Cosmonaut Keep (19 page)

It was true, and Gregor knew he couldn't object.

"I'll come with you," he said.

De Tenebre rocked back and snorted. "For three weeks of trailing around after us? I can think of no better way of prolonging your pain -- and Lydia's."

"No," said Gregor, suddenly dizzy with decision. "I meant -- "

De Tenebre raised a hand, shook his head.

"No!" he barked. "I will not hear of it. I will not let you say it. Traveling is no life for someone not born to it, and certainly not for you. You have another calling, man. Do not disdain the gifts the gods have given you. And they have not given you my daughter ... "

He paused, frowning in thought.

" ... or if they have," he continued, "it will be through your own work and your own gifts that you will win her."

Gregor squeezed his eyes shut for a few seconds. He was afraid that at any moment he might start weeping worse than Lydia had. Gradually the trader's words sank in. He looked up at him.

"What do you mean by that?" he asked.

De Tenebre stood up and leaned forward on his knuckles.

"We intend to stay on Croatan for half a year. I can leave you a schedule of our route thereafter, every port of call all the way back to Nova Terra. Your chief, the lord Driver, has told me about your family's Great Work. The lord Cairns your grandfather has confirmed it. They have high hopes in you. If you fulfill them, you can come after us yourself, and meet Lydia again within a few months or a few years of your life and even less time in hers. Bring me a ship. If you do that, Gregor Cairns, you can take my daughter, and I will be forever in your debt."

Gregor felt Lydia's arm fall away. The world became, for a moment, black-and-white and filled with white noise. He took some deep breaths. His first thought was outrage at this challenge, this offer to
trade
Lydia for a ship, or for shipping. Then --

Thoughts tumbled,
click-click-click,
like logic gates. If Hal Driver and James Cairns had told the merchant the Great Work could be completed in some feasible time -- then that explained James's new urgency about it, and at the same time made it difficult to dismiss de Tenebre's suggestion as unreasonable. And if James was interested in the team's research as having something to contribute to calculation, something to do with neural nets, then there was some connection between what they'd been doing and the Great Work --

A chill went through him as he realized what that connection might be. It unfolded before his eyes, the map of the squid nervous system overlaying the data structures of the navigation problem. He understood the architecture of the mind that could understand the problem, and in so doing he understood it himself. He could see, in principle, how the problem could be solved.

He blinked, and the world came back, in full color and high resolution. Lydia and her father were looking at him very oddly.

"I'm surprised to see you look so pleased," said de Tenebre. He straightened up and took a step back. "And encouraged. I was afraid your seniors were bluffing to drive a bargain."

A bargain
-- Gregor was struck by a further consequence of his train of thought. The deal the merchant had offered to the team would give him a share in all its future outcomes and applications -- and if their research was connected to the Great Work, it would give him a share in the grand starship enterprises that James had outlined. A permanent say in all their futures, and in the future of Mingulay, which would thenceforth be tied to Nova Babylonia.

He swung his legs over the bench and stood up, facing the merchant.

"I'm not pleased at all," he said. "I make you no promises, and I don't accept your offer of your daughter because that's for her to decide." He moved behind Lydia, and laid the tips of his fingers gently on her shoulders. "She may be your daughter but her life is her own, not something to be traded between families. I love her too much for that. I knew from the beginning it was hopeless, but it's possible to love without hope."

Lydia reached a hand up and gripped his.

"You're right," Gregor went on, "that I can't and won't come with you. If Lydia feels about me as I feel about her, she'll stay here. If not ... I'll do my best to come after you. But what Lydia does then, or now, is her choice. What
I'm
going to do now is go back to the lab and urge my colleagues to make sure that your offer to fund our team is politely turned down."

Lydia's grip on his fingers was beginning to hurt.

Then she let go, and scrambled up from the table and stood looking at him, her eyes wet.

"No!" she said. "You don't understand! Coming for me in a ship of your own is how it should be! When my father said that, I felt for the first time some hope for us! You must do it! You must achieve something of your own to win a woman, that's how it is with us. I wouldn't feel traded at all! If you love me, you'll do it!"

How different our worlds are,
he thought.
And how alike.
She could have had his. She still could.

"I do love you," he said, and turned and walked away. He didn't look back, but he hoped with every step -- across the yielding grass, and the crunching pebbles, and down the echoing tiled corridor to the lab -- that Lydia would come running after him.

She didn't.

"It's going," said Elizabeth, from the lab window.

Gregor looked up from a table covered with sheets of paper. White paper and black ink, scrawled with shapes, speckled with numbers. He felt utterly dull, as he had for the past forty-eight hours. Unable to explain the reasons for his objection to the merchant's funding to anyone except James -- who approved of it, and had hastily seen the syndics to confirm the objection -- he was in bad favor with his team, and with the department. Everyone thought there was something of a scandal behind it, some offense given or taken, something of a cloud.

But still, lured by the primitive primate urge for visual stimulation, he made himself stand up and walk to the window. Another sunny, blustery day. The last of the skiffs were swooping and darting into the bays in the starship's hull, like seabats to their roosts on a cliff. The lighters and sightseeing craft, and the little humming airplanes, were standing or circling well off.

The ship's sides ran with colored lights that scribed names and logos, flags and symbols. The bays and hatches sealed without leaving a seam. Around it, the water bent away from beneath it, until it was obviously not floating but hanging a little above a vast, shallow depression. It began to rise slowly. St. Elmo's fire crackled on masts a mile away. The meniscus of water rose up beneath it, until the sea bulged a fathom above sea level.

Then the water slumped back, setting a swell racing out to rock the distant boats, and the ship rose faster as though released. It began to move forward as it continued to accelerate up, and within a minute was lost from sight in the shining unfathomable blue of the sky.

Gregor realized he was craning to watch, his cheek pressed to the pane. He came down off his toes and took a step backward and turned his back on the horizon. Elizabeth and Salasso faced him, the saur with no discernible expression, the woman with a tentative smile.

"Well, that's it," he said. "They're gone."

At that moment emotion returned to him, flooding his veins and nerves with singing relief. The pain of parting from Lydia, and the pain of not knowing for sure what that parting meant, broke the grip of his anhedonic depression. He felt so much the better for it that he smiled.

Lydia was gone, but he still had friends, and he still had work, and it was suddenly obvious how his friends and his work could yet let him see Lydia again.

"Yes, well ... " Elizabeth was saying. Gregor stepped forward and caught her by the shoulders, grinning. She almost recoiled, but her smile broadened.

"I have something to tell you," he said. Her shoulders, under the rough wool of the jersey, were quivering in a way that reminded him painfully of how Lydia's shoulders had felt. He let go with one hand and clapped the saur's shoulder too. "It's about starship navigation."

"Oh," said Elizabeth. Her face fell for a fleeting moment, and then she looked away and looked back at him, interested. "So, don't keep us in suspense."

But keep them in suspense he did, all the long walk to the castle and through its corridors and stairs. Carrying the papers he'd been working on rolled up under his arm, he marched to the Navigator's room. It was unoccupied.

He waved a hand at the sofa. "Make yourselves comfortable -- uh, not on that bit, some coffee got spilt."

Elizabeth perched on an arm of the couch, Salasso found some space that was neither stained nor loaded with books and files, then put his hands behind his head and leaned back with his legs stretched out -- a human posture he'd picked up, but one which his height, or lack of it, didn't help to carry off.

"So tell us," he said.

"Our family has over the generations been working on a navigational problem," Gregor said. "That much, I'm sure you know. It's no secret. What I've realized is that the actual solution to this problem requires a non-human mind, specifically a squid mind, and that our research in cephalopod neurology can contribute to simulating such a mind -- in its barest outlines, of course, but it's the outline, the structure, the
architecture,
if you will, that counts."

Salasso had jerked out of his laid-back pose and now leaned forward, tense.

"I see, I see," he said. "The electrical potentials, the gross and fine anatomy, yes! Yes! But how would you simulate it?"

"In a calculating-machine, of course," said Gregor. "The brain is a computer, and any computer can simulate any other computer."

Elizabeth looked around at the calculating-machines.

"In
these
heaps of mechanical junk?"

"If necessary," Gregor said. "Yes. But I hope, with them and many more, working in parallel."

"It would still take forever."

Gregor's eyes narrowed. "Oh, you know that?"

"Well, I can give you an educated guess!"

Gregor jumped up. "I can see it all in my head, I can see how it could be done. The structure of the problem and the structure of the brain match so exactly it's uncanny, it's like they were made for each other."

He realized what he'd just said, and added: "Perhaps they were."

Salasso said nothing, but it seemed his lips became, if that were possible, thinner.

"But you're right," Gregor went on. "In theory, yes, one computer can simulate another. But it's just not possible to do it quickly, without far better computers than we've got." His fists clenched. "Now, if we still had the computers the first crew brought from the ship ... "

"That might be possible," said Salasso.

10

____________

Launch on Warning

Somebody was shaking my shoulder. I struggled up from a deep midday doze to find myself sitting on the sofa in Alan's office. Alan was looking down at me with a concerned expression.

"Sorry," I said. "Didn't mean to -- "

"That's all right, you've just had a few tough days catch up with you," Alan said. "We'd've let you sleep, only -- "

He gestured at the wall, and with that wave of his hand the posters cleared and reconfigured to a patchwork of news-screens. Most of them showed the same face: Jadey's. I jolted into wakefulness.

The picture was recent -- no, it was live, the camera tracking her grim face as she was escorted by two women police officers from the Sheriff Court in Edinburgh to a police van. I caught passing phrases. "Remanded in custody." "Extradition hearing."

"Extradition?"

"To the F-U-K," said Mary-Jo, spelling it out viciously. "Down there she's been charged with the murder of a Russki officer they say she was having an affair with."

"That's a fucking lie!"

"One would assume so," Alan said, "from first principles. But how do you know?"

I told them. Mary-Jo's finger's tapped on air all the while.

"Right, right," she said when I'd finished. "Assuming she told you the truth, and I think she did; it explains why they have a sample of clothing with that poor son of bitch's blood and her skin cells. And a bloody knife with no goddamn prints or anything. And even if your ware didn't work, and the whole thing was taped, there could still be evidence that there'd been a hack-attack on the street cameras, which would make any record showing what
actually
happened inadmissible. Shit."

"It gets worse," Alan said in a flat tone. He dug a couple of layers deeper in the news, to the detail behind the headlines. At this level it was practically raw court transcript -- nobody'd bothered to summarize this uninteresting minor detail about a mere Brit -- and all that leapt out at me was my name and a lot of pictures of me, mostly grainy surveillance grabs but recognizable enough.

"They want you," Mary-Jo translated from the legalese. "They're not sure yet whether they want to subpoena you as a witness or extradite you as an accomplice after the fact. Whichever -- the U.S. government is quite likely to cooperate, and even if it doesn't stand up in the courts you're looking at a long legal hassle at best. At worst the INS will have your ass on a plane back to the commies before you can say 'refugee.' "

"Wait a minute," I said, trying to stop a pebble in the landslide of bad news, "I thought people from Europe had automatic refugee status, or something."

"Nah." She shook her head. "It's all de facto. They turn a blind eye, and that's, you know, policy -- to waive the immigration controls -- but the laws are still on the books. It's a privilege, not a right, and it can be withdrawn at any time and only challenged in court after the fact. Legally you're still an illegal immigrant."

"All right." I sank back in the sofa, feeling drained. "I can handle that. What about Jadey?"

"Excuse me," Mary-Jo said, "but you
can't
handle that. Jadey's situation, we
can
handle. It's what we
do.
No matter what charges they stick on her, it's still political, we can still do deals. It's not like you guys have an independent judiciary or shit. Whereas over here, we do, more or less. Your problem
here
is a bunch of extra-legal -- official and freelance -- people who might come after you. Hell, any of the camo dudes on the gate here might decide to make a bit on the side by turning you in. You don't want to be either administratively dealt with
or
stuck in the courts, believe me."