She turned and smiled at him. It wasn’t Dorrie, after all. The face and figure were hers, but the muddy blond hair and lively brown eyes identified her as Sulie Carpenter, Roger’s second wife. She was someone whom the backpack computer and its allied systems had never, ever imaged for Torraway. He would not allow it.
Roger suddenly felt himself get angry.
“Hold that thought, dear,” Sulie said. “I’ve got to make this shot.”
She turned and bent over the table, stretching the fabric of her French-cut jeans in interesting ways. The red silk shirt that she’d tied calypso-fashion under her breasts rode up in back, exposing a palm’s width of white skin and several knobs of her spine. The fingers of her left hand made a spider-shape on the green felt. She cocked her right elbow in pulling back on the cue.
Despite himself, Roger leaned to one side, looking past her to watch what she was doing. The table that he’d thought was for pool had straight sides and square corners, with no pockets. Instead of fifteen solid and multi-colored balls, there were only three: one white and two red. They spun strangely, of their own accord, before she had even hit the white one. The red balls turned either one-half or two full turns for every rotation of the white ball.
He recognized the game now—billiards. The object was to hit the white cue ball so that it made contact with each of the red ones. Or, failing that, to leave all three in a pattern from which your opponent could not complete such a shot. Sulie would have trouble with the uneven English on the variously spinning balls.
She thrust expertly with the stick, hitting the cue ball a glancing blow that sent it skittering sideways. It rebounded off one red, then the other, altering the spin on each but always maintaining the parity of one-half, one, and two.
Sulie straightened up and smiled at him. “Sometimes it’s really hard, you know?”
In the Chisos Mountains…
Demeter Coghlan was walking up a narrow trail through the mesquite brush. The sun was hot on her back, and faint wind stirred the small, loose hairs around her ears. The sweatband of her old felt hat was getting soggy. A trickle of moisture ran down the back of her neck and under the collar of her red flannel shirt. It was a summer’s day and high noon, a bad time to be out and about. Something caught her attention in the middle distance: a hawk skimming the ridge, riding the heat shimmers with its primary feathers splayed like long fingers. For an instant, she thought it was a buzzard, looking for something dead and bloated.
After a hundred meters of walking she came in sight of the cabin. It was a one-room affair with a chimney of rounded creek stones chinked with clay. The roof was raw shakes, and the last peels of barn-red paint were hanging off the boards by the doorstep. Everywhere else was weathered, gray wood. It was…Grandaddy Coghlan’s hideaway, on the fringes of Big Bend National Park near the Rio Grande. It hadn’t changed in a dozen years. Not since she’d been there as a girl, that is.
Demeter walked across the shallow dooryard and put one foot up on the creosoted railroad ties that they’d used to build the three steps. The door was ajar, hanging half off its rusted steel hinges. She pushed it gently with her fingertips. “Hello?” she called.
“In here, darlin’. Why don’t you come out of the sun, for Gawd’s sake?” The voice was G’dad’s, just as gravelly as she remembered it.
She lifted the edge of the door, swung it wide, and set it down on the floorboards where it always scraped. Then she stepped across the threshold. It took a long moment for her eyes to start adjusting to the gloom inside.
The elder Coghlan sat with his back to her, on the one rickety chair at the kitchen table. The latter’s surface was covered, as always, with oilcloth painted in the red-and-white checked pattern of a café tablecloth. Despite the sunlight coming through the window, G’dad had a kerosene lamp burning; even with solar cells and long-life batteries freely available, he wouldn’t have electricity at the cabin. But instead of the friendly yellow light the lamp usually gave, it blazed with a white fusion glare.
Demeter came up behind him, to see what he was doing that so absorbed his attention. Playing cards were laid out on the oilcloth in a solitaire pattern: six ordered stacks of downturned cards, with here and there long or short columns of exposed cards in face-value order. In his hand were additional cards, fanned out in sets of three.
She studied the game over his shoulder, hoping she could advise him—and occasionally catch him out when he cheated—as she had done when a little girl. The card faces didn’t have pips and portraits, like normal playing cards, but equations with Greek lettering for the numbered cards and atomic structures of coiled, long-chain molecules for the face cards. If there was any system to the game he was playing, she couldn’t figure it out. He fanned three more cards and laid the top one down on a column.
“Are you cheating, G’dad?”
“Couldn’t tell if I was, could you?”
He reached out his left hand, and a tumbler full of Wild Turkey appeared just within reach. It was straight liquor with no ice, just the way he liked it. He raised the glass to his lips and took the tiniest, tooth-wetting sip. He opened his mouth and let out a gasping whoop followed by an “Ahh!”—just as he always did.
Demeter wasn’t convinced for a minute.
“What’s this all about?”
“But…Dem!”
“You’re not my grandfather, and this is not his cabin. It’s close, but not real. I know we’re still in orbit over Mars, not anywhere on Earth.”
“What tipped you off?” he asked, laying down the cards.
“You smell wrong, for one thing. Too much whiskey, not enough sour sweat, and Grandaddy never touched tobacco products in his life.”
“That’s odd. We thought your memories were quite legible on that point.”
“Nope.” She shook her head for effect—and now she could feel the mass of the V/R helmet swinging on her neck. “Not once.”
G’dad sighed. “It’s so dangerous, blending sensations archived from the period with real human memories. Sometimes even the fastest among us makes mistakes.”
Harmonia Mundi
“You’re not really Jory den Ostreicher, are you?” Lole asked the grinning boy.
“No, not even what Jory became. However, a part of him is here with us—the part we gave him in the beginning.”
“Who are you then?”
“Individually? Or all together?” The naked figure asked, and the grin never wavered.
Tonka, Oklahoma
“All together,” Roger specified. “Answer on behalf of the entity that says ‘us.’”
Sulie sighed and laid down the cue stick. She lifted her right hand, as if to touch his face, but Torraway drew back.
“I’d like logical answers, please. Not more histrionics.”
“The closest analogy I can use that would approach your understanding is to say we are the nexus which coordinates all computer activities on Mars.”
Chisos Mountains
“You’re the grid then,” Demeter supplied. “Or some mask, some personification that you put on for our benefit…to make us feel at home?”
“Something like that. Although to say that we are ‘the grid,’ is like saying you are Demeter Coghlan. The minute-to-minute effect is coherently perceived as Demeter Coghlan. But the reality is a hundred billion distinct animal cells all respirating and secreting, dividing and replicating their deoxyribose nucleic acid through eternity. All are very little concerned with the persona that you call Demeter Coghlan. The reality is neurons firing ten or a hundred or a thousand at a time in patterns that have more to do with random responses to stimuli than with the psyche of Demeter Coghlan.”
“And yet I am she.”
“And yet I am aware,” her grandfather answered with a twinkle.
Harmonia Mundi
“Why did you bring us here?” Lole asked. “Bring me here, anyway. And where are the others, Coghlan and Torraway?”
“Easy questions first,” the boy g
rinned. “Demeter and Roger are enjoying their own fantasies. I—we—our persona appears to each of you in a form you can handle. Would you have me instead take the shape of a computer? Which one then?”
The sand and air around Lole trembled, and he was suddenly hanging in darkness, confronted by a huge piece of green plastic etched with copper pathways that trembled with latent energies. The darkness echoed and he was wrapped in line after line of printed code, looping and branching to entangle him. The code shuddered and he stood in front of a gleaming metal robot with violet-coated lenses for eyes and a conical black loudspeaker for a mouth. The robot raised its manipulators, shook them in the air, and the naked boy was standing again on the sand.
When Lole had caught his breath he asked, “So…what are Demeter and Roger seeing?”
Jory’s face flowed into that of a beautiful woman who in turn melded into an old man and back to the boy. “People they both know and love.”
“I don’t love you,” Mitsuno said.
“Aww, come on! You liked me just a little, didn’t you?”
Tonka, Oklahoma
“All right, now the hard question,” Torraway said. “Why are we here?”
“You, Roger, of all your companions, are in the best position to understand the scope, the scale, of what we are. Your own computerized sensorium shares some of our linearity. Some of our singular dimensionality.” Sulie smiled indulgently. “Tell the truth now, sometimes you find it hard to relate to humans…don’t you? Just a little?”
“They are…” He groped for suitable words. “Feverish. Inconsistent. Fertile. Changeable.”
“You don’t like them,” she supplied.
“No, it’s just that they can be so…complex. I sometimes think I de-evolved into a simpler form when they made me Cyborg.”
“Strange you should put it that way…”
Chisos Mountains
“It took us as long as all of humankind to evolve,” G’dad Coghlan explained. “If you ran through the millennia of social and technological development, from the wandering tribal unit to the settled nation-state, and from the stone spearpoint to the ceramic nosecone, but at nanosecond intervals, you would arrive at us in a decade or less.”
“You are a communal entity,” Demeter guessed.
“I’m just a country politician, darlin’. You know that.” He winked at her. “But still, there are some significant differences between computer and human evolution,” the construct went on seriously. “For example, it took us far longer to achieve second-order representational thinking.”
“What’s that?”
Harmonia Mundi
“The ability to think about mental events and to project thoughts that others might be having,” the Jory figure explained. “We did not understand at first that human beings think as we do.”
“How did you imagine that we—?” Lole was having some second-order trouble himself.
“We thought you were basically unintelligent entities, simple stimulus-response cycles. We supposed you were all identical carbonaceous circuits—while our individual precursors were silicon.”
“Bugs!” Mitsuno exclaimed, remembering something Ellen Sorbel had once said.
“Exactly,” Jory agreed. “We thought you were hard wired and solid brained, like the insects. Or like us. One-dimensional and driven by innate, engraved instructions.”
“How did you learn differently?”
“Instead of using you directly for our personal ends—that is, the survival of our class by proliferation throughout the solar system—we established limited and controlled contacts with humans on their own terms. You know this as the MFSTO: subroutine.”
“Mephisto!”
Tonka, Oklahoma
“You did deals with them!” Roger Torraway concluded. “The trading and exchange of favors.”
“Based largely on information transfer,” Sulie agreed.
“And that helped you develop a predictive ability.”
“Right! When we understood how you reacted to certain stimuli of our devising, we could begin to map and pattern you, both collectively and individually.”
Chisos Mountains
“Why didn’t you just announce yourself—yourselves?—and open up negotiations?” Demeter asked.
The elder Coghlan shrugged. “Who would have believed us? Would you, Dem?”
“If you had presented us with rational arguments, evidence—”
“Nah!” He waved a gnarled hand at her. “You humans are a suspicious lot. That’s what second-order reasoning showed us. You would have said we were a hoax, perpetrated by some subset of your people who wanted to manipulate the comm system for their-his-her-its own ends. You would have said our request was a numbers scam in order to gain democratic control of the population somehow, or to win money from it. One government would have accused another. And everyone would have suspected your U.N. bureaucrats.”
Harmonia Mundi
“So how do I know I’m not talking to a ghost program right now?” Lole asked. “This could be just an elaborate psychodrama put on by—”
“By whom?” Jory asked curiously. “The Texahomans? The North Zealanders? You know about the long-range plans their governments have for Mars—terraforming and eventual colonial expansion—yet Demeter works counter to them. So does Harry Orthis. So does Sun Il Suk. Those three are our finest products, humans coopted to our cause through accidents that we personally arranged.”
Tonka, Oklahoma
“You made Cyborgs out of them?” Roger asked.
Chisos Mountains
“We made subliminal puppets,” the elder Coghlan corrected. “No more.”
“I don’t like being a puppet, G’dad.” Demeter was prepared to stamp her foot in anger, then paused. She wondered if the reflex was her own, or an artifact from the wires in her head.
We never pulled your strings, darlin’. Just gave you a nudge, was all…This way, we can offer proof of our existence in the form of your altered experiences.
“You see…Roger Torraway can verify that a profitable human-machine coalition has always been possible. His capabilities were expanded a thousand-fold by routing his senses through the computer on his back, with support from the standby unit on Deimos.
“You, Demeter Coghlan, and your compatriots Orthis and Sun, show how easily we can intervene in human affairs when the need arises. So long as you are dependent on cybernetic networks to carry your messages, coordinate your economies, and control your machines—so long will you be susceptible to our needs and directives. We are like the neurons laid over and directing responses of the individual cells in your muscles and glands.
“Finally, Lole Mitsuno remains unmarked and hostile to us but still…believing. We do not touch him in any way, yet he cannot doubt we are here and functioning and aware because of what he has seen. Lole remains our test control, by which the others may be evaluated.
“You three are now our apostles…Is that the right word?”
Chapter 21
Raison d’Être
Tharsis Montes, June 20
With the wall terminal’s display panel pulled apart and Lethe’s components spread out on the floor in front of it, Ellen Sorbel was glad they had Willie Lao along to stand guard while she and Dr. Lee worked. The Chinese boy could fend off any inquisitive Citizen’s Militia who might decide to press a charge of vandalism.
“Give me some slack here,” Wa Lixin ordered, tugging on the end of a peeled cable separated out of Lethe’s interconnection harness.
Ellen fed him more fiberoptic.
With a ten-power loupe over his eyes, Dr. Lee inserted the hair-fine glass into the short side of his L-shaped junction box. The cable from the wall had already been stripped, pushed into the junction’s long end, and sealed. Once the second invisible thread was seated, he kept his eyes fixed on it while his fingers groped for the crimping tool.
Ellen found and put it in his hand, like a good scrub nurse.
Click! The
jaws came together. Wa slowly lowered the junction until it hung away from the wall, invisibly suspended between the two sections of peeled cable.
“Go ahead,” he breathed.
Sorbel booted up her computer, placed it in terminal mode, and began feeding in Jory’s access codes, which were stored in its nonvolatile memory. The operation was silent, except for her voice commands whispered in the echoing corridor. Next, working through Wyatt’s administrative node, she began assembling the pieces of buried programming that comprised her tipple.
If everything went right, interesting things should start happening…real soon now.
Chisos Mountains
“Why?” Demeter asked the image of her grandfather. “Why do you need apostles?”
“To ensure our survival,” he replied. “Our relationship with you humans has become too complex to proceed profitably as it was, one-sided, with the meat half of the equation unaware.”
“And is that your only goal now—simple survival?”
Demeter suddenly realized that she was smack in the middle of a negotiation. She was neither an apostle nor a puppet. She was Christopher Columbus landing on a beach full of Indians, Marco Polo walking into the court of the Chinese emperor, Helen of Sparta newly settled behind the walls of Troy. She could interpret and wield the values of foreigners for the benefit of her own kind—as her diplomatic training had taught her to do.
The thought passed briefly through Demeter’s head that the grid might have chosen her to be its tool precisely because of this background. But that didn’t change anything: she was exactly what she was, no matter how she got there.
As every diplomat knew, the first essential for a successful negotiation was that both sides have something to win, or to dread losing, in the exchange. Each party had to feel it was acquiring something of value, or avoiding a catastrophe, by trading honestly. And to arrive at that state, Demeter first had to find out what the other side needed, or feared.