Smith checked the sifter every planetary day — about four solstan days — and made a find on average once every solstan year. Mostly he came to empty out strange-shaped stones and package artefacts from more recent ages for transmission to associates. On this occasion he had a find. In the red light of the giant sun the coralline material was the colour of old blood. Under the lamps it would be pink and Smith knew where he had seen its like before. The excitement he might have felt before was lacking now. Years of research and now, out there, a real living Jain. Smith glanced up at the red sun and the psuedobirds. A shape was coming towards him and it wasn’t a bird. The crab drone landed on the cowling of the sifter with a clattering and scrabbling and once it got its balance it peered at him with stalked eyes.
“Who are you then?” asked Smith.
“I am the Cable Hogue,” said the drone in a gravelly voice.
“Interesting name.”
“I am a ship AI speaking to you through this drone. The drone is called CH143 though it sometimes calls itself Spider.”
“It has an independent mind then?”
“Yes.”
“Well… what do you want of me?”
“Your expertise.”
“Go on.”
“To advise on matters Jain.”
Smith dropped the fragment of ancient Jain technology back into the collection box of the sifter.
“I’ll come,” he said.
The drone rose from the cowling.
“You have four hours to get to the runcible here. Go to the Vorstra moon for short range transference to the Cable Hogue.”
The voice was somehow different this time.
“I take it Spider speaks now.”
“Spider spoke then. Only Spider speaks now.”
Smith nodded and smiled to himself, then returned his attention to what he was being told.
“By shuttle?” he asked.
“By runcible,” said the drone.
“Tell me, what manner of vessel is this Hogue?”
“A dreadnought.”
Smith felt a slight shiver of excitement. It would have to be one hell of a ship to warrant having a runcible aboard. He was about to ask what classification of dreadnought it was when the drone accelerated away with a sonic crack. After a pause he headed for his AGC, his desert boots kicking up plumes of the red sand. The sifter went on sifting.
“Initially she was your clone. That she is a she, is the least of her alterations,” said Chapra. The girl lay on the examination couch in medlab, her blue eyes wide open, her body motionless. She just stared at the ceiling.
“There’s the interface in her back,” said Abaron. “What else?”
“A lot. She wasn’t burned in there even though she was in water that is nearly at boiling point. She can withstand temperatures that would kill a normal human. Very tough. Also her brain is human, but there are sub-brains branching all down her spine. In that sense she is nearly an amalgam of Jain and human.”
“Normal DNA?”
“Not trihelical, no—”
Chapra paused. The girl was sitting upright.
“Not trihelical, no—” said the girl.
“She can speak,” said Abaron.
“She can speak,” said the girl. Only when she heard the girl repeating Abaron’s words did Chapra realise that she had used exactly his voice, as she had spoken with exactly Chapra’s voice before.
“She is learning, I think,” said Chapra, and listened as the girl repeated it. “We’ll have to give her the meanings of words. She’ll have to be taught.”
The girl repeated everything she said, then smiled. Chapra did not recollect smiling. She stepped up by the couch and took the girl’s hand, brushed stringy blond hair from her face.
“Come with me,” she said, and gave a gentle tug. The girl got off the couch. She did not repeat the words. Chapra felt a cold shiver. The girl had recognised the instruction. That was fast. That was AI fast.
“Let’s go and get you some clothes and something to eat.”
“Clothes and something to eat,” said the girl.
Chapra felt that shiver again. It wasn’t fear. It was awe. And her awe increased when in the eating area the girl learned how to use the eating utensils in moments. All the time Chapra and Abaron kept up a running dialogue, some of which the girl repeated and some of which she ignored.
“I believe the educative process can be speeded,” said Box, out of the blue. The girl tilted her head. “Hello,” she said.
The AI turned on the single screen in the eating area and ran the upper and lower case English alphabet, reciting them as they scrolled past. On the second run through the girl recited. Box did the same with the Chinese alphabet, but at twice the speed. The girl recited. The AI ran the Russian alphabet even faster. The girl recited. After that neither Chapra nor Abaron could tell what was being run as the screen was a liminal blur and Box’s and the girl’s voices a babble. Abruptly the screen flickered and divided and Box began to teach a word at a time: sea, seaweed, water, human, hand, eye. Chapra noted the AI presented huge amounts of information with each word. Beside seaweed, Box opened a frame to display many different kinds of seaweed, nanoscopic pictures of genetic helices, cladograms and other graphical information. She and Abaron sat back and watched in fascination. After an hour Judd came in with a touch console and ran its fibre-optic cable to a wall socket. He laid it in the girl’s lap. Shortly after that the screen became a liminal blur once again and the girl’s fingers were moving across the console faster than even Chapra’s. At that point the two humans left. For some it is a comfort to believe there are entities far superior to themselves. For some it is a comfort to know this. For others both views are merely depressing.
“What do you think it will want?” asked Abaron, as he poured vodka into Chapra’s glass.
“You mean after it has downloaded everything the girl has learnt?”
“Yeah.”
They were sprawled in form-fitting loungers in Abaron’s quarters. This was the first time Chapra had been in there. She noted that the only ornaments were old paper books arrayed on a shelf. A glance at one had shown it to be very old, dating from the twenty-first century before the Reliteration. The language in them was fragmented, almost impossible to understand.
“I don’t know. What would we want? What would you want if you were woken five million years hence by aliens?”
Abaron thought about that for a moment then said, “I would want to find out what happened to my own kind. I’d want to get in contact with them. But then that is me. We don’t know how the Jain associate. They may be rabid individualists.”
“Doubtful. You don’t achieve that level of technology by yourself.”
“Yeah? It might be old knowledge to them.”
More vodka poured into the two glasses. Chapra and Abaron were using an old human remedy for what ailed them.
By the time Chapra was washing down hangover pills with a pint of orange juice the girl was literate in eight Earth languages. She was now rifling Box’s libraries of information. Human limitations slowed her and she had gone through less than one percent of the information stored.
“Any specific interests?” asked Chapra as she stepped into the shower.
“She was taking an overview of all the information; dealing in generalities. She now probably has a general idea of human history, present attainments, and socio-political structures. She was avoiding the specific until a couple of hours ago,” said Box.