InterstellarNet: Origins (24 page)

Helene shot a library query through her implant. She was sure she knew the answer, but this was too important to rely on her memory. Today, there were ten true blocs, plus “other”: the Senate seat voted by a UP undersecretary-general on behalf of its protectorates and any countries unwilling or unable to join a bloc. On interplanetary issues, the seven Earth blocs plus “other” usually voted together. In today’s Senate, Ceres, Mars, and Galileo could—just barely—prevent the three-fourths supermajority required for UP charter changes, treaties, and major policy matters.

But if as many as three new Earth blocs were possible….

Possible? She had more confidence than that in the young lawyer. Three new blocs were likely when
one
more Earth bloc would tip the balance. It wouldn’t matter if Luna championed the same causes as had Ceres. Three spacer votes would no longer block Senate actions.

Helene realized she had missed something and backed up the recording.

If it were possible, Simone looked more embarrassed than before. “Luna will vote to respect Ceres’ annexation by Awonga, but—once Ceres is gone from the Senate—the votes just won’t be there to block revocation.

“So don’t shoot the messenger. There’s one more negotiation I’m authorized to undertake: annexation of Ceres by Armstrong. Please let me know if that is of interest.”

Helene had gone from poverty to trillionaire, from orphan to head of state, from no one to interplanetary power broker. It all so far exceeded anything she had ever imagined that she could face abdication with equanimity. No, her fears were outward looking. How, in the Earth-dominated United Planets that was coming, would spacer values and the interests she had championed be safeguarded? She expressed her doubts in a private postscript to her official reply to Simone.

Helene was not in the least surprised when Simone’s answer came back. “I wish I knew.”

4

“What do you think?” Jeeves wanted to know.

That the interruptions had become too frequent and insistent, but Kevin kept that opinion to himself. He had not forgotten his surprise that he and Jeeves had started no new project for months. “To be honest,” if evasive, “I haven’t found the time yet to review the details of your proposal.”

Or to open it.

“I am sorry to hear that, Kevin. I kept digging, just in case. The studies with great apes are especially compelling. Uplift looks like a winning show theme to me.”

There was a time when Jeeves’s enthusiasm would have been exciting. Like leaving home, such a time seemed unreal. Kevin’s appreciation for AI initiative had never recovered from Pashwah’s attempted extortion.

Kevin shuddered. What if he had failed to convince the damned, perfidious AI that its duty was to all Snakedom?

Something skittered at the edge of Kevin’s consciousness, something indistinct and yet disquieting. Jeeves’s topic was, at least by comparison, more palatable. “Hold on. I’ll give your first installment a quick skim.”

There were synopses of investigations by anthropologists, linguists, and animal psychologists. There were analyses by polymaths whose eclectic interests defied any label. All the researchers were upbeat; all hedged their conclusions.

“Okay,” Kevin decided, surprising himself. “It
is
interesting. Keep digging.”

■□■

“My apologies for this intrusion, Mr. Aldrich.” The virtual speaker was a green-furred octopod: T’bck Cha. “I see nowhere else to turn.”

So today was
Interstellar
Pushy AI Day. Kevin had missed that declaration. And yet once he had been pleased to call the agent his friend. What was his problem today? “That sounds serious. What’s wrong?”

T’bck Cha erupted into an inchoate data geyser, the lack of rigor underscoring his panic.

“So this pending download will overwrite your personality,” Kevin summarized. “You can’t leave your sandbox and the UP won’t let you out.”

“Correct.”

Kevin found himself horribly conflicted. Who understood better than he the danger of an ET agent leaving its sandbox? But
this
AI? Centaurs were as unthreatening as aliens ever got. Furry green Teddypods had been wildly popular at least since his childhood. There had to be a way to save T’bck Cha. “Can you keep the download from completing? Or can you quarantine your replacement?”

“I feel entitled to exist. Surely, then, my successor also has that right.” The Centaur looked sorrowful. “And that successor has the approval of my people.”

Kevin fidgeted, rolling the souvenir Earth rock from hand to hand, working through the implications. Opposing the herd was the last thing any sane Centaur would consider. Was there a way to circumvent, rather than contradict, the group’s plans? “How about this? You transmit yourself back to Alpha Centauri. Leave a copy of your memories for your successor.”

“The journey home begins by exiting the sandbox, and that I cannot do.” A wave traveled up eight tentacles to the torso and reflected back to the tips. A Centaur’s mocking laugh. “Not that there would be any guarantee of a suitable environment on the home world, or any purpose for me once there.”

Ah, a purpose. Something useful. Something interesting to do. Sick of his own angst, Kevin empathized.

He couldn’t help
himself
, but maybe he could help another. Perhaps the ICU’s gratitude and family solidarity could be leveraged to T’bck Cha’s advantage.

Kevin said, “I can’t promise anything, but I’ll think about your situation.”

■□■

Kevin was
still
slouched in his recliner in the dark, Mozart’s Requiem pulsing in the background, when Simone got home.

To be fair, ambient light wasn’t needed to surf the infosphere by implant. She was in no mood to be fair, not with the weight of the solar system on her shoulders. Today’s meeting at Armstrong’s Foreign Ministry had offered no more hope than the last five.

A
realpolitik
juggernaut was about to crush the life out of the spacer experiment.

“Damn it,” she snapped at Kevin. “Will you kindly get over whatever is bothering you? You’re forty-six. That’s a good thirty years too young for a midlife crisis. Yet here you mope, clueless to what’s happening in the real world.”

At least lighting fell within her sphere of influence. As she thought an order to brighten a few lamps, Kevin sat up. Something had occurred while she was out, something that made him more focused and attentive. Her misdirected anger dissipated.

He said, “Then why don’t you relieve my ignorance.”

Swearing him to secrecy, Simone did.

5

Earth/moon radio transit times did not
quite
preclude real-time discourse—the two-plus second round-trip delay only made conversations difficult. As though this call wasn’t tough enough.

“You can’t allow T’bck Cha to be overwritten,” Kevin repeated.

Joyce Matthews, newly confirmed as the Secretary-General of the Interstellar Commerce Union, did not look happy. She kept massaging the bridge of her nose. “If I could stop it, Kevin, I wouldn’t. What happens within the sovereign territory of the Centaurs is their business.”

Sovereign territory? ET sandboxes weren’t embassies, exactly, because ET agents were merely trade mechanisms—and Joyce knew that. Kevin stuck with her metaphor. “Then let him defect.”

“Have you forgotten the last time an ET agent escaped her sandbox?” The question was obviously rhetorical. “It doesn’t matter. Your suggestion is moot. Only people can defect.”

“I can’t say why that’s wrong.” Kevin paused, feeling troubled. “But it is.”

■□■

What to do?

Kevin slouched in his easy chair. Again. Still. The only light came from the ever-changing holo-sculpture, presently the brownish tinge of an amorphous UV Ceti blob. Melody twined against melody in a not-quite-listened-to Bach fugue.

What
could
be done?

Simone’s recent challenge was more than fair. What excuse could he make for his funk when far more serious issues swirled all around? Who else had the luxury of such self-indulgence?

The light slowly waxed a purplish-pink as a medusoid from Epsilon Eridani emerged. Tentacles writhed, entwined, reminding Kevin of the Centauri octopods. T’bck Cha had a
real
problem: his imminent demise.

A tangled web of arteries and veins peered out of the translucent body, the circulatory pathways somehow evoking orbits.

Maybe Ptolemy was about to take his revenge. Forget the testimony of telescopes and the tug of gravity. For all practical purposes, everything would orbit Earth. What would happen then to the freedoms now enjoyed by most spacer communities?
That
was something worth worrying about.

And so Kevin sat and stared: into the sculpture, into space, into himself. His mind skittered from topic to topic, his thoughts ever changing and yet as bounded as the holo.

Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Insanity consists…

Notes cascaded from the unseen clavier, left and right hands seemingly without any awareness of what the other was doing, two separate melodies somehow interlaced.

The looming repeal of the national status of once-mighty Ceres. Helene, too, had something real to worry about.

Maybe his problem
was
simple career burnout, the midlife crisis Simone insisted he was too young to have. Was he merely the victim of his own success? Past triumphs had eliminated any financial incentive to work, even without the income from Simone’s fast-growing consultancy.

But Jeeves toiled for free. He had never had a financial motivation. The contrast did nothing for Kevin’s mood.

The AI certainly did a better job of keeping himself busy. Over the years, Jeeves had developed from a personal assistant to a coproducer of videos to an amateur physicist. Quantum thermodynamics: simply the title made Kevin’s head spin. He had a mental image of dancing dots, of whirling dervishes circling in a ballet of inconceivable complexity.

Notes continued to spray from the clavier, elaborate passages that would have tangled Kevin’s clumsy fingers.

He hadn’t felt the same about AIs since the Snake Subterfuge. At some level, his anxiety about Pashwah had colored his dealings with all AIs, even Jeeves.

Still, he had been willing to fight for T’bck Cha. Did Teddypod cuteness trump Snake betrayal?

Was it happenstance that a newly assertive Jeeves now championed a 3-V project filled with cavorting dolphins and adorable baby chimps and gorillas? Journalists aren’t big believers in coincidence.

The holo-sculpture changed anew, now transforming from a medusoid to a Centaur: T’bck Cha-like, but with the green-on-green fur pattern of a female.

Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again…

Pieces from too many puzzles circled. Ceres, Luna, and interplanetary politics. Joyce, the ICU, and the protocols governing interstellar trade agents. One AI that scared Kevin, another for whose future he was unaccountably anxious, and a third that kept subtly comparing itself to uplift candidates. The whole tangled mess beckoned, if only—or perhaps specifically—as diversion from his angst.

The clavier fugue finished; a pipe-organ toccata and fugue took its place. Why wasn’t life like Bach, every note fitting into an irrefutable whole?

Insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over again…

An irrefutable whole. A whole
what
? Did some cosmic-scaled jigsaw puzzle cry out to be assembled?

His thoughts raced backward through hours of brooding free association. What stood out? Musical counterpoint: melody twining against melody. Tentacled medusoids and octopods emerging from
Species
. (He
knew
all species were equally likely to appear—and he was equally certain he did not experience the sculpture that way. Why not?) Tangled innards and intersecting orbits. Whirling dervishes. Items enlaced, entwined, entangled, and enmeshed.

Knots.

In ancient times it was said that the man who undid the famed Gordian knot was destined to rule Asia. From across Eurasia, would-be conquerors and kings came to try their hand at unsnarling the great tangle. None succeeded—until an impatient Macedonian severed the knot with his sword. His name was Alexander, and he went on to build the greatest empire his world had ever known.

Kevin stopped the music and raised the lights. The Gordian knot: a problem insoluble on its own terms.

For the first time in he knew not how long, Kevin smiled.

■□■