He had a starship dreaming, and now it began to seem that he had become a small, peculiar sort of starship of his own.
Even for an AI, there was a fine art to doing everything at once, and Richard was stretching his limits faster than they could grow. If you were a certain kind of person, it was a universal constant that demands expanded slightly in advance of resources. Richard was forming the opinion that, in his case, the pigheadedness of the universe amounted to malice aforethought.
Most of his — and Alan's — awareness was spread in a thin web of nanosurgeons flitting through the waters of the Atlantic Ocean. In particular, he was tracking the rapidly evolving shifts in the damaged ocean's unstable currents, still hard at work on the incredibly complex calculations required to enact the solution suggested by Jen's offhand comment regarding the Aegean Stables and the diversion of rivers.
To wit: What if the climatic damage could be ameliorated by re-creating — by healing—the Atlantic thermohaline deep-water turnover process, using mechanical means to redistribute saline? What if Richard could reverse some of that damage, buffer both the current global cooling and the looming catastrophic warming trend, and stabilize the climate? It could save millions of lives, if he could attain a sufficient understanding of the process. He might be able to re-create the warming processes of the defunct Gulf Stream and the so-called great ocean conveyor belt, the saltwater-density-driven worldwide ocean current that had helped keep northern Europe unfrozen for thousands of years, and which no longer existed. If he got it right, the British Isles might even be salvageable, although the process of moving the evacuees back was logistically daunting.
Or, if he understood the process incorrectly, and pulled the wrong string in his meddling, he could provoke an ecological meltdown to make the current crisis seem like a glitch. He finished checking Alan's climatological analysis and handed the body of the data back to the other personality thread with corrections and suggestions. Alan replied with a string of information regarding Leslie and Charlie's quandary; being less emotionally involved, Alan had honed Richard's hopeful numbers and reworked his code to something more aggressive.
An attempt to free the captured men could possibly outrage the aliens — could be seen as an act of war, could provoke them into violent action against the Montreal, or against the Earth. Of course, doing nothing might provoke them just as easily. He mentioned that to Elspeth over the speaker in her office, and Elspeth nodded and tapped her thumbnail against her teeth and said, “You know what occurs to me, Dick?” in that slow, thoughtful way she sometimes had.
Richard reached out to the nanites in contact with the two scientists, who he hoped very profoundly were unconscious, marshalled his forces, and paused. He couldn't control the Benefactor bugs, but he could feel them, coating two intact space suits, the outlines clear as the shape of a hand pressed into a pin box. There was no reason for the suits not to be functional.
“Elspeth, if I could read your mind, people would have good reason to be far more scared of me than they are.”
“Hah. Well, they haven't taken any drastic action before now, have they?”
“Nothing aggressive. Nothing at all, really.”
“Until we moved onto their turf.”
“And they slapped us back.”
“Unless,” Elspeth said, “they were inviting us in.”
Richard paused for mere fragments of a second, considering. “You make a good point,” he agreed. “We can't know at all what they expect. They could expect us to come back and continue the conversation, and be hurt — offended — when we don't.”
“Exactly.”
“Except we have another problem,” he said, as a new pattern of movement in the nanotech layer drew his attention. “I think they're taking the space suits apart.”
“Dick? Can you do something?”
“I'm on it, Elspeth.” And he was. Moving, his improvised—the phrase you're avoiding is “slapped together,” Dick—code compiled and ready, a best-guess and nothing he would have wanted to stake his own life on, let alone anyone else's. “Look, can you get Jeremy up there? I need the two of you to distract somebody.”
It's always easier to get forgiveness than permission, he told himself, and woke up Jenny and Min-xue.
The magnitude of the problem was evident when Valens walked into the prime minister's office. He read it in the set of her shoulders as she stood leaning against the wall and how her hands coiled around the mug she held like a shield before her chest.
“Are we going to war?” Perhaps not the most politic question, but Valens's relationship with Riel had come to be characterized by a certain bluntness.
“Not with the Chinese,” she said. “The Benefactors may be another matter. They've captured two of the researchers.”
Valens's heart dropped into his belly, even though he knew Patty hadn't been on the EVA team. “Who?”
“Forster and Tjakamarra.”
“Damn. Charlie…” And then he paused. “Captured?”
“That's what Richard and Alan think.”
“It occurs to me, Prime Minister,” he said, and crossed the room to the decanter three-quarters full of Scotch, “that we're becoming entirely too dependent on ‘Richard-and-Alan-say.'”
“That hasn't escaped my notice either, General.” Riel's voice was dry, bittersweet. He didn't turn to see her expression; he could picture it well enough. The decanter was heavy, crystal cut in a crosshatched pattern cool and rough under his fingers. He filled a tumbler, two fingers, as she continued. “You were about to comment on the capture of two of our leading scientists, unless I misread you.”
Valens stared into the dark amber fluid, but did not taste it. “When was the last time you misread somebody, Connie?”
“I think it was your friend Casey, now that you mention it.”
“Casey's not my friend,” he answered, and now he did raise the glass, and ran the Scotch under his nose. It smelled of smoke and peat; it tasted like sugared fire when he touched it to his lips. “There can't be too much of this left in the world.”
“We'll be reduced to Kentucky bourbon when it's gone,” she answered. “Enjoy it while you can.”
“I should examine the details more closely before I jump to any conclusions regarding Charlie and Dr. Tjakamarra and the Benefactors,” he said. He turned back to face Riel, propping himself against the sideboard. She was still holding her coffee mug, staring out the window.
“The data will be made available to you.”
“Good. How did your meeting with Frye and the odious Mr. Hardy go?”
She shrugged. “Toby's going to try a power play. Or perhaps just flatly sell us out to the highest bidder. Frye can still be managed, though.”
“You're certain?”
“Don't be foolish.” Her hands dropped to her side. She kept the mug upright, but he heard the coffee slosh. She crossed to the window, standing behind the drapes as she twitched them aside. She stared out for a moment and then turned and looked back at him, frowning. “Of course I'm not certain. But that's besides the point; she can be used, and I intend to use her. I think I have the opposition figured out, Fred.”
“You're enough of a bitch to leave me hanging like that, too, unless I ask.” He softened it with a smile. She chuckled.
She crossed the room and set her mug on the edge of her desk, then began rearranging her clutter away from the access surfaces of the interface plate. “Fred, did it ever occur to you that we might lose?”
Somehow, he knew what she meant. Not her government, not Canada. But the whole human race, Earth and everybody on it. “Some days, Connie, I think maybe we already have. Some days I think it's kinder that way, and maybe we're too dumb and self-destructive to live.”