Implied Spaces (36 page)

“I built myself a ship—about the size of that tumbler you’ve got in your hand—and uploaded myself into it. It was better designed than the hasty ship the others had used, and luckier—I managed to reach the Kuiper Belt in a hundred sixty years. I spent three or four of those years awake, experiencing the journey in realtime and making plans.”

“You stopped in the Kuiper Belt? Why?”

“I was tired of virtuals—particularly the amateur ones I’d programmed myself. I dropped onto a rocky Tombaugh Object, built a habitation, and incarnated myself there. I also built a communications laser and opened a conversation with Courtland.”

“Courtland.” Aristide took a deliberate sip of water. “How did you manage the conquest of Courtland? Or was it a seduction?”

A glint of vanity showed in Pablo’s eyes. “A little of both. I knew its interests in cosmology and teleology. On condition of secrecy I showed it Daljit’s work, and Courtland confirmed both the data and the interpretation. I convinced it of the necessity of finding and confronting the Inept. In the end I built myself a little pleasure craft there in the Kuiper Belt and emigrated to Courtland itself, so that it and I could continue our conversation without the hours-long time lag. Courtland shared my disgust in the fact that so little had changed in the centuries since I’d been away. But—in the end, and even though Courtland was willing—a delicate little adjustment of its software was needed to overcome the Asimovian Protocols. The seduction was to convince Courtland to allow me access to the core programming.”

Aristide looked at Pablo with interest. “You found a back door into the program?”

A superior glint entered Pablo’s eyes. “You mean the hasty back door that I—that
we
—programmed into Endora in case everything went wrong, and we had to crash civilization in a hurry?” He gave a thin smile. “No, that back door was useless, or hadn’t been fully transferred to Courtland—I suspect our heart was not in it when we created the thing.”

Which was lucky, Aristide thought. Else Pablo could have all of the Eleven.

“No, I found a back door peculiar to Courtland alone. One planted by Lombard, when he headed the team that created Courtland.”

“Lombard!”

“I suspect he acted for much the same reason I—we—tried to plant a back door in Endora.
Just in case
. But then Lombard went off to Olduvai to knap flint and eat wildebeest for the last eight hundred years, and who knows when he will be back? And,” smiling, “if he hears some alarming rumors around the campfire and arrives during the current crisis, he will find his back door locked.”

Pablo dropped carelessly into his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and lit a cigaret.

Aristide sipped his water.

“Earlier,” he said, “you ventured several criticisms of my character. Allow me to reciprocate:

“Firstly, though I’m pleased that you found a love so transformative, I fear some of the ways love transformed you are unfortunate. Specifically, Daljit’s love for you has created in you a rather adolescent regard for the primacy of your own emotion. You demand the universe reflect your feelings in every way:
your
anger,
your
tragedy,
your
pain. The fact that others don’t share the depth of your emotions offends you. Hence, all must be made to feel as you do.”

Pablo listened quietly, darkly. He flicked ashes onto the carpet.

“Second,” Aristide continued, “though your fortitude in the face of calamity, loss, and isolation is nothing short of admirable, I have to observe that your long separation from human company has resulted in a sad disconnection from actual human values—you’re simply divorced
from the way that people work
. Pablo—
we just don’t operate the way you want us to
.
We
are
contrary and chaotic and pulling in many directions at once—and for the most part it works to our benefit. Once everyone is marching into the same tunnel, any little cave-in can kill all of us.

“Every attempt to get us marching in unison toward Utopia has been a complete disaster. You can cite the examples as well as I.”

Pablo looked at him. “I’m different.”

“No. You’re sad.”

“Bah. You used more interesting adjectives earlier.” Pablo flicked more ash onto the carpet.

“That’s when I was angry,” Aristide said. “Now I’m simply tired. But my question is this: Once you get us all into that hypothetical wormhole of yours, and we confront the Inept and demand justice—and exactly what justice are you going to demand, by the way? A sincere apology? Seppuku? Ten thousand dollars for everyone who’s died of smallpox throughout history?”

Pablo narrowed his eyes.

“I’ll get on with my question, then,” Aristide said. “Once you get whatever justice you intend to extort out of your trans-universal victims, are you prepared for what happens when the
rest
of us build our wormhole to
you?”

Pablo gave an uneasy shrug of his shoulders, then said, “I’ll take what comes.”

“No you won’t. You won’t ever free us, because you’ll never dare face the same vengeance you want to mete out to the Inept.”

Pablo looked away. “I’m beginning to lose interest in this conversation.”

“What alarms me,” Aristide said, “is how this reflects on
me
. My whole life’s project has been to avoid megalomania, and now I’ve learned that under the right tragic circumstances I could become a flaming nut case.”

Pablo did not reply, but Aristide saw blood flush his cheek.

Aristide raised his glass to his lips, sipped, and lowered it—and the glass slipped from his hand to bounce on the carpet in front of his chair. He felt a wet splash on one ankle.

“Damn,” he said.

Pablo sighed, rose from his chair, walked to Aristide, and bent over to pick up the glass. Aristide hurled himself forward and ended by planting himself face-first onto the carpet.

Pablo straightened. “What the hell was
that
about?” he asked.

“I was trying to get into position to apply a guillotine choke.”

“And assuming that Courtland allowed it, what good would it have done?”

Aristide sneezed. There was a lot of cigaret ash on the carpet by now.

“You remember that bad cinema we watched when we were growing up?” he said. “Old
NorteAmericano
films badly dubbed into Spanish?”

“I suppose so.”

“Well, in a lot of them there was the scene where the villain captures the hero and boasts of all his plans. And then the hero cleverly escapes into the villain’s secret headquarters, finds the self-destruct switch marked PRESS BUTTON TO CANCEL ARMAGEDDON, and wins the day.”

Pablo sounded curious. “Did you really think that would succeed?”

“It seemed worth a try. Could you pick me up before I sneeze myself to death?”

There was a pause long enough for Pablo to communicate on his implant, and then Aristide climbed to his feet and walked in silence to the door.

He watched his own body move as if it belonged to another person. Courtland had taken complete control of him; he tried at least to move a finger, but couldn’t.

He tried to speak. His vocal cords were frozen.

Aristide’s body came to the door, then paused and turned his head. Aristide saw Pablo frowning and looking at a book on the shelf. Aristide’s glass was still in his hand.

“I’m beginning to think this conversation was a bad idea,” Pablo said, still peering at the book. “I think we’ll do a little brain surgery on you, and then you’ll tell me everything you know or suspect of enemy plans without making me witness these ridiculous gymnastics.”

And you’re petulant
, Aristide thought,
because I challenged your damned ideas, and you don’t have answers for me. All civilization might die because you’re in a snit.

But he couldn’t say the words. Aristide opened the door, walked down a mahogany-paneled corridor and stepped through another door. A pool of life waited there, shimmering in a cream-colored marble tub. Pablo’s personal pool, apparently, available whenever he had an insight he felt like backing up.

Aristide undressed, dropping his suit in a heap on the tile, and lowered himself into the pool. It was pleasantly warm. He floated for a while, the thick fluid holding him up. His pulse marked time in his ears. Then the pool accepted him and he sank. Fluid covered his face, crawled into his nose. His mouth opened to allow the transformation to happen more quickly.

He silently cursed himself. If he had played nice, if he’d pretended to be persuaded… but no. Courtland was doubtless monitoring and would have known when he lied.

He’d failed miserably. Twice in one day, apparently.

Anger simmered in him, mixed with a kind of distaste at his own failure. He had really thought better of himself than this.

He understood why Daljit avoided him. He was a walking reminder of a part of her life that had gone missing, but in which she knew that she had been a puppet or a raging, mindless burnout with a kitchen knife, in each case the pawn of a distant, unhinged tyrant. Who would want that kind of keepsake in her life?

He would not want to remember this, either.

His booming pulse slowed. He couldn’t feel his body anymore.

A voice sounded in Aristide’s head.

“Pops? How are you doing?”

A bubble of astonishment bursts from his lungs.

“
Bitsy?”

“It’s me, Pops. Now just hang on and I’ll get you out of here.”

20

The light was not gentle. Aristide came awake with floodlights stabbing his retinas and his lungs filled with fluid. He turned on his side and heaved up the water of life, then narrowed his eyes and peered out.

The pool of life was stainless steel and stood in the middle of a bare room equipped with functional furniture made of aluminum and pseudo-leather. One wall was featureless white, and featured a steel toilet and steel sink: the other walls were transparent plastic. The room was so brightly floodlit that he could see very little past the walls, only the occasional dim yellow light.

Apparently he was still a prisoner.

Aristide rose, let the fluid escape back into the tub, and then put on the clothing that he found waiting on a chair. He recognized the gabardine trousers and spider-silk jacket twenty years out of style.

He put on his clothing and walked up to the glass and made binoculars of his hands and pressed them to the glass wall. Through the wall he could see human silhouettes beneath the dim yellow lights.

“Hello hello!” he called. “Where are we this time?”

“Myriad City.” Tumusok’s voice came from speakers somewhere above him. Aristide relaxed slightly.

“How’d I get here?” Aristide asked.

“Maybe it’s you who should enlighten us.”

“Surely you know better than I.” Aristide leaned away from the glass, frowned. “I seem to remember my cat talking to me.” He touched the glass. “Is there some reason I’m stuck in a glass room?”

“We’re trying to find out if you’re a bomb wired to explode.”

The voice was Lin’s.

“A sensible precaution,” Aristide said. “Though I presume you’ve checked my code thoroughly to make sure no one’s tampered with it.”

“True,” Lin said. “But Vindex has been full of surprises up till now, and—”

Tumusok interrupted, his voice harsh. “Of the forty million-plus men sent to Courtland,” he said, “you’re the only one who’s come back.” There was a pause, and then: “Even
I
didn’t come back.”

Aristide looked at the dimly lit figures beyond the glass.

“Did I come back with a cat?” he asked.

“Not a cat,” Lin said. “Some kind of amphibian mammal. And what appears to be a lot of data, much of it astronomical. Not in size, but in content.”

Aristide smiled.

“Perhaps you can explain,” Tumusok said, “why you came back from Courtland when so many others didn’t.”

“Well,” Aristide began. He gave a wan smile, then sighed. “I’m afraid the answer won’t reflect well on me.”

“It’s lucky that Vindex is lonely,” Bitsy said. “Otherwise he might not have been so susceptible to a glossy, shiny-eyed mammalian bouncing up and down in his lab asking ‘
Where Master? Where fish?’”

“He didn’t scan you?” Aristide asked.

“Of course he did. He pinged me to find out what components answered his hail, but as I’m an avatar of Endora, I have the power to tell my higher functions not to answer.” Bitsy narrowed her eyes in a piece of smug self-congratulation. “Besides, I
acted
like a good little pet. I managed to convince him that I was nothing more than what I seemed. I’m a pretty good actor, if I say so myself.”

“You’ve had enough practice at making
me
think you’re harmless, that’s true enough.”

Bitsy did not deign to reply.

In a government Destiny limousine provided by Tumusok, Aristide and Bitsy were speeding toward Aristide’s pink marble hotel from the Domus’ bland, white headquarters with its rows of identical windows—whatever state architect had designed the building hadn’t realized that, in a place like Myriad City, it was the inconspicuous buildings that stood out.

Aristide had spent three days being debriefed in his glass-walled cell. Bitsy’s confinement had been even more rigorous: she’d been brought to consciousness only in a bare virtual space, surrounded by ferocious firewalls while being simultaneously probed, analyzed, and interrogated by Endora and ferocious attack programmers—”hattackers”—employed by the Domus.

Eventually both Aristide and Bitsy had convinced the Domus of their bona fides, and they were released in order to prepare a formal report on their activities, to be delivered to the Standing Committee the following afternoon. Bitsy’s virtual personality and memories had been downloaded into the physical Bitsy that had remained in Myriad City. Though now possessing two complete sets of memories, Bitsy seemed to have little trouble reconciling them.

“Is my formal report prepared yet?” Aristide asked.

“Yes. You might want to read it before you sign it.”

“And
your
formal report?”

“Also ready.”

“Perhaps you would favor me with some of the details?”