland wars without any of this coming out.”
Tears made Joanie’s blue eyes shimmer. “Cadzie, please. Wait until Landing Day.”
Cadzie sighed. If he admitted no empathy for her position, he’d be lying. “Fine. Fine. You have your two days.”
“Good choice,” Aaron muttered.
The school was together again, assembled on the high side of the dam. The water tasted too fresh: they would need brackish, too soon. The voices of the dam roared, drowning out thought. Roar of water, roar of magnetic flow.
The dam’s magnetic voice was deep inside its structure. The school could not penetrate, not even from here, not even by diving deep underwater. Whast could make out nothing of the dam’s thoughts, no matter how hard he listened.
What was this thing that the walkers had built?
Magnetic force was the essence of thought. The dipole in Whast’s belly amplified his voice, joined him to the school. What was being amplified by this thrumming thought, inside this immense curved stone wall? Whast could only wonder, like the rest: What were the walkers trying to say?
♦ ChaptEr 4 ♦
awakening
Narrator Marco Shantel came alive in stages. First tactile: he was lying on something metallic and cold. Then auditory: a low hum. Whispered human voices. The sound of his own breathing. Then finally visual as he opened his eyes. For a moment he wondered if he was on a movie set. That would have made sense, would have matched a life he knew quite well. Then he realized he was a trillion miles from Hollywood, on the colony ship Messenger, on its way to fulfill destiny.
Then he lapsed from consciousness again, as if it had taken all his strength just to absorb his surroundings: the line of recessed lights along the white-tiled ceiling was the last thing he knew before blackness. This time his descent was shallow, and he swam back to the surface quickly, to see the warm, lovely face of Evelyn Welsh, a medic he recognized. She was waiting for him patiently, and he smelled something: protein broth. Not chicken, not beef. Like liquid shwarma, a blend for optimal nutrition and taste, and his taste buds awakened with a vengeance.
She helped him sit up, and slipped the first spoonful between his lips. He thought he was passing out again, but held on for another sip. “Coffee,” he whispered. “Feels like I need coffee, Evelyn. A double mocha latte, please?” He’d only met her briefly on Earth, and found her unremarkable. But Evelyn was the first human female he’d seen in frozen decades, and some parts of his body were perking up faster than others. Her short black hair and heart-shaped face were suddenly angelic. He grinned toothily, applying a little of his wattage. With any luck he’d be laid within the next couple of hours.
“Not yet,” an unfamiliar voice said. “No stimulants. Just try to focus. You’ve been asleep for eighty years and a bit. And call me Major Stype. I will supervise your recovery, sir. Evelyn will continue as nurse.”
Who was that? He wondered if she’d been in the interviews that got him selected to go with Messenger. There had been a half dozen, maybe more. But they were only voices from a computer, and he couldn’t be sure.
“What are we doing now, Major?” He listened with his body. One gravity, he thought: it felt like Earth, except for a sort of pulse he could feel in the floor. He knew that pulse from before they put him to sleep. He was still aboard the starship Messenger, and Messenger was under thrust.
“We’re decelerating,” Major Stype said. “Less than two months before we—well, I’m not sure what the captain has in mind. Things have turned a little weird.”
“Weird? A story I can tell?” Coming alive: the Marco Shantel, actor turned interstellar astronaut. “Narrator” for the documentary that would tell future generations of this great adventure. He couldn’t see a mirror. He wondered what he looked like, how much muscle mass he had lost.
“You tell me, Narrator Shantel. We were observing a world we’re sure is Avalon. Looking for intelligent life. Trying to contact Geographic’s computer. We found a big island that matches the description of Camelot in those early—were you awake when the first m
essages came through from Tau Ceti?”
Avalon? Avalon? That was where the ship Geographic was heading. Their own destination, Hypereden, had been light-years distant. His mind rebelled. Was he hallucinating?
“Frozen like a rock,” Marco said. Better think of himself as Narrator Shantel. Act like the star he had been. Godsons liked their celebrities. They also liked their leaders strong and certain. This was no time to show doubt. “When I went to sleep, I don’t think Avalon was where we were going.”
“It wasn’t then. It is now, and you’ll learn why another time.”
“But—Don’t I have to tell the story?”
“We haven’t decided what story you’ll tell.”
“Oh.”
“Oh, indeed, Narrator Shantel.”
“Avalon—the Geographic expedition.” His voice made it a question.
Major Stype came into view. Deeply tanned Mediterranean skin, with a face that would have been lovely if not so stern. Piercing eyes. Well-fitting one-piece coverall, officer insignia. Middle-aged—if she’d been one of those selection committee voices, she’d been in cold sleep just like him. “How long have I been out?”
“Nearly eighty years.”
“You, too, then? Because I think I met you.”
“You did. Briefly. Surprised you remember.” Her smile was frozen. “Their plan was to find an island and make first landing there. They did that. Camelot is about the size of both New Zealands. The continent is not far, ninety miles or so, and they should be colonizing that too by now, so we looked.”
Narrator smiled at her. She didn’t smile back. Might take an extra hour, he thought. He said, “Pregnant pause? You know, we’ll be cutting this into my record.”
She smiled now. “You’ve really got your work cut out for you. Eighty years of cameras all over the ship. You’ll have to view all of that, and pick and choose what goes into the log. Take you years.”
“Take me a lifetime. I’m vidding for posterity, for an eternity of schoolkids. What’s happening now, Major Stype?”
“There’s a veldt. A million square miles of it. The green lines in the spectrum aren’t quite chlorophyll. Infrared suggests it’s grass and some tree clumps, little forests. Someone has been writing on it in really big letters.”
Finally, a message from God? Marco didn’t say that.
He’d get reported, or slapped. “Writing on the veldt?”
“Just on the grass. Whatever it is avoids the trees.”
“What does it say?”
“We can’t read it. The letters are cursive, all linked up with almost no breaks. We’re not even sure it’s writing, but that’s what it looks like. No human language, except that there’s one little stretch that’s in English.”
“What’s it say? For God’s sake, Major!”
“It’s in script, no breaks. It says, ‘Ice on my mind.’”
The narrator didn’t have to ask what that meant. He’d just come out of cold sleep, and with his mind intact, as far as he could tell. But that phrase had terrified him when he went to sleep.
“You may thank God we solved that problem,” Major Stype said.
“Ah. It’s probably an obscenity, for them, the ones down there. So you woke me with a mystery, Major? Good. What else?”
She laughed. “Hah!” Her expression hardly changed as she continued, “We got through to Geographic. Well, to an AI that calls itself Cassandra. An AI, built in the old days without a lot of the safeguards we put in now. And still in orbit, not down on the planet. Think about that. Still in orbit. Older AI. The chief engineer is going over the Cassandra plans now, and chuckling half the time.”
“Chuckling?” Humor? Just what kind of story was this? The major, or monitor, or whatever she was laughed again, but not much; something worrying her.
“Chuckling,” Major Stype said. “We learned a lot about AI after Geographic launched. Maybe the First Speaker should have eased into that conversation. The first thing he asked about was the writing on the veldt. Do they have intelligent aliens? Cassandra broke off. Sudden silence. That was three days ago, and we can’t get a peep out of Cassandra since.”
“Why would it do that—just shut up. Ignoring us?”
“That’s one explanation. Paranoia’s another. Maybe it’s making sure we don’t learn any more about Avalon.”
“But—but—”
“You may not recall, Narrator, but the Geographic trustees made it very clear that they wanted no Godsons aboard, nor did they need our help.”
“I recall, Major.” He tried Smile Number Three, the one he used in fashion shoots rather than on the screen. It was authoritative, but vulnerable. “Which is why I am astonished that we are headed to their planet. I assume there is a reason?”
“Not your problem just now. You’ll learn more when you’re fully awake.” She was all business. This one wouldn’t be seduced, not here, and not by him.
But the nurse was still promising. Later, perhaps. Business now.
Marco’s brow furrowed as he went into planning mode. He’d start there, stock footage of Messenger under thrust, then the telescope footage. Avalon, then closer, then the veldt. Then backflash. He had plenty of footage during the two years leading up to takeoff. Cut that a lot. Some tracks from the pacing ships, then it would be all stock from outside.
Prechildren loading, ten thousand fertilized eggs at a time. Then frozen crew . . .
Major Stype was watching him, the tip of a pink tongue touching the middle of her upper lip. She liked watching his concentration. It earned her respect . . and a little more.
Good. Back to two hours again. Less, if he was lucky. “Major? When can I get to work?”
♦ ChaptEr 5 ♦
backgrounds
“Hand me that grippy, Jason.” Carlos tightened the clamp on his workbench’s plasma cutter. Vibration shivered the housing, making the very precise alignments necessary for tool construction more difficult to achieve. Jason Tuinukuafe, the big beefy kid who was the younger of the Samoan Twins, wheeled the all-purpose calibrating solderer over and locked it down so that Carlos could work his magic. It looked like a short-armed steel octopus.
He’d heard from Cadzie that skeeter “Blue” Three gave him the willies on the way to the mainland. While skeeters made water landings just fine, it was still disturbing.
Twyla staggered yawning into the shop from their bedroom in the adjoining house at the foot of Mucking Great Mountain. He hated to admit it, but much of the current attraction in a bedmate was simple companionship, feeling a warm body nearby. Madre Dios, he had certainly never expected that change. For others, perhaps, but not Carlos Garcia.
As the saying goes, time wounds all heels.
Twyla was a sweet lady, physician and chief psychologist who thought herself a mix of Irish and Cherokee, but couldn’t be certain. Her long black hair had lovely white streaks now. They suited her. She kissed his cheek, scenting of cinnamon. “Morning. Coffee?”
“Had mine,” he said.
“Surprised to find you boys out here so early, Jaxon.”
“I’m Jason,” the Samoan replied.
“Of course you are.” She massaged Carlos’ shoulders, her fingers digging into knots of tension. “You’re tight,” she said. “What’s the urgency?”
“We’ve got problems, but thank goodness Camelot is isolated, and safe.”
“Problems,” she repeated. “I thought you said we couldn’t undo our biggest problem.”
“The printer, yes. That was a real disaster.”
“Come on,” Jason wiped a meaty forearm across his brow. It was summer on Camelot, and mornings got humid early. “That was a long time ago. Tricky for a while, but we make just about everything we consume now. What was the big deal?”
Carlos sighed. “We didn’t like what we saw happening on Earth. Things had gotten too easy, for too many of us. There was a breakdown of ambition and drive . . and fabricators were a part of that. You could just ‘print’ anything you
wanted. Sand was a perfect starting material for much of it. We were impossibly wealthy, and getting soft.”
She took another sip, and grinned at him over the rim of her cup. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but you didn’t used to think like that.”
“Is that right?”
“Oh, it’s right. Cadmann did, though.”
Carlos winced. She might have been reading his mind. “Fair enough. I . . .”
“What?”
Carlos sighed. Why was it so hard to say this out loud? “I miss him so much. I didn’t know him very long. All totaled up, what? Twenty years of real time? But he’s haunted me for forty. He saved us. And I find myself thinking ‘what would Cadmann do?’ Not often, just ten times a day or so. I watch Cadzie, wondering whether or when he’ll start showing the same strength.”
“And?”
“He’s a good kid. Strong, smart. But it isn’t fair to ask him to be his grandfather.”
Jason doffed his goggles. Pale circles marked where the lenses had protected his face from grinder dust. “It’s not fair not to let him be. Are you worried? About the machines?”
“You tell me.”
“Well . . .” Jason was a big man, brown, stocky, with intense dark eyes. He was SecondGen, like Cadzie, two minutes younger than his brother Jaxon. Both twins were brilliant, but in different fields. He believed they were polymaths who enjoyed confusing people: only they could tell each other apart. “We’re down to one Minerva. We can’t make any more repairs. When it’s dead, we’re done with space travel for generations. We’ll never get to Geographic again.”
Carlos cursed. “I know the skeeters are in repair . . .”
“Thank goodness,” Jason said. “Yeah, we can repair the skeeters, and most of the farm machinery . . and our forges can actually produce many new parts. But we’ve used two skeeters as hangar queens, sources of spare parts, and it looks like we’ll have to take another one out of service. Just like the Minervas, only we’re down to it now, we only have three; last week I had to use the last of the minithruster controls from Number Two to get Three reliable. One and Two are decent power sources, but they’ll never fly again. Hell, why am I telling you this? You told me to do it that way.”
