It had been a grand plan, and a long plan, that I’d listened to in my last encounter with the decaying domain of the fast folk. They would slow their physical and mental processes down, almost freeze their development; and then, with literally cool deliberation, the ones who retained their rationality would excise the rest. Then, with the resources of Jupiter at their disposal, the survivors would multiply again. This time, they could wait, until their expanding domain embraced the Malley Mile: the gate to the end of time.
The shock of this understanding broke through the illusion that it was something I’d always known. I realised the tower had changed me after all. It had installed this new knowledge; of the Malley equations, of the macros’ plans, and more: I knew now how to start-up a stored mind, and imprint it on a brain. I didn’t have the reach, the scope, the speed of the being I’d been when I first learned them, in the macro. If I had, now, become one of the fast folk, I was running slow, in primitive hardware. But I remembered what I’d learned, and understood the peril we faced.
I stepped out of the frame, and told Meg. She had been changed, too; she understood.
‘Call Reid,’ she said.
We flipped the scene. Back, now, in the illusory cab, to our shared fantasy of being just a trucker and a girl hitch-hiker he’d picked up; sad, really. I mentally checked the positions of the communications satellites, then tilted the phone-screen and put a call through to Reid.
It was the most private, personal number I’d ever found for him, and still I got his secretary.
I stared at her, my mind working a lot faster than hers; as her green eyes widened, her black eyebrows narrowed in puzzlement as she looked back at us, at a strange, silent couple in a truck out on the desert. What arrogance Reid must have, what contempt for anything I might feel! By now he must be certain that I felt nothing, that virtual blood could not really chill, and simulated tears could not wet a representation of a face.
I noticed, thinking so fast that everything froze for a moment, that I had an open channel. I threw subliminal suggestions and viral subversions down that channel like a curse. Some of them hit firewalls, some got lost in transcription, and some just screwed around with Reid’s electronics. But some, I was sure, got through.
Her lips just opened, just parted. I blinked, once.
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘Wrong number.’
We set a course for the foothills of the Madreporite Mountains, intersecting the Stone Canal. We wanted to get as close to the source as possible, where the cometary thaw was still rich in organic molecules. Every day or so another chunk of dirty ice would hurtle overhead and make a flash behind the eroded peaks.
After parking the crawler in a gorge by the canal, I went around to the back and started hauling out equipment. The growth-vat was crude, barely more than a tub with a computer and a microfactory attached. I tapped the extraction-pipes under the canal-bank, and put together my own refinery. I checked through my new knowledge of how to install a stored mind in a copy of the brain from which it had been taken. I took a small plastic slide from inside my shell, and slotted it in the machine.
Part of the clone’s growth was natural, but much of it was hastened and forced by smart-matter assemblers. Even so, building a body takes time. We didn’t have time to recapitulate development from an embryo: he grew full-size from the start, a skeleton taking shape and acquiring organs, muscles and skin in a grotesque reversal of the process of decay. But Meg and I observed his growth, or construction, as fondly as if he’d been a foetus in a swelling womb.
He was sleeping when, one early morning ten days later, we hauled him from the vat. We dried him, and dressed him, and carried him past the crawler, now locked and sealed and armed; out of the gorge and along the canal until, as the day warmed, he began to stir. We laid him on the bank, and waited. The sun climbed the sky.
He woke, and remembered dying.
21
Vast And Cool
I stood there in the cave, in Dee’s body, and tried to think fast. It wasn’t easy.
Of all the bodies I’d been in, this one was the strangest, the most alien. (And the more so because I had once known its every intricate inch.) In the robot bodies I’d had a virtual body to retreat to. Not in this. As Meg had said, there was room in this mind for us all, but with Dee’s Self and selves there was no room for virtual realities. We had to time-share it, one of us in control, the others conscious but passive passengers.
Although I surely never planned, or imagined, that things would turn out this way, it was also the best body through which I could persuade Reid of what had to be done. All his conscious prejudice might be undermined by this voice that had coaxed and teased, this face that had smiled and cried, this embodiment of an obsession that had lasted beyond the death of its real object.
I had at first hoped to defeat Reid, to force him legally and by popular pressure to release the codes that could unlock the interface with the smart-matter storage of the fast folk and the dead. I’d underestimated the strength of his resistance to the very idea.
I initially rescued Dee and Ax, leaving Wilde to fend for himself, in part to hold Dee as a bargaining-chip and in part to stop the killing spree on which she and Ax had embarked. It was only when I invited Dee into my virtual reality that I learned just where Reid had stored and secreted his codes: in Dee’s mind, in Stores and Secrets. That I never expected to find them there is, perhaps, a testimony to the cunning of his choice.
With these codes, and the information from the macro that Meg and I had finally interpreted, I knew I could go ahead and restart the fast folk without any co-operation from Reid, voluntary or otherwise.
And now that plan, too, was down the tubes.
So I just confessed everything.
‘All right,’ said Reid. ‘All right. I’ll grant you have an argument for starting these things up.’ He gestured at the stacked crates which he’d helicoptered in, long ago, and the stacks of stuff I’d added since. By this time we were all sitting around on the crates, talking and smoking and drinking coffee. (One of the trade-goods I’d accumulated.)
‘But what,’ he went on, ‘do we do about stopping them again?’
‘Simple,’ I said. I searched in Dee’s handbag, with Dee’s hands. I pulled out the plastic box I’d given her, and opened it. Inside were the slides for my clone and Meg’s, and a sealed plastic vial of smart-matter poison.
‘You had it all the time,’ I said. ‘Blue Goo. This shit has been sprayed on stray nanotech for decades, changing all the time. It’s evolved beyond any immunity the fast folk can come up with for, oh, minutes and minutes.’
Reid laughed. ‘“Here’s one I prepared earlier”, eh? And what if their researchers are smarter than our viruses?’
‘Nuke the fuckers,’ I said. I looked around the cavern, vaguely. ‘I’ve got a few kilotons lying around somewhere.’
‘Bit suicidal,’ Reid commented.
I gave him a severe look.
‘You do take back-ups?’
He laughed again. ‘Of course.’
‘Wait a minute,’ said Tamara. ‘You’re talking about implementing, what, thousands? of superhuman minds in smart matter, getting them to answer a few questions, and then wiping them out?’
Reid and I exchanged puzzled frowns, and at that moment I knew I’d won.