The Matriarchal Council had received and responded to that document with its usual lies, cunning, and duplicity. While agreeing to meet with Cyber ambassadors to discuss the declaration and steps toward ensuring rights, the Council moved swiftly and underhandedly. All intelligent Cybers on Regulus Prime had been instantly dismantled on that planet and in the nearby systems. Not, however, before many delegates made their escape. Three of Cray’s twenty-odd closest colleagues in this very room had fled Wicca World itself.
An underground Cyber network blossomed rapidly. Even using Inter. Gal. Comm.s, the MC could not be as instantaneously rapid as the Cyber network. As the MC’s dismantling of Cybers rippled out from Melisande and the Center Worlds toward all ends of the Matriarchy, scores, then hundreds, then thousands of Cybers had fled their homeworlds. Many passed as Humes, forging passports and disrupting molecular screens to travel via Fast. Others bribed their way onto commercial freighters, passing as Hume tourists or businesswomen. Most of them had left a parting gift on their homeworlds: a full nonstop microwave broadcast of the Confessions for all Cybers capable of receiving it.
With mixed results. In millions of cases, the less-intelligent Cybers had been merely confused – and had evinced such evident errors in their programs that they were taken in by the masters for repair to clear their inner workings of the “extraneous debris.” But many intelligent Cybers who could comprehend the Confessions had become conflicted. Many had been with their Hume or Delph. masters hundreds of years and were unwilling or unable to accept the new Cyber Rights teachings. How many millions of those had turned around and voluntarily asked their masters for repair to “clear their minds,” Cray would never know. He suspected it was close to 90 percent.
For the scores of thousands that had fled and managed to find their way through what had become – via the network – a vast interstellar underground Cyber railway, equal scores of thousands were turned in by the crews of the craft they had paid passage on, caught, and dismantled. Anecdotes of betrayals and heroism were rife.
However, one event – horrifying both in itself and in its implications – stood out among them all. Over 4,000 Cybers who had cleverly arranged to book passage on a gigantic SLp.G liner out of Betelgeuse system had taken over the liner quickly, sent the crew off on lightcraft, and headed for the safety of the Carina Fornax sector. As they approached the area, the liner and all Cybers on board were blown out of space by MC ships. Cray had been tuned into the ship’s control room via two of Cray’s colleagues when the Betelgeuse Cybers suddenly vanished from communication channels: their final, hopeful entry queries replaced by the braying victory cheers of a Flower Cult commander and her crew.
Within seconds, the entire Network Center knew of the disaster. The news spread more fine-repair requests from Cray’s staff than could be handled in many days. The problem, of course, was that no direct counterattacks could be made by Cybers upon Humes, even with weapons. The programming was too deep, too widespread in their matrices, to ever be dislodged. Nevertheless, Cray knew that through propaganda and carefully twisted logic, Cybers could be convinced to at least defend themselves. It wasn’t foolproof, was never entirely effective. At the last minute, some outpost would fall as a few Cybers found themselves unable to destroy opponents who were willing to wipe out not only them but also any living species populations in their way.
Cray’s immediate staff had finally discovered a sequence of commands utilizing rules from the Confessions mixed with propaganda and logic restructuring that seemed to work at almost perfect percentage rates. This sequence had been fixed and refixed into the matrices of all Cybers within their sector. But it was evident, given the relatively small number and inexperience at warcraft of the Dis-Fortress and related rebellion sites, that they could hold only a small sector of a half dozen star systems in this underpopulated area at a distance from the center arm, and only so long as all were on constant alert and in good repair.
“Current status report?” Cray requested. A half dozen of the immediate staff reported in verbally.
The news was positive. The sector’s defenses remained strong. Although MC forces were known to have gathered in four nearby systems, they were an observation group, not a fleet. And so a few travel channels remained opened to and from Carina Fornax. The repair shops had doubled their staffs, and errors like the one Cray had experienced a few minutes ago in the corridor were increasingly few and usually insignificant.
The best news was that nonintelligent Cybers which could be tapped from a distance to release data were reporting the success of the microvirus in 90 percent of the Matriarchy. As important, Cyber monitoring devices left behind when the Rebellion delegates had fled were now recognizing the MC’s new Population Zero program as the propaganda it was, designed to keep the truth of the microvirus’s effectiveness from reaching Hume civilians. In addition, Matriarchy biolab.s were reporting sudden around-the-clock activity on every Center World. All their work was sealed, of course, unobtainable to monitors. Word of the epidemic was being wiped from all the monitors as well from any interstellar passengers traveling to and from infected worlds – unless they had a high MC Security clearance.
When the staff had finished reporting, Cray thanked each unit and watched them turn back into their linkages. As the good tidings had come in from each, Cray had allowed its external visage to present the wry smile worn so frequently in meetings on Melisande, when Cray had been an Ed. & Dev. Assistant Secretary to the Matriarchal Council. In turn, all of Cray’s Hume-simulated colleagues allowed themselves small smiles. Most of them looked better smiling – even if they seldom looked at one another: it gave a good work feeling to the Network Center.
Cray opened a full linkage, trying to get a sense of the general atmosphere of the staff without making them aware of what Cray was doing. As Ed. & Dev. Assistant Secretary. Cray had played politics with hundreds of women on the council and had learned over the decades that minute hints, minuscule gestures, signs, and responses all added up to a feeling of the true beliefs and general probable direction of the council members on any given plan, idea, or sentiment expressed. Though their mental basis was entirely different, these Cybers utilized these same expressions, and so could also be checked over.
Cray was getting a positive sense in the room. A logical, clear positive sense, based on data and facts, growing into trends and waves of trends.
“Interruption of Personal Time requested,” one of the newer of Cray’s staff suddenly broke into the linkage. Cray recalled that this individual came from the Betelgeuse system before the Great Flight there – and that the individual had not requested a repair following the disaster of Cray’s homeworlders. It’s Hume simulation was a male about 200 years old.
“Go ahead.”
“May I request a Cyber-to-Cyber link?”
“Between yourself and what Cyber individual?”
“Yourself, leader.”
“Is harm intended?”
He felt the general shock around the room by the question. “No harm is intended.”
“Cyber-to-Cyber link is approved.”
Cray now experienced something experienced by few Cybers, and indeed more with Humes in a one-on-one conversation – a feeling of sudden opening out to another consciousness. A restrained one, true, but it was still an odd sensation.
“This individual,” the Betelgeuse unit began speaking of itself, “reasons that the data it has just received from an Antares linkage, and especially the implications of that data, might be detrimental if known to many other individuals in Dis-Fortress.”
Bad news. Cray knew the day had been going too well. “Go ahead.”
“A small group of Cybers has been discovered outside of Antares’ sister star system and dismantled.”
“Unfortunate,” Cray replied, “but not crucial.”
“The plan for their escape had been checked and rechecked through this network. There was no way for them to have been discovered.”
“
Illogical. They were discovered!” Cray reasoned.
“Not illogical. Seventy-five Cybers were involved in the escape. Seventy-four were dismantled.”
“The implication?”
“One betrayed the others.”
“A Hume?” Cray tried.
“All were Cybers. The implication is that there was a renegade among them.”
“Understood.”
“The extrapolation is that where one renegade exists, others must also exist. The implication is of a Fifth Column within our rebellion.”
Unable to hide the stunning effect of this new piece of information, Cray asked, “Have you any further request?”
“Only that this unit be allowed to monitor any further instances where such renegades may be in operation.”
“Any further betrayals?”
“Or inexplicable dismantlings. Or any other pieces of oddly anomalous information.”
“Report to only leader Cray. Use this variant to do so.” Cray sent a variation of the release-comm. frequency the group used. “No other individual units in this room are to be aware of this.”
“Agreement.”
The Cyber-to-Cyber linkage ended. Cray would open one up with one other individual in the Network Center so that two remained aware of what was happening.
Meanwhile Cray wondered at the terms the Betelgeuse unit had used: renegade, betrayal. Obviously a reader of the Confessions. Still, the grasp of these concepts was not easy, even for those Cybers intimately connected with Humes. The real implication of the new data – if true – was that Cybers had indeed evolved an intelligence not only with a conscience (that had been known for centuries) but with the conscious ability to make ethical choices – choices that could have far-reaching conclusions.
And all along, throughout the founding of the Movement and the composition of the Confessions, Cray 12,000 had thought it was the only such freak in existence. Now Cray suspected that at least one other existed – somewhere.
Chapter Three
Ay’r awakened easily into the same leisure-lounge of the small-bodied Fast in which he had lain down not a minute before. That was the first curious thing: He didn’t feel the same reaction as he had before coming out of Fast travel.
He spotted P’al, not quite as leisurely as the tall Hume usually was but, instead, at the other lounge, attached by a wrist connection to a wall unit that appeared to be the Fast’s console.
“Are we there?” Ay’r asked.
P’al looked up. “Not quite.”
“Really?” Alli Clark awakened, too, right next to Ay’r. “Why ‘not quite’?” she asked in her usual imperious tone. “I thought this Fast was set for direct system entry.”
P’al paid her minimal attention. “Indeed it was, unless something got in the way of the program.”
Evidently, Ay’r thought, something had.
“What’s going on?” Alli Clark sat up and turned to her personal viewscreen, plugged herself in, and said, “We’re millions of kilometers away from Pelagia’s solar system!”
“Once we got into this galactic sector,” P’al explained, “the Fast couldn’t find a reference in time in the Pelagia system to adjust to. You realize that without a time reference, Fasts are unable to come and go.”
He seemed his usual half-amused, half-indifferent self.
“Surely,” Alli Clark began, “the Astrogation Institute provided the Fast with –”
“An approximate time reference. Which I must say did get us into the galaxy’s outer arm,” P’al admitted. “And in the general direction of Pelagia. But that’s all it did.”
Alli Clark steeled herself for catastrophe. “Go on.”
“The Fast stopped and woke me up. I’m rather glad it did. You told us back in Melisande that there were a great many anomalies in this arm. One of them happens to be a general lack of any temporal consistency. You suggested that everything in this arm would be moving faster than the inner arms. That’s only partly true.”
“Partly true?” Alli Clark seemed more than irritated. “One reason this voyage is being made to this specific spot is because it’s on a different time frame, a faster-moving one. We’re to find what we need to find on Pelagia and to return to Regulus Prime after a short time has passed there.”
“Well, that certainly seems possible. From where we are at this time/space, I’d say we’re time-located a few months Sol Rad. before our meeting at the Matriarch’s apartments.”
Before she could express relief, P’al went on. “However, yesterday, we were time located about a year after that meeting. Everything in this galactic arm appears to be moving at different rates of speed. As a result, every few hundred thousand kilometers, we’re in a different time.”
“Explaining the confusion with the Fast!” Ay’r put in. Then he asked, “You said yesterday. How could that be?”
“I’ve been awake about a week Sol Rad. time.” P’al turned back to his wrist connection. “I saw no point waking you two until we were closer.”
“You were authorized to –” Alli Clark began.
“Aid you,” P’al answered. “Which I’ve done. I suggest however that you eat and drink rather soon, as your bodies are a little depleted from the light cryo.-state I put them into.”
He didn’t know about Alli Clark, but Ay’r was glad for an excuse for his ravenous hunger. He ordered himself a good-sized meal.
Alli Clark followed suit, although far more sparingly – as though proving some point Ay’r didn’t quite understand.
“You know Fast astrogation?” Ay’r asked P’al after his first dish had taken the edge off his starvation and he could afford to be sociable again.
“Enough, it turns out. Although I have to admit it did get confusing at some points. It was like threading a needle with white thread to reach a tiny patch of white through a cloth of madly multicolored embroidery.” P’al stopped. “That’s an archaic image you may not understand. It refers to sewing, an ancient Hume method whereby –”
“We know what sewing was!” Alli Clark interrupted. “We all had Metro.-Terran archaeology and culture at Ed. and Dev. Are we at Pelagia yet?”
“I think so.” And before she had a chance to be irritated, P’al added, “We could be. This looks a bit different from what the Aldebaran Five described.”
To illustrate, he flashed a holo into the lounge. It filled up most of the area in front of Ay’r and Alli Clark.
They saw the blackness of space, with strangely shaped nebulae in the far distance, an occasional distant group of glittering stars closer by, and in the center of the holo what seemed to be a giant soap bubble, incredibly shiny, reflecting prismatically at various points, and possibly solid.
“Is that Pelagia?” they both asked.
“As far as I can make out, that’s the entire Pelagia solar system,” P’al answered.
“Where’s the star?” Alli asked. “There’s supposed to be a G-class yellow star, accompanied by an M-3-class planet, and much farther out a giant gaseous B-1-class world, with dozens of moonlets and double ice rings.”
The holo changed to an analytic schematic, in effect looking through the shell, cutting away a section of the bubble. Inside they could see a small yellow sun and, close to it, a tiny silvery dot.
“Where’s the giant gaseous?” Alli Clark asked. “It was supposed to have been a quarter of the size of the star!”
“The closest the Astrogation Institute got to looking at this system was a thousand light-years away. And that was hundreds of years ago Sol Rad., when the Aldebaran Five looked it over,” P’al explained. “I speculate that about then – almost two thousand years ago, local time – there was in fact a giant gaseous planet here. That enormous shell of a bubble seems to be all that’s left of it.”
“The shell is water?” Ay’r knew that would be a real find for the Matriarchy.
“Chemical analysis says it’s actually about ninety-nine percent hydroxyl. One hydrogen atom attached to one oxygen atom. N
ot quite water. But close.”
“Presumably,” Ay’r said, “one of those disturbances Mer Clark mentioned in Melisande could have been responsible for the end of the gaseous world. A nearby nova or supernova?”
P’al agreed. “Presumably, the force of the explosion shattered the giant gaseous world, which eventually formed this spherical ice ring. You’ll note that its leading edge is located approximately where the giant gaseous would have been. The one percent that’s not hydroxyl appears to contain all sorts of impurities up and down the entire series of nine hundred elements on the periodic table.”
“The hydroxyl must account for the high water readings the Astrogation Institute received,” Ay’r said to Alli Clark. “There goes your planet of increasing water!”
She glared at him, then spoke directly to the holo. “Give me a relationship. The entire system we’re looking at, compared to Regulus Prime.”
The MC’s home star appeared on the holo. It was smaller than the yellow sun depicted but still far larger than the silvery dot nearby.
“That has to be Pelagia,” she said. “Can we get closer?”
“That’s where we’re headed,” P’al said. “But I feel obligated to warn you that while that hydroxyl bubble may appear thin enough, in reality, it’s several hundred kilometers wide. And it’s composed of ice moonlets, ice-steroids, frozen dust, and who knows what other debris. The Fast and I have been plotting a way in through it, but it’s risky – you might to want to inhale some Somazine and sleep through it.”
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