The Diamond Deep (35 page)

“There is no single
they
here,” he murmured. “It worked for us to think like that on the
Fire
. But here? Here there are a hundred
theys
. Maybe more. We have to get the attention of people we think can help us, and we have to convince them to help us.”

“Surely there are people here who could have stopped the babies from dying.”

“Everything here costs credit.”

“What does a life cost?”

He couldn't bring himself to tell her that he'd asked Naveen about how to get medical care. Naveen had asked for how many, and then told him what it would cost to buy the services of a specialist doctor—human or robot. They had their own medical care from the
Fire
, of course. But they knew the diseases of a ship, the angsts and sores and cuts and sorrows of a contained colony. To buy more expertise would cost them all. A few days of life for the whole colony against a chance—not even a known outcome—for a few children. He had reported the information to Ruby and Joel and SueAnne and watched them decide to use hope instead of credit. It had been hard to watch; another decision between bad and awful, between hopeless and barely hopeful. “We'll find a way. Really, we will. There has to be way.”

The choices here were far more cruel than the choices aboard the
Fire
had been. At best, they would survive their own choices with their hearts intact. He held Marcelle a little tighter.

Onor, Ruby, and KJ were alone with Naveen in Ruby and Joel's living room, staring at the blue pill-shaped heart of Aleesi. The round ball of Ix lay beside the webling that held Aleesi's brain. Both looked too small for the beings that inhabited them.

KJ looked alert and rested, like he always did. In contrast, Ruby's shoulders still drooped with exhaustion and the dark circles under her eyes had barely faded. She leaned in over the objects and whispered to Naveen, “Do you think you did it? Do you think it's okay?”

Naveen looked as serious as Onor had ever seen him. He'd chosen to change his myriad browns for somber blacks, as if demonstrating how earnestly he took her need to preserve Aleesi. He set a small speaker down on the table beside Aleesi's brain, and his slate beside the speaker.

“I was able to move all that is Ix—or all that I could tease apart from the ship when I copied it—into Aleesi. There was some space that she wasn't using, anyway. It wasn't enough to store or process all of Ix, so I deleted some of the very old parts to make room.”

Naveen must have felt Ruby's frown.

He grinned at her. “She should be fine. In some ways it will have made her stronger.”

“Did you talk to her?”

He shook his head. “I waited for you. I ran tests on both of them, and they should both work.”

“What about Ix?” KJ asked. “Did you change it, too?”

“Ix will be different. It will retain most of its memories from the ship, but Ix knew itself as the ship, as all of the many myriad bits of data it collected. It knew itself as the cargo bays and the drive and the water systems and the recorder of trash. It probably experienced the ship as its body.”

KJ leaned in, his dark eyes narrowed. “Will it work?”

“I hope so. It appears the copy was crude, but true. AIs are like humans; they want to live, to continue.” Naveen leaned forward and pushed a button on the small speaker. “This will broker these conversations, keeping them off your community communication network. That's for security.”

“Will everyone be able to use Ix eventually?”

“I don't know. We don't know what is safe. Ix was programmed to protect the
Fire
, not individual people.”

Ruby took the ball of Ix from the table and held it in her lap. “Perhaps we can program it to protect us now? We are all it has left.”

Naveen picked up his slate and typed something. “I'm waking Ix up first. I will tell it who is here.”

The speakers were good, and the voice that came from them was clearer than it had ever been on the
Fire
. “Hello, Ruby Martin.”

Ruby clasped her hands over her face and her eyes shone with unshed tears. “Hello Ix. It is good to hear your voice.”

“I can't feel anything.” The voice didn't sound panicked at all. “I remember coming in. The closer we came to the
Diamond Deep
, the more I had trouble thinking.”

Ruby and KJ exchanged a glance. Ruby spoke. “You were limited, and copied. The you I am talking to now is a copy. We are no longer on the ship.”

“We are in the station?”

“Yes. There is me and Onor and KJ, and a man from the station named Naveen who has been trying to help you.”

“Hello, Naveen.”

Naveen glanced around the room. “There's no point in keeping anything secret from it.”

Ruby said, “You are . . . you have been put into a small space. From one of the robot spiders. You remember the robot spiders?”

“The invaders? Of course. Where is the
Fire
?”

Naveen held up a hand quickly, forestalling
that
answer. “Yes, the invaders. I copied you into the brains of Aleesi, the one we saved. That's where you are.”

“With the being Aleesi?”

“Yes.” The voice was Aleesi's though the speaker.

“I thought that might happen,” Naveen muttered.

“Hello, Aleesi!” Ruby said. “I'm glad to hear from you.”

“I detect that I am different,” Aleesi said.

Naveen immediately asked, “Better? Do you feel better?”

“Different.”

Ruby licked her lips. “I feel bad that we put Ix in with you. We didn't have a choice.” She caressed the ball in her lap. “We need Ix very badly. We need Ix to help protect us, who are all that is left of the
Fire
.”

Naveen looked unhappy with Ruby.

“I am used to sharing. Copies of my selves collected up from time to time and shared.”

“Is the
Fire
gone?” Ix asked.

KJ spoke. “Only in physical form. It's being scrapped.”

Ruby winced and added, “We remain, and we are in a new place. Ash. That's what you need to help us protect now.”

“I still cannot feel anything. I cannot help if I cannot be connected.”

Naveen spoke to Ix. “We will do that when we can. First we need to know that you can live where we placed you, and that you and Aleesi can share space.”

“Of course we can,” Aleesi said. “But you have created more of an abomination to the station culture than I was by myself. You should understand the risks.”

“There are risks to you, too,” Ruby said.

“I have been dead since you caught me,” Aleesi replied.

KJ stared at Naveen. “What is wrong with this—to the station culture? Aleesi is a human and Ix is an AI. Is that it?”

Aleesi answered before Naveen had a chance to. “My very existence here is dangerous to you. The laws that made me illegal caused the Edge to flourish. Humans are not allowed to inhabit fully robotic bodies. The history is complex, but assume that this was seen to benefit both the AI community and humans. If Ix and I can share directly, it is a marriage of AI and human. That is also forbidden.”

No one spoke for a few moments. KJ recovered first. “What will they do to us if they catch us?”

This time Naveen answered. “We will see that that does not happen.”

KJ's eyes narrowed in a way that made Onor glad the AIs had no visual receptors at the moment. Ruby, however, did have eyes. She looked at KJ as she spoke. “We will be very careful.”

KJ whispered. “Someday, one of your risks will kill us all.”

Ruby and Naveen and SueAnne stood at the window, looking down on the Brawl, SueAnne's chair parked behind her like a safety net. Ruby's hands splayed across the cold glass, her face pressed to it. The Brawl looked ten times as crowded as they were, maybe twenty times. Bodies side-by-side, too close. Close enough to smell each other, to reach out and touch someone else easily in most directions most of the time. Lovers held each other, lying two to a one-person cot. People gathered and talked or played games, usually with someone facing away from the group and watching, the way Onor and the other guards watched at concerts. Many people sat by themselves, or stood by themselves, surrounded by others but not touching or being touched by anyone else. Enforcer robots moved silently and efficiently through the crowd, which always seemed aware of them.

This might be her people's fate.

“There are no children,” Ruby murmured. “What would they do with our children?”

“There are schools,” Naveen said. “We send the young children of people who end up here to boarding schools.”

SueAnne asked, “Is it possible to visit people who are here?”

“For a fee.”

“Of course,” Ruby replied, bitter. Angry. “Everything is for a fee.”

“What does it take to get out?” SueAnne asked.

“It depends on why you are there. If it's just for non-payment of your life fee, then merely credit—repayment plus paying forward half a year.”

“That's a fortune.”

“Family members have done it. Some that have skills can sign contracts for certain types of jobs and buy their freedom as long as they keep their contracts.”

“So they have to do whatever the person who hires them tells them to do?”

“For a year. The first six months pays their way out of here, the next pays forward enough that they have a year and a half before they would have to go back.”

Ruby remembered Lake, and choked out a question. “Can women sell their bodies to get out of there?”

Naveen's answer was, “Sex is one of the most exquisite things people can sell here.”

Ruby shuddered. She looked down, searching for more details. No walls, no privacy. A few stacked blocks where people sat slightly above the crowd. Aisles snaked between groups. Here and there, benches and cots were fiercely protected. An exercise area was full of people and ringed with enforcer bots. Maybe those were the ones with the most will, staying as strong as they could.

You'd have to be strong in a place like this.

She hated it.

Looking down at it didn't help her gain control of her dismay. “There is enough food and space that everyone could live better than this. I've seen it, already. You could take half the space that's in the Exchange, and still get the business of the Exchange done. That half could feed these people.”

“If the people here have enough to live well and not work, they will do that. Such an experiment was carried out on another station, and the whole station became less competitive.”

So the idea of competition happened between stations as well. You competed, or you ended up here. “Why else are people here, besides not paying?”

“People who get caught breaking rules but who aren't violent can be sent here. We have a lockup for big crimes, and banishment for others. They can't get out until their time is done, and they have to also make the life payment.” He paused and they were all silent. She glanced away from the window to check Naveen's expression. He looked closed.

She stared back down at the crowded expanse, watching a man thread through the crowd while an enforcer followed him, like a slow dance. She couldn't quite tell if the man was being chased, but a way was opened for both, one at a time, as if the crowd below wanted the man to escape and yet couldn't block the enforcer.

“It's not pleasant,” Naveen said quietly, “but this system works. For each of the people you see down there, there are a hundred who are either pulling their weight and doing the work of the station, or earning credit with entertainment—like me. Some are simply taken care of by others.”

“You sound defensive. But you wanted us to see this.”

“Not because the Brawl is a good place. It's not.”

Below her, the man seemed to be getting ahead of the enforcer.

She felt puzzled. “But you approve of it?”

“It keeps civilization going.”

“I don't approve.” Here and there, she noticed the flickering lights of video screens. “They have slates?”

“Of course. And group entertainment. I've even sold a few of your songs in to them. They like them.”

She stiffened against the glass, staring down at the people below, looking for the man who had been running from the enforcer. “Sold?” It some ways it was less horrible than she had imagined, in other ways it was more. She hated the idea of it, of segregating people and watching over them with machines. “You sold my songs to people who have nothing?”

“Of course. It is to help keep you from having nothing.”

“Give them away here. All of them. Even the future ones.”

Naveen frowned. “You have to have credit to make a difference.”

She ripped her attention from the window and turned to him, speaking too loudly for the small hallway and not caring. “This is my work, not yours. I will have it given to these people.”