I recognized Wan immediately. Since becoming machine-stored he had elected to make himself a good deal less unattractive, but he was the most belligerent-looking of all. "Who the hell are you?" he demanded. "What the hell are you doing here? Anyway, you're not leaving. Robin! De-Von! Take this man prisoner."
He was quite amusing, really. I didn't bother to answer. I merely wrapped myself around him, as I had done to his servant long before, and began to squeeze.
None of his present servants interfered. I hadn't expected them to. It would have made no difference if they had, of course, nor did Wan's own struggles. In less than ten milliseconds I had him cooped up in his data fan; I turned it off and ordered the others: "Have this delivered to the spacecraft in the valley."
They didn't look eager to carry out my instructions. They didn't look as though they objected much, either. After a moment one of them spoke. She was human and female, and she apparently had given much thought to her appearance. "Take us with you, please?" she asked.
That had not been among my priorities, but I could see no objection. "You are not to waken Wan," I told them, "or you will deeply regret it. However, you may include your data fans with his on the ship." They had started a handling machine loading their fans for the trip down into the valley and I returned there as well. After that it was only a matter of completing the boarding and flying back home.
23
In Orbis's Ship
I
That hotshot AI that calls himself Marc Antony never asked, but I have a name. It's Phrygia Lorena Todd. If he blamed me for working for that freak, Wan, that's his problem. It wasn't my idea. I certainly didn't want to get involved in the Planetless Very White Very Hot Star thing at all, but Wan didn't give me any choice. He claimed he had the right to do anything he wanted with me, since, after those damn buildings collapsed into the subway station in Kuala Lumpur, where I was unlucky enough to be driving one of the cars, he claimed he owned me.
Wan wasn't the first man who thought that. He was the first one who had the law on his side, though. So when he told me I had to pilot Orbis McClune to where he could blow up that star, I didn't see any way of getting out of it.
Anyway, the way he put it to me, the blowing up wasn't necessarily going to happen. I listened to the broadcast when he made it and, sure enough, he said if they'd give him his damn cavemen he'd call it off.
All right, I shouldn't have believed a scum like him. But I wasn't in any position to argue, was I? If you think you could have handled the whole thing better, well, maybe you could, and I hope next time you're the one who's stuck with the problem, not me.
Still, the way it worked out, it was a damn good thing for everybody that I was there.
Maybe I shouldn't have taken so seriously the way Marc Antony treated me like dirt all the way back to the Core. He treated everybody else like dirt, too. All the same, I couldn't help snickering when he got his comeuppance.
See, the minute we passed through the Schwarzschild he got on his communicator, talking to whoever it was he'd left in charge of things when he took off for Arabella, and I could tell he wasn't liking what he was hearing. Most AIs won't lose their temper, but Marc Antony sure lost his. "You have not located the vessel with the nullifier?" he was snarling—it wasn't a statement, it was a question, and a rhetorical one at that. "That is unacceptable! It is also unacceptable that you cannot undertake to complete the task of locating it in less than two hundred million additional milliseconds! That much time is not available!"
When Marc Antony cut the connection he was looking—well, not worried, I'd say, because I don't think AIs worry much, but certainly kind of concerned. I asked him, "What's the problem?"—not really caring what the answer was.
I thought at first that he wasn't going to answer, but he did. "I do not think you would understand," he told me, "but it is a very serious matter. I left my subsets a task to do in my absence. It was a long and tedious job, to be sure but not a particularly demanding one. However, they have failed. Now I have no way of reaching the vessel in time to prevent the explosion."
"Huh," I said. "I do, though."
That got his attention. "Do not make jokes with me," he said, sounding dangerous.
"No joke. I was the one who set it in its orbit. I can take you right to it."
Antony probably didn't believe me right off, but he didn't have any better choices. When we got there and I showed him Orbis's torpedo on the lookplate I thought he might have said something a little bit apologetic to me. He didn't. "You, pilot," he said, looking straight at me. "Now you will do something else for me." Then he told me what the something else was. I wasn't thrilled about taking orders from a bad-tempered AI in an apron and white cap, especially when he was ordering me to do something I'd never done before. "Let me get this straight," I said. "You want me to, what, project myself to Orbis's ship? How do I know it will work?"
He gave me an impatient nod. "It works. I've done it myself."
"Okay,' I said, not entirely convinced but going along with it. "Then why don't you do it this time?"
"Because he knows you. I'll be there with you, but I won't show myself. I don't want to frighten him."
I didn't say what I thought the chances of Orbis McClune being frightened by a man in a chef's hat might be. I just said, "I'm not easy in my mind about this."
Then he just said, "Do it, pilot," and the tone he said it in didn't encourage any more argument. And it didn't actually sound so hard, you know. I figured about all I had to do was convince Orbis that, if he pushed the button, he'd die too. So I did what Marc Antony said.
II
Altogether I think I was talking to Orbis for something like thirty-one or thirty-two minutes, organic time. That may sound like a fair amount to you, but you don't know the half of it. That's thirty-one minutes times sixty seconds in every minute and a thousand milliseconds in every second— what I mean, it was a lot of time. I can't say I talked myself hoarse. Machine-stored people don't get hoarse. What I did do to myself, or really what that SOB Orbis did to me, was to pretty near drive myself as batty as he was.
When I looked around Orbis's tiny ship it appeared he wasn't expecting much of a career in it. He hadn't even made a surround for himself. The place looked like a garbage dump. There were odds and ends of all sorts of things sliding around on the floor—physically real things sliding on the physically real floor, I mean.
See, the thing was that Orbis wasn't giving me any chance to interfere with him. He was already holding the triggering thing—well, the simulated but nevertheless quite functional triggering thing—in his hand. I don't know why he was doing that. Maybe because he thought I was a more violent person than I really was. I thought it might have been because he'd been sort of toying with the idea of pushing the button right there and then. You know, like a nut with a razor might be laying the flat end of it against his wrist a couple of times while he made up his mind whether or not he was going to start slicing.
Then the argument started. "If you're in such a hurry to die," I'd say to him "—I mean really die, so you aren't even machine-stored anymore— why don't you just get a gun and blow your brains out? Or something; you know what I mean." "Can't do that," he'd say. "Suicide's a sin." "Then it's a sin to push that button, isn't it? Cause you'll be killing yourself too?" Then he'd give me a big smile. "That's the part I haven't figured out yet,' he'd say. "After all, Wan didn't say I'd be killing myself. I only have your word that that's true. And there are other considerations." But he wouldn't say what the considerations were, and so when we'd get to that point I'd start screaming things like, "Are you crazy? Killing yourself's a sin, but killing Christ knows how many goddam people that are going to die when the goddam star blows is, like, just a misdemeanor or something?" And then he'd give me another smile—he was the smiliest SOB I ever knew—and say he was studying it over and he'd let me know if he figured it out. God almighty! I could've killed the bastard. Would've been glad to, too, if only I'd had some way of doing it.