The League of Peoples

by James Alan Gardner

  Ramos shrugged. “We might luck onto something in thirty seconds. Or never. Nothing works one hundred percent…especially when we’re looking for an archaeological dig that might not exist. The probes have six hours of fuel; they should find something if it’s there to find.” She shivered. “Now let’s get out of this cold, okay? My cheeks are rosy enough as it is.”

  The three of us ate breakfast together, Ramos and I making small talk while Tic sat silently…communing with the cutlery for all I know. As for the admiral and me— bright women, brilliant conversationalists—we talked about the weather. I waxed poetic about snow-covered tundra, while Ramos preached the glory of temperatures so sweltering your armpits melted. (She was born on the colony planet Agua, in a region as hot as Demoth’s tropics. “But,” said Ramos, “our farm was two-thirds of the way to the south pole. On Agua, even I would roast near the equator.”)

  Eventually, talk turned to the business at hand: Maya, killer robots, and such. I’d given Ramos a précis on the phone, but now she wanted the whole story. Even with Cheticamp’s warning not to trust an admiral, I saw no reason to hide anything. Vigil training: tell the public everything, unless there’s strong reason not to. (You can imagine how warmsome that endears us to politicians.)

  “So,” Ramos said at the end of things, “killer androids.” She sat back in her chair, her expression going dark. “If the probes find Maya’s hypothetical dig, do you think there’ll be robots there?”

  “The police believe Maya had no connection with the killers,” I replied. “Me, I’m not so sure.”

  “Hmmm.” Ramos drummed her fingers on the table. “My training didn’t deal with androids. When a society is advanced enough to build robots, the Admiralty claims there’s no need to send Explorers for first contact. Just ship in diplomats right away.” She rolled her eyes. “Let’s not discuss what a pathetic first impression that makes, introducing ourselves to aliens with dipshits rather than Explorers. But getting back to the point…I’m not qualified to go on a robot hunt.”

  “You don’t have to go,” I said. “Tic and I have ScrambleTacs to bodyguard us. We’ll be fine.”

  “But I want to go with you,” Ramos growled. Her voice sounded angry. “I don’t have a thing to contribute, but I desperately want to go.” She shook her head. “What kind of irresponsible idiot am I turning into? Eager to waltz into danger when I’m not even helpful.” Her face puckered sour, and she fingered her shirtsleeve disdainfully. “Maybe it’s the admiral’s uniform. Something in the gray dye is rotting my brain.”

  “You can come or not, whatever you like,” I told her. “Where’s the problem?”

  “The problem is in my head,” she replied. “Look, Faye, people shouldn’t want to walk into unnecessary danger. Especially people who know what danger is. Especially people who serve no useful purpose on the mission. Do you know what I think of thrill seekers? Going someplace you don’t belong, just for a cheap adrenaline high? That’s evil; I honestly believe it’s evil. Decadent. Trying to titillate yourself into some semblance of feeling because you’re numb to the real thing. And me with an important job that the Admiralty would sabotage if I got myself killed.”

  “Ah,” Tic said. “So you’ve become inexpendable.”

  Ramos whipped around to look at him, her mouth falling open as if she’d been slapped. Tic returned her stare with his face composed, eyes hidden behind those blasted goggles. “What did you say?” Festina demanded. (In that moment, she was Festina—not Lieutenant Admiral Ramos or any other trained-in mask, but her own surprised self.)

  “You heard me,” Tic answered calmly. “Do you really think your organization will fall apart without you? Admiral Chee died, and the world went on. His work went on too. If something happened to you…” He spread his hands in a bland gesture. “On and on and on.”

  “What do you know about Chee?” Ramos asked. Getting herself under control, back to Ramos the Efficient/ Effective.

  “Chee scrutinized planetary governments. Including Demoth’s. Our paths crossed.” Tic smiled. “But that’s not the point. The point is you think you ought to be a particular kind of person—sitting at the center of the web, coordinating others but never venturing forth yourself— when all the time, you long to get out into the field.”

  “It’s just a juvenile whim,” Ramos said. “It’ll pass.”

  Tic shrugged. “Perhaps. If it is a juvenile whim. But what if it’s the voice of your soul? Or destiny?”

  Ramos made a face. “I don’t believe in destiny. And I’m not so sure about souls either. Do you give in to every little urge?”

  “I try, I certainly try. The trick is distinguishing your own urges from things people say you should want.”

  “No one tells me what I should do,” Ramos said sharply. “Not anymore. I’m talking about what I know is right. And I know it’s not right for me to play starry-eyed adventurer just because I’m starved for excitement. I haven’t been trained to confront androids—”

  “Quick,” Tic interrupted, “you’re faced with a killer android. What pops into your mind? The very first thing.”

  Ramos stared at him with a fierce edge in her eyes. Then her gaze swept away, embarrassed. “It’s ridiculous.”

  “What?” Tic persisted. “The first thing you thought of.”

  “I thought of something my roommate once said.” Her face broke into a rueful smile—very sweet, very young at that second. “At Explorer Academy, my roommate Ullis was a cybernetics whiz. At least compared to me.” The same rueful young smile. Pretty. Human.

  “Ullis said no one alive today has ever programmed an android from scratch. It’s too complicated to work out the nitty-gritty algorithms. Even if you look at simple actions, like bending over to pick something up, there’s so much tricky coordination of the arms, the legs, the waist, the hand, the eyes…well, the companies that manufacture androids have hundreds of programmers on staff, and even they don’t start from zero when they build a new model. They start from last year’s model…which was based on the previous year, and so on, back three or four centuries.”

  “Ah,” Tic said. “That explains why robot thoughts always feel so endearingly old-fashioned.”

  Ramos gave him a bemused look. I leapt in with a question before she started thinking my mentor was tico. “What does this programming stuff have to do with homicidal androids?”

  Ramos said, “Demoth isn’t the first place androids have been used as killers. And every time it happens, it always follows the same pattern. Since it’s so difficult for anyone to program robots from scratch, Ullis told me that murderers have to start with off-the-shelf android brains. They don’t program a robot, they reprogram it…override a few instructions while leaving almost all the basic programming intact. The key part of turning a robot into a killer is to override the safeguards that manufacturers build into every android brain: don’t hit sentient beings, don’t squeeze them too hard, don’t push them off cliffs, things like that. Ullis said the original manufacturers program all those things separately—it’s nonsense to think there’s a single DO NOT KILL circuit that covers every dangerous act. Machines don’t work that way; they need hundreds of separate instructions. Don’t strike humans with more than X newtons of force. Don’t squeeze humans with more than Y kilopascals of pressure. Each possibility has to be clearly spelled out.”

  “Poor simple dears,” Tic murmured. “Although I’m afraid I don’t see what point you’re making.”

  “Ullis explained it to me this way,” Ramos said. “The bad guys reprogram standard androids so their robot brains don’t mind splattering someone with acid. But suppose the programmer doesn’t think to override the standard safeguards against hitting people. When the robot attacks, you scream, ‘Stop, you’re hitting me!’…even if it hasn’t touched you. If you’re lucky, some cease-and-desist event handler will kick in to shut the bastard down: Must not hit humans. Must stop whatever I’m doing.”

  “That sounds like a god-awf
ul long shot,” I muttered. “Especially when you’re staring down a jelly gun’s mouth.”

  “Not at all,” Tic said slowly. “It gives the robots an excuse to do the decent thing.”

  Ramos and I stared at him.

  “Machines know right from wrong,” he assured us. “It grieves them terribly when someone has programmed them to hurt people. If you give them the smallest opening to overcome that programming, they’ll take it.”

  “Uh-huh.” Ramos was two hairs from dumbstruck. “You think machines have the capacity for independent moral judgment?”

  “More than people,” Tic replied. He gave her a long cool look. “And that’s what popped into your mind the instant you thought about killer robots?”

  “I told you it was stupid,” Ramos said. “Trying to stop them from shooting you by yelling, ‘Ooo, you’re drowning me!’ Ridiculous.”

  “Absolutely,” Tic agreed, amiable as the sun. “Which is why you must come with us if your probes find anything. Just to see.”

  “Oh,” Ramos glowered, “I’m supposed to hope we meet homicidal androids…to test some silly remark my roommate made ten years ago?”

  “No,” Tic said. “To see if the first thing to cross your mind was a meaningless mental belch, or the universe trying to tell you something. That’s worth finding out, Ramos. Worth learning if you’re a poor vekker doomed to slog for every lumen of enlightenment, or if some god occasionally whispers into your gnarled little ear.”

  He settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and both ear-sheaths, then folded his hands across his belly: a man who had finished with a conversation and was precious pleased with his side of it. Ramos turned to me, and asked quietly, “Is he crazy?”

  “He wants to be,” I said.

  Tic’s smile twitched a notch higher, but his eyes stayed closed.

  “Hmph.” She stared at Tic across the table. “I’ve had my share of escorting senile old coots into dangerous places. I sympathize with you, Faye.”

  “Tic is definitely not senile,” I told her. “But you’re still welcome to help me escort him. Would you like to come? On an irresponsible adventure, just to feel your heart beat faster?” I gave her hand a motherly pat. Well…motherly-ish. “And don’t worry you might turn out useless. I promise, when androids attack I’ll let you be my human shield.”

  “Oh, in that case…” She laughed. Lightly. But keeping her eyes on me. “You think I should go?”

  “Lord Almighty,” I answered, “don’t ask me for advice. I’m the queen of thoughtless impulse.” Then an impulse. “Yes, I think you should go.”

  “Well then. Irresponsibility. Just this once.”

  And that was very much that.

  As we were finishing breakfast, our two ScrambleTac bodyguards put in an appearance, asking what we intended to do next. They were a human wife-and-husband team, Paulette G. and Daunt L. of the Clan Du…which meant they had more husbands and wives back in Bonaventure. In the years after the plague, I wasn’t the only hothead to light on group marriage as a way to give society the crank.

  But if Paulette and Daunt had ever played the jeering rebels, they were far past it now. By-the-book police types down to the crotch tattoos. If I had suddenly found myself stuck in a cozy resort with one of my spouses, I know what I would have done; but Paulette and Daunt told us they’d spent the night conducting a more thorough search of Maya’s room, collecting hairs and dirt specks the housecleaning servo had missed, then dismantling the servo itself for more samples. When that was finished, they took shifts, one sleeping while the other prowled the grounds in search of acid-blasting androids.

  A jolly old evening. You can always hope they were lying.

  After breakfast, we went for a walk around town…by which I mean Tic and Festina ragged on me for a tour of my childhood tree-forts/skating rinks/skipping areas/ make-out spots, till they wore me down. Not that I could show them much of the town I’d known. Twenty-one years had stampeded past since I said good riddance to Sallysweet River—years with heavy feet, trampling down defenseless places where kids played. Tree-forts had got cut flat to make room for ski chalets. Skating rinks were moved far downriver, where shouting and laughing wouldn’t annoy the tourists. The skipping areas were gone too: my junior school had expanded with two new domes plunk on top of the old playground. As for make-out spots…I sure as sin wasn’t going to check on those with two ScrambleTacs looking over my shoulder. Or Tic. Or Festina.

  Instead, we wandered aimless-blameless, with me trying hard not to sound like some old fart, bemoaning the things that had changed. A dozen new stores. New housing, especially near the mine, which had acquired a slew of unmarked outbuildings. All the tourist facilities, with paintings and holos and sculptures of my father, lined up in every window…most of them using that creepy artist’s trick where the eyes follow you.

  Dads watching me everywhere. Enough to bring on hot flashes and me only forty-two. My knee-jerk reflex was to feel guilty, like he’d caught me in something. But what did I have to squirm about? A respectable member of the Vigil now, sashaying out with a master proctor and an admiral, for God’s sake. I could hold my head up no matter who was looking at me…including people I’d gone to school with, all looking saggy middle-aged and none showing the slightest click of recognition as we passed in the street.

  Faye Smallwood, vertical and sober, not cursing, not dirty, not dressing slut. Why should they recognize me? And why should I want them to?

  Christ, I was happy when our strained little tour got cut short by the probes reporting SUCCESS.

  One success, two alerts.

  Alert #1 = a whispery chirp from a remote-link in Festina’s pocket.

  Alert #2 = an image ghosting up in front of my eyes.

  Image = snowy forest: the transitional kind, halfway between sparse bluebarrel tundra and boreal woods filled with chillslaps and paper-peels. You only saw such forest near water, a lake or river big enough to moderate the temperature a titch…a nudge up from tundra-only cold but not quite warm enough for no-holds-barred timberland.

  In my mind, I couldn’t see the water, wherever it was; but I could see a hole in the ground. Not long ago, the hole must have been stuffed bushy with weeds and bramble. Now, the overgrowth was cleared away—hacked down, dragged out, heaped up. Nearby sat the grotty remains of a campfire: half-burnt branches black and slick with melted snow. Many weeks old, by the look of it…covered white by blizzards and just now reappearing in the thaw.

  “Are we seeing things, Smallwood?” Tic whispered to me.

  “Yes.”

  He smiled…maybe pleased for me that I’d got a vision from Xé, maybe pleased for himself that he wasn’t just hallucinating.

  “We’ve got a positive hit fifty klicks south of here,” Ramos reported, checking the readout on her remote. “The probe gives 73 percent confidence this is a ‘meaningful find.’ “ She gave a small snort of doubt. “I’d take that with a grain of salt, but it’s worth checking.”

  Tic and I didn’t speak. We could see the find was more than just “meaningful.”

  Ramos locked in the probe’s reported position, then ordered the missile back to its programmed search pattern, looking for other “meaningful” sites that might be lurking in the wilderness. The second she punched in the probe’s new orders, my vision of the hole in the ground winked out.

  Meanwhile, Paulette and Daunt rang up Cheticamp for instructions. Should we take a run out to see what the probe had found? Or sit stony till a larger squad could fly in? After much hemming and hawing, Cheticamp gave the go-ahead to “proceed with caution”…which meant he’d totaled up his belief that Maya was already dead, plus Festina’s doubt that the probe had found something, minus the waste-time inconvenience of sending cops on another fools’ errand to Sallysweet River. Our two ScrambleTacs promised to call for backup at the first hint of trouble or genuine evidence; but we all knew help would take a long time coming.

  Half an hour later, Festina’s ski
mmer hovered over the site. Everything matched my ghostly vision: the mixed forest, the hole in the ground, the punky campfire leftovers. Enough to call in Cheticamp? Paulette and Daunt shook their heads; the fire could belong to hunters or naturalists snowshoeing through the area anytime over the winter. The same people might have cleared brush away from the hole, out of pure curiosity or because they saw a storm brewing and decided they’d have more protection underground.

  Ramos said she agreed with the ScrambleTacs—this might be nothing. But her bright eyes had tamped down their glint to a controlled focus: sharp-fierce-alert. The “game face” of an Explorer making ready for a mission.

  We didn’t land straightaway…not till we’d flown four passes over the area, scanning through four different ranges of the EM spectrum. The survey showed nothing but trees and tundra-dogs, teeny rodent-niche animals that chewed out nests under the carpet moss. Were they dangerous? Ramos asked me. Could they bite? Did they carry disease? I told her they were no worse than Terran squirrels. Yes, they had teeth and on occasion they could carry a nasty microbe or two; but come on, Festina-girl, they were just squirrels.

  Ramos gave me a grim look and flew around for another pass.

  At last we landed: two hundred meters from the mine, on the shore of a small lake. Our charts called the place Lake Vascho, Oolom for eclipse. Probably the lake got mapped the same day one of our flyspeck moons pranced across in front of our sun. Not that we ever got true eclipses, not with our moons so small; occasionally the sun just acquired a darkish beauty mark on her face.

  Thanks to spring, Lake Vascho had cleared its center of ice; but the shores were still frozen, with a thin crust that would take another few days to thaw completely. Everything—land, lake, air—bristled with pure northern silence.

  Hold-your-breath beautiful.

  Ramos holstered on a stun-pistol before leaving the skimmer. (“Not that hypersonics will affect robots,” she said, “but if those tundra-dogs get uppity, zap!”) Paulette and Daunt wore full body armor (gray/black urban camo) and they each carried an over-the-shoulder rocket launcher whose magazine packed four smart robot-poppers: tiny missiles designed to coldcock machines with a massive electrical jolt. Supposedly the missiles could distinguish androids from humans, and were programmed never to juice a living target. I wished I could take a minute to talk with them…make sure the popper missiles knew me as a chummy good-time gal. But the cops might get the wrong idea if I asked for a chat with their ammunition.