Then he bowed again, quickly. Her tea-bulb missed his head by an inch, ruptured on the unpadded bulkhead behind him and splattered his back with hot tea. When he straightened, she was giving him the finger.
His expression did not change. He left.
Pain nagged at her attention, but she had long ago learned to bypass pain. She could still dimly sense Reb and the others; a ghost of the seventh sense with which she had perceived them earlier was still with her, like a ghostly heads-up display on her mind’s eye. There was no point in entering deep meditation and trying to wake them again. She had no assets she had lacked the last time she’d tried, was weaker if anything, and the medical technology keeping them stupified was sure to be foolproof.
She was going to have to think her way out of this. Or fail and die.
God dammit, I have not endured all these years of bullshit to become the greatest failure of all time!
And with that, an idea came to her. It was only a possibility, and a long shot at that, but it was infinitely better than nothing.
She thought it through carefully, with the slow, intense deliberation of a freezing man with a single match planning the building of his fire. She built event-trees in her mind, assigned probabilities and risks, prepared contingencies, rechecked every calculation. Finally she felt she was ready.
Assuming that she was right, and did in fact possess a match…
She checked her pocket, and found her personal wafer was missing. She hoped that was a good sign.
Well, I’m not getting any younger.
“Jeeves!” she said.
He shimmered into existence. “Yes, Madam?”
Chen Ling Ho had cherished the hope that she would agree he was Alexander the Great and accept the role of emperor’s companion; naturally he would have installed her AI on-line in case he won her over. He would remove the wafer again after she was dead and his war was over. That much had made psychological sense. What had worried her was a matter of semantics. Was an AI a “person”—in the opinion of another AI? And if so, since AIs were effectively everywhere, was Jeeves a person “outside this room”?
She was still alive. Step one accomplished. Now to push the envelope…
“Jeeves, is Rild on-line?”
If the answer was no, Sun Tzu would not know who Rild was, and might kill her out of caution, just in case this Rild was a “person.” And Eva thought it likely the answer would be no.
Chen’s holographic gear was excellent; Jeeves became discreetly pained. “Yes, Madam. He has been under constant interrogation since our arrival in this pressure.”
Good. Then Sun Tzu was aware of Rild, and classified him as “not-a-person-outside-this-room.”
“Rild, can you hear me?”
Reb had long ago given Eva access to all but the most personal levels of Rild; she was privileged to summon him. The question was, did he have bytes to spare? Or did the software interrogating him tie up too much of his capacity?
“Yes, Eva,” Rild’s soft voice said.
She felt like she was tap-dancing on a high wire in terrestrial gravity. Balanced in her hand were all the eggs there were, or ever would be. She began breathing in slow rhythm, composing herself, reaching again for the wordless timeless Evaless place. “Do you have some way to wake Reb?”
The answer came from far away, down a long tunnel. “Yes. A posthypnotic trigger.”
Causing a person to be awakened is not communication. “Do it,” she murmured, and her eyes rolled up.
This communication, Sun Tzu was not equipped to monitor…
Reb was there waiting for her; awake, untroubled, numinous. His serenity helped calm her, eased her fear, brought them closer together.
She merged with him. She became him, and he her. For the first time in her life she sensed what it must be like to be a Stardancer. She had always wondered why beings who expected to live for centuries did not fear death more than a human; now she understood. It was not the brain that mattered, nor the mind which invested it, but the energy that wore both like a series of intricate disguises for a time and then became something else. She had dimly known this for a long time; now she surrendered to it.
She felt the entire Starmind, all around her, heard its chorus echo in the Solar System, grasped its quarter-million-member dance in its entirety, from the orbit of Mercury to the farthest fringes of the Oort Cloud where the comets winter.
And when that happened, Reb knew all that she knew, simply and effortlessly. And she in turn knew what he knew, which was all that the Starmind knew. Well over ninety-nine percent of that information she would never get to integrate, but she did have time to perceive certain essentials.
Such as: nanotechnological booby-trapping is a game that two can play. And: some nanobombs can be triggered, not by radio signal, but by biting a simple code on the back of one’s tongue. And: her great granddaughter Charlotte in Toronto was going to recover. And: Reb loved her, and everything was going to be okay now. And finally: things are worth what they cost, and death is a small coin.
She even had time, in those final nanoseconds, to grasp the full extent of the cosmic joke the Universe had played on her, and to begin to smile.
Then she and Reb and all the other atoms in and of Chen’s flagship were converted to a rapidly expanding perfect sphere of plasma, the color of a Stardancer.
Different conditions obtained on Terra; at the same instant, the corresponding base in North China began turning into a large white mushroom cloud, the color of a Starhunter.
24
Noteworthy Events in March 2065
—Military mop-up of the rebel forces went into high gear, spearheaded in space by Admiral Cox and on the ground by General Chang of a mortified China; after the first week, loss of life was nominal. Doubtless many conspirators were missed… but they were not free for long. Some ninety-three percent of the relay trigger stations in the Solar System were located and destroyed, although it was apparent that all those who had known the trigger code had died in the same instant.
—After lengthy consultation with the Starmind, the UN high command elected to delete all mention of a plague of triggerable nanobombs in space from its report to the public. This had the effect of making the Rebellion of the Group of Five appear a desperate, doomed kamikaze affair rather than a narrowly averted coup. Despite—or perhaps because of—its irrationality, the story played.
—The media went into delighted spasm, like sharks dropped into a fish farm. Old-timers for whom the business had lost something when people stopped having wars wept openly. The Sacrifice of the Adepts passed almost instantly into fiction—the cronkites and riveras had it to themselves for nearly a week before the first movie and novelization could be released, and then the floodgates really opened. The job of massaging the legend into a pleasing shape began. The performing arts, oddly, did not seem to take to the new subject: most of them already had funded work under way, with more upbeat themes.
—The Board of Directors of the Shimizu Hotel appointed a new manager and a new PR chief. A special monument was installed in the Grand Foyer, to honor their predecessors, who had bravely sacrificed themselves in a vain effort to ensure the security of guests. In return for keeping their faces straight at the dedication of this monument, and their mouths shut forever after, Co-Artistic Directors Rand Porter and Jay Sasaki received lucrative new contracts terminable only by them. Each contained an ironclad artistic control clause.