I nodded. He swallowed, staring out the window, and continued as if it were an effort to talk. “I’ve consulted with Alice One and Alice Two, and with our advocates on Mars, and I’m hiring an advocate here. We’re seeking a jury trial, with a minimum of two thinkers impaneled on the jury.”
“That’s smart,” I said.
Bithras sat in the chair opposite and folded his hands in his lap. “All of this has been done in confidence, but before we leave, I am going to release the details. That will force Mind Design to take the case to court rather than settle in secret. It will be scandalous. They will deny all.”
“Probably,” I agreed.
“It will be very bad for GEWA, as well. Our advocate will voice suspicions that Earth is involved in a conspiracy, using Mind Design, to cripple Mars economically.” Bithras sighed deeply. “I have made mistakes. It is only small relief to believe they have done worse. Alice Two will stay here.”
“Good plan,” I said.
“Someone should stay with her. Allen has volunteered, but I thought to offer the chance to you.”
“I should leave Earth,” I said without hesitation.
“We have both had enough of Earth,” Bithras said. Then, dropping his gaze, “You think I’m a fool.”
My lips worked and my eyes filled with tears of anger and betrayal. “Y-yes,” I answered, looking away.
“I am not the best Mars has to offer.”
“I hope to God not,” I said.
“I have given you opportunities, however,” he said.
I refused to meet his eyes. “Yes,” I agreed.
“But perhaps disgrace, as well. The Council will conduct hearings. You will be asked embarrassing questions.”
“That isn’t what makes me so angry,” I said.
“Then what?”
“A man with your responsibilities,” I said. “You should have known. About your problems and the trouble they might cause.”
“What, and have myself therapied?” He laughed bitterly. “How Terrestrial! How fitting a Martian should suggest that to me.”
“It happens on Mars all the time,” I said.
“Not to a man of my heritage,” he said. “We are as we are born, and we play those cards, and none other.”
“Then we’ll lose,” I said.
“Perhaps,” he said. “But honorably.”
I said my farewells to Alice in the suite an hour before we left for the spaceport. For a time, Alice had withdrawn, refusing to answer our questions about her contamination. She would not even talk with the advocate chosen for our lawsuit, or his own thinker. But that changed, and she seemed to accept her new status — a beloved member of the family who could not be employed as she had once been.
“I have been replaying parts of the sim you shared with Orianna,” she told me as she tracked on her carriage into my room. My suitcase and slate lay on the field bed, squared with the corners. I am sometimes excessively neat. “You kept all of it?” I asked.
“Yes. I have observed fragments of created personalities undergoing portions of the sim. It has been interesting.”
“Orianna thought you might find it useful,” I said. “But you should delete it before the Mind Design thinkers check you over.”
“I can delete nothing, I can only condense and store inactively.”
“Right. I forgot.”
Suddenly, Alice laughed in a way I had not heard before. “Yes. Like that. I can temporarily forget.”
“I’m going to miss you,” I said. “The trip home will seem much longer without you.”
“You will have Bithras for company, and fellow passengers to meet.”
“I doubt that Bithras and I will talk much,” I said, shaking my head.
“Do not judge Bithras too harshly.”
“He’s done a lot of harm.”
“Is it not likely that the harm was prepared for him to do?”
I couldn’t take her meaning.
“People and organizations on Earth behave in subtle ways.”
“You think Bithras was set up?”
“I believe Earth will not be happy until it has its way. We are obstacles.”
I looked at her with fresh respect. “You’re a little bitter yourself, aren’t you?” I asked. And no longer very naive.
“Call it that, yes. I look forward to joining with my original,” Alice said. “I think we may be able to console each other, and find humor in what humans do.”
Alice displayed her image for the first time in weeks, and young, long-haired Alice Liddell smiled.
We returned to Mars. News of the suit on behalf of Alice followed us. It did indeed make a ripple overshadowing Bithras’s indiscretions. The scandal caused GEWA considerable embarrassment and may have contributed to a general cooling of the nascent confrontation between Earth and Mars. The suit, however, was quickly swamped in drifts of prevarication and delay. By the time we arrived home — the only home I would ever have — ten months later, there still had been no decision. Nothing had changed for the better. Nothing had changed at all.
Part Three
After a Martian year away from home, I returned to deep disappointment, the suspension of my apprenticeship, a furor at Majumdar, and Bithras’s resignation. The Majumdar suit against Mind Design Incorporated did indeed turn into a scandal, but it wasn’t enough to save my third uncle from disgrace. Mind Design passed blame to the Intra-Earth Computer Safety Bureau, which they said was responsible for injecting certain obscure safeguards into neural net designs. The suit dragged on for years and satisfied nobody, but it spurred fresh interest in Martian-grown thinkers.
Martian thinker designers — the best Mars had to offer at the time — claimed they could deactivate the evolvons. Mars would be safe from Terrie “eavesdropping.” Alice was soon cleansed and redeemed, and that pleased me. The concern faded. It shouldn’t have.
One benefit of the scandal was that we heard no more about Mars’s threat to Earth’s security. Indeed, a good many Terrie pressures on Mars subsided. But the scandal was not the sole reason. Earth for a time seemed content with a few stopgaps.
Cailetet broke from the Council and negotiated directly with Earth. We could draw our own conclusions. Stan, lawbonded and transferred to Jane’s BM, did not know what Cailetet had done, or what agreements had been reached — and I would not ask Charles, who ostensibly still worked for Cailetet. My letter to him requesting information still embarrassed me.
Father told me that Triple dollars smelling of Earth were flooding steadily into Cailetet, but not to the Olympians. Funding for the requested QL thinkers had never gone through.
Cailetet continued to refuse Majumdar BM’s offer to join the project. Cailetet revealed little, except to say that the Olympians had been working on improved communications; nothing terribly strategic. And they had failed, losing their funding.
My mother died in a pressure failure at Jiddah. Even now, writing that, I shrink; losing a parent is perhaps the most final declaration of lone responsibility. Losing my mother, however, was an uprooting, a tearing of all my connections.
My father’s grief, silent and private, consumed him like an inner flame. I could not have predicted this new man who inhabited my father’s body. I thought perhaps we would become closer, but that did not happen.
Visiting him was not easy. He saw my mother in me. My visits, those first few months, hurt too much for him to bear.
Like most Martians, he refused grief therapy and so did Stan and I. Our pain was tribute to the dead.
I had to make my own plans, find my own life, rebuild in the time left to my youth. I was thirteen Martian years old and could find only the most mundane employment at Majumdar, or work for my father at Ylla, which I did not want to do.