‘That a good idea?’
She gazed at him. ‘If it was volcanic, who’s to know what might have been brought to the surface?’ She turned to the rest of her group and shouted, ‘Keep heading on to Grit—we’ll join you later!’
Dornik set their carrier trundling down a side canyon while the sand hogs and their trailers continued on to Grit. Within an hour they reached the source of the fire. Climbing down from the carrier, they moved as close as the latent heat would allow.
‘Not volcanic,’ decided Chandle.
She poked her toe at a globule of glass, then wished she hadn’t when her footwear began to smoke. The crater, extending about fifty metres across, shimmered under a heat haze as its lining of molten glass cooled. A butte standing at the crater’s edge had half melted away, its inward face still glowing, too.
‘Maybe a meteor?’ Chandle was groping for another explanation. But she wished she did not feel so damned sure this had something to do with that spectral visitor to their camp. And that it was no natural phenomenon at all.
15
Why do the AIs put up with us? It could be but the work of a few decades for them to exterminate us, and they don’t even have to do that. Space is big, so they could just abandon us to our fate and head off elsewhere to create some halcyon AI realm. The answer, as it always is in such circumstances, is both simple and complex: to ask why the AIs have not exterminated us is to suppose that only humans create moralities and live by rules. They do not destroy us because they think and feel that to do so would be wrong, perhaps just as humans felt it wrong to drive to extinction the closely related apes. As to them abandoning us, well, many of them do leave the Polity, but then so do many humans. The truth is that their motivations and consequent behaviour patterns are much like our own, for being first created by us, they are just the next stage of us—the next evolutionary step. It is also true that with haimans and human memcording, it becomes increasingly difficult to define the line that has been stepped over. And, in the end, to ask the initial question is to put yourself in the gutter and AI upon a pedestal—uncomfortable positions for both.
— From Quince Guide compiled by humans
Anderson blessed both the industry and the inventiveness of the metalliers. Water pumped up from a borehole to tanks on top of the butte to the rear of the roadhouse ran, during the day, through solar panels. And now, the simple luxury of turning on a hot-water tap. As his bath filled, he took off his boots, unbuckled his armour plates, then stripped off his padded undersuit, which he dropped in a basket by the door for laundering. He was ready to dip his stinking foot into the water when there came a knock at his door.
‘That you, Tergal?’ he asked.
‘No, it’s Unger Salbec,’ replied the voice from without.
With a sigh, Anderson wrapped a towel around his waist, and looked at the metallier handgun on the bed. The sudden déjà vu he felt was almost painful. The first time had been five years ago, when he was stripping off his armour inside a minerallier hut so he could find out just exactly where the Salbec boy had stabbed him. Dressings were laid out ready for him, and a steaming bath. He remembered the occasion welclass="underline"
‘Who is it?’
‘I am Unger Salbec’
Fusile quickly up and braced against his hip—he had kept it loaded.
‘What do you want?’ Anderson pulled the hammer back and advanced to the door.
‘I want to talk to you about my brother.’
‘What’s to say? He committed crimes, knowing the penalties, and he paid. Have you come to tell me how he was really a good boy and had been sadly misled?’ Anderson leant forward and flipped the latch over with the barrel of his gun, then rapidly moved back and to one side.
Unger Salbec opened the door and stepped into the room. She seemed not to be carrying weapons, so perhaps only a tongue-lashing was to come. But then, he considered, she probably had a gun tucked into the back of her loose trousers, concealed by her tunic. Ah, any moment now, he thought, as she reached back to close the door and latch it.
He went on, ‘The other one I get often is how poor the criminal’s family was, and how with money he or she would never have turned to crime, which I’ve always considered insulting to those poor people who graft all their lives without putting a foot wrong.’
There was no denying that, barring her resemblance to her sociopathic brother, Unger Salbec was an alluring woman. Her brown hair was tied back from a wide but attractive face, and since she was of metallier ancestry, she was without lip tendrils or wrist spurs. Also, Anderson couldn’t help but notice the unrestricted movement beneath her tunic.
‘You are right, it is insulting,’ she said, moving in from the door. ‘From childhood I trained in the husbandry and breaking-in of sand hogs—and only last month was I finally considered competent. I have supported my parents, and… Querst. He repaid me by trying to rape me, and when I beat him off with a thuriol hook he went and found my best friend Elasen to rape and murder instead. I’m not here for vengeance, Anderson Endrik—I’m here to thank you.’ She shrugged and gave him a deprecating grin.
It all sounded so plausible, but that same plausibility was the reason he required the dressings. Foolishly, he had thought the boy Querst would run, when in fact he had waited in ambush. Anderson intended never to repeat such mistakes.
‘I’d like to believe you, but you’ll understand my caution.’
‘I am unarmed,’ she said, holding her hands out from her body.
‘So you say.’
‘You don’t believe me?’
Anderson shrugged.
‘Very well.’ Unger reached up to the neck of her tunic, and dipped forward to tug it off over her head. She kicked off the sandals she wore, undid the cord of her trousers, and dropped them to her ankles, stepping out of them. Now completely naked she moved closer to Anderson and turned one complete circle. ‘See, no weapons.’
His mouth feeling a little arid, Anderson stared at her plump breasts then down at her shaven crotch. He noted the wheel tattooed over her belly button—a metallier sign—and the curved scar on her thigh. This last decided him, for it was the kind of mark received from the sharp edge of a young sand hog’s carapace. Clicking his fusile’s hammer down, he put the weapon aside.
‘Now let me really thank you,’ she had said, and so she had.
Returning to the present, Anderson realized he had a raging erection. It had ever been thus, and he cursed his treacherous body.
‘The latch is off,’ he said.
Unger Salbec stepped into the room, a touch of grey in her hair and the angles of her face somewhat harsher. “Did you think you could keep on avoiding me?’
‘I’ve managed to do so for a year,’ Anderson replied.
She eyed the towel around his waist. ‘But I can see you’re glad to see me.’
‘I’m filthy, and I need a bath,’ he said.
She stepped up close, pulled his towel away, then reached down to close her hand around his penis, and slowly began to rub it.
‘It’s a big tub. I’m sure there’s room for the both of us.’
Anderson sighed. One way or another he had been running away from this woman for the last five years, and she knew how to catch him every time
Cormac had never before come out of cold sleep with a stinking headache, and he realized that his reaction to Jack’s news could perhaps have been a bit more positive. But after he applied an analgesic patch his headache faded and he began to see reason.