The Credulity Nexus (35 page)

“
He's going to do something
terrible.”

“
You're talking about McGregor, right?” He
could see Greet-Greet's features in the boy's now that he looked
more closely. The poor little bastard.

“
That's right. You've got to stop
him.”

Greet-Greet
was Cordell's man. What would Cordell have him do that was so
terrible?

“
Where is he?”

“
He's in church.”

“
Which church?” Heinlein had more churches
than whorehouses. And that was a lot.

“
I'll take you.”

The boy jumped
down and set off to cross the street but Rik's big hand caught him
by the shoulder of his tattered shirt. “Tell me what this is about,
first. I need to be somewhere else, not playing games with
you.”

The boy looked
stricken, as if Rik's stubbornness was the last straw, just too
much for him to cope with. “He's going to kill my Mammy,” he
wailed, almost in tears. “He's going to kill everybody.”

Rik looked
across at Freymann and Burleigh, to see what they made of it.

“
A trap?” Burleigh asked.

Freymann bent
down to speak to the boy. “My name's Fariba,” she said. “What's
yours?”

The tiny light
of hope in the boy's eyes made Rik feel like a heel for treating
him so roughly.

“
Izzy,” the boy said. “It's short for
Isaiah.”

“
Don't worry, Izzy. We won't let your
mother come to any harm,” Burleigh said, assuming the role of
policeman again.

“
Cordell must know by now that Lanham's
plan has failed,” Freymann said. “That means Cordell's plan fails
too.”

Rik saw where
she was going. “So he'll have a backup, some other way to blow up
the city and blame it on Omega Point.” The other two were clearly
with him, so he let the boy go. “OK. Let's get moving.”

“
Great!” the boy said, and hurried
off.

-oOo-

The
Radionuclidian church was not far away, although the crowds made
the going slow. The boy, Izzy, kept getting ahead of them and would
then wait, jiggling with impatience for them to catch up. Rik could
barely credit the idea that a miserable worm like Greet-Greet
McGregor had a child, and a wife. It just didn't seem right. On the
other hand, it occurred to him that people had said similar things
about himself and Maria.

For the first
time in ages, he wondered how she was doing. Burleigh had confirmed
that she was being looked after at the UNPF HQ, but what that
amounted to at a time like this, he could only guess. He pictured
her on a bench in a corridor or in the reception area, sipping
genteelly at a coffee, with the desk sergeant glancing her way from
time to time.

Maria was a
puzzle to him now. Seeing her again had been like seeing someone
from a different reality: an elf-creature, perhaps; beautiful and
otherworldly, delicate and vulnerable in this knockabout world of
human apes. Whatever connection he had once imagined he had with
such a being was beyond his ability to recall. He remembered trying
to hold her with infinite tenderness, like a child with a
butterfly, damaging those lovely wings despite his overwhelming
desire to possess it and keep it safe.

Somehow, Rik
had stepped out of that fantastical realm of elf-maids and
impossible yearnings, into a harder, tougher, more honest place. He
glanced at Freymann, hurrying along beside him, her pretty face set
and determined, and thought that it was she who had led him into
that new, more vivid reality. He wanted to stop and thank her for
it.

But they were
already there.

There was no
name on the standard commercial prefab unit, just the usual level,
tunnel and unit designator, but the boy insisted it was his
father's church, the Church of the Holy Radionuclide. The irony
that they had come there looking for a nuke did not escape Rik. The
door was closed and there was a cheap electronic lock on it.

Burleigh
stepped forward, pulling a shotgun from the holster on his back. He
levelled it at the lock.

“
Why don't I just knock politely?” he
said.

Rik looked
around for the rest of the lieutenant's troops, but they were
nowhere in sight.

“
If you're looking for my support act, I
told them to go do what the Major told them to do. No point in us
all ending up in gaol.”

“
Let's just think about this a minute,” Rik
said.

Freymann told
the boy to stand well clear, and made sure he did it, before she
came to stand beside Rik.

“
Cordell expected the uploads to blow the
town up and start a war with Earth that they can't win, but we
stopped that from happening. So Cordell has invoked his backup
plan, which is to have a religious nut down here do the job. What
about Lanham? Might he have a backup plan too? Is there another
bomb being primed somewhere else in town?”

“
No.” Freymann sounded confident, and Rik
was very glad of it. “The nuke inside Rivers was Lanham's backup.
He wasn't planning to take out Heinlein. He just wanted to get the
credulity nexus vector. If that failed, if the phials got broken,
he needed to sterilise the area. That was why he put the nuke
inside the person who was most likely to be on the spot if his
first plan failed.”

“
I guess you're right.” Rik's own reasoning
was essentially the same. “He still believes Heinlein has been
infected. I got a reply to my message just before we left the car.
He wished us all farewell. He said my story about an elaborate
double-cross by Cordell was just the kind of thing an infected man
would believe.”

Rik took a
deep breath and drew his gun. Freymann followed his example. “OK,”
he said. “If you wouldn't mind opening the door, Lieutenant?”

Burleigh
dropped to one knee and fired – on the Moon discharging a big gun
downward was a surefire way to end up sitting on your ass. A hole a
foot wide appeared where the lock had been. Rick and Freymann
kicked in the door and rushed through before anyone inside had a
chance to recover from the shock.

Greet-Greet
McGregor had tumbled from a plastic seat when the shot came, and
now he slowly rose to his feet. Rik and Freymann kept him covered
as they fanned out to either side, with Burleigh coming up the
middle. There were two other people in the church: a young,
emaciated woman with lank blonde hair, and a middle-aged woman
wearing a headscarf. They looked alarmed, but not terrified, and
Rik didn't like the way that Greet-Greet's expression was slowly
turning to one of triumph.

“
Where is it?” Rik said, looking around the
room. Apart from a few chairs and a viewscreen on the wall flashing
numbers, there really was only one place to hide even a small nuke.
Sure enough, one of the women glanced towards the little
altar.

“
Cuff 'em,” he snapped to Burleigh and
strode over to Greet-Greet. The little man didn't flinch, but met
Rik's furious glare with an expression of manic excitement. Rik
ploughed into him, lifting him off his feet, dragging him by the
neck to the altar, scattering chairs as he went. His fury increased
as he realised the viewscreen was counting down. The digits flicked
past thirty as he watched.

“
Shut it off!” He threw the Scotsman
against the altar with enough force to knock out the front panel.
Greet-Greet lay on the ground beside it and laughed. The screen
showed twenty-five seconds.

Rik was on him
in a moment, smashing his fist into the man's face. “Your fucking
son is standing outside, you little shit!” Greet-Greet fell,
stunned, against the mechanism inside the altar, but when he looked
up, he was smiling again.

“
Vengeance is mine, sayeth the–”

Rik hit him
again. Eighteen seconds. This time Greet-Greet showed no sign of
getting up, so Rik hurled him aside. “Fariba,” he yelled. “Can you
do anything to stop this?”

She reached
the altar as the display showed ten seconds. One of the women
started up some kind of chant or hymn, and the other one joined in.
Rik had seen old vids where the hero, in situations like this,
would cut one of the wires that laced the bomb, successfully
choosing the right one against all the odds. But the mechanism had
no wires. What kind of electronic device had wires these days?
There were just a dozen smooth casings, bolted together.

“
Four seconds,” Freymann said, in a
whisper.

Rik reached
for his gun. He'd laid it beside him when he bent down to look
inside the altar, and had to grope for it on the floor. He moved
back and aimed it at the device. If there was only one thing left
to do, then he'd better get on and do it. He squeezed the trigger,
feeling the hammer slide back.

The gun went
off at the same moment Freymann hit his forearm with the heel of
her hand. The bullet tore through the side of the altar, missing
the bomb by a couple of centimetres. Rik struggled for balance,
bellowing with surprise and anger, whirling as fast as he could to
take another shot.

But Freymann
was blocking him and Burleigh was shouting, “No, Rik. Look!”

He glanced at
the cop then followed his gaze to the timer display. It was steady
at zero.

“
What the...?”

Burleigh
started laughing. “The damned thing didn't go off! The stupid
assholes must have put it together wrong.”

Rik goggled at
the unexploded nuke. In a flash he saw in his mind's eye
Greet-Greet and the other faithful, struggling with a spanner and a
set of schematics for the complex piece of kit that had been
smuggled to the Moon piece by piece. The mental image was so
ludicrous, the fact of his continuing existence so marvellous, that
he too started laughing. He grabbed Freymann and pulled her to him,
hugging her in wordless appreciation as he roared out his sheer,
unconstrained joy at being alive.

Martin Lanham was not himself that day. In
fact, he wasn't sure quite who he was. To the crew of
The Phenomenon of
Man
, he was Captain
Louis Campos, upload and loyal servant of Omega Point. And indeed,
even to himself, he was part Campos, the part that had qualified as
a ship's pilot and had flown around the system for over thirty
years, man and boy. He also had the man's speech and language
patterns, his motor skills and habits, all those bits and pieces
that made the crew see Campos when they looked at him and not just
the old robotic body with another man's spirit animating it. It was
a strange feeling to move and sound like someone else and not feel
quite yourself, even inside your own mind.

The process
that had copied Lanham's mind into this other man's shell had left
much behind. Not just Lanham's physical and linguistic
peculiarities, but also large parts of his knowledge and his
cognitive abilities. Some of that was because there just wasn't
room in Campos' brain box for the massive amounts of processing and
storage Lanham required these days, but also, because there were
some things it was best for a copy not to know, secrets, codes,
special things that might help it usurp the original.

Creating
copies of human minds was illegal throughout the system, and the
uploads were the most vociferous in ensuring that it remained so.
The various laws and treaties that enabled an uploaded mind to
retain the legal status of its original human version depended
crucially on the legal doctrine of “transferable consciousness”, a
convenient fiction that the lawyers themselves referred to as the
“mind as soul” doctrine. As long as there was only one version of
each individual's mind in the whole universe, the illusion that a
person's consciousness was relocated at the point of death seemed
to convince most people. Seeing multiple copies of that same
individual in different bodies would definitely weaken the
argument.

Yet it was
sometimes convenient, Lanham found, to make a copy of himself.
There were times when he needed to be on the spot to make a
judgement call, and a seventeen minute round trip conversation
would not be acceptable. Today was one of those times, and Lanham
blessed his own foresight in sending himself along on this
trip.

“
Are you sure this trajectory is right,
Captain?” The co-pilot was a young woman, a living human,
inexperienced and anxious about challenging her captain. Yet she
had quickly seen what Lanham was doing.

“
This would eventually put us into a
powered descent. It would–”

She slumped
forward in her seat, and Lanham put the stunner back in his pocket.
She would still be unconscious when the manoeuvre was complete. A
mercy. He might disconnect his own mind before the end, or at least
turn down his endocrine simulation to nothing. He had no desire to
experience fear, or even excitement. Yet perhaps it would be
interesting to watch his approaching death.

“
This is Partway control to
The Phenomenon of
Man
. Your manoeuvring
thrusters have fired in contravention of your agreed orbital plan.
Please readjust your orbit.”

Lanham ignored
them. They were irrelevant now.

“
This is Partway control to
The Phenomenon of
Man,
please respond.”
When he failed to acknowledge them again, they become more
agitated. “
Phenomenon of Man,
we are initiating a complete systems override to bring you
under our control. Please do not attempt to operate your
craft.”

Red lights flashed in the cockpit, and
warning messages murmured all around.
The Phenomenon of Man
continued to fall away from its
orbit as Partway Station's computers tried in vain to commandeer
the ship's systems.