“I don’t hate you.”
“Yes, you do. I feel different things than you. You’re hard-wired to be disgusted by things that are different, and your instinct is to kill that which disgusts you.”
William sighed and fidgeted. “I don’t hate you,” he repeated.
“You might be one of the few, then,” Gates-15 said. “I’ve had to live among humans for a long time.” The professor eyed his dangling feet and picked at his fingernails. “I may hate you, though. If Del Casal somehow manages to make you into a counterfeit Numen, you’ll be among the most prized of all things to the Puppets: divine and possessed of independent will, the way the first Numen were. And then I would hate you.”
“Because I could abuse your people and they’d like it?”
“No,” Gates-15 said quietly. “They would like anything you gave them, whether it be kindness or cruelty. I would hate you because I would be outside again. You’ll have unwillingly joined a world I can’t join for all my wanting.”
“You would be a slave again,” William said.
“Have you read Milton’s Paradise Lost?”
Belisarius and William shook their heads.
“It’s a bit of a reborn classic among the Puppets. It has a number of messages, but the important take-away is the nature of Lucifer’s suffering. To be out of the presence of God is to suffer.”
“You don’t suffer now,” William said.
“Not biochemically, the way my people would.” The Puppet slipped from his chair. “Good day, Mister Arjona. Good day, Mister Gander.” He left Del Casal’s lab.
“He’s one creepy little bugger,” William whispered.
Belisarius sat in the vacated chair.
“It’s hard to con a mark who doesn’t want money,” William said.
Belisarius extended his magnetic field, enough for Del Casal to notice on some of his equipment, but also enough to detect anyone in the hallway. Gates-15 was gone.
“You taught me that everyone is greedy for something, Will. The Puppets want technology, military power, legitimacy, and most of all, their divinities. You’re the distraction.”
“They still give me the shivers.”
“You should read their theologies.”
“I have time.” He gave a barking laugh that turned into a cough. He patted Belisarius’s shoulder. “Go on. You’ve got a lot to do.”
Belisarius accessed an introductory text to Puppet theology on a reader, gave it to William and left. He wandered pensively, passing close to the hallway leading to Cassandra’s room. It had been a barracks once. Robots had been working at refurbishing it and building a suite for her. After a few false starts, he stopped at her door and knocked.
“Come in, Bel,” she called tonelessly.
He stepped in. Cassandra sat in front of an array of glimmering holographic calculations that lit her face. She did not look at him.
“Are you in savant?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said flatly.
He stepped closer. This wasn’t the Cassandra he wanted. Right now, she wouldn’t be able to meet his eyes, welcome any attention he offered, or even respond with warmth.
Anglo-Spanish genetic manipulation had made caged monsters of the Homo eridanus, religious slaves of the Homo pupa and intellectual automata of the Homo quantus. All things considered, humans had done a terrible job of directing their own evolution.
“Do you want to talk?” he asked.
“I’m working,” she said.
He took her pad from the desk, wrote Call me when you come out of savant and set it before her. In savant, she would note the pattern of movements, know what he was up to. But that wouldn’t stop the little jolts of serotonin as she imagined models of the eleven-dimensional space-time geometry of the Puppet Axis Mundi. Only when she grew too tired to continue in savant would she return to the world, and read the note again, with little memory of him having been here.
Belisarius had his own room, near the surface. The dome of the ceiling bulged into the vacuum on the surface of Ptolemy. Although it was an indifferent view of the stars, he’d found a couple of chairs that reclined enough to look out the whole dome. At this time of day, it was nothing more than star-spattered blackness. Even when Epsilon Indi rose in a few hours, it would not be more than a bright star among many. He didn’t come for the daylight. He liked to look at the stars. Their vast numbers touched deep parts of him.
The conversations with Saint Matthew and William had disturbed him.
The Puppet served, worshipped. The Homo eridanus hated their benthic environment, but they could live nowhere else. They were programmed, like him. He both loved and hated the quantum fugue. The mental power and the deep insight thrilled him. Yet the tremendous loneliness and utter isolation, even from himself, repelled him. He was moth to candle. They all were.
The blinking red light of an old satellite hurried across the arc of his vision. Even without savantism, his brain calculated the orbit. If he sat here for two point seven one hours, he would see it again, in exactly the same spot. And in high, synchronous orbit, with green and red running lights, were the two old wormhole-capable freighters he’d leased.
Beyond those two ships yawned nothing but stars for thousands of lightyears. His ocular augments could collect other wavelengths of light. He could step down X-rays and ultraviolet and step up radio and microwaves, bringing them all into the visual range, while telescoping his vision until blooming flowers filled the immense emptiness on the surface of his sight. And yet, like a fractal, for every starry point, infinite volumes of hard vacuum lay just beyond, pulling at him. The Homo quantus lived in those infinite spaces,dreamed in that emptiness, where the quantum world frothed without observers. It was a lonely home—not because they were alone, but because in those spaces, they themselves became no one at all.
Much later, there was a knock at his door. Without waiting for an answer, Cassandra entered. The dark curls of her hair were matted and her shoulders sagged.
“I’d never imagined your life to be this bad,” she said.
“What?”
“Schemes. Chasing money. Lying to people.”
An uncomfortable weight settled in his stomach. “What happened?”
“Nothing.” She approached, stretching her arms. “You’ve assembled a bunch of outcasts to commit a crime. I don’t belong here.”
“Maybe you don’t. This is just an interlude. A necessary price to pay for experimental results.”
“I can’t fit in my head that we were in the Garret, and now we’re here,” she said. “I can’t believe I’m part of a confidence scheme.”
“Do you ever look at the stars?” Belisarius asked.
She neared, looking up.
“It feels so narrow just to look at the points of light without understanding the interrelationships,” she said. “How long has it been since you’ve looked at the stars from within the fugue?”
“The fugue will kill me, Cassie. It won’t kill you, but it will kill me.”
“Is that a lie?”
“Short of dying in the fugue, there’s no way for me to prove it. “You either believe me or you don’t.”
“I can half believe you. I can half doubt you. Doubt and belief are just another way of stating probability.” It was a very Homo quantus response. She stared up at the stars for so long, he wondered if the conversation had ended. “I sometimes stay in the fugue longer, soaking in it, just to see the interference of starlight. It’s awe-inspiring.”
“The recordings your brain makes are awe-inspiring,” he corrected. “You never really experience seeing it because you’re not there.”
“Don’t you miss it?”
“I miss the fugue the way an alcoholic misses vodka.”
“You’re supposed to like it. Like food. Like sex.”
“It’s programmed to hit the pleasure centers.”
“You say that like it’s a bad thing. Evolution created a set of algorithms that, interacting together,
created consciousness in humans. And yet those algorithms still link food and pleasure, hunger and pain. If you were creating a wholly synthetic being, and you programmed them to be happy when they’re fed, how is that different? The concept of programming is meaningless. Does it matter who made me love to look at the stars from within the fugue? All that matters is that I do.”
It was dark in the dome. Starlight was a poor lamp. Maybe she could see his face. He dilated his pupils to draw in enough light to see her in blurry smears of gray.
“I would love to look at the stars with you,” he said, “like this. As ourselves. In the fugue we’re not together.”
She sighed loudly and sat straight in the other chair, regarding him in the dark.
“Why don’t you try subjectivity more often?” he said. He posed the question softly, an undertone of pity in his voice.
“Maybe I am, right now,” she said, “but I’m not seeing any value, or quid pro quo.”
He sat up, close to her, staring into eyes lit by starlight. For a long moment they were frozen. They’d been so close once. And it was true that he had left. He had left her. The Garret. He’d run away from the fugue. No wonder there was no caring in her anymore, no softness. No. There was a bit. An invitation to reclaim his heritage. But not an invitation to get closer to her. He looked away. He rose, struggling with his words.
“The Homo quantus look at the cosmos, in its immensity and its interacting detail,” he said. “We look at the history of the universe, and we peer into the future, but what have we done with our insight? We’ve turned observation and theorizing into a license for inaction and hiding from the world. We’ve stopped moving.”
“We’re evolving every generation, Bel.”
“Evolving means becoming more adapted to an ecological niche, interacting better with it, Cassie. Instead, we’re forsaking all environments. We tell ourselves we’re evolving when we engage in the busyness of rewriting DNA, mixing and matching invented genes. We grow new neurons on experimental templates. But are we really evolving, or are these all just permutations on a single idea?”
“How can you compare what I am now to what theproject made five generations ago?” she demanded. “I have new senses! So do you. Those senses are as world-changing as the evolution of sight, Bel. We’re not going to finish becoming in one generation or in five. Our new senses were built for specific uses, but one day they could be repurposed for something entirely unseen, for the growth you say you want! After mutation, new ecological niches open up.”
“We’re enslaved by new instincts and the intellectual comforts we give ourselves,” Belisarius said. “We sit in the Garret, see everything nearby, and we’re not only satisfied but addicted to what we have in front of us. We won’t have room to grow until we go out there. Look at the data I found in the Expeditionary Force, Cass, just one Homo quantus! We need to get out, among humanity, or we’ll wither. I want to change. I want to break free, but I can’t do it alone.”
“You’re so angry at being engineered, Bel, like you’re the only one who can possibly be right!” she said, her own anger rising. “You’re not the only one who was programmed and some of us, many of us, love it. I’m not fighting my instincts. Maybe you wouldn’t be so miserable if you weren’t carrying this fear and anger around. You’re hiding from the things we fought for.”
He felt himself flinching. No one had talked to him like this. Maybe no one else could have.
“I am free, Bel,” she said, “and it doesn’t matter that you and I call different things free. I’m happy and you can be too. Once you and I were something, Bel. And when you offered me the data, and the chance to learn something, I thought you were offering more.”
“I am offering more.”
“You can’t offer to diminish me and call it more, Bel.”
Her footfalls echoed. The opening door slashed light across the floor until the darkness swallowed it again. Then only the stars, and their vast enshrouding emptiness, were with him.
Chapter Nineteen
TWO MORNINGS LATER, Belisarius heard low singing in the kitchen. He was surprised to be able to say good morning to both Marie and Saint Matthew when he got there. They seemed to be civil, perhaps even more. Marie was deep in the guts of the food processing system and kept singing a twenty-third century love song. Belisarius’s brain matched the patterns: an old hit called “Share my Kicking Boots,” a fusion of the second Indonesian Rock Revival and the British Punk Retreat.
Saint Matthew blessed Belisarius from atop the body he rode. The great, wrinkled head from Caravaggio’s Saint Matthew and the Angel floated in holographic stillness. Smaller automata scurried about him. A miniature holographic head, also of Saint Matthew, but with long curly hair, a beard and a relaxed expression, bobbed above each.
“They’re not Caravaggio,” Belisarius said. The pattern of brush strokes was different.
“Paolo Veronese,” Saint Matthew said. “I wouldn’t use Veronese for myself, of course, but for my automata, it adds the right touch of softness, don’t you think?” Each of the tiny holographic heads looked up at Belisarius with expectant, waxy smiles.
“Nice touch,” Belisarius said uncertainly. “Are any of these automata the final forms for the mission?”
“Prototypes and proofs of principle,” Saint Matthew said. Belisarius moved carefully to avoid stepping on them.
“Are you wearing clothes?” Belisarius asked. A long strip of shiny cloth hung from the metal body’s neck, nearly to the waist.
“Miss Phocas noticed that the unfinished body didn’t match properly with the godliness of my face,” Saint Matthew said. “She made me a stole out of one of her scarves.”
Belisarius poured himself a coffee. “That seems out of character.”
Saint Matthew turned the holographic head to Marie, who smiled innocently. The AI smoothed the stole on his body with articulated metal hands, but the expression on his face had become less carefree.
“It’s so I can look the part when I take confession,” Saint Matthew said.
“When you have some converts,” Belisarius said.
“You’ll be the first.”
“Marie,” Belisarius said, leaning around Saint Matthew, “this cloth isn’t explosive, is it?”
Saint Matthew spun the holographic head to face her, eyebrows rising incongruously.
“Bel! Would I do that?” Marie looked hurt. “And how would I get that past Matt? He’s not stupid. He would know.”
The holographic head swung back to Belisarius. Belisarius squinted at the weave and rubbed it between careful fingers.
“Have you checked it?” he asked.
“Of course I did,” Saint Matthew said.
“Feels funny.”
“It’s synthetic, but certainly not explosive,” Saint Matthew said.
“She’s the best explosives expert I’ve ever met,” Belisarius said doubtfully.
Saint Matthew stroked the cloth. “I did need a stole. I’ve analyzed it. It’s not explosive. If she’s playing another trick, she’s playing on her own reputation to get you to convince me to discard something I like. Is that what you’re doing?” The stern head swivelled at Marie.
“What I’ve been doing is thinking about Bel’s love problem,” Marie said.
“I don’t have a love problem.”
“Sure you do. You and Cassandra have a past and you’re both weird and intense in the same way. You’re made for each other. You need a grand, romantic gesture to win her over. A song.”
“I don’t have a love problem.”
Marie rolled her eyes and restarted the food processing equipment. The smell of baking bread started filling the kitchen, laced with an organic odor.
“What are you cooking?” Belisarius asked.
“He’s in denial,” Marie said to the painted head. “Stop changing the subject! I’m trying new recipes.”
“That doesn’t smell like food,” Belisarius said.
“It isn’t,” Ma
rie said.
Saint Matthew moved erratically. He picked gingerly at the stole, which appeared to have stuck itself to the body he was riding. The painted eyebrows rose in alarm. Belisarius backed away. Marie watched with narrowed eyes.
“That’s far enough, Bel,” she said. “It won’t be big.”
“What won’t be big?” Saint Matthew squeaked.
A loud pop accompanied a flash from under the stole. Smoke puffed from the complex moving parts of the body as it slumped against the workbench and then to the floor.
“Yup,” she said. “It works.”
Saint Matthew was shrieking. “My brain! Someone protect my brain! I can’t move!” The small automata scuttled to the slumping body and removed the service band from the neck.
“See?” Marie said to Belisarius, waving black smoke away. “It wasn’t explosive. It passes all the tests. It only becomes an explosive when complexed with a particular vaporized organic.”
“This isn’t even needed for the mission,” Belisarius said.
“I have hobbies. Why don’t you have any hobbies, Bel?”
Saint Matthew squealed as little automata beat an escape with him out the door. The panicked expression on the holographic head by Caravaggio bobbed in a wash of tiny holographic heads by Veronese, each accented with eyebrow-elevated surprise.
Chapter Twenty
THE SCARECROW ASSIGNED to the Epsilon Indi system was typical of its kind. Its face was crudely drawn in black paint on a head of gray steel cloth tied close about the neck. An ill-fitting carbon-weave shirt hid unknown devices. Dark, inscrutable wires emerged from between sleeve and glove. Bulky pants pinched at its ankles over articulated steel shoes. The Scarecrow had come to Oler with one of his senior officers to assess ambiguous reports from the world of the Puppets. Anomalous communication patterns. Excessive false leads. The silence of some of its informants in the Puppet Free City. More than one party was hiding something.
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