Take No Prisoners

by John Grant

  I've no idea how long I clung there. I suppose I could check in the records, but it hardly seems worth it.

  When I returned to my normal consciousness my ears were filled with a tinny whine. Something was complaining bitterly about the way I'd been overloading my senses. Irritably I snapped myself into activity.

  Repairing the hole took me far less time than I'd anticipated. The ferroplastic boiled from its tube and, it seemed, in seconds had sealed the rift. Certainly I can remember the repair as having taken only moments; then I found myself slowly nudging my way back down towards the main body of the ship, struggling a little against the centrifugal force. I was in a strange condition, then, my mind still filled with echoes of that desperate scene of total annihilation. My body moved automatically – certainly not under my direct control – as I saw again and again that omnipresent light.

  I was a changed being as I pulled myself back along the safety line. I had felt emotions before, but at the same time I'd known what they were: pulses of electrons designed by the ingenious humans back on Mars. When I'd told Andrew that I loved him I hadn't been lying – I'd been speaking the absolute truth, and had known that this was the case, because I could identify quite easily the subprogram within me that was labeled "love." Now I was feeling emotions that didn't seem to have been deliberately implanted in my mind. They were fickle things, and they didn't come to me with any convenient tags which I could read.

  ~

  As I say, I remember little of the journey back; it was something which happened inside me, rather than being a physical progress. At one moment I was watching the ferroplastic coalesce around the lethal hole, then there was a blaze of confused and confusing emotions, and then I was hauling myself back in through the airlock's outer door.

  My conscious mind clicked back into existence, telling me that something was wrong.

  I'm not programmed for clairvoyance – of course not – but occasionally my subprograms reach a conclusion that is very close to it. As the inner door swished open I saw Andrew standing there at the end of the corridor, the helmet that I had discarded swinging idly from his fingers. The expression on his face held nothing of the affection I'd come to expect. Even more frighteningly, it bore no resemblance to one of his occasional rages. Instead, it was a liquid hatred.

  When he first spoke, though, his tone was reasonable. Clearly he was making a colossal effort to control himself.

  "You went out there without a helmet."

  "Yes."

  There seemed nothing else to say.

  "People can't do that."

  "Yes ... except people like me."

  The reins snapped.

  "You're not 'people'!" he screamed. "You're a fucking android!"

  "Yes."

  Again, the only possible reply.

  "I've spent the last thirteen years with you, loving you, talking with you, joking with you, screwing you ... I've even seen you shit, but I suppose that was just some kind of clever masquerade put on to fool your pet moron ..."

  "Andrew," I said, trying to calm things down again, "you've got it all wrong ..."

  "No I bloody haven't," he yelled. "You're a fucking machine – exactly that: a fucking-machine."

  "I'm more than that. I was made to be more than that."

  "Bullshit! You pretend you're a woman, but you're not: you're only a wank-aid. But a wank-aid with just enough of a synthetic brain to be able to spy on me. Gods! To think I could have been so stupid as to think I loved you!"

  He stood there swaying slightly, his mouth bubbling, while I thought out what I had to say – had to say. His talk of me spying on him was the worst part: clearly the shock of discovering the deception was making him paranoid. Fortunately I'd been given routines for handling outbursts like this.

  "Andrew," I began.

  "Bitch," he responded. "Robot whore."

  "Andrew, I'm not just an automaton."

  "No, you're a computer with grrrreat legs."

  "It's difficult to explain it, Andrew, but let me try. I'm a being just like yourself – with emotions, pains, panics and terrors just like yours. In every respect you can think of I'm a living human being. I told you once before – long ago. Scratch me hard enough and I bleed, beat me and I hurt, yell at me and I'll wish you'd stop yelling or I'll start yelling back. I'm not anything different from any person they might have sent on this mission with you – except for the fact that I can do things like save your life."

  I was also about three times as intelligent as any normal human being, and had awarenesses which humans would have found it hard to conceive, let alone describe, but I decided not to give him further reasons for thinking of me as a second-class citizen. Especially since there were restrictions on the way in which I could operate my faculties which he would have regarded as weaknesses.

  He paced backwards and forwards.

  "All the times we made love, I suppose it must have been terribly boring for you. I guess you must have put it in your diary what a lousy lay I was."

  I winced at the sarcasm. But I felt a much more bitter pain than that. His mind seemed to be obsessed with the sexuality of our relationship. I was certain I'd been a lot more to him than just a good fuck. I resolved to reexamine the relevant data later: it seemed unlikely that I could have misinterpreted them all these years.

  "No," I said. "You're not listening to me. I'm not just a machine – I'm a human being ... with differences."

  "Wank-aid," he repeated.

  I followed him down the corridor. He grabbed the bedding from our bunk and fled with it into the control room. His face was wet with tears of anger and craziness. Through the door I could hear him choking brokenly. I suppose I could have simply pulled the door from its hinges and gone in there, grabbed him and tied him up or something, but it hardly seemed worth it. There wasn't much damage he could do, because most of the controls were shams or secondaries, put there so he wouldn't realize how unimportant his role as crewman really was.

  I lay down alone on the bunk. So much for saving people's lives.

  There wasn't much I could do except hope that in time he'd see reason. I instructed the main computer to dim the lights.

  I discovered a subprogram I'd never known I had. For the first time I found out what it was like to cry.

  ~

  Ten hours later Andrew opened the control-room door. He was freezingly normal.

  "Now that we understand where we are ..." he began pompously.

  "If you don't lock that kind of fucking crap behind your fucking lip I'll go outside the fucking ship and pull the fucking covering off that fucking hole," I argued, shaping my fists and squaring up to him. My voice-of-sweet-reason speech had been worked out carefully in advance.

  He said nothing for quite some time, then: "You do have a point."

  ~

  It might seem strange, but we barely spoke over the next few years. At one level this didn't concern me very much – I was able to occupy my mind with the data that were now flowing in from the ship's sensors – but at the same time I was very concerned about Andrew. It seemed almost superhuman of him to be able to cope with the loneliness. Sometimes at nights I could hear him cursing away bitterly, a monotone of obscenities punctuated by tears or rage or tears of rage. My initial bitterness over his rejection of me soon disappeared, and I had little difficulty in thinking rationally of the times when we had been close – not as something better than the current situation, or even as something more desirable than it, but just as something different. After I'd gone through that stage I began to relish again the fact that I was a woman, in close confinement with a man and yet totally independent of him.

  When we had to, we worked together as a team – and very efficiently. During our periodic checks of equipment, position, velocity and trajectory (a rather pointless exercise, since of course I knew such things the whole time, but I didn't want to rub his face in it), we'd react towards each other just like two ants cooperating in the transport of a large bread
crumb. He addressed me as "Captain"; I hated it, but I couldn't bring myself to ask him to call me by my real name. Anyway, it would have been an order:

  "Call me 'Qinefer,' not 'Captain.'"

  "Aye, aye, sir."

  I wanted him to want to call me by my name. I didn't want him merely to obey instructions.

  And slowly – over years – the formality eased. Familiarity may in some cases breed contempt, but in my limited experience it more normally breeds, if not genuine affection, then at least a goodish simulation of it. Also, of course, on his part there was a certain amount of straight lust involved: I was perfectly aware of the fact that, after several celibate years, he was in a sort of lock-up-your-budgerigar state. He was now in his forties, with gray beginning to appear at his temples, while I was still seemingly twenty-five. A lot of the time I knew he was desperate to sleep with me – not because he wanted to "make love" with me but simply because his hormones were telling him he needed a fuck. He could have tried to rape me, I guess, but he never did. Instead, he slowly – over many months – worked at the task of seducing me. And, in order to seduce me, he needed at least to act as if he were my friend. I think that in the end, simply through playing the role, he did rekindle in himself a genuine affection for me.

  For my part, I was tempted to throw myself at him; after all, it had been built into me that I was supposed to love him. Which was exactly why I didn't lead him on at all; I wanted him to make love with me as a lover, not as – to quote him – a wank-aid.

  The night that, for reasons of whim, I'd fiddled the controls of one of the recycling units so it produced neat ethyl alcohol, we sat together sipping the rotgut and chatting about inconsequentialities. There were long spaces in the conversation, but it was easy and relaxed. I'd decided to let the booze have an effect on me. Andrew didn't have as much choice in the matter: he opened out more than he had in years, telling me what had been going on in his head all this time. He was totally honest (I think) with me, in a way that he hadn't been since the time we'd been lovers. I could remember a lot of what he said if I chose to, but I choose not to.

  A few things, though:

  "You look very much like a real human being, you know." A glance at me which he thought I didn't notice. "Even now I can only tell the difference when you forget to breathe for a few minutes."

  "Must be a faulty connection," I said sarcastically, although not with any malice. "We robots never forget anything."

  "Hey – hey. I wasn't trying to be ratty. I was just, you know, saying."

  I smiled. In fact, I quite often did "forget" to breathe. There were a lot of other things I had to do, and simulating respiration came pretty low down on my list of priorities now that he knew what I thought I was.

  I looked at him – really looked at him. I'd been aware of the fact that he was ageing, but I hadn't really focused on it for a while. I saw the way that his hairline was receding. His face and the backs of his hands had become mottled with liver-spots. His fingers, as he twined them together or wrapped them around his glass, were knots of sinew. I knew that he was only in his forties, but he looked nearer sixty. His loneliness was taking its toll.

  "Sorry," I said, trading apologies. "I didn't mean to be sour. But I've been somewhat sensitive these past few years. Understandably so."

  There was quite a long pause. I could see him working out what I'd meant when I'd said "understandably."

  "Do you feel like a machine?" He said it very casually, looking into his glass as if the question had been nothing more than a conversational nicety.

  "Not at all," I said sharply. "Can't you get it into your head, Andrew? I'm not a machine. In every important respect I'm a human being just like yourself."

  "But you weren't born," he said, knowing he was getting into difficult territory, but carrying on nevertheless. "You were made in some bloody laboratory."

  "That's not strictly true. I wasn't 'made' – I was grown. First of all two cells were united, and then more and more cells – as well as some plastics and metals, I grant – were grafted onto me. Does the process sound familiar? It ought to. It's not so much different from what happened in your mother's womb. And I had a childhood, just like you, only it didn't last nearly as long and I didn't have to go through all the stages of growing."

  I'd started off being deliberately patronizing. Now my voice was beginning to rise. Ah, but what the hell? I'd been putting this off for far too long.

  "They grew me so that I was a human first, a machine second. I'm a living creature that happens to be better adapted for survival than you. As you know, I can go for hours – forever, if I wanted to – without breathing. I can stand heat and cold and radiation that would kill you. My body's as near as dammit indestructible, whatever it looks and feels like – you could hit me with a hatchet and the blade would just bounce off. It'd hurt me like hell, but it wouldn't damage me. My reflexes are perfect, and faster than you could even conceive. My brain has a capacity several times yours ... I'm cleverer, more agile, faster, more intelligent, more everything than you are. But instead of thinking 'My God but I'm lucky to be drifting through space with a drunkard's dream like this' you blinker yourself into seeing me as a bloody machine!"

  It was all the truth, as I knew it.

  Silence for a minute or two.

  "And furthermore," I added grumpily, "I have an advantage in arguments as well. Other people have to pause for breath from time to time."

  He giggled, like a schoolboy who's just thought of a Terribly Filthy Joke. The sound was delicious: it'd been years since I'd heard it. He looked as if someone had just given him a transfusion of youth.

  I didn't sleep alone in the bunk that night. To be precise, I neither slept nor was alone. Come to think of it, quite a lot of the time I was only partly in the bunk.

  ~

  The next few decades were very happy ones. At ninety Andrew seemed to look younger than he had when he'd been forty. In part this was due to the fact that he was using the ship's facilities to maintain his health, but I'm fairly certain it was mainly due to the relationship we'd built up together. The only real sign he was getting older was that he made silly mistakes from time to time, but it was easy enough for me to quietly correct them.

  ~

  τ Ceti is rather larger than the sun, but less massive and quite a lot less luminous. As we came closer to its red globe the instruments began to tell us that it did indeed have the planetary retinue the astronomers had detected, and soon more specific details began to come through. There were seven planets, three of them gas giants, and a horde of small bodies gathered together into two fairly well defined belts. Most important of all, there was a planet of about twice Mars-mass some fifty million kilometers out from the primary. It had an atmosphere. It was our obvious destination.

  We spent a few weeks of gradually mounting excitement. We went into orbit, and found that the atmosphere was primarily an oxygen-nitrogen mix – although of course we'd no way of knowing what other ingredients there might be in the soup. Surface temperatures were perfectly reasonable for human habitation, except near the equator. The world had four large continents and many scattered bracelets of islands, an intricate and ever-changing pattern of clouds, bright blue-green oceans ... Away from the equator many of the land areas were covered with vegetation, literally teeming with it: great plains of the green that bespoke photosynthesis.

  This was not all undilutedly good news, of course. Where there's life, some of it's going to be in the form of microorganisms, and those little bastards can have really lethal effects when they get their teeth into the human cell. If you're lucky, they're so alien that they don't have any effect at all; but the very fact that a planet has Earth-style vegetation would suggest there's a good chance the microorganisms will have similarities with terrestrial bacteria and viruses. From up here you couldn't tell if this was going to be a minor problem, a major problem, or something a lot worse than that.

  The world had mobile lifeforms – we could
tell that from orbit. Andrew insisted on calling them "animals," and we joked about it, me maintaining that "animals" is strictly a Solar System term until you've had a chance to dissect. Some of these ani ... mobile lifeforms were of quite a reasonable size: evolution had obviously gone a fair distance. We were of course too far out to be able to discern individual creatures with any degree of clarity, but we could see great herds of the dominant species crossing the plains of one of the continents, like spilt ink on a baize tabletop. They were quadrupeds and appeared to be herbivorous; they were the prey of various smaller quadrupeds. All shared a curious purple skin coloration. None of the lifeforms we observed seemed to display much by way of intelligence.

  We accumulated more and more data about the planet turning beneath us, and the computer and I duly processed them. But it hardly needed an artificial brain to tell us that this could well be a future home for humanity.

  We couldn't allow ourselves to get too ecstatic about the possibility, though, because at the back of our minds there was a constant foreboding, a nagging gloom that just wouldn't go away. As each of the planet's days passed (16.08739807 standard hours, to the nearest meaningful figure) the time was approaching when we'd have to make the critical test of the environment beneath.

  There's only one really foolproof experiment you can do if you want to find out if a planet's got poisons in its atmosphere or killers among the microfauna. Mission Control had sent along a uniquely sensitive piece of testing equipment as part of the expedition.

  This device was called Andrew.

  The logic was impeccable. Andrew had by now outlived any usefulness he might once have had: he was old, and an untamed world is no place for old people. Our computer was filled with billions of bits of information, now, about Andrew's World – as I sentimentally insisted on calling it; his own name for it was, for some reason, Starveling – and soon these would be sent back to Mission Control in a series of complicated, highly energetic pulses. There was just this one final experiment to perform ... before the apparatus became obsolete.