“The cipher was not complex.” The voice came again as I ran the balanced drive up to maximum thrust. “Dialog is valuable and instructive. It is too soon to end it.”
“Oh my God.” Knudsen ran to check the transmitter switch. “Off, but it can hear us — it knows what we’re saying, even with the transmitter off. Turn on the drive.”
“It is on.” I gestured toward the observation port. “See for yourself.”
The long plume of relativistic plasma created a blue glow outside the Ptarmigan. The display showed an acceleration of four hundred gees. Contradicting that, the inertial locator showed we were not moving and the Cyber Ark was visible as large as ever on the screen.
“Increase the drive!” Knudsen was almost screaming.
“Can’t be done,” I said. “We’re already at maximum.”
“Oh my God, civilians.” Knudsen moved over and pushed me out of the way. “Let me have that damned thing.”
“Even this degree of interaction is useful,” said the voice from the speaker. “It should continue.”
“Dialog and interaction should continue.” McAndrew was sitting on the floor holding his chest. His voice was throaty and weak, but he finally spoke. “However, such activity is impossible. Humans have an emotion which you may not possess and which may be unknown to you. It is called fear. That fear forces us to destroy you—”
“Damn right it does,” Knudsen cried. “You stupid son-of-a-bitch, you’re a traitor and a disgrace to the human race. Stop talking to that fucking thing.”
“—but humans are not always so illogical.” Mac talked right on through Knudsen’s rage. “On behalf of our whole species, I apologize for the fact that the human emotion of fear will make us end your existence—”
He couldn’t finish the sentence, because Knudsen was on top of him. The captain had his hands around McAndrew’s neck and was screaming, “You’ll pay for this if we get back home. I’ll see you hit with every charge in the book.”
I’m not sure that McAndrew was listening. His face had turned red and his eyes were beginning to bulge. I straddled Knudsen’s back, grabbed two handfuls of hair, and heaved as hard as I could.
That might not have broken his grip — he was stronger than me, and in prime condition — but as his head came up he faced the observation port. I felt his body freeze. I stared out over the top of his head. The Ark was there, looming larger than ever. It seemed different, and at first I was not sure how. Then I realized that the surface had changed. Rather than rough and textured rock it had become a perfect mirror. I could even see a distorted image of the Ptarmigan reflected there. As I watched the surface began to glow with its own light, a dull red that quickly brightened to orange-white.
“This interaction must be terminated,” said the voice of the AI.
“It’s going to kill us.” Knudsen went scrambling away to the drive controls, though the drive was still at maximum and we were not moving a millimeter. “It’s going to burn us up.”
It seemed he was right. The Ark became a blaze of blue-white, so bright that I could not look at it. I closed my eyes and it stood there still as a dark after-image. I felt a dizzying lurch, as though the Ptarmigan had suddenly spun end over end.
“This interaction is terminated,” said a voice inside my head, and I opened my eyes.
To nothing. Our drive was off, the ship hung motionless in space. As my eyes recovered their sensitivity I saw the forlorn bodies floating in space; but the Ark had gone.
Knudsen was gabbling into the transmitter. “Gone, it’s gone, we’ve lost contact. There’s no sign of the Ark. It just disappeared. We’ll keep on looking.” And then, something that I’m sure he didn’t intend to be sent out, “Oh my God, we’d have been better off if we’d died with the others. Simonette will flay us alive when he finds out.”
“Aye,” McAndrew said softly, as Knudsen gazed aghast at the transmitter and realized what he had just said into it. “We’ll look, but we won’t find the AI.”
“Of course we will,” I said. “When the other ships get here they’ll comb in every direction. You told Knudsen it couldn’t travel far.”
“No, I never said that. I told him” — he jerked a thumb toward Knudsen, who seemed to have gone into a catatonic trance — “that the drive engines on the Cyber Ark couldn’t move it far.”
“Those were the only engines it had.”
“The only ones that humans think of as engines. How did the AI hold the Ptarmigan in place? How did it hear our messages when the transmitter was off? Did it speak inside your head, the way it did mine? If the AI is what I think it is, our rules of thought simply don’t apply.”
“Mac, it can’t be that smart.”
“Why not? Because we’re not that smart? Jeanie, the AI isn’t like us. It’s not even like it was, a couple of months ago, when we were at the Ark last time. It was a baby then, with a lot of growing up to do. It’s smart enough to know that it can’t do that safely if it stays close to the Solar System. We’d hunt it down, and do our best to destroy it.”
“Mac, I’ve changed my mind again. We have to kill it.”
“I don’t think we can. And I’m not sure we need to try. It knows what it did.” He gestured to the display, with its forlorn multitude of drifting corpses. “The AI left, but it gave us back our dead. Maybe those deaths were an accident, maybe it’s sorry. As sorry as we are.”
He turned away from the screen and moved across to the observation port. He was looking out, staring at the stars, silent, searching.
I know McAndrew, better than any person alive. He spoke the truth. He was sorry, deeply sorry, by the deaths of so many innocent victims. Of course he was. McAndrew is human, I know that, even if most people in the Solar System think of him as intellect incarnate.
But he is also McAndrew, and they are right, too. He was mourning, for his dead human fellows; and also he was mourning for the loss of the other, the permanent loss of an alien intelligence that he would never again have a chance to meet with and strive to understand.
Then he turned around. He didn’t look at me — at anyone. His eyes were a million miles away.
Mourning? Certainly. But I knew that expression. He was also planning, estimating, calculating.
I went over and grabbed his arm. “McAndrew, don’t even think of it. It’s gone. Get it? It’s gone.”
He returned to the world of the Ptarmigan. His limbs jerked and his eyes blinked like a wind-up toy. “Uh?” he said. And after a few moments, “Gone? Yes, yes, of course it’s gone. I know it is. But Jeanie, if we go back to the exact place where the Ark was when we found it, and make an appropriate set of measurements… we wouldn’t need to tell the USF what we were doing, and of course we’d take every imaginable precaution…”
I hate to admit it, but the others are right. When science is on the agenda, McAndrew doesn’t qualify as human at all.
NINTH CHRONICLE: McAndrew and the Fifth Commandment
What do the following have in common: Aristotle, Confucius, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Einstein, and Madame Curie?
The answer is, each of them had a mother. And if that seems like a stupid and trivial response, I offer it to make a point. Every famous man or woman has a mother. More often than not, we never hear of her. How much do you know about Hitler’s mother? Not a thing, if you are like me.
So it was a shock one morning to come to the Penrose Institute and learn that McAndrew’s mother was expected to arrive there later the same day. He had a mother, of course he did, but she lived down on Earth and I hadn’t heard him say much about her, except that she had no interest in space or anything to do with it.