Orienting itself toward the hatch meant that the skimmer had to position itself vertically. The skimmer’s local gravity kept me from feeling any change in orientation, but my eyes were another matter, and my mind refused to forget that the vast wall before us had been up only a few seconds before. I tasted stomach acid and closed my eyes to ward off the worst of the vertigo. “You trained Santiago too, correct?”
“That’s correct.”
“Did she and Warmuth ever train together?”
“Yes.”
“Was there any friction?”
“There was some off-duty, I believe. A bit of a shoving match. I wasn’t around for it. On the job it was minimal. You would expect to get more from Santiago, considering her attitude, but she was, if anything, the easier of the two to work with. Focused. No interest in adding a personal element. Far from charming, but right to the point.”
Lastogne broke in: “You can open your eyes, Counselor. We’re in.”
We were traversing an octagonal access tunnel, only twice the diameter of the skimmer, with walls of an indistinct blue that remained bright without any obvious light source. Shiny black panels appeared every few meters, but I couldn’t tell whether this was tech or just a design element. Nor could I tell how we were oriented with respect to the Habitat, but I’d already experienced so much vertigo today I was relieved not to care. “You trained them both for their first contact with the Brachiators?”
“That’s right,” the Porrinyards said. “We have a policy here, requiring escorts during individual first contact.”
“Tell me how it works.”
“Mr. Lastogne has probably already told you that the Brachs have unusual perceptions regarding the difference between life and death. As far as they’re concerned, alien sentients like us are not alive in the sense you and I understand the concept. We’re ‘Dead.’ Introducing a stranger involves a ceremony that boils down to telling the Brachiators something along the lines of ‘This is (insert name), an Emissary from the Dead, who wishes to be with you in Life.’”
Just ahead another portal irised open. Not much time left for follow-up questions. I bit the tip of my thumb, cursing a little when I realized I’d drawn blood. On a bad day, my fingertips were a mass of scabs. “And if they’re amenable to that, Insert Name has to cling to the Uppergrowth for several hours, while the Brachiators around her decide she’s sufficiently Alive to merit their company.”
The Porrinyards nodded. “Alive enough to be declared a Half-Ghost anyway.”
“Is this something only required for offworlder visitors? Not with strangers of their own kind?”
“Only with offworlders,” the Porrinyards said. “We don’t know if they’d react this way to any species other than human beings, but they think we’re dead. We haven’t figured out what gives them that impression, but as long as we observe the proper etiquette in their environment, they’re more than happy to declare us Half-Ghosts for the purposes of getting along.”
“Until,” Lastogne said, “like Warmuth and Santiago, you die for real.”
I digested that as the skimmer slid into its bay, in a well-lit chamber with a platform bearing tubes curving away to what must have been other Hub locations. Given the convenient scale, it all seemed too much like the rapid transit system on New London to suit a cylinder world, which had never been intended for the convenience of human visitors, but then, the AIsource were great at building things and might have built all this within a day of inviting Gibb’s inspection team.
That is, assuming they hadn’t expected human visitors all along.
We disembarked and stood on the platform, getting used to the novelty of a solid, if spongy, floor. Local gravity seemed about one-third of what it had been in Hammocktown, but that didn’t matter to me. My legs, which were used to carrying me around in that traditional manner, thanked me with the abject relief only aggravated limbs can express.
The blue lighting made Lastogne’s face look cold. “I’m sorry about this next part, Counselor.”
I said, “What?”
“If you don’t like heights, you may not be all too happy about what’s coming up.”
7. INTERFACE
Every human being who’s ever dealt with the AIsource knows them through their ubiquitous traveling remotes, hovering flatscreens approximately one meter square and only a handful of molecules thick. These remotes travel so widely in diplomatic circles that it’s easy to consider them the AIsource in flesh. It’s hard to remember that the AIsource are really only intertwined sequences of multitiered code and not just aliens who look like floating black rectangles.
On One One One, the AIsource eschewed appearances and interfaced with visitors on their own terms.
The portal into the Interface was a hatch in the wall of a narrow corridor near the dock. Entering it meant enduring almost a minute of what felt like free fall, another minute of what felt like steady acceleration, then a third minute of vague disorientation as air currents guided me to someplace where gravity was negligible.
My destination turned out to be a vast chamber lit by a soft blue light. I drifted through the warm and richly oxygenated air, feeling a sense of well-being that belied what should have been terrifying disorientation, until the caress of unseen breezes brought me to a halt at what might have been the chamber’s center. Between the blurring effect of the light and the AIsource’s refusal to provide a reference point, there was no way of telling where the hatch had been or how far I had traveled. The room itself seemed to extend for an infinite distance in all directions.
The sense of entire kilometers of space below me should have wrecked the composure I’d managed to rebuild since reentering the hub. Instead, it felt womblike. I was nervous, and off-center, but no more than they must have wanted me to be.
Interesting.
This had to be the AIsource equivalent of maintaining an intimidating home office to cow troublesome visiting dignitaries. Such a tradition was the main reason human bureaucrats still sat behind used imposing desks, long after the transfer of record keeping from paper to hytex relegated such work surfaces to the technology of the past. It was cheap theater, nothing else. But effective theater.
The AIsource had always frightened me, a little. All other sentient species, however alien, could be counted on to need the same things needed by just about all other biological life: sustenance, habitat, the ability to procreate. Among sentients who shared those needs, there was at least a basis for understanding. But the AIsource had no biological needs. They were pure intelligence, driven by imperatives comprehensible only to them, and I’d never believed them as conscientious regarding organic considerations as they’d always been careful to pretend.
That and the fact that I liked being able to look other sentients in the face.
The chamber spoke in a feminine voice that always seemed to originate from some unseen presence directly in front of me regardless of how much I drifted. It is a pleasure to see you again, Andrea Cort.
This was no surprise. Flatscreen remotes had been treating me like an old friend for years. Not that I’d ever made the mistake of confusing that for actual friendship. “You saw me yesterday, didn’t you?”
You must be referring to your conversation with the Subroutine piloting your skimmer. It is a limited individual, enjoying only limited interplay with our diplomatic functions. As far as meaningful communication goes, this is your first contact with the bulk of the AIsource shared intelligence aboard this facility.