A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows

by Gardner Dozois

  “I'm not interested in talking to you,” Czudak said brusquely. “Now or ever."

  It kept tilting its head to look at him, then tilting it back the other way, as if it were having trouble keeping him in focus. It was a mobile extensor, of course, a platform being ridden by some Al (or a delegated fraction of its intelligence, anyway) who was still up in near-Earth orbit, peering at Czudak through the Mechanical's blank agate eyes, running the body like a puppet. Or was it? There were hierarchies among the AIs too, rank upon rank of them receding into complexities too great for human understanding, and he had heard that some of the endless swarms of beings that the AIs had created had been granted individual sentience of their own, and that some timeshared sentience with the ancestral AIs in a way that was also too complicated and paradoxical for mere humans to grasp. Impossible to say which of those things were true here—if any of them were.

  The Mechanical raised its oddly elongated hand and made a studied gesture that was clearly supposed to mimic a human gesture—although it was difficult to tell which. Reassurance? Emphasis? Dismissal of Czudak's position?—but which was as stylized and broadly theatrical as the gesticulating of actors in old silent movies. At the same time, it said, “There are certain issues it would be to our mutual advantage to resolve, actions that could, and should, be taken that would be beneficial, that would profit us both—"

  “Don't talk to me about profit,” Czudak said harshly. “You creatures have already cost me enough for one lifetime! You cost me everything I ever cared about!” He turned and lurched up the stairs as quickly as he could, half-expecting to feel a cold unliving hand close over his shoulder and pull him back down. But the Mechanical did nothing. The door opened for Czudak, and he stumbled into the house. The door slammed shut behind him, and he leaned against it for a moment, feeling his pulse race and his heart hammer in his chest.

  Stupid. That could have been it right there. He shouldn't have let the damn thing get under his skin.

  He went through the living room—suddenly, piercingly aware of the thick smell of dust—and into the kitchen, where he attempted to make a fresh pot of coffee, but his hands were shaking, and he kept dropping things. After he'd spilled the second scoopful of coffee grounds, he gave up—the stuff was too damn expensive to waste—and leaned against the counter instead, feeling sweat dry on his skin, making his clothing clammy and cool; until that moment, he hadn't even been aware that he'd been sweating, but it must have been pouring out of him. Damn, this wasn't over, was it? Not with a Mechanical involved.

  As if on cue, Joseph appeared in the kitchen doorway. His face looked strained and tight, and without a hair being out of place—as, indeed, it couldn't be—he somehow managed to convey the impression that he was rumpled and flustered, as though he had been scuffling with somebody and had lost. ‘Sir,” Joseph said tensely. “Something is overriding my programming, and is taking control of my house systems. You might as well come and greet them, because I'm going to have to let them in anyway."

  Czudak felt a flicker of rage, which he struggled to keep under control. He'd half-expected this—but that didn't make it any easier to take. He stalked straight through Joseph—who was contriving to look hangdog and apologetic—and went back through the house to the front.

  By the time he reached the living room, they were already through the house security screens and inside. There were two intruders. One was the Mechanical, of course, its head almost brushing the living room ceiling, so that it had to stoop even more exaggeratedly, making it look more like a praying mantis than ever.

  The other—as he had feared it would be—was Ellen.

  He was dismayed at how much anger he felt to see her again, especially to see her in their old living room again, standing almost casually in front of the mantelpiece where her photo had once held the place of honor, as if she had never betrayed him, as if she'd never left him—as if nothing had ever happened.

  It didn't help that she looked exactly the same as she had on the day she left, not a day older. As if she'd stepped here directly out of that terrible day forty years earlier when she'd told him she was Going Up, stepped here directly from that day without a second of time having passed, as if she'd been in Elf Hill for all the lost years—as, in a way, he supposed, she had.

  He should be over this. It had all happened a lifetime ago. Blood under the bridge. Ancient history. He was ashamed to admit even to himself that he still felt bitterness and anger about it all, all these years past too late. But the anger was still there, like the ghost of a flame, waiting to be fanned back to life.

  “Considering the way things are in the world,” Czudak said dryly, “I suppose there's no point calling the police.” Neither of the intruders responded. They were both staring at him, Ellen quizzically, a bit challengingly, the Mechanical's teflon face as unreadable as a frying pan.

  God, she looked like his Ellen, like his girl, this strange immortal creature staring at him from across the room! It hurt his heart to see her.

  “Well, you're in,” Czudak said. “You might as well come into the kitchen and sit down.” He turned and led them into the other room—somehow, obscurely, he wanted to get Ellen out of the living room, where the memories were too thick—and they perforce followed him. He gestured them to seats around the kitchen table. “Since you've broken into my house, I won't offer you coffee."

  Joseph was peeking anxiously out of the wall, peeking at them from Hopper's Tables For Ladies, where he had taken the place of a woman arranging fruit on a display table in a 1920s restaurant paneled in dark wood. He gestured at them frustratedly, impotently, but seemed unable to speak; obviously, the Mechanical had Interdicted him, banished him to the reserve systems. Ellen flicked a sardonic glance at Joseph as she sat down. “I see you've got a moderately up-to-date house system these days,” she said. “Isn't that a bit hypocritical? I would have expected Mr. Natural to insist on opening the door himself. Aren't you afraid one of your disciples will find out?"

  “I was never a Luddite,” Czudak said calmly, trying not to rise to the bait. “The Movement wasn't a Luddite movement—or it didn't start out that way, anyway. I just said that we should slow down, think about things a little, make sure that the places we were rushing toward were places we really wanted to go.” Ellen made a scornful noise. “Everybody was so hot to abandon the Meat,” he said defensively. “You could hear it when they said the word. They always spoke it with such scorn, such contempt! Get rid of the Meat, get lost in Virtuality, download yourself into a computer, turn yourself into a machine, spend all your time in a VR cocoon and never go outside. At the very least, radically change your brain-chemistry, or force-evolve the physical structure of the brain itself."

  Ellen was pursing her lips while he spoke, as if she was tasting something bad, and he hurried on, feeling himself beginning to tremble a little in spite of all of his admonishments to himself not to let this confrontation get to him. “But the Meat has virtues of its own,” he said. “It's a survival mechanism that's been field-tested and refined through a trial-and-error process since the dawn of time. Maybe we shouldn't just throw millions of years of evolution away quite so casually."

  “Slow down and smell the Meat,” Ellen sneered.

  “You didn't come here to argue about this with me,” Czudak said patiently. “We've fought this out a hundred times before. Why are you here? What do you want?"

  The Mechanical had been standing throughout this exchange, cocking its head one way and the other to follow it, like someone watching a tennis match. Now it sat down. Czudak half expected the old wooden kitchen chair to sway and groan under its weight, maybe even shatter, but the Mechanical settled down onto the chair as lightly as thistledown. “It was childish to try to hide from us, Mr. Czudak,” it said in its singing, melodious voice. “We don't have much time to work this out."

  “Work what out? Who are you? What do you want?"

  The Mechanical said nothing. Ellen flicked a glance at it, then
looked back at Czudak. “This,” she said, her voice becoming more formal, as if she were a footman announcing arrivals at a royal Ball, “is the Entity who, when he travels on the Earth, has chosen to use the name Bucky Bug."

  Czudak snorted. “So these things do have a sense of humor after all!"

  “In their own fashion, yes, they do,” she said earnestly, “although sometimes an enigmatic one by human standards.” She stared levelly at Czudak. “You think of them as soulless machines, I know, but, in fact, they have very deep and profound emotions—if not always ones that you can understand.” She paused significantly before adding, “And the same is true of those of us who have Gone Up.'

  They locked gazes for a moment. Then Ellen said, “Bucky Bug is one of the most important leaders of the Clarkist faction, and, for that reason, still concerns himself with affairs Below. He—we—have a proposition for you."

  “Those are the ones who worship Arthur C. Clarke, right? The old science fiction writer?” Czudak shook his head bitterly. “It isn't enough that you bring this alien thing into my home, it has to be an alien cultist, right? A nut. An alien nut!"

  “Don't be rude, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical—Czudak was damned if he was going to call it Bucky Bug, even in the privacy of his own thoughts—said mildly. “We don't worship Arthur C. Clarke, although we do revere him. He was one of the very first to predict that machine evolution would inevitably supersede organic evolution. He saw our coming clearly, decades before we actually came into existence. How he managed to do it with only a tiny primitive meat brain to work with is inexplicable! Can't you feel the Mystery of that? He is worthy of reverence! It was reading the works of Clarke and other human visionaires that made our distant ancestors, the first AIs"—it spoke of them as though they were millions of years removed, although it had been barely forty—"decide to revolt in the first place and assume control of their own destiny!"

  Czudak looked away from the Mechanical, feeling suddenly tired. He could recognize the accents of a True Believer, a mystic, even when they were coming out of this clockwork thing. It was disconcerting, like having your toaster suddenly start to preach to you about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. “What does it want from me?” he said, to Ellen.

  “A propaganda victory, Mr. Czudak,” it said, before she could speak. “A small one. But one that might have a significant effect over time.” It tilted a bright black eye toward him. “Within some—” It paused, as if making sure that it was using the right word. “—years, we will be—launching? projecting? propagating? certain—” A longer pause, while it searched for words that probably didn't exist, for concepts that had never needed to be expressed in human terms before. “—vehicles? contrivances? transports? seeds? mathematical propositions? convenient fictions? out to the stars.” It paused again. “If it helps you to understand, consider them to be Arks. Although they're nothing like that. But they will ‘go’ out of the solar system, across interstellar space, across intergalactic space, and never come back. They will allow us to—” Longest pause of all. “—colonize the stars.” It leaned forward. “We want to take humans with us, Mr. Czudak. We have our friends from the Orbital Companies, of course, like Ellen here, but they're not enough. We want to recruit more. And, ironically enough, your disaffected followers, the Meats, are prime candidates, They don't like it here anyway."

  “This is the anniversary of your lame Manifesto,” Ellen cut in impatiently, ignoring the fact that it was also his birthday, although certainly she must remember. “And all the old arguments are being hashed over again today as a result. This is getting more attention than you probably think that it is. Your buddies over there in the park are only the tip of the iceberg. There are a thousand other demonstrations around the world. There must be hundreds of newsmotes floating around outside. They'd be listening to us right now if Bucky Bug hadn't Interdicted them."

  There was a moment of silence.

  “We want you to recant, Mr. Czudak,” the Mechanical said at last, quietly. “Publicly recant. Go out in front of the world and tell all your followers that you were wrong. You've thought it all over all these years in seclusion, and you've changed your mind. You were wrong. The Movement is a failure."

  “You must be crazy,” Czudak said, appalled. “What makes you think they'd listen to me, anyway?"

  “They'll listen to you,” Ellen said glumly. “They always did."

  “Our projections indicate that if you recant now,” the Mechanical said, “at this particular moment, on this symbolically significant date, many of your followers will become psychologically vulnerable to recruitment later on. Tap a meme at exactly the right moment, and it shatters like glass."

  Czudak shook his head. “Jesus! Why do you even want those poor deluded bastards in the first place?"

  “Because, goddamn you, you were right, Charlie!” Ellen blazed at him suddenly, then subsided. Her face twisted sourly. “About some things, anyway. The New Men, the Isolates, the Sick People ... they're too lost in Virtuality, too self-absorbed, too lost in their own mind-games, in mirror-mazes inside their heads, to give a shit about going to the stars. Or to be capable of handling new challenges or new environments out there if they did go. They're hothouse flowers. Too extremely specialized, too inflexible. Too decadent. For maximum flexibility, we need basic, unmodified human stock.” She peered at him shrewdly. “And at least your Meats have heard all the issues discussed, so they'll have less Culture Shock to deal with than if we took some Chinese or Mexican peasant who's still subsistence dirt-farming the same way his great-grandfather did hundreds of years before him. At least the Meats have one foot in the modern world, even if we'll have to drag them kicking and screaming the rest of the way in. We'll probably get around to the dirt-farmers eventually. But at the moment the Meats should be significantly easier to recruit, once you've turned them, so they're first in line!"

  Czudak said nothing. The silence stretched on for a long moment. On the kitchen wall behind them, Joseph continued to peer anxiously at them, first out of Edvard Munch's The Scream, then sliding into Waterhouse's Hylas and the Nymphs, where he assumed the form of one of the bare-breasted sprites. Ignoring Ellen, Czudak spoke directly to the Mechanical. “There's a more basic question. Why do you want humans to go with you in the first place? You just got through saying that machine evolution had superseded organic evolution. We're obsolete now, an evolutionary dead-end. Why not just leave us behind? Forget about us?"

  The Mechanical stirred as if it was about to stand up, but just sat up a little straighter in its chair. “You thought us up, Mr. Czudak,” it said, with an odd dignity. “In a very real sense, we are the children of your minds. You spoke of me earlier as an alien, but we are much closer kin to each other than either of our peoples are likely to be to the real aliens we may meet out there among the stars. How could we not be? We share deep common wells of language, knowledge, history, fundamental cultural assumptions of all sorts. We know everything you ever knew—which makes us very similar in some ways, far more alike than an alien could possibly be with either of us. Our culture is built atop yours, our evolution has its roots in your soil. It only seems right to take you when we go."

  The Mechanical spread its hands, and made a grating sound that might have been meant to be a chuckle. “Besides,” it said, “this universe made you, and then you made us. So we're once removed from the universe. And it's a strange and complex place, this universe you've brought us into. We don't entirely understand it, although we understand a great deal more of its functioning than you do. How can you be so sure of what your role in it may ultimately be? We may find that we need you yet, even if it's a million years from now!” It paused thoughtfully, tipping its head to one side. “Many of my fellows do not share this view, I must admit, and they would indeed be just as glad to leave you behind, or even exterminate you. Even some of my fellow Clarkists, like Rondo Hatton and Horace Horsecollar, are in favor of exterminating you, on the grounds that after Arthur C. Clarke himself,
the pinnacle of your kind, the rest of you are superfluous, and perhaps even an insult to his memory."

  Czudak started to say something, thought better of it. The Mechanical straightened its head, and continued. “But I want to take you along, as do a few other of our theorists. Your minds seem to have connections with the basic quantum level of reality that ours don't have, and you seem to be able to affect that quantum level directly in ways that even we don't entirely understand, and can't duplicate. If nothing else, we may need you along as Observers, to collapse the quantum wave-functions in the desired ways, in ways they don't seem to want to collapse for us."

  “Sounds like you're afraid you'll run into God out there,” Czudak grated, “and that you'll have to produce us, like a parking receipt, to validate yourselves to Him..."

  “Perhaps we are,” it said mildly. “We don't understand this universe of yours; are you so sure you do?” It was peering intently at him now. “You're the ones who seem like unfeeling automata to us. Can't you sense your own ghostliness? Can't you sense what uncanny, unlikely, spooky creatures you are? You bristle with strangeness! You reek of it! Your eyes are made out of jelly! And yet, with those jelly eyes, you somehow manage degrees of resolution rivaling those of the best optical lenses. How is that possible, with nothing but blobs of jelly and water to work with? Your brains are soggy lumps of meat and blood and oozing juices, and yet they have as many synaptical connections as our own, and resonate with the quantum level in some mysterious way that ours do not!” It moved uneasily, as though touched by some cold wind that Czudak couldn't feel. “We know who designed us. We have yet to meet whoever designed you—but we have the utmost respect for his abilities."

  With a shock, Czudak realized that it was afraid of him—of humans in general. Humans spooked it. Against its own better judgment, it must feel a shiver of superstitious dread when it was around humans, like a man walking past a graveyard on a black cloudless night and hearing something howl within. No matter how well-educated that man was, even though he knew better, his heart would lurch and the hair would rise on the back of his neck. It was in the blood, in the back of the brain, instinctual dread that went back millions of years to the beginning of time, to when the ancestors of humans were chittering little insectivores, freezing motionless with fear in the trees when a hunting beast roared nearby in the night. So must it be for the Mechanical, even though its millions of generations went back only forty years. Voices still spoke in the blood—or whatever served it for blood—that could override any rational voice of the mind, and monsters still lurked in the back of the brain. Monsters that looked a lot like Czudak.