“Writing in your little diary, again?”
I jumped.
In zero gravity, this accomplished a slow rotation about my own center-of-mass. Lucille’s voice was sharp as she re-entered the room. Regaining proper attitude, along with the remnants of my dignity, I folded the notebook irritably, tucked the special pencil through its loop, tangled both in the mesh along the wall that I had kicked myself into.
She brushed her freshly-washed hair. “Don’t worry, Corporal-baby, I wouldn’t dream of peeking at your secret scribblings if you paid me to.”
“I do not worry about that, Lucille,” I replied coolly, looking around for my smartsuit. For some reason she was keeping to herself, war had been declared between us again. “I only worry about whether I can get my impressions down in a way that will make sense of them later.”
She could not know that the notebook was a weapon for the defense of my civilization. I would wrap up my dissertation on metaphysical philosophy as soon as I had provided enough background for Vespuccian Intelligence, then begin on the technological details. They might be useful to our scientists, however badly I failed to understand them myself.
“Okay, write this up in your book.”
The walls around us cleared. We were no longer in a warm cavern, but the upper section of a scoutship exactly like the first I had ever ridden aboard. Outside, the stars—the real stars—shone as hard, bright chips. The pearlescent disk of
Tom Paine Maru
appeared to one side like an oddly-shaped moon. The brightest object was the sun of Hoand, illuminating a half-dozen planets, most of them out of sight, with their half a hundred natural satellites. The planet itself hung before us, swirled white-green marble with its own three pock-marked companions.
“Operation Klaatu” was about to begin.
Despite my annoyance with her, Lucille was another individual I felt guilty toward, possibly toward her more than anybody. We were aboard a borrowed auxiliary spacecraft,
John Thomas Maru,
following the giant interstellar vessel that served as its base. This was supposed to be a holiday excursion for us. She had been working hard. Her compatriots had been working my head hard. It was time for a break.
It turned out to be another education, of sorts.
I had always wondered what lovemaking in free fall might be like. Aboard the
Asperance,
there had been neither the opportunity nor the room. Now I was finding out, as often as the two of us could manage, that it is fairly messy, requires considerably more energy than I had expected, plus a modicum of equipment—handstraps and so forth—but that it is interesting, relaxing once you get used to it, oddly satisfying.
As usual, Lucille was irked with me. This time (although she would never admit it), I had not tired as soon as she expected. She had that effect on me. Altogether, we were an awkward pair, our lovemaking always violent. Each seemed to have something that the other needed powerfully.
Almost against our wills, she and I had wound up together again, aboard this little ship. When things went well between us, I saw my life more objectively than I did at other times, measured it less in terms of duty, more by what it had always demanded from me without offering any reward. I entertained uncharitable thoughts about the Lieutenant. I even found myself considering the terrifying possibility that Eleva might even be something of an—well, the proctological reference Lucille used we do not employ much in polite company on Vespucci.
Lucille put her hair up now, snugging it into the hood of her suit which would dry it for her. It was just an ordinary safety precaution—we would soon be docking with the mother vessel in the usual way. With her, however, it also seemed to serve as punctuation, delineating business from pleasure, her ordinary toughness from those rare moments of tenderness that baffled me even more than her habitual combat posture.
“I have to get back to the ship,” she informed me. “There’s a big conference in an hour, over plans to discredit pro-war politicians in Great Foddu. It’s going to be a delicate job. War is always so popular with—”
I shook my head. Even a few minutes away from a crucial operation on an altogether different planet, the planning for Sodde Lydfe continued.
I decided to risk starting yet another fight. “Lucille, how can you people contemplate meddling in the lives of others a scale like this?”
Was that bewilderment on her face? “Why should the scale matter, Whitey? Is it somehow worse than meddling in the life of a single individual?”
She settled to the floor as gravity came up slowly again, produced a self-lit cigarette. I watched her puff ill-humoredly. “And what sort of meddling would you call war itself? Isn’t it better to ensure the election of anti-war ward-heelers there and in other democracies on the—”
“Or to foment a violent revolution in the Hegemony of Podfet, or its allies?” I folded my arms, sitting on a wall-couch rising to meet me.
She raised her eyebrows. “You know about that, do you? It bothers you?”
“It bothers me very much. Oh, all right, Podfet is a tyrannical dictatorship. It probably deserves whatever you people decide to do to it. But Great Foddu, that’s a constitutional monarchy, Lucille. It’s a democracy.”
“We’d do the same thing there, if it were pragmatic.” She was as close to raising her voice as she could be without doing it. “Get it through your hardened military skull. As someone said, ‘a difference that makes no difference is no difference’. Authoritarianism exists in varieties too numerously nauseating to discuss, Corporal. But that isn’t the issue on Sodde Lydfe at all. All the governments there are majoritarian.”
I threw up my hands, “Political lectures in bed, again.”
“After bed. You started this one, don’t complain. Look, stupid: just as there are only three ways that people can organize themselves, there are three basic forms of majoritarianism—socialism, fascism, and democracy. Understand that fascism is a majoritarian form. It relies just as heavily on popular support as any democracy. Look at the crowd scenes it’s so fond of. What’s more, Democracy is just as rottenly dictatorial as the other two. Should half a dozen individuals tell a seventh what to do, just because they could beat him up if they wanted?”
This was insane. “Is voting not better than beating people up? Howell says your system is based on greed. But people need taking care of.”
Lucille snorted with contempt. “A free market feeds more people, Corporal, more equitably, than any other system known to history. It’s the only system capable of feeding non-productive idiots like you. But you all eventually come to expect it, as a right, and that’ll probably be its undoing. That it accomplishes all of this as a by-product of greed is irrelevant—unless you care more about motivations than results!”
Now she had finally raised her voice, only centimeters from my face. Hers was flushed; fire crept up into my cheeks, as well. Howell had told me something like this, about the free market system, more quietly. It was difficult, right enough, separating results from motivations. Right now, I was having a lot of trouble the other way around.
“Idiot?” I asked at the top of my lungs, wishing she could just go back to being nice. Between her and Eleva, I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that I have terrible taste when it comes to women. “Stupid?”
“Stupid! idiot! And a military-industrial parasite on top of that!”
I had never hit a woman before in my life. The slap echoed through the little ship—outside, the vessel was docking, though I did not consciously notice it at the time—as did my voice a second later when she let me have a small, high-velocity fist in the pit of the stomach.
We stood, toe-to-toe, panting, speechless. Curiously, desire for her raced through my system. I could see it on her face, too, along with the embarrassment that such spiritual nakedness leaves in its wake.
“All right, then,” Lucille broke the spell. “That settles our account, Corporal O’Thraight. Next time we run into one another, don’t bother to speak. I guarantee that you’ll never hear another word from me.”
The floor rose beneath us, carrying us into the
Tom Paine Maru.
So much for our holiday excursion.
-2-
The Lieutenant was not home when I went looking. I could not have said exactly why I did it, except that, suddenly, I felt that I had misjudged him. It was always like this: when things were not going well with Lucille, I grew homesick, overly forgiving, overcome by nostalgia. I was ashamed of letting interest in a woman (a woman like Lucille, at that) distract me from loyalty to my friends, duty to my country. Returning to my stateroom, I found the man waiting in the corridor.
“Corporal!” It was a hoarse noise, trying to be a shouted whisper, or a whispered shout, all at once. He pranced nervously, wrung his hands, spread them, shook them, then went back to wringing them as I approached.
“I have been looking all over for you! I have finally discovered the truth about this ship! It is the most startling information you possibly—”
“Sir?” Somehow, the Lieutenant’s face was deathly pale, while the veins stood out on his broad forehead as if he were about to have a stroke.
“Let us go inside ... ” He craned his neck to make sure we were not being overheard, “ ... where there is less chance of being spied upon.”
I could have told him there was more chance of that inside, but he was the Lieutenant. Also, I was suddenly very tired. I wanted to lie down. Entering, he threw himself onto the bed, wiping a hand across his forehead. I sat down in a chair, listening through my personal depression.
“I have been speaking with that Nahuatl ... person this morning. You know him better than I do. Do you think that he is inclined to lie?”
“I think he is less inclined than anybody else aboard this ship. Why?”
“Because if he tells the truth, Corporal, we are in deep, deep trouble. Are you aware that he is half-computer? That he possesses a sophisticated electronic implant within his skull—or it possesses him—that provides most of his intellect. That when we speak to him, we are actually speaking to a device, instead of an intelligent organism?”
“Well, sir, I—” What I wondered myself was what difference it made.
His eyes bulged with agitation. “The truth is that they are all like that! Every one! They are nothing but walking computers: whales, chimpanzees, gorillas—even human beings! They are all controlled by computers stitched in amongst their very brains! Corporal, we are doomed!”
“Sir?” I was not feeling very articulate all of a sudden.
“Oh, I was offered a hasty explanation by the creature himself, to the effect that everybody carries a wholly independent multi-gigabyte computer in his head, and that there is no master machine, no overall program. It was laughable! What society would miss such a chance for control?”
Vespucci would not. I pondered the question for a moment. “On the other hand, would the Confederates, with their fanatic devotion to individual liberty, tolerate such a thing? I find it highly confusing, sir.”
He said, “Not at all, Corporal. You see, their desire for freedom, their freedom itself, is no more than a cybernetic illusion foisted on them to maintain their tranquillity. Now that I know the secret—now that we know—they are certain to do us in! This society must have been taken over by an artificial intelligence during a period not much more greatly advanced than our own. They are the prisoners of their own machines! They will kill us before we let their secret out, I know it!”
-3-
Notes from the
Asperance
Expedition
Armorer/Corporal YD-038 recording
Page Five:
Quarks may be removed from atomic nuclei, substituted for any or all electrons, thereby vastly altering the character of any element. An early example, “catalytic” fusion at room temperatures, used quark-electron shells less resistant to being squashed together than is natural.
But quarkotopics goes further than “mere” catalytic fusion. Now, instead of permutations of 100-plus natural elements, they have unlimited possibilities based on the number of electron positions in any given element, on whether they choose to leave them alone or alter them.
The door said, “Corporal O’Thraight?”
I put my notebook away. The Lieutenant had departed earlier on some unnamed errand. I saw Edwina Olson-Bear, as the door cleared, standing outside, her suit a plain, pale green. Noticing something in my movements that told her I had been busy, she began, “I’m sorry to disturb—”
“That is all right, I was just finishing up. Please come in, er, Chief Praxeol—Doctor Olson-Bear.” I gestured clumsily, embarrassed by what I had been doing, but moreso by not knowing how to address her.
I was turning out to be a lousy spy.
As pretty as her sister in her own quiet way, she leaned on the frame. “Edwina. I came to ask if you want to see the first of our operations on Hoand. It’ll only be another ... ” She rolled her eyes, looked at me again, “ ... twenty-three minutes. We’ve just time to get there.”
“Where?”
“You’ll see. It’s something that I want to watch in person, rather than by telecom. It’s a pet project of mine, really. You see, Hoand has been steeped in warfare for something like three thousand years. There’s only one way to end it. All the organizing and demonstrating in the universe never did a lick of good, as long as taxation and conscription—”