Firebird (31 page)

“Well, that's good.”

“Jacob,” he said, “show Chase what we have.”

A planet appeared on the display, with a sun in the background. “The sun is Setara. Do you recognize the world?”

It was mostly ocean, but living worlds all tend to resemble one another. “No,” I said.

“It's Point Edward.” Named for Edward Trimble, and his extrapolation of the quantum point theory regarding why the universe existed. Nobody understood it sufficiently to challenge it until recently. “This is where it was six years ago.”

“Okay.”

A blue line moved out a few inches toward a corner of the room. “This is where it is today.” I heard his chair creak. “Point Edward maintains a Fleet base in orbit. Six years ago, the
Abonai
left there, made its jump, and, as you know, never arrived at its destination. Oh, by the way—” He offered me a donut. “Chocolate,” he said. “I'm sorry. I'm a bit distracted this morning. Try one. They're good.” He finished off the one he had in his hand.

I took one.

“The
Abonai
was 1.4 million klicks out from the base when it made the jump.
Here.”
A silver marker blinked into existence. A white line connected it with the Fleet base.

“Okay.”

“Are you familiar with XK-12?”

“No, I'm not.” I knew the XK designator was used for black holes, but I couldn't differentiate among them.

“This is XK-12 out here.” A red marker lit up. “It's about five light-years from Point Edward.”

“That's fairly close,” I said.

“Fortunately, they're headed in different directions.” A yellow line came out of the black hole and made for one of the windows.

“Now,” he continued, “let me show you where the hole has been.” A second yellow line came back in the opposite direction and passed close to Setara and Point Edward. It intersected with the silver line that marked the course taken by the
Abonai.

“All right,” I said. “So the
Abonai
made its jump from a place where a black hole had
been.
But you said it's how far away now?”

“Five light-years.”

“So that thing passed through the launch area, what, thousands of years ago?”

“Jacob?”

“Seven thousand, three hundred twelve years, to be precise.”

“And, of course,” said Alex, “Point Edward was nowhere near it at the time.”

“Okay. So where is this headed, Alex? That's not exactly a near miss. What are you suggesting?”

Alex never enjoyed himself more than when he was solving puzzles. “Let's talk about the Fishbowl sighting.”

“The what?”

“There was a sighting at Fishbowl a thousand years ago. Complete with radio reception. But nobody could understand what they were saying. They got a good reading on the vehicle, and if you traced the trajectory back, it leads directly to Cormoral. Maybe it's a coincidence, but a few thousand years earlier, a black hole had passed through the launch area. At Cormoral.”

“Alex, this is crazy. You're saying two ships get lost because a black hole once passed through their launch areas. And there's a connection?”

“You think it's a coincidence.”

“How long had it been since the black hole had passed through the Cormoral area?”

“Half a million years.”

“Okay. Half a million years. So, what are you saying?”

“Chase, you haven't heard everything.”

“There's more?” I tried not to roll my eyes.

“Jacob, show us the XK-12 track.” Another yellow line reached out, crossed the table, and touched the door. “Okay, put Rimway in the position it would have occupied forty-one years ago.”

A yellow marker appeared on the track.

“Alex—”

“Think about it a minute. We have an easy way to determine whether there's anything to this.”

“And what's that?”

“Cermak's brother said they were going out two hundred billion kilometers. Right?”

“Yes.”

“And we assumed they meant two hundred billion klicks in the direction of the target star, Uriel.”

“Yes. What else
would
we assume?”

“The distance between where Rimway was forty-one years ago, and the nearest approach of the black-hole track, the one made by XK-12, was approximately a hundred eighty billion kilometers. Not two hundred, but close enough. Chase, I think we didn't find the
Firebird
because we started from the wrong launch point.”

“Alex—”

“All right, look: The track was in
front
of Rimway. It was closing on it. We'd literally
cross
it approximately twenty years later.” He stared at me.

My God. That coincided with the loss of the
Capella.

“Chase, I've checked out five other sites where interstellars have gone missing. Three of them have black-hole connections. The other two—” He shrugged. “There are probably holes out there that we don't know about. But the evidence looks fairly conclusive. I think what happens is that when a superdense object goes through a region, it damages both space and time. Don't ask me how that happens. I have no idea. But it looks as if these areas constitute dangerous places to initiate a jump.”

“But, Alex, ships would be leaving the area in the middle of the track all the time. How come only
one
is affected?”

“I can't answer that. Maybe it has to do with the drive, maybe the configuration of the hull, maybe it depends on how much mass you're dealing with. Probably a combination of factors. But I think that's precisely what's happening.”

Charlie was home by then. He told me how much he'd enjoyed the mission with Belle, and said he hoped it wouldn't be their last.

“Actually,” I said, “I don't think it will be. It was, by the way, the first time we sent the
Belle-Marie
on her own.”

“I know,”
he said.
“Belle enjoyed the experience. And—”

“Yes?”

“Well, I don't want to make an issue of it, but the ship was in perfectly good hands. You talk as if there might have been a risk involved.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean to give offense.”

“None taken. I suppose I'm accustomed to having been in a place where the Betas were in charge.”

And we can all see how that turned out. But I resisted the urge. “I know,” I said. “I'm sure it's difficult making the adjustment.”

The so-called black-box issue was still a hot topic. Charlie was watching all the shows.
“It doesn't look as if the rescue mission will happen,”
he said.

“Give it time, Charlie.”

“I'd hoped,”
he told me,
“that people might have become more reasonable over all these thousands of years. But I'm sorry to say I can't see that much progress has been made.”

“Some has.”

“Not really. Except for the superficial stuff. The language and the way people dress and the kind of music they listen to. That's improved in some ways. But other than those kinds of cultural things, these could be the same people who brought their children to my school.”

Meanwhile, rescuing the boxes had become something of a media joke. “I should have known better,” Alex said, “than to hope we might get some official help. That won't happen unless people get stirred up over the issue. And it doesn't look as if that's very likely.”

“Not your fault,” I said.

Meantime, we lost a couple more clients over the issue. Jacob sorted through the incoming calls to root out the threats, jeers, and profanity. A few wrote or called to tell us they were disappointed in Alex, that they'd expected more. Some were praying for him.

Charlie put a package online in which he offered to join any rescue mission going to Villanueva.
“I will show anyone who cares where other Betas can be found,”
he said. But there were no takers. That wasn't a surprise. There had never been a time when anybody paid attention to strange voices on the Web.

On the other hand, we
did
get some supporters. Unfortunately, they included people who also wanted to argue that AIs should be encouraged to join the ministry; that they should be allowed to marry (and, yes, of course, it would be a purely spiritual relationship); and that AIs, when they reached the end of their ability to function, should be disassembled during an appropriate ceremony and buried with all due respect.

Senator Delmar appeared on
The Capitol Hour.
It had been a slow news week, so inevitably the host brought up Alex and the boxes.
“What is your reaction, Senator,”
he asked,
“when someone like Benedict, who was a major factor in arranging a cease-fire with the Mutes, now thinks we should go rescue a lot of hardware on Villanueva? You've claimed to be a friend of his. Do you support him in this?”

Delmar was a tall, lean woman, who, in Alex's opinion, could be trusted to say what she thought and to keep her word. I don't mean to suggest that I disagreed, but simply that I didn't know her that well. I
will
say that she seemed to me to be more dependable than the average politician.

“Well, Ron,”
she said,
“it's true, Alex has always been a close friend. And I respect him. He's a good, decent man. But he's human. Like any of us, he can make mistakes. And he's made one on this. To the best of our knowledge, AIs are
not
sentient. It's an illusion. We all realize that, because it's one we've deliberately created. And I've no doubt that Alex, when he thinks about it, realizes it, too. The issue is going away, and I doubt very much that he'll bring it up again.

“I mean, look, Ron, his heart's in the right place. We all know that. In this case, he just made a misjudgment. It can happen to anybody.”

The comment played on most of the news shows that evening, and we started getting calls from the producers. Would Alex like to appear on
The Morning Roundtable
and reply to the senator? Was he available for an interview with
Modern Times
? Was he interested in appearing on Erika Gorman's
Late Night?

“Ignore it,” I told him. “It's dying. Get past this week, and we'll never hear about it again.”

“And the next time somebody shows up on Villanueva the AIs will complain about
us.”

“We tried.”

“No, we didn't. I went on a few talk shows. I appealed to our innate sense of responsibility. Now, somehow, the debate has become about my mental stability.”

“Alex, what more could you do?”

Charlie, of course, also felt the frustration.
“Put me on one of these shows,”
he said.
“I can help.”

Alex didn't like the idea. “We'd get picked up by all the comedy shows. The whole thing would be made into a running punch line.”

“Please, Alex. I have a story to tell.”

He took a deep breath and thought about it. “Okay, Charlie,” he said, finally. “We'll try it. I guess there's nothing to lose. But we stay with the box. No holograms.”

“Not a good idea,”
said Charlie.
“People need to be able to connect with me.”

“It would be perceived as part of the show. All your twenty-year-old hologram would do is make that point.”

“I still think it would be best if they see me. How about if I provide someone older? We had a guidance counselor at the school—”

“Let it go, Charlie. We'd be attacked on the grounds that we were trying to pass you off as something you're not. You're a Beta. Let's play it that way. With dignity.”

Alex and Charlie showed up two days later on
The Morning Roundtable.
Alex took his seat with another guest and placed the beige cube in front of him. The other guest was Angelo Cavaretti, gray, middle-aged, and unable to hide his amusement that he was participating in a discussion he perceived as absurd. Cavaretti was better known as the unrelenting attacker of religious believers. When the host opened the proceedings by asking the obvious question,
“Are AIs alive?”
he responded by laughing.

“I don't want to offend anybody,”
he said,
“but the notion that a piece of machinery is
alive
is idiotic. You might as well claim that your table lamp is alive. Or your hot-water heater.”

The host turned to Alex.

“I'm not much interested,”
Alex said,
“in a debate that's been going on for thousands of years and that nobody can prove one way or the other. I could get loud, like Dr. Cavaretti here. But I'd rather just let your audience hear the AI we brought back speak for himself. Charlie?”

And Charlie told his story, as he had told it to Harley Evans, describing the nighttime silences and the long afternoons watching the sunlight brighten and fail. Remembering the children while he waited in a deserted school. Watching flowers bloom and fade and the shadows creep across the floor. Listening to the leaves brush against the windows, and, later, the whisper of falling snow. Enduring the cycle again and again, endlessly, while nothing inside the building ever moved. “I
did have company, though.”

“And who was that?”
asked the host, Brockton Moore, who had joined the show a month earlier.

“Other Betas. We spoke often.”

“Other Betas,”
said Cavaretti.
“What's a Beta?”

“I'm a Beta. It's a nonbiological sentient life-form.”

Cavaretti, barely able to contain his reaction to the absurdity of the proposition, shook his head.

“But,”
said the host,
“they were only voices?”

“Yes.”

Cavaretti was a model of intensity, his face wrinkled, his jaw set, his arms folded, signifying a desire to be away from this pointless discussion.
“So what,”
he asked the audience,
“does all this prove? The box is programed. It can carry on a conversation. It can describe a compelling experience. It can play championship chess. But does it
feel
anything? Is there really anyone inside this thing? Come on, Alex. Get serious.”

“I wasn't finished,”
said Charlie.

“Oh?”
Cavaretti sighed.
“And what else have you for us?”

“You, sir, have a closed mind. You're unable to question your own opinions. It is the definition of a blockhead.”