"That sounds like a god-awful long shot," I muttered.
"Especially when you’re staring down a jelly gun’s mouth."
"Not at all," Tic said slowly. "It gives the robots an excuse to do the decent thing." Ramos and I stared at him.
"Machines know right from wrong," he assured us. "It grieves them terribly when someone has programmed them to hurt people. If you give them the smallest opening to overcome that programming, they’ll take it."
"Uh-huh." Ramos was two hairs from dumbstruck. "You think machines have the capacity for independent moral judgment?"
"More than people," Tic replied. He gave her a long cool look. "And that’s what popped into your mind the instant you thought about killer robots?"
"I told you it was stupid," Ramos said. "Trying to stop them from shooting you by yelling, ‘Ooo, you’re drowning me!’ Ridiculous."
"Absolutely," Tic agreed, amiable as the sun. "Which is why you must come with us if your probes find anything. Just to see."
"Oh," Ramos glowered, "I’m supposed to hope we meet homicidal androids… to test some silly remark my roommate made ten years ago?"
"No," Tic said. "To see if the first thing to cross your mind was a meaningless mental belch, or the universe trying to tell you something. That’s worth finding out, Ramos. Worth learning if you’re a poor vekker doomed to slog for every lumen of enlightenment, or if some god occasionally whispers into your gnarled little ear."
He settled back in his chair, closed his eyes and both ear-sheaths, then folded his hands across his belly: a man who had finished with a conversation and was precious pleased with his side of it. Ramos turned to me, and asked quietly, "Is he crazy?"
"He wants to be," I said.
Tic’s smile twitched a notch higher, but his eyes stayed closed.
"Hmph." She stared at Tic across the table. "I’ve had my share of escorting senile old coots into dangerous places. I sympathize with you, Faye."
"Tic is definitely not senile," I told her. "But you’re still welcome to help me escort him. Would you like to come? On an irresponsible adventure, just to feel your heart beat faster?" I gave her hand a motherly pat. Well… motherlyish. "And don’t worry you might turn out useless. I promise, when androids attack I’ll let you be my human shield."
"Oh, in that case…" She laughed. Lightly. But keeping her eyes on me. "You think I should go?"
"Lord Almighty," I answered, "don’t ask me for advice. I’m the queen of thoughtless impulse." Then an impulse. "Yes, I think you should go."
"Well then. Irresponsibility. Just this once."
And that was very much that.
As we were finishing breakfast, our two ScrambleTac bodyguards put in an appearance, asking what we intended to do next. They were a human wife-and-husband team, Paulette G. and Daunt L. of the Clan Du… which meant they had more husbands and wives back in Bonaventure. In the years after the plague, I wasn’t the only hothead to light on group marriage as a way to give society the crank.
But if Paulette and Daunt had ever played the jeering rebels, they were far past it now. By-the-book police types down to the crotch tattoos. If I had suddenly found myself stuck in a cozy resort with one of my spouses, I know what I would have done; but Paulette and Daunt told us they’d spent the night conducting a more thorough search of Maya’s room, collecting hairs and dirt specks the housecleaning servo had missed, then dismantling the servo itself for more samples. When that was finished, they took shifts, one sleeping while the other prowled the grounds in search of acid-blasting androids.
A jolly old evening. You can always hope they were lying.
After breakfast, we went for a walk around town… by which I mean Tic and Festina ragged on me for a tour of my childhood tree-forts/skating rinks/skipping areas/make-out spots, till they wore me down. Not that I could show them much of the town I’d known. Twenty-one years had stampeded past since I said good riddance to Sallysweet River — years with heavy feet, trampling down defenseless places where kids played. Tree-forts had got cut flat to make room for ski chalets. Skating rinks were moved far downriver, where shouting and laughing wouldn’t annoy the tourists. The skipping areas were gone too: my junior school had expanded with two new domes plunk on top of the old playground. As for make-out spots… I sure as sin wasn’t going to check on those with two ScrambleTacs looking over my shoulder. Or Tic. Or Festina.
Instead, we wandered aimless-blameless, with me trying hard not to sound like some old fart, bemoaning the things that had changed. A dozen new stores. New housing, especially near the mine, which had acquired a slew of unmarked outbuildings. All the tourist facilities, with paintings and holos and sculptures of my father, lined up in every window… most of them using that creepy artist’s trick where the eyes follow you.
Dads watching me everywhere. Enough to bring on hot flashes and me only forty-two. My knee-jerk reflex was to feel guilty, like he’d caught me in something. But what did I have to squirm about? A respectable member of the Vigil now, sashaying out with a master proctor and an admiral, for God’s sake. I could hold my head up no matter who was looking at me… including people I’d gone to school with, all looking saggy middle-aged and none showing the slightest click of recognition as we passed in the street.
Faye Smallwood, vertical and sober, not cursing, not dirty, not dressing slut. Why should they recognize me? And why should I want them to?
Christ, I was happy when our strained little tour got cut short by the probes reporting success.
One success, two alerts.
Alert #1 = a whispery chirp from a remote-link in Festina’s pocket.
Alert #2 = an image ghosting up in front of my eyes.
Image = snowy forest: the transitional kind, halfway between sparse bluebarrel tundra and boreal woods filled with chillslaps and paper-peels. You only saw such forest near water, a lake or river big enough to moderate the temperature a titch… a nudge up from tundra-only cold but not quite warm enough for no-holds-barred timber-land.
In my mind, I couldn’t see the water, wherever it was; but I could see a hole in the ground. Not long ago, the hole must have been stuffed bushy with weeds and bramble. Now, the overgrowth was cleared away — hacked down, dragged out, heaped up. Nearby sat the grotty remains of a campfire: half-burnt branches black and slick with melted snow. Many weeks old, by the look of it… covered white by blizzards and just now reappearing in the thaw.
"Are we seeing things, Smallwood?" Tic whispered to me.
"Yes."
He smiled… maybe pleased for me that I’d got a vision from Xe, maybe pleased for himself that he wasn’t just hallucinating.
"We’ve got a positive hit fifty klicks south of here," Ramos reported, checking the readout on her remote. "The probe gives 73 percent confidence this is a ‘meaningful find.’ " She gave a small snort of doubt. "I’d take that with a grain of salt, but it’s worth checking."
Tic and I didn’t speak. We could see the find was more than just "meaningful."
Ramos locked in the probe’s reported position, then ordered the missile back to its programmed search pattern, looking for other "meaningful" sites that might be lurking in the wilderness. The second she punched in the probe’s new orders, my vision of the hole in the ground winked out.
Meanwhile, Paulette and Daunt rang up Cheticamp for instructions. Should we take a run out to see what the probe had found? Or sit stony till a larger squad could fly in? After much hemming and hawing, Cheticamp gave the go-ahead to "proceed with caution"… which meant he’d totaled up his belief that Maya was already dead, plus Festina’s doubt that the probe had found something, minus the waste-time inconvenience of sending cops on another fools’ errand to Sallysweet River. Our two ScrambleTacs promised to call for backup at the first hint of trouble or genuine evidence; but we all knew help would take a long time coming.