“Who?”
“Nilis — ah, Nilis Prime. My original. He must get the data, of course, and my analytical impressions. But I think I should keep back the rest. The emotions. I’ve already begun the process of deletion.”
“You’re a Virtual. It’s against your programming to edit yourself.”
Nilis shook his head. “You can’t hand out sentience without enabling choice.” His smile faded. “It feels… odd, though. To be closing down sections of my mind. Like a partial suicide. But it’s necessary. He wouldn’t go on, you see, with the Project, if he knew.”
“Knew what? The fear?”
“Oh, not that. Fear is trivial. Pirius, at most only three of our eight ships will make it home. No, not fear: the horror of seeing those around you die, and die for your ideas. Nilis has never really confronted this, you know, sitting in his garden on Earth, immersed in his studies. And he won’t be strong enough. I know, because I’m not. But he must go on; he has to complete Project Prime Radiant, for all our sakes.”
“Commissary—”
“I’m all right. I’ve already cut it out of myself, you see.” Nilis lifted his Virtual face, red-giant light casting subtly shifting shadows from the lines of his expressionless face. “Shall we go home?”
Chapter 33
Nilis stayed at Saturn, studying the material Pirius had retrieved from configuration space, which appeared to be a spec for a weapon system. But, apparently plagued by guilt, he sent Pirius Red back to Earth, ordering him to rest up. Pirius didn’t like the idea, but he didn’t protest.
The rest cure didn’t work out, though. Pirius Red was alone again, alone in Nilis’s apartment, aside from a few bots.
Of course here he was on Earth itself, surrounded by a vast population, a population of billions: a greater crowd than any other human world, save only the pathological Coalescent communities. Somehow that made it worse than in the Venus habitat.
He tried walking in the Conurbation’s teeming corridors and parks. He even dug out one of the Commissary’s old robes so he wouldn’t stand out from the crowd so much. But he had nothing in common with these chattering, confident swarms with their rich, intricate social lives, their baffling business, their soft hands and unmarked faces. They were so remote from everything he knew from his origins in the Core that he may as well have been from a separate species.
And even if he could stand the openness outdoors, even if he could tolerate the people, he was still on Earth. Every time the sun went down, the sky glowed bright in the lights of the Conurbations, and beyond the glow strode the immense, arrogant engineering of the Bridge to the Moon, around which interplanetary traffic crawled constantly. It was like being trapped in some vast machine.
So his days were troubled. And when he lay alone in the dark, his thoughts were drawn back to Callisto, over and over.
He didn’t understand it. Why should he feel so disturbed? All he had done was walk through a doorway. He was the Pirius who had walked out unharmed; it was not him who had been mapped to a new level of reality, with no hope of return, to be leached of his humanity. He despised himself for his weakness.
But if he didn’t think about Callisto, images of the hive in Olympus came into his mind — or of the strange immortal, Luru Parz — or, worst of all, the Silver Ghosts on Pluto, and the shameful, helpless way he had reacted, like a machine. He felt as if his mind was becoming like Callisto, ancient and battered. And he feared that if he looked too hard, he would find deep inside it the kind of strangeness Luru Parz had uncovered in that ice moon.
Perhaps Nilis had been right that he needed a break. But Nilis had not been able to see that being on Earth, alone, was precisely the wrong kind of rest cure for a Navy brat. He longed for Torec, his only point of familiarity in this strange solar system. But she was out at Saturn. He was able to speak to her; Nilis even let him use expensive inseparability channels, so there was no time delay. But it wasn’t the same. He needed to be touched, held.
And anyhow even Torec seemed cold.
After forty-eight sleepless hours he called Nilis. He begged to be brought out to Saturn and put back to work.
Pirius arrived in time for a test firing of what Nilis called the “Callisto weapon.”
He was brought to Nilis’s corvette, which the Commissary was using as his work base. The interior was cluttered, with data desks strewn on the floor, bots of all sizes tumbling through the air, and Virtuals obscuring every view. Nilis was here, with Commander Darc, Torec, and various assistants. In this noisy mess it was impossible to see how any work got done. Nilis and Darc seemed to be working closely, but their arguments crackled like lightning.
Pirius spotted Torec, peering out at the test rig. He made straight for her. He hadn’t seen her for weeks, since before Venus. She acknowledged him with a nod, but turned away. He stood awkwardly, arms suddenly heavy, longing to touch her. He just didn’t understand.
He pulled himself together. He stood with her and looked out of the hull.
Orbiting far from Saturn’s patient golden face, the test rig was a set of twenty GUTdrive engines, mounted in a loose spherical framework perhaps fifty meters across. Technicians and bots crawled over it. It had been put together in a few days, and it didn’t look much like anything, let alone a weapon for striking at the most formidable fortress in the Galaxy.
But a few kilometers away, the captive Xeelee ship waited, surrounded by its usual cordon of watchful guardian drones; today, once again, the nightfighter was the test target. Spinning slowly, surrounded by its attendant cloud of bots and techs, the test rig looked as much a threat to the patient Xeelee as a spitball.
He said, “It looks like shit.”
Even that didn’t force a smile from Torec. “Actually we’ve come a long way in a few days. But we’re as underfunded as ever. We need GUTdrive generators, but all Nilis was able to get hold of are those dinged-up, decommissioned relics. You can see the scars where they have been cut out of wrecks.”
“Darc and Nilis are at each other’s throats.”
“That’s just their way. Darc is keen, once he forgets that he disapproves of the whole thing. He likes getting his hands dirty — especially on something new like this. He’s okay.”
Pirius looked covertly at her so-familiar profile, the finely carved chin, the upturned nose, the lines of her face softened by golden-brown Saturn light. “And you’ve kept busy.”
She shrugged. “It’s not so bad right now. When, if, we get through this proof-of-concept stage, I’ll be involved in developing the flight hardware. You, too, I guess.”
His need to touch her was an ache. “Torec, listen. I—”
She held up a hand, silencing him. A green light flared beyond the hull.
The techs and bots backed away from the rig, leaving only a few drones for close-in monitoring. Pirius watched Torec silently counting down, tracking the clock in her head, as she always did: Three. Two. One.
The rig quivered. Waves of distortion, easily visible, spread out from each of the GUTdrive generators, as if they were pebbles thrown in a pool.
GUTdrive engines worked by allowing a fragment of compressed mass-energy to expand, releasing energy through the decay of a unified superforce. In this configuration, rather than using that energy to drive a spacecraft, the engines were each supposed to create a spherical wave of distorted spacetime. The engines had been positioned so that the ripples moved inward, into the rig.
As the waves converged, blue-white light flared, dazzling. The flash dissipated immediately — but now a concentrated knot of distortion was traveling along the axis of the rig. Shifting, oscillating, the distortion made the stars blur as it traveled. It was like an immense drop of water, Pirius thought. As it burst from the rig the knot broke open struts, and sent the scavenged GUTdrive engines flying — and it was aimed straight at the nightfighter.