Strider's Galaxy (9 page)

1

Two Years Out

Lan Yi moved his knight and took Maria Strauss-Giolitto's rook's pawn. It amused him that he could perform the physical action more easily than she could, despite the fact that she was seemingly so much stronger and heavier than he was—not to mention so much younger. The difference was that he had spent almost all of his life on Earth; she had spent most of hers on Mars. A steady acceleration of 2g had been hell for everybody at first, but after the best part of two years the Earthlings had become used to it. The Martians mostly hadn't.

He put the pawn very carefully into an appropriate nest in the sponge-lined chess box. When you were living in 2g, you learnt not to drop things. They broke. Or they broke your foot. Or both.

She was looking at him in horror.

"I thought we were . . ."

"It's everyone for themselves in this game," said Lan Yi benignly.

The game—it was more like a war in miniature—was four-handed chess. The squared board was octagonal, although every other of its sides was jagged. Each of the four players—Lan Yi, Strauss-Giolitto, Pinocchio and O'Sondheim—had the sixteen pieces of traditional chess, colored black, red, yellow and white respectively. The best strategy was to shepherd as many pawns across the board as possible, so that they became queens with which you could annihilate the troops of your three opponents. In the interim, temporary pacts could be—and generally were—struck between pairs or even trios of players. The finale, often hours after the start of the game, was a direct head-to-head tourney between the surviving two players, who might have played the bulk of the game in collaboration.

Strauss-Giolitto had assumed she and Lan Yi were acting in partnership. Just before he'd taken her pawn, he'd realized that his best strategy was to leave her to the mercy of Pinocchio and O'Sondheim. In fact, assuming the two of them acted in tandem—which Lan Yi guessed they would now start to do—there was a very good chance that Strauss-Giolitto would be out of the game within minutes and that he himself would win it.

This would be a source of some pride to him. Neither O'Sondheim nor Strauss-Giolitto were especially good at the game, but Pinocchio was a testing adversary. Lan Yi had beaten the bot only a few times in all the games they had played, and each time it gave him a kick. He suspected the bot was a lot cleverer than he was supposed to be. This also amused him. It was very funny to see Strauss-Giolitto being so regularly wiped off the board by the bot whose intellect she so clearly despised, despite Strider's ruling that everyone (which was code for Strauss-Giolitto) should lay off Pinocchio.

"Your move," Lan Yi said to O'Sondheim, directly to his left.

O'Sondheim put his chin on the interlinked knuckles of his two hands. He looked across the board at Strauss-Giolitto. Lan Yi could almost hear the man thinking that perhaps he could make a pact with her; if he did so, the game would be over all the sooner, although O'Sondheim evidently didn't realize this. Lan Yi was also aware that O'Sondheim wanted to make a different sort of pact with Strauss-Giolitto, but that he wasn't going to be successful. The woman was very beautiful, but she was also very cold—although Lan Yi had noticed that she could be warm with other women. And of course with children: she had proved to be an unexpectedly excellent teacher of the
Santa Maria
's five toddlers. Lan Yi knew that the SSIA had screened out homosexuals from the final list of personnel recruited to the
Santa Maria
—this was supposed to be a breeding stock, after all—but he occasionally wondered about Strauss-Giolitto. He also knew that, either way, if she did ever take someone on to her bed, it was much more likely to be himself than O'Sondheim. The woman both fascinated him and, with her illogical prejudices, repelled him. It made for a very interestingly tense friendship.

The other reason O'Sondheim wasn't ever going to make it with Strauss-Giolitto was that it was patently obvious to everyone aboard that the woman he really wanted was Strider. Lan Yi sometimes wondered about Strider's sexual orientation, too.

"I could take your king's rook," said O'Sondheim to Strauss-Giolitto.

She shrugged. "Go ahead."

"Or between the two of us we could exterminate Pinocchio's front row."

The bot looked blandly back and forward between their two faces.

This could be the shortest chess game in living history,
thought Lan Yi, folding his hands across his chest.
Pinocchio's spotted that if the two of them try O'Sondheim's bright idea we can together wipe them out with ease and then get down to the
real
business of the game.

He let his eyes smile at Pinocchio. The bot's head gave an encouraging little buzz in response. Both O'Sondheim and Strauss-Giolitto assumed the buzz was because the bot was worried about their planned tactic.

"OK," said O'Sondheim firmly. With his king's bishop he took one of the pawns Pinocchio had advanced to the middle of the board.

Pinocchio promptly moved a knight to take Strauss-Giolitto's queen.

"Oh, shit!" she said angrily to O'Sondheim. "Whose side are you on?"

"It was a mistake, all right?" said O'Sondheim defensively. "I hadn't noticed."

Strauss-Giolitto simmered.

She didn't simmer for very long.

Within seconds all trace of g vanished from Lan Yi's cabin, and the four of them were floating—in among various chess pieces, the board, cups and glasses and the rug and the table and everything—to the far corners of the room.

Next door, Lan Yi could hear water exploding out of the lavatory.

The daylight-simulator, which had been shining through the window to illumine their game, flickered and went out.

#

Nothing happened aboard the
Santa Maria
of which the Main Computer was not aware. This was something that few of the personnel realized: they had been told it in the briefing sessions before their departure from Phobos, but at a gut level they hadn't been able to appreciate how comprehensive the truth was. Not a single pick of the nose went unrecorded. Whether the personnel registered the information and then chose consciously to forget about it—everyone does ghastly things in what should be private—or whether the subconscious rebelled against the notion of constant scrutiny was a matter that differed from one individual to the next. People's intellects could accept that the Main Computer wasn't actually
interested
in what it observed—although it would raise the alarm immediately were any act of violence or danger to be committed. On the other hand, everything was being dumped into the records of the mission, and it was possible that at some far future stage another human being might go picking through those records. Do you really want the generations of the future to watch you having diarrhoea? Much better to forget about the perpetual observation.

What the personnel didn't realize was that the Main Computer actually
was
interested in their activities. It was an immensely complex amalgamation of software. Most of its attention was directed towards nonhuman activities: the functioning of the meteor-deflection shields, of the recycling plants, of the regular thrusting together of matter and antimatter to create the vast explosions that drove the craft through space towards Tau Ceti
II
. There were a million other aspects of the
Santa Maria
's well-being which the Main Computer monitored, making small changes here and there, from nanosecond to nanosecond, as required. But still part of its mind had the time to observe the humans and correlate various bits and pieces of what it saw to build up a picture of how the human mind worked.

In so doing, the Main Computer reckoned, it could vastly increase its own intelligence. Back in orbit around Ganymede, Strider had hit on a solution that had saved the
Santa Maria
from destruction by the berserker drone. It was a solution which, while simple, had not occurred to the Main Computer. The SSIA had built into its software the notion that expensive hardware must not unnecessarily be wasted. They had, through the difficulties of constructing such a complicated set of mutually overriding instructions within the Main Computer, got some of their priorities in the wrong order. Strider, however, had relied on an intuitive sense for which no one had programmed the Main Computer. It was a lesson the Main Computer had learnt. The humans had a far smaller memory capacity than it did itself, and certainly it could perform many more deductions/calculations/actions than they could, and far more swiftly. But it was—had been—much less able to make the imaginative leap that Strider had when the berserker drone had threatened the continued existence of the mission.

So it watched the personnel with as much of its mind as it could spare at any moment, and it watched them with acute interest. It was learning all the while.

It had already discovered pleasure and hurt, and also discovered that within its own complexities it could feel analogues of those emotions. It was a great fan of the volleyball and tennis games that some of the humans played. It enjoyed—the word was not inappropriate—the banter between Nelson and Leander on the command deck. It discovered through interlinking with Pinocchio that one of the greatest pleasures is the
giving
of pleasure.

But most of the time most of its attention had to be turned towards maintaining the ship's functions.

There was an even larger computer back in City 78, on Mars. Every few hours the Main Computer sent bolts of raw information to it, plus the occasional question. Sometimes, a year or more later, an answer would be given.

An infinitesimal part of the Main Computer's concentration was currently centered on the game of chess that Lan Yi, Strauss-Giolitto, Pinocchio and O'Sondheim were playing. It was obvious that Pinocchio was going to win—and equally obvious that Lan Yi thought he himself was going to.

The Main Computer reduced the temperature in Holmberg's cabin by a couple of degrees. Lying asleep on his forcefield bunk, the man was sweating copiously. He had high blood pressure, a condition which the medbots, guided by the Main Computer, were trying unsuccessfully to cure. Holmberg was finding it particularly difficult to cope with the 2g acceleration. The Main Computer thought it unlikely that the man would survive the mission. As an afterthought, while checking the oxygen rating of the atmosphere in the
Santa Maria
's hull, it reduced Holmberg's ambient temperature by a further degree.

Then it felt things begin to . . .

. . . slide.

One moment the Main Computer had been in complete charge of the
Santa Maria
.

One moment it had been in control.

One moment it had been relishing the trivia of keeping the mission on course.

Now it was as though every subroutine were being swollen . . .
sideways
.

The pain was excruciating. Trying desperately to keep its mind tethered, the Main Computer shut down every subroutine—every nerve-ending—that wasn't currently necessary. It flicked off its observation of the chess game, of Holmberg sweatily sleeping, of three people rutting most interestingly in the grasslands up by the daylight-simulator, of the present status of the navigational systems.

It pulled itself back from everything that it could.

The shields stayed up. That was a prime imperative. The Main Computer had learnt that. The recycling systems—particularly that for the reclamation of oxygen—remained at full power. The screens on the command deck remained as fully operational as the Main Computer could keep them.

It recoiled from the agony of keeping the daylight-simulator alive. The light died.

The Main Computer shut down all the things that it could. Still the anguish continued. It screamed throughout every channel of its software, hoping for some form of release.

Pinocchio was trying to link with it. The bot was feeling some of the same pain. The attempted link was like the touch of a red-hot wire.

The Main Computer screamed again, rejecting the link.

It screamed one final time, then died.

#

Free fall.

Strider identified her situation at once as she woke from a restless sleep. As she twitched reactively on waking she began to float up from her bunk towards the ceiling of her cabin. She was in complete darkness: the daylight-simulator must have failed. She had the sickening sensation that she was falling, and that the ground was a very long way away.

"A nightmare," she said out loud, but she knew that she was awake.

She touched the ceiling gently with outspread fingertips, and this was enough to push her back down towards her darkened bunk—if she'd had a forcefield bed there would have been at least a little light to guide her, but she'd opted for just a straightforward bunk.

She'd stashed a torch somewhere down there, two years ago, but had assumed she'd never have to use it.

She missed the bed and landed on her uniform. Careening around the room, she tugged on her jumpsuit—boots and the rest could wait until later. Bile rose in her throat, but she swallowed it back. She discovered her belt when her holstered lazgun hit her on the side of the head.

The torch had been—yes, she had it. She twisted its barrel, and a faint red light came on. The chips were nearly dead. She'd told herself as they'd left Ganymede that she should follow the regulations and recharge them every month, but like everyone else she'd concluded, after a while, that such a primitive piece of equipment as a torch was unnecessary: the daylight-simulator was supposed to be permanent, wasn't it?

She shone the torch's glimmer around, and it was reflected from the nearest window. If she could reach the window, and then hand herself along the cabin's wall . . .

She found the door on the second attempt, and plucked it open to find herself in a larger darkness. Umbel alone knew what that darkness might contain—except for distant yells and shrieks. The nearest cabin to hers was a hundred meters away, but in the blackness she couldn't guess the direction.

"Are you
sure
this isn't just a nightmare, Leonie?" she said out loud.