The sphere of incandescence on the telescope images obliterated several square kilometers of moon-city. It had also flung something completely out of Diadem's gravity well. This appeared as a dopplered radar image, just a tiny smear. The ship had not even bothered to report its existence to the crew until it changed heading under its own power.
Fourteen hours later they had drawn next to the limp figure of a woman hanging like an abandoned doll in the velvet black of space. The swans were rising from Diadem, their music strange and threatening. The woman was gently brought on board, and bundled straight to the operating theatre, for what everyone expected would be a routine post-mortem. In the course of the operation, which Axel attended, several things came to light:
The woman bore an astonishing resemblance to Calandria May.
The ship's instruments could not penetrate her skin. Indeed, nothing could.
She was still alive.
Axel rode a lift shaft up to the ship's axis and, now in freefall, grabbed a tow line that soon deposited him at the little-used gods' infirMarya. He knew Marya was trying to catch up to him, but he ignored her.
The patient hung like a crucified angel at the focus of a bank of deity-class equipment. Most of the equipment was dark; the patient was not a god after all. She was a robot, merely masked by sophisticated but commonly known screens. She was not, it seemed, a product of Wind technology.
Her eyes were open. Seeing this, Axel stopped dead at the entrance. The two attending technicians noted his presence; one came over. "We're just waiting for the commander," she said. "Then we can start getting its deposition, if it wants to talk."
The thing looked at him. It had pale grey eyes. The impact of its gaze made his skin crawl.
"Axel, my friend," it said in a familiar voice. "So good to see you again."
He knew that voice. Its tone was measured, musical, as though the speaker were savoring every syllable spoken. So like Calandria May's voice, he had always felt, but different in its underlying serenity.
Marya bounced to a stop next to him. "Is it talking?" she asked loudly.
Axel let himself drift into the center of the high chamber, nearer the patient. "Are you who I think you are?" he asked.
It arched a brow just as Calandria would have. "You know me, Axel," it said. "I am the Desert Voice."
§
"Chan!" It was the ship's commander, hanging next to Marya in the doorway. "Do you know this thing?"
He rotated to face the watching humans. "Yes," he said. "I think. I mean—I'm not sure."
He turned back to the imitation of Calandria. "Desert Voice was the name of Calandria May's starship," he said. "Are you trying to tell me you are that ship?"
It nodded. For the first time its expressionless face changed, a minor ripple of what looked like worry touching its brow.
Marya came over, braking her drift with a hand on Axel's shoulder. "You're the ship's AI," she said. "But... this body... why?"
"For survival," said the Voice. "I had to don this guise. And I needed to survive in order to do two things. One was to ensure the safety of my captain. I must tell you that Calandria May is trapped on the surface of Ventus, and a rescue mission must be mounted."
"We know all about that," said the commander. "It's in our hands now."
The Voice ducked its head in acknowledgement.
"What was your second purpose?" asked Axel.
"There were no witnesses to my capture and destruction by the Winds," said the Voice. "I had to return a record of the event so that my captain can make the proper insurance claim when she is rescued."
Axel laughed in surprise. "Insurance! You're telling me this body is just a... a courier? An envelope?"
It nodded. "I have made a complete record of the end of the Desert Voice, and will deliver it as soon as you provide me with an uplink. Then I will have fulfilled my purpose."
The commander turned to Axel. "We've got the right data buffers in place. We can accept an uplink. What do you say, Chan? Do you really know this AI?"
"Too early to tell. Don't give her access to the network."
"Of course not." The commander nodded to one of the technicians. "Let her into the buffer."
The technician gestured, and Axel felt, rather than saw, the Desert Voice stiffen. He turned to see it staring straight ahead, concentrating.
A moment later it slumped. "Done," it said. Then, to Axel's complete astonishment, it began to weep.
The tears seemed real enough; they grew like flowers at the edges of its eyes, and when it flung its head from side to side, they spun away like jewels. One came to rest on the cuff of Axel's sleeve, where it clung for a moment before slumping as if in relief into the cloth.
"Careful, Chan, it may be a ruse."
He ignored the commander. His left hand was on the Voice's shoulder, his right cupping her chin. "Look at me," he said. "What's wrong?"
The Voice raised its eyes. He felt its jaw tremble under his fingers. "It is the disguise," it said quietly. "I have fulfilled my purpose. The data is delivered. I should shut down now, but I can't. In order to make the disguise real enough, I seem to have removed my ability to cease existence. I have no purpose now, but I am still here."
Questions crowded Axel's mind; he couldn't think of where to start. "But—"
"Maybe," said Marya from close behind, "you'd better start from the beginning. Tell us what happened to you after you were captured by the swans."
The Voice locked eyes with Axel for a moment, then looked past him at Marya. "Yes," it said. "That is enough like my purpose to... I can do that."
The Desert Voice began her tale.
§
The last command I received was to destroy an aerostat that was threatening my captain's life. I hurried to obey, but the action was difficult because I did not want to drop the wreckage on top of her. So I circled, looking for the best shot, and all the while the Diadem swans were closing their net around me.
It was a terrible dilemma. I could still escape, and I was her only means off the planet. On the other hand, if she were killed now all other purposes would be rendered moot. It appeared I had to sacrifice myself for her temporary survival.
I found my shot, and clipped the top from the aerostat. It screamed outrage on numerous frequencies, and I heard the swans respond. They normally made a giant invisible shell orbiting around the planet, billions of black cables absorbing energy from the sun and the planet's magnetic field. I had been able to thread my way among them before, and they obliged as in a game; the swans sang as they swayed aside, and when two or more met they were liable to twine together in a burst of energy, and form fantastical shapes, like beasts or birds, or their favorite, winged women. To orbit Ventus is to sail a river of song, where apparitions rise and shimmer and vanish behind.
Now, enraged, they made a net, and the net appeared as an angel with a flaming sword.
It's an instinct, said Marya. Part of their original programming is to make these shapes from EuroAmerican mythology. The Ventus terraforming team were insane.
Or brilliant, countered Axel.
I, designed to resemble a bird of fire sixty meters long, would have appeared as small as one of this creature's fingers. It used the shear and pull of magnetic forces among its countless threadlike members to wrap me in a bundle of fibre, like a black spiderweb.
I tried to signal my captain, but the crisscross of threads made a Faraday cage that my signal could not penetrate. The swans had me, and according to everything I knew about them, that meant I was to be destroyed.
There had been no time to signal any of the other craft in the system. I had no way of knowing if any had seen my capture. That meant my captain's insurance claim might be difficult to process. I was unable to pursue my main purpose of ensuring her immediate safety, but at the very least I could try to send a signal out so that if she survived she would be recompensed for my destruction.
I began to record everything that was happening.
The swans made a cocoon around me, and spun tails of thread a thousand kilometers up and down. They poured current into these tails, and the tug against Ventus' magnetic field swung us out and away, towards Diadem. As this was happening they were making fists and hammering on my hull, seeking entrance. I was surprised that they had not simply crushed me, and it took some hours before I realized why they were being so gentle. They thought I might be carrying passengers.
I recalled that the Winds are protective of living things. They are conscious, and have ethics and priorities, and on Ventus their priorities put human life well below the integrity of the ecosphere as a whole. In space, their priority would be to protect fragile life forms, since there is no ecosphere to manage there. They would be hostile to me as a technological construct, but as nurturing as possible to the lives within me. I had no proof for this theory, but it made sense from what I knew of them.
Their fingers began to pry the seams of my hull apart. As they entered they ate away the machinery in their way. They were curious about it, in the way that a surgeon is curious about the extent of a growth that has to be excised. The instant they realized there was no life aboard, they would crush me to dust and be gone.
I was not built with the latest technology, but I did have the ability to repair myself and create replacements for damaged parts. Near my power core was a nanotech assembler station. I diverted all my resources to this as I felt my airlocks failing. As radiant fingers touched the inside doorframes, I flooded the assembler station with energy and ionized gases. I had a maintenance robot climb into the organized flame, and it shut the door just as a human-shaped member of the swans swept into the chamber, its searchlight eyes hunting for signs of biological life.
At first I thought I might be able to create a hard-shelled message buoy, or a thousand of them, hoping one or more might escape my destruction. That hope faded as I felt the swans eating me thoroughly, from the hull in.
My other maintenance robots fought the swan that had penetrated to the power core, and meanwhile I remade the maintenance robot in the assembler station. I gave it a pseudo-biological skin that it could regenerate from an inner reservoir of fluids, and changed its shape so that it resembled a human. I chose the best model in memory for this body: my captain.
The body's skin I designed to exude the pheromones and other trace proteins that I knew from my identity-scan records of Calandria May. And behind this skin I made shields and cloaks to hide the mechanisms that ran it. Finally, as the swans tore my bird-shape into a million pieces and devoured them, I uploaded my AI into the new body.
I opened my eyes to see hands—my hands—pressing against the inside of a cylindrical chamber. I was swimming in a plasma of hot gases, enmeshed in the fine spiderwebs of the assembler gantries. An oval window in the chamber's door showed only bright light. I moved to it, and beheld the final disintegration of the Desert Voice take place outside.
The swans opened the door—or to be exact, they ate it. The glowing fields around me collapsed, leaving me in darkness lit only by the glow of the swans. They looked at first like a nest of flaming serpents; the gases escaping around me sounded like the hiss of their tongues.
When they scented life, they drew back, built a bubble to stop the air escaping, and then detached a human-shaped member, who reached into the cylinder to draw me out. I stood, human, in an iridescent cocoon specked with the debris of my old body, my wrist clasped by an angel. Behind me the swans fell upon the assembler station and consumed it.
"Are you injured?" the swan asked.
"No," I said. For the first time I heard my voice echo back from outside my body, rather than within my corridors and chambers.
"Do not be afraid," said the swan. "We will provide you with sustenance and the places of life." Then it withdrew, dissolving into the wall of the cocoon.
As the cocoon slowly rotated, the transparent sections began to reveal tantalizing glimpses of Diadem, which we were approaching.
The swans had withdrawn, but they were observing. I could feel the ping of signals striking me; I had crafted this body so that it would absorb them and re-emit the kind of response a human body would produce. They had not seen through my disguise, but they also did not seem to be convinced. They kept watching.
The hours passed, and Diadem approached. My new body was breathing, taking in oxygen and emitting waste gases, for no doubt they would be monitoring that. As time went by, though, I began to realize that they would expect me to eat and excrete as well.
This I had not designed myself to do. Luckily, remnants of the nanotech assemblers were stored in the core of my body, and I had some command of them. I gave them new instructions, and curled up as if to sleep, while they constructed an alimentary canal, or at least a good approximation of one.
I let them believe me asleep while they lowered a long tendril containing my bubble to the surface of the moon, where it was received by gentle cargo mechanisms and drawn into a cavernous storage hangar. When I uncurled and opened my eyes, I found myself in the very center of a floor that my newly imprecise senses told me must be a kilometer on each side. The place was not empty; it housed hundreds of dead trees, and sheaves of yellowed grain and dried bushes. I did not know what the human sense of smell is like, but I sensed the chemicals that leached into the cold air from these bodies. I knew how Calandria and others had described the scents of autumn; I took the galaxy of readings and categorized them: musty, dry, fungal. I did not know it at the time, but that small act was the first time I altered myself for reasons that did not directly have to do with survival. There would be more such changes.
I cried aloud to the Winds to give me food. I told them I could not eat dried bark and leaves. They eventually relented, opening a door from this chamber to an adjacent one that held a garden.
You should not be surprised at this. The purpose of the Winds—or so my records said—is to craft and maintain the ecology of Ventus. They require a laboratory to test new methods and ecosystems. Diadem is perfect for this. Indeed, I believe at one time the entire moon was a honeycomb of gardens and aquaria, inhabited by Winds of types and names unknown to Man for a thousand years. Supplying me with food was a simple matter, for every living thing on Ventus has its prototype on Diadem—except for Man. I met no humans while I was there, although I did meet ample evidence of their presence in the past.
What evidence? asked Marya.
Writing etched on the walls; journals hidden in niches; the remains of houses and other structures in some of the bigger gardens. These gardens are for the most part the hollowed bottoms of ancient craters, roofed over with one-way glass. Some are many kilometers across. To my new eyes they appeared as hazy bowls of jungle or tundra, sky'd with jewels. They are joined by networks of underground tunnels, much like the ones I sensed in my scans of Ventus. Beneath them are caverns and catacombs in which dwell the greatest Winds—the ones who I think are masters over the Diadem swans. Throughout this wild realm I found evidence of humans, but centuries old. It may be that unwary travellers arriving at Ventus have had their ships eaten as I was, and have been marooned on Diadem to live out their lives in the gardens. Or maybe the Winds bring specimens from the planet every now and then. I was not too concerned. In fact, I was concerned with avoiding them, for I did not need human contact to survive and they might have seen through my disguise, and alerted the Winds to the fact that I was a technological infection.
So I wandered, conscious of the Winds' gaze upon me. I ate and defecated like a human, tried without much success to make clothing, and shivered a lot. I spent much time worrying about whether my behavior would appear human to them, so I was careful not to stand in one place for more than a few minutes, and to lie still with my eyes closed about one third of the time. This might not have been enough, though. To be thorough, I should mimic the more subtle aspects of human behavior. What would a human's emotional response to this place be?
So I consulted my records regarding my captain. T
hey were extensive; after all, in order to guard my captain I needed to know the differences between cries of passion and those of fear, the slowness of distracted thought and that of illness, and so on. I already had a model of her emotions. I merely had to take that model and make it my main behavioural drive.
You became Calandria?
Yes, Axel, as best I could. There were many sights on Diadem that would stop any human in her tracks. To describe only one: one morning I emerged from a long hexagonal tunnel full of machine traffic to find myself on a hillside above a lake. This oval crater, at least two kilometers deep and five wide, was roofed with geodesic glass like others I had seen. It was muggy and hot here, and palm fronds waved dissolutely in an artificial breeze. Just then sunlight was falling in a single shaft through tiny trapped clouds onto the emerald surface of the lake. I gasped as Calandria would have at the light that shimmered there.
Elsewhere, I wept in frustration at my inability to create clothing or make fire for myself. I hugged myself and sang aloud for company. I tried to bargain with the Winds, and screamed my frustration when they would not answer.
At first, I did these things self-consciously, as a strategy to avoid the Winds' detecting what I was. But I found that if I did this, I was continually booting up my model of Calandria and then shutting it down again after I had exhibited some behavior or other. It became obvious after a few days that the result was discontinuous: my emotions began with whatever I reacted to first upon booting up the model, then evolved until I shut it down. If I restarted it the continuity of my behavior was broken. I was acting like a mad woman, in other words, laughing one moment then crying the next, backtracking on my path as new emotional dynamics made me seem to change my intent in mid-step.
Finally I decided to boot the model and leave it running continuously. Then, when I lay down to "sleep", I discovered that these emotions continued to react to my thoughts in the absence of other stimulation. So I began shutting off my thoughts as I "slept".
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