Beautiful Intelligence (17 page)

Manfred said, “Blue’s injured, not–”

“
Violet’s
carin’,” Pouncey replied.

Manfred watched as Violet moulded the bioplas into a glove that fitted over the damaged end of Blue’s arm. Bioplas, engineered from bacteria, created its own nutrient channels as it was transformed by whatever intelligence directed it, but Manfred knew that a simple cover would not be enough. He wondered if a healing process might begin, instigated by physical contact.  Perhaps the obvious care shown by Violet would improve the chances of success. If Blue knew that it was cared for...

“I think you might be on to something,” he told Pouncey. “Just look at them. They’re totally aware of one another. They care.”

“Could be a kind of act of safekeepin’,” Pouncey replied, nodding.

Joanna joined them. “Look at those patterns,” Manfred told her. He turned to Pouncey, adding, “Fetch Indigo. I want to see if it too manifests the dye patterns.”

Pouncey brought the bi from the comp, resting it in the crook of her left arm. Indigo’s surface showed a moving pattern, like the oscillating colours of an octopus.

“It’s emotion, I’m sure of it,” Manfred said. “Mmm, they’re appalled that Blue is injured. They know that’s bad because they’re aware of their own bodies, and how delicate those bodies are.”

Pouncey handed Indigo over to Joanna. “Interestin’ that Indigo shows the patterns even though it’s blind,” she remarked.

Manfred nodded. “Yeah... what you doing?”

“Had a thought,” Pouncey replied as she put on her spex and tapped on her wristband.

Manfred waited. Joanna, entranced by the scene before her, said nothing. After a few moment she placed Indigo on the ground, whereupon it hurried over to the other two. The gesture was unmistakeable.

Pouncey nodded at Manfred. “Thought so,” she said.

“What?”

“A nexus trace. Those rednecks’ rifles were nexus heavy.”

“Yeah. I saw the tech bulge by the triggers. Hypocrites.”

“Did the rifles refuse to fire?”

Manfred turned to face Pouncey. “They did. How d’you know?”

Pouncey pointed at Indigo. “It sensed what was goin’ on. It sensed the redneck rifle, and you, the victim. It modelled the whole scene in realtime. And it knew there was danger because of its experiences. Flexible thinkin’. Mental movement in time.”

“Jeez... it knocked out the rifles through the nexus?”

“To Indigo, the nexus must be like the air we breathe. It don’t see the boundaries we see. It knows the nexus, but it don’t know what we know – how the nexus evolved, all that. It just senses it and uses it, like a dolphin uses water.”

“Then if we don’t get to Portland soon, we’re dead.”

Pouncey nodded. “Listen, we could set up a Faraday cage using aluminium foil–”

“No way!
No.
You joking? How long d’you think you could last in an isolation chamber? An hour? A day? No... we get in the soltruck and drive back to the nexus just as fast as we can.”

Pouncey nodded. “Like the twisters of Ichikawa was after us.”

Then Joanna said, “Soon, very soon, we shall need to speak with Indigo.”

Leonora saw through her binoculars that Annaba was a small city of desert agriculturalists, solar mirror designers and junk artists, their advertising hoardings covering the hillsides like litter. She turned, thumbing the binocs up to full power. A group of Berber children was heading their way, smiles on their faces, spex tied on with string around the backs of their heads; running single file, like a caravan.

“Incoming,” she said, turning to the group.

“Who? What?” Hound asked.

“Just the local kids.”

“Give ’em a few coins to make ’em scatter,” he replied. “It’s the surest way. Man, the quickest way. We don’t need the attention.” He handed copper coins to them all, coins Leonora saw came from various countries.

They walked on. Annaba was an important stop, their supplies low, energy waning, only the camels unaffected by the heat and dry air. Zeug, the only member of the group riding, sat quiet and dignified, recharged to the max, soaking in the sunshine. She and Yuri had both noticed how much he liked the camels (because they weren’t human, Dirk said, because their behaviour was simple and predictable.) That comment had caused another argument.

She had stopped worrying about Hound and begun worrying about Dirk. Yes, she was a worrier: she knew it. But she could not help herself. Dirk’s position in the group had become redundant and there was little for him to do except become argumentative. On the other hand, Hound was over thirty and, she suspected, he wanted to settle down – yet he was still with the AIteam. Still doing good work, still loyal. She had been wrong about him.

Dirk glanced at her, smiled, waved his cheroot. She smiled back. Really, it was more of an intellectual argument they had, nothing more; it was not as if bad blood existed between them.

Then children’s cries surrounded the group and she fell out of reverie. The kids were everywhere, yelling in English and in French, “Give money! La bourse ou la vie! We want money!”

Hound began throwing coins into the sand, making the kids work, making them run. They all followed suit and it became a game. But then a group of the children began taunting Zeug, who sat, high and remote like a king, on his camel, staring into the sky in silence.

And then Zeug seemed to freak out.

He jumped off the camel in a single motion, landing on all fours in the sand. At once the children ran towards him, but he backed off, his face alternately scrunched up as if angry, then blank like a dead monitor. Leonora stared at him. His arms moved up and down like wings. A stream of words poured from his mouth.

“Tell! Vin. Large. Sign! Go! Helm. Man. Sun. Hot! Hot! Cowl. Zip. Grow!”

“What the...?” Hound said, turning around.

Yuri began running towards the children, shouting at them, almost screeching. “Leave him alone! You have had your money, now leave us alone!”

Leonora ran too. She had seen how strong Zeug was. A child’s death here would be a disaster.

Zeug continued to speak. “Four metres ten. One metre sixty one. Two metres fifteen.”

Yuri began shoving the children, throwing his hat away to scare them; and seeing his forehead, they screamed and scattered. But Hound grabbed the hat and pulled it hard over Yuri’s head. “Don’t show yourself up!” he yelled. “Zeug’s safe, man.”

“Get these brats away from him!” Yuri yelled.

Leonora chivvied the remaining children away, shouting at Dirk to give them the last of the coins. The kids ran behind the camels, then disappeared into sandy hillocks. The camels groaned. The wind whistled and the sand hissed.

Zeug began waving his hands again. “Camels I like. Camels I like. They are twenty five metres distant. No! The nearest, twenty four sixty two. The furthest... twenty seven eighteen. Dirk Ngma, thirty metres twenty five.” He turned to face Hound, then yelled, “
Mr Hound, I am watching you!
”

Zeug’s voice was so loud Leonora winced. Hound ran off. Yuri froze. Then Leonora walked up to Zeug and tried to put her hand on his shoulder, but he yelped and walked off.

“Twenty two sixteen. Fix. Spin! Load. Fire. Speck. Brush. In! By! To! Nineteen oh five.”

“He’s having some sort of fit,” Hound said. “Do something, Yuri.”

For once, Yuri’s emotions came to the surface. “What like? Stuff some of your Negro common sense into him? Fuck you! I do not know what is wrong, except that those vile brats upset him. Now get some common sense!”

Leonora shook her head at Hound, but she knew from the expression on his face that he would not respond. Yuri never spoke like this. The incident could be dealt with as a one-off. Hound walked away, high-fiving Dirk, who approached.

At least Zeug was calming.

They clustered around him. Leonora glanced back to see Hound drinking bottled water next to one of the camels.

She looked at Zeug. “Did you panic?” she asked.

Zeug did not reply.

“Da action of dem children caused da incident,” Dirk said.

Yuri nodded. “The brats spooked him, as you Westerners would say, causing him to panic, or so I believe Mr Ngma.”

Dirk nodded. “Autistic.”

Leonora stared. “What?” Now she felt
her
anger rising. “What did you say?”

“It just a guess. Autistic mind. He focussing on distances, which I think he measure. With his senses. He not able to cope with kid who look like him. And like us. He like camel. Simple, stolid, boring camel. Predictable.” Dirk nodded, looking at her. “Kids never predictable. Zeug sense dat. I not like dis situation at all.”

“What d’you mean,
autistic?
”

“Mr Ngma,” Yuri said, “you are skating on very thin ice.”

Dirk shrugged, patting his pockets, but finding nothing to smoke. “Dere no ice in da desert, so I not care. It only a guess, lighten up! You know autistic savant?” He waited for a response, taking a stick of chewing gum and popping it into his mouth. “Yeah, da autistic savant, his mind is concrete. No generalisation. Little or no social skill. Safety in da lack – in, what you say... in exactitude. Exact is safe.”

“You are saying Zeug is autistic?”

“I guess he
growing
autistic. I use dis as analogy. Or I could be right. We wait and see.”

Leonora took Yuri by the arm and pulled him back to the camels. The heat of her own anger surprised her. “What
is
that man going on about?”

Yuri’s face was flushed, his brow furrowed. “I do not know Ms Klee, but I must confess to concern over–”

“Yes, me too, Dirk–”

“Concern over Zeug! Never mind Mr Ngma, he is just a man, a single man with his own quite interesting opinion. But Zeug is definitely changing, and there I do agree with Mr Ngma.”

“Zeug is
not
autistic.”

Yuri glanced over his shoulder. Zeug was running to catch up with them. Yuri said, “I agree with you that it cannot be true. Zeug is too noble. But we must take from Mr Ngma what we must, for he has been correct before.”

“I
won’t!
” Leonora said, gripping Yuri’s wrist.

“You are hurting me.”

She let go. Words failed her. She turned and ran back to the camels.

Hound raised his hands palms up as she approached. “I ain’t saying a thing,” he said.

She walked around the nearest camel, slumping on the sand out of view of them all. Why did she have the sensation of losing control? Was the genie out of the bottle? If so she had to put it back, but she did not know how; and she was just one woman. She did know however that she did not want anybody to help her. The AIteam was her vision. And Zeug was hers.

~

Hound gazed up into black midnight heavens. Minuscule words danced around the constellations as the nexus told him which stars lay where. A satellite, invisible to him this late at night, passed overhead, its path tracked and visible like a string of neon in his spex.

With a flick of a tab on a wristband he reduced the info to a minimum (it was impossible to reduce it to zero short of removing spex). He gazed west. Nothing. East, also nothing. To the north lay the hallucinatory oasis, around which the mist-wreathed image of himself walked.

South...

He leaped to his feet. Southwards he saw a new figure.

An old man, small, pale, white haired. Without thought Hound reached out through the nexus, thumbing full throttle with his wristband, but the incarnation dissolved into a cloud of numbers. He stopped. This was something
different.
He initiated a full analysis of the nexus corresponding to the region he stood in. Seconds passed. Then a lead. He moved forward, following the man’s trail, but it was so well camouflaged he almost lost it. An expert, then. But who?

Then, for a millisecond, Hound saw a route into the old man’s machines. He risked it. He went in. The images in his spex became a jumble of land, air, sky and space as the old man’s smoke and mirrors tried to baffle him. But Hound was made of tough e-stuff. He took the beating.

Then he saw cities whirling by. Then Tunis. Tunis again, shimmering in midday sun! The old man’s computers were reacting to his presence, unable to shake him off but unwilling to give him free data, as Hound found himself following a trail through the nexus in ultrafast motion, heading west across North Africa at a thousand virtual kilometres per second. Following the route of the AIteam... then, with a heart-stopping instantaneous halt, he faced himself. And the nexus illusion shattered as the old man’s computers hustled him off their territory.

He lay on the sand, gazing up into black midnight heavens, minuscule words dancing around the constellations as the nexus told him which stars lay where...

His spex rebooted. Duration total: 8.472 sec. The whole episode had lasted less than a dozen heartbeats.

He dumped the trail file into a wristband then deleted the nexus signposts so the analysis could not be retrieved, or at least could only be retrieved by people who knew what to look for; witch doctors and the like. Nothing in the nexus could be
deleted.

The trail was unambiguous. He was being watched, and that act of surveillance had created a trail in the nexus, so faint it was almost nonexistent. But he knew at once who had done this, for it was not the deed of a human.

So... Zeug was watching him.

Hound stood up and sauntered over to the sleeping group. Zeug, as ever, sat in opened-eyed trance. Hound bunched his right hand into a fist, drew back his arm and lashed out. Zeug’s left hand moved as if teleported from one position to the next: without apparent motion. Hound’s fist struck that hand. Then Zeug turned his head to stare into his eyes.

“You’re watching me,” Hound said, pulling his fist back.

“I don’t like you,” Zeug replied.

“Why are you watching me?”

“My master told me to.”

Hound stepped back, appalled. It only took him a second to decide who
master
referred to.

~

Hound strode past the souk’s ceramics and jewellery salesmen, then paused. The main souk of Annaba spread like a dazzling, multicoloured labyrinth through the remains of its old sector (bombed in 2033 by the European Community, then rebuilt by the European Community, so that it became the first augmented city in Africa). Like chandelier-reflected rainbows its myriad signs and advertisements struck his eye with an intensity almost physical – and this without spex. With spex, the intensity of the info would be breathtaking.