"We made it!" Mickey cracked in a voice like old dust.
" Da!"said Alexei, pulling off his hood. "We made it. I did not think you would, but you do pretty good for terries. I only had to drag one of you into the shade. Welcome to Prospector's Station." He glanced at his watch. "You make very good time too. For terries."
"You didn't think we'd make it–?" That was Douglas. Weakly.
" Da.But if I tell you that, you wouldn't try."
"If you didn't think we'd make it … " Douglas began slowly, " … then why did you let us try?"
"Because I assume–rightly–that like all terries, you are too stupid to lie down and die. You keep going anyway. Yell at me later, Douglas. You have prove me right again. Save voice for now. You are all dehydrated. Here, drink water." He started passing out plastic water bags. He popped the nipple of mine and held it to my face. "Drink slowly–little gulps. You have been through much. Give body time to recover. We have plenty time before train arrives. Over an hour."
THE DARK SIDE OF THE LOON
Prospector's Station was three cargo pods, laid end to end, half‑buried in the Lunar dust. They were sheltered by three near‑vertical sails of solar panels. The pods were linked together on a north‑south orientation, and the solar panels were mounted on gimbals so they could swing down on either side to block the sun's rays at dawn and dusk and all the positions in between. The habitability of the shelter depended solely on the maintenance of the motors.
The pods were divided into two levels; the bottom level of each pod was storage, the top was function. The pod at the north end was a hydroponics farm, the pod at the south was a machine shop, the center pod was the living area. Nobody lived here permanently, it was a communal site. Everybody who used it had to replace what they used and make sure that the station was in working order for whoever might stay here next.
Crosshatch decking had been laid along the bottom of the pod to provide a level floor. Underneath the floor, several plastic bags served as impromptu water tanks–another use for inflatable airlocks; waste not, want not. Above us, identical mesh decking provided the ceiling to this level and the floor to the next; we could see up through the crosshatch to the level above. It was just like being in a tube‑town again, only this time with lighter gravity.
I sprawled on my back, with my eyes closed, watching the purple glares fade into mottling blue‑and‑gray fractalizations, watching the fabric of unreality unravel in my imagination, occasionally sipping at the water bag that Alexei was holding for me. Every so often, he'd tip it to my lips, let me suck a few swallows, then pull it away before I could start gulping greedily.
It didn't make sense. Why was he being so nice to me now if he wanted to kill us? Maybe because he needed our deaths to look natural?
Sure. That was it. Because he knew the monkey would be a witness to whatever he did. The testimony of robots had been used before in court cases, especially when they had stored audio and video records pertinent to the legal matter at hand. Most robots above Class 6–and that included the monkey–were continually sorting and storing their records. Cheap memory made it possible for a robot to retain a lot of information; it turned out to be useful for a lot of things–family albums, long‑term health records, behavioral records, insurance tracking, consumer tracking, the census, stuff like that. Anyone who wanted to track "lifestyle information" could poll the international robot database for specifically correlated information.
It was rumored that robots were also good for amateur pornography, because they also tracked human sexual behavior. Which is why Mom had always said, "Don't do anything in front of a robot that you wouldn't want God to see you doing." Which meant never do anythingin front of a robot, if you didn't want to get caught. There were so many robots in some neighborhoods that getting away with a crime was impossible.
This didn't mean that crime didn't happen. It just meant that enforcement was more about finding wherethe criminal was than whohe was.
So, if Alexei were planning to kill us, he had to make it look like an accident. Because the monkey was watching everything.That would explain leaving us on the rim and taking us into the sunlight to get to Prospector's Station.
Alexei couldn't just take the monkey from us, because he knew I'd programmed it to be loyal to me first, then Douglas, and finally Stinky. It was emotionallylinked. It wouldn't go with anyone else unless we told it to–or unless we were dead. If we were dead, its loyalty programming would store all pertinent information about us and our deaths in unerasable files–and without further instructions of who it should report to, it would shut down and wait for the next person to open it up and assign ownership to himself. Alexei? Probably. Most certainly.
Unless I had been out in the sun too long and was still making up crazy paranoid fantasies … I had to consider that too. Alexei put the water bag to my lips again. I took another sip. Around me, I could hear everyone else breathing softly, catching their breaths, sucking at water bags. I could smell their sweat in the air. It smelled like a locker room in here. We all stank. I didn't care. It was cool. Blessedly cool. Almost too cold. I was evaporating excess heat as rapidly as my body could carry my overheated blood to my skin.
What was in the monkey that was so valuable it was worth killing for?
I was pretty sure it wasn't information. Whatever data was packed into the memory bars would have already been piped to its recipient some other way by now. Probably the moment we were served with our first subpoena at Geostationary somebody somewhere was saying "Oh, merde!" and then, "All right. Switch to Plan B. Code it in the least significant bit of each pixel of the local news and let them download it off the web." Or whatever. There were just too many ways to smuggle bits from here to there. So it wasn't the information. It had to be something physical.
Money? No. Codes for money? No, that was more information. They'd have found another way to send it by now. Physical ID keys that unlocked money? Maybe. But if that's what it was, they wouldn't have trusted Dad with it. It had to be something so unique that this was the only way to move it from here to there. Wherever therewas.
So it wasn't information. And it wasn't money. What else was there?
Power.
I took another sip of water. I was feeling better, but I wasn't ready to open my eyes yet.
Power was a good answer. People would kill for power, wouldn't they? Of course they would. If they wanted it badly enough.
But what kind of power?
Processing power.
If you had processing power, you had everykind of power. It all depended how you applied the processing power.
Quantum processing?
Could you pack a quantum CPU into a memory bar?
I'd have to ask Douglas that.
He'd probably tell me I was crazy.
It wasan outrageous idea.
Alexei trying to kill us–then saving us–then holding the water bag for me. Yeah, sure. The monkey wasn't sentient. It hadn't done anything at all to help us survive.
No. There had to be a simpler explanation.
I laughed at my own paranoia and opened my eyes, blinking and squinting. I could almost see again. I lifted up on my elbow to thank Alexei for saving me–and almost choked in horror.