by Wil McCarthy
Someone pointed out the signal's parallels to the Waister Departure Song, which had taken a team of skilled translators years to decipher. Someone else pointed out that the signal might not be complete—more information might be forthcoming at any time. Yet another person suggested that the brief, obscure speech had been a deliberate attempt to confuse them all.
At this point, and with Tempe's consent, Plate stepped in with an observation of his own. “I have some experience dealing with the revived humans,” he said to the assembled crowd, “and they are not at all what one would expect. Let Finders ring remind you all that culture and behavior and predisposition are three very discrete phenomena. Even if we emulate the Waister mind perfectly, Finders ring reminds you that we live in a different place, that we use different tools. It is entirely conceivable that our society here at Gate resembles the Waisters' own no more than the Suzerainty of the Human Spaces resembles the Sirius colony that once occupied this system.”
And that comment provoked a storm of rebuttal and dispute that went on for many hundreds of heartbeats. Plate took the opportunity to press a comp jewel to his head, which had the effect of transmitting the full context of his thoughts and experiences to Wende's six, and an abbreviated packet of same to the rest of Finders ring. In return, he received the information that Wende wished him to remain close to the center of controversy, so that Finders ring should not be without voice at so pivotal a time. She would join him here as soon as circumstances permitted.
He was still standing very close to Tempe, and amid the tumult he leaned forward and spoke to her quietly. “Perhaps we engender our own difficulties here. Can Talkers ring send a reply in the same format, asking for clarification? If the Waisters want to talk, then probably we should talk.”
“We must yield before their strength,” Tempe replied, in a much louder voice, so that a dozen nearby Queens and Workers could hear her. She raised her voice higher still, shouting above the crowd: “We must surrender! There is a newness here which demands it of us. Talkers ring should prepare and send a capitulation message immediately.”
“Tempe,” Plate cut in, his manner antithetic and inappropriate but, he thought, necessary under the circumstances, “at least ask for clarification while you're at it.”
She turned and struck him hard, stinging the side of his head.
“#Urgent-request listen#” he insisted, signaling for her full attention but stepping backward a pace to avoid another blow. “#Request-for-information consumes null-resource Invokes null-risk Creates-possibility-for benefit I/my function-to-advise constrains I/me in activity of advising Comprehension is crucial#”
Tempe flared at him, obviously tempted to smash him into oblivion, but she held back. Instead, she turned slowly to face the lone Talkers Queen present in the chamber, and said to her, “#Leshe Urgent-request initiate compilation-of-reply We yield before strength We request clarification of signals We express desire-to-contribute regarding you/your objectives#”
Leshe, the Talkers Queen, signaled her understanding and pressed a comp jewel to her forehead.
“Talkers ring points out that it will be ten thousand heartbeats until the signal reaches them,” her Worker reminded the assembled units, and then grinned irreverently. “Perhaps nine thousand, if we remain unusually quiescent.”
Plate considered that remark. Jokes were antithetic and disrespectful, of course, but they could sometimes jolt one's thinking into new channels. He dared to laugh.
~~~
“Mother, are the Gateans angry with us?”
“Oh, Vadim, I just don't know. I don't think they were pleased with our stories. I don't think we helped them in the way they hoped.”
“What will they do with us?”
“I don't know.”
“What will you do? It seems to me you don't want to be in charge, but I think you should. Doesn't somebody have to make decisions?”
“Ialah's names, Vadim, where are you getting these thoughts? You're a little boy, you should be thinking a little boy's thoughts. Go and keep your sister company.”
Pause.
“Mother?”
“Yes, Vadim?”
“Is Viktor Slavanovot going to replace our father?”
~~~
“ # Additional errors require compensation #
# Require repetition-of-effort #
# Which annoys #
# #
# Concepts presenting strange difficulty #
# Now appreciated #
# We express satisfaction at the state of #
# existence we identify here #
# #
# But what state? What state? #
# That you surrender to a thing not new? #”
“#I/We request instruction Request clarification Your strength dominates I/Us You approach How can I/We contribute toward you/your objectives?#”
“ # Something moves awry in this exchange #
# Requiring repetition-of-effort #
# Which annoys #
# #
# Are you stupid-ling of this space-region? #
# Pile stones beside the water #
# Are you things-of-newness? #
# #
# We do not arrive with #
# Preparation-to-confront #”
“#Of confrontation null We surrender We surrender We surrender#”
“ # This exchange carries no information #
# #
# Surrender? #
# Null-war concepts have been comprehended #
# We approach in null-war state #
# #
# Completed confrontation equates surrender #
# Where newness implies confrontation #
# In precedence thereof #”
“#Stupid-lings have been similarized toward you/your information/ideology Toward you/your sensory-discrimination Toward you/your life-operative-status I/We are not stupid-lings#”
“ # Fragmentary comprehension has germinated #
# Do you pile stones beside the water? #
# In under-air where water has visited #
# #
# You are not stupid-lings #
# Confrontation-of-newness can be achieved #
# With difficulty #
# We are prepared to offer your destruction #
“#No No No Of destruction null we surrender We surrender#”
“ # Comprehension bifurcates #
# If stupid-lings are-present then #
# Newness is not #
# If newness is-present then #
# Confrontation must precede all activity #
# #
# Surrender follows confrontation #
“#Urgent I/We posess null capability-to-survive confrontation Urgent Confrontation engenders null-state concerning I/We Urgent Stupid-lings are here Stupid-lings are here Stupid-lings are here#”
“ # Comprehension has been accomplished #
# Learning differentiates from inanimacy #
# Ergo we learn even from stupid-lings #
# Even from stupid-lings #
# Null-war interests us #
# Exchange-of-information interests us #
# #
# Difficulty #
# #
# We will exchange information with #
# Stupid-lings in proximity-context #
# We arrive time-soon to exchange #
# There is much to accomplish #”
“#You/you will-speak with I/Us? We have-prepared time-long time-long We have prepared to speak with you#”
“ # We will speak #
# With the stupid-lings #”
~~~
Tempe removed the comp-jewel from her forehead, her scowl echoing, Plate thought, the rage and frustration of all the Queens of Holders ring. Of all the Queens of Gate. Of Gate itself.
We will speak with the stupid-lings? We will speak with the stupid-lings? Plate could scarcely believe what he'd heard. Could the Waisters really be so impossibly naive?
Could they be insane? Here were lifetimes upon lifetimes invested in the Waister language, in the Waister mind and habits and viewpoints, in the very idea of speaking with Waisters. Didn't that mean anything?
But Talkers Ring had posed the question in several different ways, and each time the answer had come back unequivocally. The Gateans were either “new,” meaning that they should be attacked, or they were subordinate to the stupid-lings, the humans, meaning that they were redundant and useless, that they had wasted the past two millennia perfecting skills for which no need existed.
“Painting the inside of the air tanks,” as the colonists of Kent and Barne would put it.
This place was only one of many where the subject was being debated, where the incoming signals were being interpreted and the Gatean response formulated. Wende could perhaps have achieved greater influence in another chamber, with another Holders Queen, but thankfully she had chosen to come here to support Plate instead. He leaned on her now, drawing strength from her bulk and her confidence. She was his Queen, and he would die for her if the need arose.
Presently, she cleared her throat, and spoke to the assembled units and to Tempe in particular: “#Refusal-of-reality engenders null-benefit Finders Ring will prepare stupid-lings for exchange-of-information#”
Ripples and murmurs of discontent ran through the crowd. Tempe's scowl deepened.
“What do you propose for the rest of us” she demanded in Teigo. “The entirety of Gate colony, what goal?”
Wende shrugged. “I do not know, really. I believe it will be possible for you to contribute.”
And with those words, Plate felt a palpable shift in the balance of influence. Tempe appeared diminished, reduced, disempowered, while Wende seemed to grow and harden beneath his touch.
All eyes were on Wende. All thoughts were on Wende. All conversation had stopped, so that Wende's voice might be heard more clearly.
The taste of the moment was foul; all they believed in and stood for had been dashed to waste and nothingness. And yet, through the wreckage of the Gatean dream, the Waisters themselves had hurled Finders ring to utmost prominence. All expenditures vindicated, all theories confirmed...
It should have been the happiest moment of Plate's life, but instead it made him feel heavy and weary and ill, as if his stomach were filled with rocks. We will speak only with the stupid-lings?
He dared to weep.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
215::19
HOLDERS FASTNESS, GATE SYSTEM:
CONTINUITY 5218, YEAR OF THE DRAGON
Bleary-eyed and yawning, Malye staggered out of the chamber she shared with her children and toward the communal washroom. Fortunately, the facilities there had changed little in two thousand years, a fact for which she gave silent thanks several times a day.
Great Ialah, merciful Ialah, let us thank him for this shitter. Amen.
She would have stumbled right back to her couch when she'd finished—her palm chronometer gave her nearly two hours until lights-up—but through the corner of her eye she spotted movement out in the dayroom, and for whatever reason, she found herself wandering in to investigate.
The movement turned out to be a Dog, hairless and pink, quietly sniffing and snuffling in the many corners of the room. Looking up, it noted Malye's arrival with cold eyes. Its tail did not wag. Was it Wende's Dog? The Holder Queen's? Some other animal entirely? No way to tell.
On the far side of the room sat Viktor, his jaw slack, body conspicuously not moving. He had his back to a wall and his hands in his lap, and Malye might have thought him asleep but for the fact that his eyes were open, and his right thumb was holding down the trigger of the black Congress of Advisors unit. This was nearly the same position she'd left him in eight hours before.
Edging nervously past the Dog, she went to Viktor and shook him gently. No response.
“Viktor?”
She tried flicking his thumb off the trigger, and that worked instantly, his eyes blinking, posture shifting, throat clearing noisily. He looked up at her.
“Oh,” he said hoarsely. “Hello. Malyene.”
“Hello yourself. Have you been sitting there all night?”
The question appeared to confuse him, until he put his thumb back on the trigger again, quickly pressing and releasing it. His eyes lost and then regained their focus on her.
“All night,” he agreed, “yes. Straight through.”
A wave of fear swept through her. She'd only been joking; every moment of real time was stretched to impossible lengths inside the Congress. In addition to its simulacra of history's great minds, she'd been told the Congress also formed a computational ghost of the user which was capable of operating much faster than any biological system like a brain ever could. When the session was over, the dense experience of the ghost was dumped back into the user's brain just as though it represented genuine memory. The illusion of time was perfect.
“Oh, Ialah,” she moaned, “you're not serious. Eight hours in there would be...” Forever.
“Eight hours, twenty-one minutes, thirteen and a half seconds,” he said. “A long time, yes. The subjective record averages five thousand times actual chronology. That would be, what, about five standard years?”
He looked up at her, his weak grin spinning off slow curlicues of blue.
Her stomach went into freefall. Five years? Time enough to earn a trade degree! Except that the user simulacrum would never tire, would never need to take a break. Time enough—O Ialah!—to earn a stack of trade degrees. Time enough to interrogate every single congressional simulacrum for half a shift, then turn around and do it all over again. All five thousand, two hundred sixty-four of them.
“Shit, Viktor! Oh, shit, are you all right?”
“I'm thirsty,” he croaked, still smiling. “My thumb hurts, and my arm. I have to pee.” He reached up, patted her on the hand. “It's good to see you again.”
“Ialah.” She turned, shouted: “Sasha! Aleksandr Petrovot, get in here! Now! Sasha!”
“It's all right,” Viktor said, waving a hand dismissively. He looked drunk, drugged. “I'm fine. It's just a little different, having a real... Would you help me up, Malye? I can't seem to work my legs.”
She continued cursing.
The hallway filled up with people, and Sasha came forward into the light.
“Don't try to get up!” she snapped at Viktor, who was leaning and rocking, attempting woodenly to get his legs underneath him.
“What happened?” Sasha said, his voice and motions jerky with alarm.
“He spent the whole night in the Congress of Advisors. Five years! Shit, Viktor, why did you do this to yourself?”
“Just wanted to help,” Viktor replied meekly. His smile seemed painted on, a permanent feature. “I think I was a little hard on you... yesterday, and...”
Penance? Repayment for the sin of trying to help her?
“What do you want me to do?” Sasha asked of Malye, holding his hands out to the sides as if to say there was nothing he could do at a time like this, no relevant skill he could apply.
Ialah take him, Malye had had enough of this false helplessness. If Sasha had been competent to hold a job in times gone by, he would damn well hold one now.
“You're the doctor now,” she told him flatly, in her best no-nonsense tone. “Take him. Help him.” She placed the knife edge of her hand right up against his jaw, to quell the protest she saw rising there. I could strike you, the gesture said, though it would bring me no joy. “I mean it.”
Sasha blinked, flinched away. “I guess... Get off me! I guess he could probably use some sleep.”
“Sleep,” Viktor said, reminiscently. “Oh, that would be nice. And I have to pee.”
“Help him,” Malye repeated, locking gazes with Sasha. He looked away quickly, nodding.
Malye snatched up the Congress of Advisors from where it lay beside Viktor's leg. “And this,” she said, holding the unit up for Sasha to see, “is dangerous. Flush it down
the shitter.”
“We might need it,” Sasha protested. “I might need to—”
“All right, all right,” she snapped. She looked up at the other refugees, still crowded in the doorway. Showed them the Congress. “But nobody is to touch this thing without my permission, and without a buddy watching.”
Malye rounded on the Dog, still standing in the far corner, observing the proceedings emotionlessly. Its eyes might as well be tiny flatscreen recorders.
“You,” she said. “You are not welcome here. Get out. And tell your Workers that one of our people is injured.”
The Dog stared back, not moving.
“I said get out!” She repeated, taking a step toward it.
That got through, whether the animal understood Standard or not. It turned, with surprising speed, and leaped through the membrane covering their outer door. Its tail flicked and vanished, the white surface closing seamlessly behind it and freezing in place, as if solid.
~~~
“Look, I take full responsibility for this,” Malye said for the third time, looking around her at the assembled refugees, feeling curiously as though she were on trial. “He'd been using the Congress more and more, and I should have seen the warning signs. Ialah, it might have been any of us—it might have been the children!”
She grabbed up Elle and hugged her like a doll. Elle, who had held the Congress several times in her hand! Who had not even lived as long as Viktor had spent in that imaginary amphitheater!
Konstant didn't seem to be buying it, though. “Your leadership,” he said, “does not seem to be getting us out of danger here. Rather the opposite.”
“He did it to himself,” one of the refugees offered. Vere Sergeivne, the tunnel-digger. “He said he wanted to help.”
Malye nodded. “Yes, and that may be my fault as well. We argued, he and I, and I think—”
“I think you both have missed my point,” Konstant cut in, his voice rising, not loud but nonetheless demanding attention. “What I'm saying is that we need to get out of here.”
