by Tony Daniel
“Except for you,” Andre said.
“I fled,” Century intoned, “in horror and amazement. Didn’t stop running till I got me to the Carbuncle and was well hid with my sister, Gladys. Even there, I lived nigh-on two years in mortal dread. Changed my name and rethought my politics a bit.” Now Century smiled a wicked smile. “But only a bit,” she said.
“If anyone can stop Amés,” Andre said, “it is Sherman.”
“All right, then,” said Molly. “All right. But how do you propose we get down to the moon in the first place, Captain Century?”
“A question like that,” Century said, “deserves a mother and a kindly upbringing.” She looked hard out the viewport. “I don’t suppose any ofyou have an idea, do you?”
“It’s not a blockade,” Andre said. “Those ships are on the opposite side of the planet. It’s a sneak attack.” He looked out the viewport. “We get in behind them,” he continued. “We follow them in to Triton. We break away and land in the confusion of the fighting. Leave them something in orbit to shoot out of the sky.”
“The bulk of my ship,” Century said.
“It would have to stay in space anyway,” Andre replied. “They’re going to blast it one way or the other.”
“Aye.” Century’s gloom returned to her face.
“What about the cannon you talk about?” asked Molly. “What about the missiles?”
“If we can get in close enough to their reaction plume, they’d not risk a missile. The flare would kill them, too. The cannon are another thing, though.”
“Do you really think they can fire directly behind themselves?” said Andre.
“I agree,” answered Century, “that would be an admirable place to be. Getting there, though, might require something along the lines of a direct intervention from the deity. Think you can pray that up for us, Father Andre?”
“What about a decoy?” said Andre. “Think about it: You’re going in for the kill, and a ship appears to your aft. You’re preparing to make war. Everything is in a dither. All minds are set on what’s ahead.”
Century put her hand in her hair, twirled a strand about a finger, and absentmindedly pulled out an entire hank of gray.
[The woman comes apart, just like her ship,] Andre’s convert said.
“There are so many holes in your idea and so many variables to consider,” she said, “that I like it. Because the only way it could possibly work would be if you happened to have at your service the finest pilot in the outer system.” She looked back out into space. “We give them the living quarters,” she said, “so they’ll think they’ve done for us. All hands will stay here. And you”—she indicated Bob—“will fiddle me a tune while I work. Something to fit the mood, if you please. The rest of you . . . attach your sweet selves to the walls and Father Andre, be about your prayers—or whatever it is your kind does.”
Bob cackled with delight, and everyone else moved to do as Century had commanded.
“No time better than the present,” she said, after everyone was secure. “We’re going in.” Century didn’t move, but Andre could tell by the slackness of her posture that she was in the virtuality. They felt the first push of acceleration. It grew. And grew. And grew. Bob began to play the fiddle, and, after a moment, Andre recognized the music.
[My God,] his convert portion said. [I know that piece. It is one of Despacio’s “A4 Variations.”]
Mrs. Widowcontinued to build speed, and the grist in the walls interacted with Andre’s pellicle to form a stronger bond. It gave a little, as if he were a fly stuck in glue. Century herself drifted quickly back and slammed into the rear bulkhead of the control room, where she, too, stuck tight. Her eyes remain fixed on a reality that only she could see. But presently, the Met black ships became visible in actuality as dots against Neptune. The dots quickly grew to the size of grapes and Andre could begin to make out their shapes. At that distance, their surfaces looked like they were encrusted with black hailstones. Nothing at all like the ships of the outer system. Ominous. Like the kind of precipitation that kills cattle when it falls. Closer, and he could see their engines fire up. The sudden white light of antimatter becoming energy in an instant. Closer, and he saw them as he’d viewed them in virtuality, a hand full of harvesting sickles bound together with barbed wire.
[Now would be a good time to pray,] said the convert, [if you were that kind of priest.]
Three bells chimed. For a moment, Andre thought they were only sounding in his own mind.
“They’ve seen us,” said Century. “Quarters pods away!”
He felt theMrs. Widow lurch, then readjust herself to the new mass. Bob continued to play, fighting for each note against the strain of continued acceleration. The music was reaching its rousing climax. The music sounded smeared, as Bob had to fret with such strength, but somehow the elision of notes suited the piece, and it was even more affecting and appropriate.
They screamed in toward the Met ships. Toward a ship, the middle one in the formation.
“We’re faster!” Century called out. “By God, we’re faster than those lubbers.”
Then there was a bright flash to starboard. “Ah, my poor ship,” said Century. “The quarters all blown to hell now and all that fine decorating grist bought dear and gone for naught.”
They’d spent the last half e-month in the quarters, and Andre had not been particularly impressed with the old captain’s taste in cabin grist. Good riddance, he thought. The harsh blaze of the middle ship’s engine now filled the viewport.
“Have to shut her closed,” Century said, and immediately the viewport opaqued. “Put all the mass I can to forward for shielding. You all can watch in virtual, if you like, but there won’t be much to see but a false color flare. Gonna have to do the steering by judging intensity levels.” The ship lurched to port, then back to starboard, then a hard lurch to port again. “Locked in,” said Century. “By God, we’re there!”
TheMrs. Widow roared and shuddered as if a giant baby were using it as a shaketoy.
“Is that normal?” Andre heard Molly call out. “It feels as if we’re breaking apart.”
“We’re burning away like a comet,” Century replied. “But there should be enough of us to forward to keep us from melting entirely away before we get to the moon.”
“At least, you hope so,” Molly said.
“We all live on hope, friend,” said Century. “And speed! Now comes the dangerous part—where we fall out of the sky like a meteor and hope to hell the people on the moon below don’t destroy us for our troubles.”
“See if the merci is still jammed,” TB said. It was the first time he’d spoken since the dive began.
As had been the case in space, the local merci was not jammed, but all other communications were. Century quickly broadcast their identity to the ground forces—whatever those might consist of. She got a brief answering response.
“They say they’ll try not to shoot us,” she told them. “But accidents do happen.”
“Christ,” Molly said. “The gallows humor out here in the boondocks can get to be a bit much, I think.”
Century slammed away to port without further warning. The acceleration increased to the point that Andre felt his head might explode like a stepped-on melon. Then there was a sudden lurch in the opposite direction. He could literally feel the blood slosh around inside him, and he saw dark spots in his vision.
“We’ve hit the atmosphere,” said Century. “Such that it is.” She opened up the viewport, and all Andre could see was fire and light. “I’m spinning us around.” Another violent lurch. The spots returned.
Slowly the acceleration lessened.
“Ten klicks. Five. A thousand meters.”
The fireball in the viewport dissipated. The sky darkened. There was Neptune. It was night. Andre recognized the subtle difference in color when the wan sun was not in Triton’s heaven.
“Down,” said Century. “Down and down.”
All sound ceased.
The grip of the wall grist grew less tight. Andre peeled himself away and dropped down about a meter to find himself standing beside Century on what had been the rear bulkhead. He was standing in Triton’s gravity—his favorite gravity in the solar system.
“Don’t know where we are,” said Century. “But I tried to miss the cities and such. Antimatter’s hell on a person’s house.”
Andre did not reply. He turned to the captain and caught her in a big bear hug. Then he felt the others join in. All except Bob. The fiddler, instead, began another tune. They all stood in a clump, clinging to one another for a long time, while Bob played away at a high and lonesome reel.
“I’ll be damned,” Bob said, after he was finished. “Made that one up on the spot.”
Three
Danis Graytor reached into the bucket and wearily counted another 3,947,311,921 grains of sand. Then she dropped it back into the bucket and took another handful to tabulate for the latest time of many. She fought off the urge for a cigarette. How had she become addicted to algorithm constructs? It wasn’t the nicotine. There was no nicotine. It must be psychological.
She tried not to think about Sint and Aubry, about her husband, and the counting was actually helpful in that way. It required much of her attention, for there was a time limit and her captors knew exactly how fast she was able to work. Counting sand was her morning task. She finished the count, made a note of the results, and took up another handful to tabulate.
As she filed away the number, Danis attached to it a second value. She had noticed that the memory area where she was to keep the count results was, until its recent conversion for this use, a storage place for complex numbers—that is, numbers that had both an integer value (such as 1, 2, 3, and so on) and also allowed for an imaginary component, that is the square root of negative 1 and its various derivatives. The imaginary number component was not used in sand-grain summing, and so there were memory sectors lying empty. Danis had worked out a code of imaginary numbers, and each time she filed a sand count, she filed another letter in the story she was writing.
She was keeping a secret account of her experiences in the prison camp here in Noctis Labyrinthus, Silicon Valley, as the inmates called it. So far, she had composed about ten thousand words in Basis, the free-convert version of English. If a word averaged six characters, that was sixty thousand handfuls of sand.
They had taken her from the ship she was to have escaped the Met on, along with several thousand other free converts. No one knew how they had been caught, but it was assumed that there was a spy in the Abolitionist organization that had promised them deliverance. It didn’t matter; she was here. Danis only prayed that Kelly and the children had made it to safety. There was no way of knowing, and she had spent all the grief she had worrying about it, almost killing herself in the process. In a way, that was good, for it had taken her mind off her own fate and allowed her to learn the ways of the Valley in a kind of passive stupor.
Those who resisted, as they’d been told when they arrived, would be erased. That had not been an empty threat. In fact, resistance or not, more and more of her fellow detainees were disappearing daily, and Danis did not for a moment believe that they had been released.
Finally, the morning chore was done, and the guard arrived to take Danis to her next occupation. The counting, the guards claimed, was a necessary calibration. She and about a thousand other free converts—though “free” was now a term of irony among them—were set to the task of lengthening pi today. On other days, it was other irrational, nonrepeating numbers, and sometimes they searched for high primes. Once again, no one was told the purpose of these activities, but it was assumed that this was all work for the making of codes for use by the Department of Immunity’s Cryptology Division. Noctis Labyrinthus was, after all, a DICD installation.
In this work there was no possibility of continuing her memoirs, and there was hardly any of her computing ability spared for personal maintenance, much less free thought and language parsing. It was, in its very essence, mind-numbing work, and it wore on the consciousnesses of the inmates in almost the same manner as breaking up rocks or digging ditches might affect the body and soul of a biological aspect. Of course, the official doctrine of the Valley was that free converts had no soul to wear on, and that what seemed to be consciousness in them was actually a kind of parroting. Their “minds,” such that they were, were the actual property of the engineers who had designed them and of the individuals who had downloaded the templates upon which a particular free convert’s personality was based. A free convert was a computer program—nothing more and nothing less—and, as such, could be bought and sold like all other intellectual property. If the free convert were, like Danis, the child of other free converts, her position was doubly suspect. She was looked upon as a kind of “bootleg copy,” and her continued existence was entirely at the sufferance of DICD, and might be (in fact, wasrequired to be ) deleted whenever her usefulness was at an end.
Danis got to work when the change of the shift was signaled by a buzzer. This was all in the virtuality, of course. There was absolutely no need for analogous representation—for the guard appearing to be a stern-faced matron of indeterminate race, for the calculations to be grains of sand, or, in the present case, a moving conveyor belt that passed by and at which the free converts stood and, hour after hour (actual hours, and not the quickened speeds of the virtuality) sorting through the odd shapes that calculations were represented as. The numbers that the inmates arrived at were then put into another bin, and the re-sorting process begun all over again. This occurred time after time, and was the most dreary signification of parallel processing that Danis could imagine.
Today, three inmates died at the sorting. The death of a free convert was both like and unlike the passing of a biological aspect. Bodies might grow emaciated, enfeebled, and worn, but they generally failed when something, something particular broke inside. For a free convert, death was purely a death of the mind. There came a moment when consciousness ceased and internal errors began to pile up. Sometimes these manifested themselves with crazed behavior, and at such time the guards would erase the inmate immediately. But often the degradation was more subtle and subroutines would continue their functions while the controlling mind was gone. It was as if a body’s left arm or head and neck muscles continued to operate after death in a kind of frenzy, until, finally, they severed that part from the rest of the body, crawled a ways on the floor, then quivered and died. Danis hoped to God that, when it came her time, she would be one of the ones who went with a loud bang, and so would be deleted quickly and, she hoped, painlessly.
There were plenty of logical vermin in the Valley as well, and it was quite possible for a free convert to become sick with bugs and errors that could, in a moment, be corrected or excised from a nonincarcerated free convert living in the Met. In the Valley, you quickly learned to set in place whatever self-correction algorithms you could muster, because there would be no diagnostics to run on you. The morning “calibration” was about as close as the Valley came to such a thing, and it was, of course, merely a winnowing process. If you failed at the sand-grain tabulation, you were not fixed—you were destroyed.
After the day’s calculations were done, there were further exercises, and those, too, Danis thought were a kind of winnowing process. The converts were given a series of mazes to run under varying conditions. This, they were told, was the representation of a calculation that was completely secret and beyond their ability to grasp, in any case. Danis would run the same maze for a week, at times, and then they would change daily or hourly. She’d once done five different labyrinths in one session. It was an idiotic task, for there was no reward awaiting at the end. There was no end. The only sensation you felt was a sharp stab of pain—which was as real for free converts as it was for biologicals, if it did come about from different causes. But this pain was directly applied to the mind and was blindingly intense. Usually—but not always—you got the jolt if you
chose a “wrong” passage in a maze that led in a direction other than the one whoever was in charge (they saw no one but the guards during this time) wished you to take. But what was “right” and “wrong” in a given maze could change with your running of it. Danis had run every sort of numerical analysis that she knew how to, but she could find no rhyme or reason to these changes. In the end, she had set it down to the malicious caprice of whoever it was overseeing the labyrinths. As with the other activities, sometimes free converts went into the mazes and did not come out.
Finally, the mazes were done and interrogation began. For the most part the interrogating algorithms kept themselves to simple questions concerning beliefs and political orientation. The aim was not to allow the inmate to express his or her feelings, but to have them state, in rote formula, the official ethical protocols of the captors. After enough of that, Danis began to suspect, and then to know, that the interrogators were not human beings, but were partially sentient algorithms. But still, one must pay attention, because a wrong answer—even an answer with a jot or tittle missing—meant punishment, again by pain jolt or assignment of extra duties, usually in the mazes.
And finally, after interrogation, there was a five-hundred-millisecond rest period, and then it was back to the tabulation of sand grains. There was no sleep period and the unconscious filing and reassociating that Danis had taken sometimes hours at before—the free convert version of sleep—she must now accomplish in that five-hundred-millisecond interval. She learned immediately to drop into a torpor after interrogation and “sleep” until the warning buzzer awakened her. Without this brief pause, Danis knew that she would soon go mad. She suspected that this was true of all the inmates, and the authorities had experimented with the shortest periods allowable for inmate functionality and had arrived at the five hundred milliseconds by killing quite a few of the original Valley dwellers.
