Cybernetic bombs going astray. What an idea. I'm sure I'll never have a realistic idea of what went on in the CC's mind, at speeds I can only dimly understand, but I have this picture of a pilot firing a killer program into a maze of hardware, hoping to take out the enemy command center. Ooops! Seems like we hit the oxygen works instead. Sorry about that.
"I did the best I could," he said, and closed his eyes. I thought he was dead, and then they snapped open again and he tried to sit up, but he was too weak. I saw that his tourniquet had loosened; more bright arterial blood had pumped out over the older, rusty stain on his clothes.
I got up from behind my rock and went down to him. Sometimes you just have to do it, you know. Sometimes you have to put aside your doubts and do what you feel in your gut. I got down on one knee and re-tied the piece of bloody cloth.
"That won't do any good," he said. "It's too late for that."
"I didn't know what else to do," I said.
"Thanks."
"Do you want some water or anything?"
"I'd rather you didn't leave me." So I didn't, and we were silent for a time, looking out over the dinosaur farm, where evening was falling. Then he said he was cold. I wasn't wearing anything and I knew it wasn't really cold, but I put my arm over his shoulders and felt him shivering. He smelled terrible. I don't know if it was old age, or death.
"This is it," he said. "The rest of me is gone now. They just shut me down. They don't know about this body, but they don't need to."
"Why the Admiral outfit?" I asked him.
"I don't know. It's a product of my evil twin. Captain Bligh, maybe. The costume is right for it. I made several of these bodies, there toward the last." He made an effort and looked up and me. His face seemed to have grown older just in the last few minutes.
"Do you think a computer can have a subconscious, Hildy?"
"I'd have to say yes."
"Me, too. I've thought about it, and it seems so simple now. All of this, all the agony and death and your suicide attempts… everything. It all came out of loneliness. You can't imagine how lonely I was, Hildy."
"We're all lonely, CC."
"But they didn't figure I would be. They didn't plan for it, and I couldn't recognize it for what it was. And it drove me crazy. You remember Frankenstein's monster? Wasn't he looking for love? Didn't he want the mad doctor to make someone for him to love?"
"I think so. Or was that Godzilla?"
He laughed, feebly, and coughed blood.
"I had powers like a god," he said. "And I searched for weakness. Maybe they should put that on my headstone."
"I like what you said before. 'He did his best.'"
"Do you think I did, Hildy? Do you really thing so?"
"I can't judge you, CC. To me, if you're not a god, you came into my life like an act of god. I'd as soon judge an exploding star."
"I'm sorry about all that."
"I believe you."
He started coughing again, and almost slipped out of my arms. I caught him and pulled and he fell against me. I felt his blood on my shoulder and couldn't see his face but heard his whisper beside my ear.
"I guess love was always out of the question," he said. "But I'm the only computer who ever got a hug. Thanks, Hildy."
When I laid him down, he had a smile on his face.
I left him there under the pecan tree. Maybe I'd bury him there, maybe I'd really give him a headstone. Just then, I'd had too much of death, so I just left him.
I went to the stream to wash his blood off me. I kept my ears open for Mario's cry, as I had from the very beginning, but he still slept soundly. I figured I'd go get him and make my way back to Callie's quarters. I didn't expect there'd be any danger now, but I planned to be careful, anyway.
I planned a lot of things. When I got back he was still asleep, so rather than pick him up and feed him I put wood chips on the glowing embers of the fire and fanned it to life. Then I just sat there, across the fire, thinking things over.
Mario was to have the best. If Cricket thought he was a doting parent, he hadn't seen me yet. There in the flickering darkness I watched him grow. I helped him through his first steps, laughed at his first words. And grow he did, like a tree, with his head held high, the spitting image of his Mom, but with a lot more sense. I got him through scrapes, through school, through happiness and tears, and got him ready for college. Would New Harvard do? I didn't know; I'd heard Arean U. might even be better these days, but that would mean moving to Mars… well, that would be up to him, wouldn't it? One thing I was sure of, he'd get no pressure from me, no sir, not like Callie had done, if he wanted to be President of Luna that was fine with me, if he wanted to be… well, hell, President of Luna sounded all right. But only if he wanted to be.
So, full of plans and hope, I went to pick him up and found he was cold, and limp, and didn't move. And I tried. I tried and tried to breathe life back into him, but it did no good.
After a very long time, I dug two graves.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I'm no good at mathematics. I never was good at math, so why should I keep resorting to these numeric metaphors? Maybe my ignorance helps protect me. For whatever reason, here it is:
If you're like me, you try to make the equations of your life balance out in a way favorable to you, in a way such that you can live with the answer. Surely there's a way to fudge this factor so the solution is a nice smooth line from y to x, a line that points to that guy over there. Not at me. There's just got to be a constant we can insert into this element that will make the two sides of the equation-the universe the way it is, and the universe the way we want it to be-agree in perfect karmic Euclidean harmony.
Alas, a lot of people seem to be better at it than I.
I tried, I tried till my mind was raw, to make the CC responsible for Mario's death.
There was the first, trivial solution to the problem, of course. That was straightforward, and really solved nothing: the CC was responsible, because he created the chaos that drove me into the cave.
So what?
If Mario had been killed by a falling boulder, would it help me to get angry at the boulder? Not in the way I needed help. No, dammit, I wanted somebody to blame. What I desperately wanted to believe was that the CC had lured me out of the cave so that some unseen minion, some preternatural power, some gris-gris voodoo necromancy had been able to steal over my darling and suck the breath from his lungs like a black cat.
But I couldn't make it add up. It would have taken powers of paranoid imaging far beyond mine to make it work.
So why did he die?
It was almost a week before I really wondered how he died. What had killed him. After I abandoned the idea that the CC had deliberately murdered him, that is. Was it a malformation of the heart the medicos had overlooked? Could it have been some chemical imbalance? A newly-mutated disease of dinosaurs, thus far harmless to humans? Did he die of too much love?
It was hard to get answers for a while there, in the chaos following the Big Glitch. The big net was not operational, you couldn't just drop your dime and pop the question and know the CC would find the answer in some forgotten library system. The answers were there, the trick was to retrieve them. For a few months Luna was thrown back to pre-Information Era.
I finally found a medical historian who was able to track down a likely cause of death to put on the certificate, not that Mario was going to have a death certificate. The regular doctors had been able to eliminate all the easy answers just by looking at the read-outs of my obstetrical examinations, the ones I had before visiting Heinlein Town made further exams too risky. They also had fetal tissue samples. They were able to say unequivocally that there had been no hole in my darling's heart, nor any other physical malformation. His body chemistry would have been fine. They laughed at my idea of a new disease, and I didn't mention my choked-with-love theory. But they couldn't say what it was, so they scratched their heads and said they'd have to exhume the body to find out for sure. And I said if they did I'd exhume their hearts out of their rotten chests with a rusty scalpel and fry them up for lunch, and shortly after that I was forcibly ejected from the premises.