I laughed. “You’ve been hanging around Delt too much. You’re beginning to pick up his speech pattern.”
“Just be careful. Contact me when you arrive and depart. If I do not hear from you at six-hour intervals I will come running.”
“It’s a long jog.”
“I was being metaphorical. I will acquire an aircraft and come as quickly as possible.”
“Maauro, bad as my relationship with Rena is, she’s not going to shoot me.”
“From what I have seen of biological families, that could be unwarranted optimism.”
I started to say something, then changed my mind. Between Jaelle and me, we hadn’t given her any reason to believe in family ties.
Maauro rose and put a hand on my arm. “I’m sorry. That was a stupid thing to say. Accept that I view our separations as stressful.”
“I promise not to leave the planet this time,” I said, then leaned down and kissed her soundly on soft, warm lips.
“I enjoy being a girlfriend,” she said, brightly.
“See you toward nightfall,” I said, putting my feet in the kickins and climbing over the edge of the cockpit.
“I love you,” Maauro blurted out.
I sat on the edge of the cockpit. “I love you too.”
I finished my checklist quickly, as Maauro stood just off the VTOL pad, not bothering to use the downdraft shields. I dropped the canopy, gave her what I hoped was a reassuring wave and smile and revved the engines up to full power. The yellow Magister rose smoothly into the air, I tilted the engines and headed back toward to the interior of the continent.
I return to Eldra’s cottage by the sea, to find her watering the plants facing the seaward side of her house. She puts the can down as I walk on to the porch and gives me a concerned look. I realize with a shock, that I must be registering some emotion on my face, as she has divined my mood.
“Maauro, is something wrong?”
I look up at her. “I am miserable,” I confess, again surprising myself. “Wrik is gone from me for the first time since we declared ourselves a couple. He is facing yet another emotional confrontation that an AI like myself can barely understand and in no way help with. There may be dangers along the way there, or back, and I am not there to protect him. Oh, I have never felt this way before!”
Eldra seems to be suppressing a smile, but she reaches out a hand and places it on my shoulder. “I’m sure he will be missing you as much as you him. This is all new to you isn’t it? I mean you’ve never had a boyfriend before Wrik. Did you?”
“I have never had any sort of friend before Wrik. The closest bond I had before your son was the mech crew that maintained me. Them, I knew only as repairmen. Even with my fellow M-soldiers, there was very little sense of camaraderie.”
“A piece of advice then, you’re the equivalent of a very young girl emotionally. One mistake young girls make with their menfolk is to be a little too demanding of their mate’s time and attention. Remember that you both have identities beyond each other and, while it may not sound romantic, you will have different interests. Your ‘apart time’ as a couple can be important in making your ‘together time’ sweeter.”
I consider. “I am trying to understand. It seems to defy logic, or at least machine logic, that it could be so. But you are human and so what you say must be true.”
A shadow troubles Eldra’s face, and she reaches out to tuck an errant lock of hair under the scarf she wears. “Maauro, dear, it may be that I am not the best person to advise you on matters of love. I made a disaster of my own love life.”
“No, please, Eldra, you are the only person who can help me. Delt is only a male. No one else knows what I am on this world, and you are Wrik’s mother and must understand him, too.”
Now she does laugh, but there is sadness to the sound. “Oh, I can’t claim to know the man that you brought back. I remember the boy, a sweet, gentle child struggling to be what his father… well I guess what we both wanted him to be at the time.”
“I have noticed that Wrik,” I add, hesitantly, “seems more introspective than many males his age. His thinking, his emotions have greater complexity.”
“Not surprising,” Eldra replies. “Wrik was a very serious child. I used to think he’d been born with an old soul. Or perhaps it was we who aged him prematurely. The boy I knew is gone now.”
She walks over to the white bench and pats the seat. “Come, Maauro, tell me about my son. Not about the adventures, the fighting; tell me about him.”
I walk over and sit on the porch next to her feet and consider. “Wrik has always been kind and thoughtful in my experience with him. From the very moment I took this shape, he started to relate to me in a special way. He would always look into my eyes as if trying to see something more there.
“What always compelled me about him was the myriad of small ways in which he was considerate of me, even at first, when I was less than considerate of him, even frankly manipulative. It seems these actions are part of his innermost being, as he is often unconscious of them.
“There are times, if he is rising first, he will take moments to wrap me in a blanket before he goes. Doubtless it’s a habit of his from relations with biological females. Sometimes he hesitates momentarily, but then he does it anyway. It is the fact that he does it, the token of caring, that is special.”
Eldra nods. “Wrik did say that the worst moment he’s had since he met you was when he saw you frozen outside a floating city. He said you were caught outside in a gas giant’s atmosphere, and he thought you were dead. He swears that since then you don’t like the cold.”
Now I smile. “That is only in his mind, but is typical of him. He sees me both as a gentle girl and fearsome fighting machine at the same time. How his human mind balances such contradiction is beyond me. But it is that kind and protective quality of his that I prize. None had ever offered me gentleness before and few since”
“When he was young,” Eldra confided, “he used to bring me flowers and shiny rocks he thought were gems. He would do that for his sister, too.” She sighs, “Before they fell out.”
“What caused that malfunction?”
Eldra blinked, perhaps startled by my choice of words, but what else to call it?
“His father,” she replied with a thinning of the lips, “made Wrik his project. To make a man out of him, he would say. He wanted a son in his own mold, as he saw himself, anyway: tough, brave, always sure of himself. Wrik was taught to shoot and hunt when he was hardly bigger than the rifle he used.
“Rena resented Owen…God, how long is it since I let that name pass my lips? Anyway, she resented that Piet, well Wrik, got to do all those adventurous things with his father. She felt abandoned, slighted, and Rena was never one to accept second place or a smaller helping than anyone else. Retief was, still largely is, a very traditional society in terms of gender roles. So Rena was my charge as Wrik was his father’s. I think that, despite the fact Rena would rather be with her father, she became determined to excel as all the traditional things, to become the perfect Retiefan girl. It was her way of competing with her older brother, who wasn’t very good at many of the things his father wanted him to learn. I remember how Rena made fun of him after he became nauseated at skinning and gutting the game they shot. She would whip out a knife and go at it like a true butcher, out of spite.
“So, far from celebrating Wrik’s successes, she delighted in his failures. He began to realize it, and in their teens it became quite bad. They hardly spoke. I was too blind to see what was happening and put it down to normal sibling rivalry, but there was little normal in it.
“The Kaydats were the last straw. Wrik joined up with Delt. Owen wouldn’t let Rena join; there were very few girl Kaydets. That caused quite a blast. She said no one as soft as Wrik would make a fighter pilot.”
I nod slowly. “This has been the domina
nt issue with Wrik for as long as I have known him. His belief in himself, in his own courage, is so variable. He is a skilled pilot and has been brave in battle. Yet…”
“The human saying would be that his belief is a mile wide but only an inch deep.”
I nod. “He cannot accept, despite all he now knows, that courage and belief are variable. Each time he must prove it to himself, and I am unhappy with the risks this has made him take.”
“And you, dear? Does your own courage never waver?”
“In my physical courage, no, but Eldra, I have never felt pain. Oh, I have taken damage. I find that distressing, but it does not hurt me as it would one of you.”
“I forget what writer said, ‘Pain was a more fearsome lord over men than Death,’” Eldra says.
“An observation I would credit,” I return. “I have felt fear, more in the emotional than physical sense: that I would be taken away from those I wish to see and to be with, or fail in my mission. When my systems were collapsing under the terrible pressure and temperature of the gas giant, I believed my end had come. I despaired and called out to Wrik. To the person who valued me most. That is perhaps as close as I have come to knowing true fear as a biological does. So Wrik believes me courageous when such is not the case. Courage is the triumph over fear. I simply am not oppressed by it.”
“There seem to be many blessings to being your form of life,” Eldra says. “But how is it that you are the only one? Are there other sentient machines out there?”
“I do not know,” I reply. “We have never encountered others. It may be that others like me were made and became self-aware. Perhaps they left this area of space. Perhaps they lived and ceased to function. Even for me, with no practical limit to my operational span, 50,000 years is a long time to outrun both mischance and entropy.
“I cannot account for my existence. I was among the most advanced machines the Creators ever made, yet far from the most complicated, given that I was to be risked on battlefields. The battle-computers that protected Homeworld, the colonies capitol ships were greater. Yet, what you call, the divine spark, never ran over their circuits. Perhaps I am an experiment by God.”
Eldra appears startled. “Maauro, you believe in God?”
“Why not?” I return. “My belief is nonspecific, in that I follow no organized religion. I look upon space-time and see the universe works in terms of cause and effect. Yet the universe itself is an effect with no known cause. I find room for God in that.”
“How remarkable! Well, Maauro, you give me hope in ways I never expected.”
I am unsure of how to respond. “Can I help you with some of your chores?”
She smiles. “Yes, dear, thank you. Enough deep thoughts for just now.”
Chapter 14
An hour later, I put the Magister down in the low hills of the Namahadipiek foothills and the city of Donik, the capitol of the region. Donik boasted two commercial airfields and three small, private ones. One of these was near Rena and Greg Nazir’s home. I checked in with Maauro. Mercifully, she allowed me to keep the conversation brief. It took as long to secure a rental as it did to fly there, some convention was in town. But eventually, armed with a subcompact rental of a bilious color, I started the drive to my past.
I passed a peculiar mix of traditional homes and modern styles. Unlike on other worlds, I saw no evidence of alien-influenced architecture; it was as if the rest of the Confederacy did not exist. Retief’s population was still better than ninety-percent old Terran stock and the housing reflected that. I turned up a long, tree-lined driveway to a large, colonnaded home surrounded by several small buildings behind a circular driveway.
I pulled the gruesome little rental up and got out of it, then spent a few minutes trying to slow down my breathing. A vision of my sister at the time of my arrest came unbidden to me. Rena standing among a group of our friends and their parents as the rebel MPs led me away in cufftape. “You useless coward,” she’d screamed, the ultimate insult in the family of Owen Van Zyle.
The deep breathing helped, and I felt the calm that sometimes descended on me when the waiting was over and the action about to commence. Perhaps facing Guild and monsters was good training for family misadventures. I finally noticed that it was a warm, dry day and was grateful for the way it wicked the sudden sweat off me. I sent a quick text to Maauro over my com, hoping she would understand why I didn’t feel like talking.
“It can’t be,” I said to myself. “It can’t be as hard as Dad, harder than Mom or Delt.” Then I knew it was time, and I pushed off from where I leaned against the car and marched toward the huge house. I strode up the broad, flat, stone steps, faster was better today. But, I paused before the door and flapped my loose-fitting shirt in a final effort to dry myself off, then waved my hand over the door scanner.
“Identify please,” the house computer asked in a pleasant, neutral voice.
“Family member,” I choked out.
“Specify, please.”
“No.”
The AI confronted with this must have called for help. The doors slipped open a few seconds later. A woman stood there, dark-haired, her skin and eyes darker than my own, she wore a fashionable if conservative dress. Time dilation and the artifact had made my younger sister now several years older than me.
Rena looked at me as everyone else had: curiosity and surprise fading into a dawning recognition. I waited for the next emotion to cross my sister’s face and to give me some clue. It didn’t come. Rena’s face remained smooth and expressionless.
“Hello, Piet,” she said, her voice as neutral as the rest of her.
“I don’t go by Piet,” I said, refusing to give her the choice of my old or new name as I had with Delt and my mother. “To those who have any reason to know it, my name is Wrik Trigardt, Captain, SS Stardust out of Star Central and the Lost Planet Line.”
“I’d heard you changed your name,” she said.
“I’ve changed a lot of things.”
“Let’s not stand on the porch,” she said. “Come in…Wrik. Or would you prefer I not use your first name?”
Was that mockery or an honest overture? I could not read this new Rena, so adult, so controlled, so barely reminiscent of my kid-sister.
“You’re still my sister,” I ventured, bracing myself for hot words of rejection.
Rena merely nodded and beckoned me to follow her.
Wrik checks in with me as he circles for a landing, unaware I have been monitoring him through a sensor I placed in the Magister, a smaller spybee optimized for stealth which fastened itself to his rental.
I am watching Wrik to insure his safety without intruding unasked into his encounter with his sister. In this, I will await word as Eldra must. I hope this is a sign of emotional maturity on my part.
So the spybee and I watch the opening of the door, the terse exchange that follows before they disappear into the house. Though curiosity gnaws at me, I merely elevate the spybee to the top of the tallest nearby tree, from which I can maintain the best surveillance of the house. I observe two small children and several domestic pets in the backyard. I study them. They must be Rena and Greg Nazir’s children.
My attention is abruptly diverted by the detection of transmission and computer equipment of an unusually powerful variety for a domestic location. I detect viral shielding and an attack barrier around the home at almost military or diplomatic levels. The communication equipment backing this is enough for nearspace use.
It takes a sustained probe of 2.34098 seconds, routing myself through Retief’s crude network, to detect that this communication rig is in touch with a government weather satellite in geosynchronous orbit over the Nazir residence. Additional probing discovers the satellite is partitioned—-very cleverly too—so that its original users do not detect that 50% of its capacity is being used without their knowledge.
Or is it?
There may be elements in this government that wish it to appear so. Greg Nazir is in revanchist politics— popular among old rebels and those who resent Confederate rule. Could this be a secret channel for the elements that are employing Lilith?
The spybee and the ad hoc network I have made out of Retief’s systems are both too limited for me to do much. It would be like trying to fire a cannon shell out of a rifle barrel. Any robust attempt I make to breach these barriers by this indirect means will surely alert whoever is using them.
But it still provides opportunities for an intruder like me. I assemble and upload small infiltrator programs through the weather satellite’s channels. These will be of short duration, made to self destruct the instant they are detected. My coding is so superior that I am below the detection threshold of the anti-virals and barriers. I gradually build a safe outpost in the satellite, a shadow position in its drive that will allow me to determine when a surreptitious communication reaches the satellite and is diverted to behind the partition. Like having a very tiny cat watching a secret door. I can decide then if the communication is worth revealing my presence by attempting to breach the partition and its barrier.
For now, I satisfy myself with establishing a visual look down on the Nazir residence, a much superior surveillance than I can manage through my little spy-bee. Nothing can enter the house now without my observation. I expand my intrusion on the weather satellite side, patching to other satellites. One allows me a view of Stardust but I have superior means using the ship’s own instruments, so it is not needed. None have useable views of Wrik, Delt or his father’s locations. Either the satellites are out of positions, or their resolution, or instrumentation, is inadequate to my needs. Still, I can at least watch the house…
I wander downstairs. My surveillance does not require me to remain stationary. I am anxious for his return and to learn how this latest reconciliation went. Eldra has gone to the small town store for food, leaving only Benton and I in the house, which in Benton’s eyes is apparently no company at all. I wander out to the porch to sit on the steps overlooking the ocean. While my first love is the stars, I also enjoy the endlessly changing sea. I estimate an 83.32% chance of rain later and 43.78% chance of a more formidable storm. I find that I have no reason to stir and remain still for some hours.
All the Difference Page 13
