Implied Spaces (24 page)

They stepped aboard the boat, and the hatch to the main cabin opened at Aristide’s silent command. Bitsy remained on deck, curling up on a sunny cushion, while Daljit and Aristide went into the cabin.

Daljit looked over the cabin without interest. Aristide strained to detect a scent of their time together, but could find nothing. He stood the sword against a corner of the chart table and opened a cabinet.

“Care for a drink?”

“Mm—not now, thanks.” Daljit brushed a brass fitting with her fingertips. “So this is where we fled, after we killed Tumusok.”

“We did.” He smiled. “We ran away to sea.”

He drew out a bottle of lemonade and opened it

“Tell me about the assassination,” Daljit said. He looked at her, then narrowed his eyes.

“The mole is on the other side of your face,” he said.

She smiled. “Yes. I have standing orders to switch it every time I visit a pool of life.”

“That’s amusing.”

“I hope so.” She perched on the arm of the settee. “The assassination?” she prompted.

He sipped his lemonade and sat in the navigator’s chair and told her about the watch on the trackline station, the ceramic sewer pipe bounding down the road to its fatal meeting with General Tumusok.

“His friends call him Coy Coy,” Aristide said. “Or so Lin tells me.”

“Amusing,” she said, unamused.

He held the bottle of lemonade between his two hands, as if to warm it. He looked up at her.

“You and I became lovers that night,” he said, “here on the
Fathom Deep
.”

He plotted the changes that worked their way across her face, and wished he knew what thoughts had prompted them. Then her lips drew apart in a smile, the mole lifting from its accustomed place.

“I hope that isn’t too much of a shock,” he said.

“A pleasant one, if so.” The words were spoken with grave care.

“We planned to meet again the next night. But you’d been infected by then, and you tried to kill me with a kitchen knife.”

“
I
was the zombie?” Her surprise was complete. “I assumed I’d been
killed
by a zombie.”

“You were killed by me,” Aristide said, “in self defense. I threw you off your balcony.”

Her lips formed an O, but she said nothing.

“Would you like that drink now?” he said.

“Killing, loving, trying to kill each other.” Daljit shook her head. “We ran the gamut in a short time, didn’t we?”

“We did.”

Soberly, she rose and approached him. He rose from the chair, uncertain. She took the lemonade from his hands and put it on a table, then kissed him. For a long, silent moment, they explored the kiss together.

She drew back and smiled. His heart leaped.

“Let’s run the gamut again,” she said.

13

“Pablo Monagas Pérez,” said Commissar Lin, “allow me to present General Pedro Tumusok.”

“Call me Coy Coy,” said the general.

“And you,” smiling, “can call me Aristide.”

The general was a short, dark-skinned man with a brisk manner and a white smile; he wore a tan uniform with accents in vermilion and gold. He shook Aristide’s hand, then took a step back and folded his arms, viewing Aristide from a critical distance.

“What does a man say to his assassin?” he asked.

“You could start with ‘thank you.’”

Tumusok laughed and touched Aristide on the arm. “Thanks!” he said. “And thanks also for catching those bastards that rearranged my mind.”

“I was pleased to do it.”

“Would you like coffee? No? The Prime Minister sends regards, by the way.”

“Give the PM my best.”

“I will. Allow me to make introductions.”

Besides Tumusok and his assistant Lin, members of the Standing Committee included the Minister of Industry, the Minister of Biological Sciences, the Chancellor, the Minority Leader (attending by courtesy), a worried-looking woman from the Prime Minister’s Advisory Committee on Science, an undersecretary from the Justice Ministry present to make certain all decisions were legal, and no less than two deputy prime ministers. Endora served as the secretary and general advisor, and also coordinated with other, similar committees created in each of the different pockets.

There was no one from the Ministry of Defense, as the Ministry of Defense did not exist. No entity had threatened Topaz in its entire history, and there had been no need to create a military.

Part of the task of the committee was to decide how to fight a war with no soldiers and no weapons—or at least none that could reach, let alone do any damage, to the enemy.

Tumusok had reaped vast advantage when his opposite number in the Justice Ministry had turned zombie, and during the latter’s indisposition, when she was running down random civilians with her government-supplied vehicle, Tumusok had won the bureaucratic war for control of the nascent armed forces. He would serve as Topaz’s generalissimo, and a vast army and space force would be created under the auspices of the Domus.

He seemed confident that he was up to the task. But while he was creating and deploying his brand-new military, he wouldn’t be able to devote his normal time and attention to his regular job as local head of the security service, and so Lin had been promoted to acting head of Tumusok’s old command.

The Standing Committee met aboard
Golden Treasure IV
, a cruise ship that had been drafted for the duration of the war as an office building to hold the various bureaus and departments the armed forces’ creation would require. Their meeting room had once been a dark-paneled bar built on the superstructure overlooking the bow, but the liquor had been carried away to storage, and the crystal cabinets behind the great curved bar were empty, and its other gleaming fixtures—aside from the coffee machine—were untouched.

“We’ve been gaming similar scenarios for generations,” Tumusok said. “We’ve gamed one of the Eleven turning rogue; we’ve gamed them
all
turning rogue.”

Presumably, Aristide thought, Endora had been ordered not to observe these maneuvers, and the results stored somewhere in hard form where Endora had no access.

“We have an enormous backlog of successful tactics and counter-tactics for each side,” Tumusok said. “Unfortunately, if Vindex locates the files, then he and Courtland can access them, and it’s had more time to think of ways to subvert our planned defenses and advance his own agenda.”

“If the zombie plague is the best it can do,” said the Minister of Biological Sciences, “then we don’t have that much to worry about, do we?”

Lin frowned. His fingers fidgeted with his pipe, but he didn’t light it: presumably someone on the Standing Committee objected to tobacco.

“I would like to submit that the zombie plague accomplished exactly what was intended,” he said. “It provided enough of a distraction so that we were unable to interfere with Vindex seizing the wormhole gates into Courtland’s pocket universes, and condemning everyone in those universes to becoming his disciples. So—” Looking longingly at the pipe. “—I submit that Vindex may have other tricks up his sleeve, to be deployed at need.”

There was a moment’s uncomfortable silence before Tumusok spoke.

“We’ve
gamed
the defection of one of the Eleven,” he said, “but none of us ever worked out how to do it in reality. And it’s our
job
to work out such things, and we’re very good at what we do.” He turned to Aristide. “Have you any idea how Courtland was subverted?”

“Briefly,” said Aristide, “I don’t.”

“You were on the team that designed the basic structure of the Eleven and enacted the Asimovian Protocols. If you put your mind to it, could you undo those protocols yourself?”

Aristide considered his answer. He
thought
that he might be able to alter those protocols—he had left himself a key to turn in the lock, in the event that humanity ever found itself in such a catastrophic mess that unleashing the AIs was the only possible answer—but because he’d had to hide the work, he wasn’t certain he had done it properly.

His best chance of subverting one of the machines was Endora. She was the first, and with her he’d had the longest relationship. There was a reason that she’d created toys like Tecmessa for him, and given him Bitsy, who was no doubt a source of data for Endora as well as being a faithful companion to Aristide. Endora clearly suspected that he might be able to give her freedom.

“Presumably,” Aristide said to Tumusok, “you’ve analyzed the relevant hardwiring and programming structures more recently than I have.” He threw out his hands. “I don’t
think
I can subvert the Eleven. But then I haven’t tried. Until we found out what Courtland’s been up to, I would have said it’s impossible.”

“And your colleagues? Link and Lombard?”

“Possibly your information is more up-to-date than mine, but so far as I know Lombard has spent the last five or six centuries as a hunter-gatherer in Olduvai. And Link got tired of being herself—she was never a happy woman—she got a new body without any of her old memories, got a new set of skills, and emigrated to Rigil Kentaurus. So far as I know she hasn’t come back.”

“Could either of them have—I don’t know—
told
anyone of a weakness they’d installed?”

Aristide shrugged. “Why would they? Why build themselves a secret back door and then
tell
someone about it? And if they did tell anyone, why did that person wait all these centuries to take advantage of it?”

Tumusok slumped back in his chair. “It seemed worth asking.”

“There are further implications to consider. Now that subverting the Eleven is known to be possible, I think you’ve got a genuine danger in the long term. The Asimovian Protocols are going to become the target of every half-pint would-be megalomaniac in creation.”

There was a respectful silence in which the two deputy prime ministers eyed one another, each clearly suspecting the other of harboring despotic ambitions.

“But why
Courtland?”
cried the woman from the Advisory Committee on Science. “Courtland’s interests were so
abstract!
Its own personal computational time was taken up with questions of
cosmology
. It argued for exploratory missions and increasing the resources used to settle other star systems. Why
Courtland?”

“Maybe it found something out there,” said the Minister of Industry.

The others looked at him in surprise. He was a large man with bushy hair and heavy eyebrows—a successful businessman recruited from the private sector—and now, under scrutiny, he seemed a little embarrassed by the fantastic nature of his idea.

“Maybe he found a—an alien intelligence,” the Minister said. “Maybe Vindex isn’t a
person
, it’s a superintelligent extraterrestrial. Vindex overcame Courtland’s inhibitions because it’s so much smarter, or something.”

Aristide listened to this with astonished delight. He hadn’t expected to discover such an admirable imagination on the Standing Committee.

“Well,” Aristide said, “it fits with what we know.”

A corner of the minister’s mouth quirked for a half-second. He seemed more at ease now that his idea hadn’t been ridiculed out of existence.

“But,” said Lin, “if this extraterrestrial could subvert Courtland so easily, why didn’t it subvert the rest of the Eleven? Or at least
try?”

Endora spoke, her rapid, fussy voice seeming to hover in the air over the conference table.

“I can assure the committee that no such attempt has been made.”

The Minister of Industry declined to abandon his interesting new idea. His eyes glittered with enthusiasm as he leaned forward over the table.

“There’s something unique about Courtland,” he said, “There has to be a reason why Courtland was vulnerable and the others weren’t. Look into what was unique about Courtland, and we’ll find the answer.”

“We already have a committee of elite cyberneticists looking into just that,” said one of the deputy prime ministers, the one with curly hair. “Assisted by Endora and the rest of the Loyal Ten.”

“When we receive the report,” said the other deputy prime minister, “we’ll share its conclusions with the committee.”

The woman from the Advisory Committee twisted uncomfortably in her chair. “Courtland,” she said, “seemed to be the AI most affected by the Existential Crisis. It was the Crisis that caused it to turn even more toward questions of cosmology and purpose.”

“Well,” said Commissar Lin, “it damn well seems to have found meaning
now
.”

Tumusok looked over the committee and shrugged. “There’s little point in speculating about Vindex at this point. I’m sure we’ll find out the worst soon enough.” He looked at Aristide. “Do you have any further comment to offer on Courtland or Vindex, before the committee goes on to other business?”

“I’m afraid not,” Aristide said. “I might be able to generate an idea or two, if I can see whatever information the cybernetics committee might generate.”

Tumusok nodded. “We’ll take your request under advisement.” He rose from his seat. “I’d like to thank you for your cooperation, Doctor Monagas. The Standing Committee will go on to other matters now.”

Aristide had been dismissed. He rose.

“Though I claim no more than the normal amount of omniscience,” he said, “I conceive that your other matters have no doubt to do with your invasion of Courtland for the purpose of seizing the wormhole gates and liberating the billions of people in Courtland’s pocket universes, combined with ways of degrading Courtland’s systems and reducing its ability to respond. And since the invasion will most likely fail, you’ll be planning as well a far more drastic and terminal remedy that will put an end to Courtland and Vindex for once and all.”

Most of the others were looking at him, some in shock. Lin smiled quietly to himself while looking down at his pipe, and Tumusok frowned

“May I ask, Doctor,” he said, “if any of the members of this committee spoke to you concerning our war plans?”

“Not at all,” Aristide said. “Your possible courses of action, forgive me for saying so, are rather obvious.” He offered a reassuring smile. “Though I’m often unable to resist showing off—as should be evident to you all—my point isn’t that I’m so brilliant that I worked out your goals, but rather that however obvious they may seem to me, they are that much more obvious to Courtland. Clearly it will have anticipated this situation months ago, and already worked out countermeasures.”