"A kind of loaded die?" Carmen asked.
"No. At least it"s not loaded by anything physical, anything that our instruments are capable of discovering. Its balance is such that it should come down according to the laws of probability, like any other fair die. But it"s not fair, either. Every fair trial brings the one-dot side up on top."
"Everytrial?"
He rolled it again, in demonstration.
"And what about the ring?" Carmen turned the tiny circlet this way and that between her fingers, then let it rest once more in her palm.
"I wouldn"t put it on my finger. Though that"s been tried, too, without apparent effect. . . . Look carefully at the finish around the outer edge. Anything strike you as remarkable?"
When she moved the ring between her fingers again, Carmen noticed that the surface of the rim sometimes seemed to blur, as if it could be moving at a different speed from the material beneath. This flow or slippage ceased immediately when she once more held the artifact still. She described what she saw as best she could to Tupelov, adding, "But I"m sure that could be produced in a number of ways by our own technology. Is that what you meant?"
"No. But it appears to have some connection with the real oddity, which it took us some time to discover. And which is that the ring you"re holding has a circ.u.mference which always measures just three times its measured diameter."
It took Carmen a moment to understand; then she remarked that the ring appeared to be perfectly circular.
"Oh, it is, by any other test. But pi, for this ring, equals exactly three. Very simple, and very simply impossible." When Carmen couldn"t find a comment, he went on, "Get something to measure it with, later, and you can try for yourself."
He reclaimed the ring from her hand now, and put both artifacts away. Then, looking at the display again, he said, "Michel, in a sense, came from the same place that those things did. He was conceived there, and then sent out into the world. Our world."
A new kind of fear dug into Carmen, somewhere deep inside. "What do you mean?"
"I hardly know myself what I mean. Consider the artifacts. On the surface, they seem normal. Whatever the basis of their peculiarity is, we can"t measure it or detect it. All they do is make hash of our picture of the universe as a place defined by the laws of physics and probability we have discovered. Like-like some kind of educational toys that have been given to us. To make us use our intelligence. Or-"
"Or what?"
"To make us use, discover in ourselves perhaps, some other faculty. Or to test us. I don"t know-"
"And you"re telling me that Michel-came-from this same place? You called it the Taj, just now."
"Yes. He did. Now don"t, Carmen, that"s not going to help. Therefore my best educated guess is that Michel is now being taken to the Directors; it"s a guess, not a logical deduction. Don"t, I said. They can"t do him any more harm than any other berserker machine can. Anyway I don"t think that their intention is to harm him."
Carmen sank back in her chair. Her eyes were closed and her lips had no more color than her skin.
"Where are we going, then?"
"We"re going to put in at Alpine first, because it"s on our way. I want to see what we can pick up there in the way of recent information. Then we"re going on, with more ships if I can get the Alpine government to send some with us. To where I believe the Directors are now, and where we can intercept Michel, if anywhere." The Secretary leaned forward, stabbing at the display with a lightpointer. "Right where the Taj was last reported. Right there near the Core."
ELEVEN.
At some point in the journey, and it was in the very nature of the difficulty that Michel did not know exactly when, he discovered that, at least as far as his conscious mind was concerned, he had lost all track of time. He no longer seemed to have any clear conception of how long ago he had been captured.
He supposed he would be lucky if that was the worst mental damage he suffered from everything that had happened to him so far.
The woman called Elly, with whom Michel was having frequent though still halting conversations, said that yes, she was probably his biomother. Somehow they managed not to talk much about that, or indeed much about anything at all. And outside of his meetings with her, his contact with human beings was at a minimum. He was guarded continuously by one or more of the robots, he spent much of his time alone in the small cabin to which he had been a.s.signed. At frequent intervals he was escorted out of his cabin, and allowed to exercise in the ship"s tiny gym, where he worked with the springs and weights and the treadmill and the bouncing b.a.l.l.s as he was bidden by the machines. Then again he would be taken to the control room, for long periods of gentle questioning by the Co-ordinator. Elly shared the gym with him sometimes, but never the control room sessions, during which one or two of the goodlife people were sometimes present. These usually stood or sat in the background, sometimes looking as if they wished they were somewhere else, never having much to say, ready to let their lord and master do the talking.
Most often it was the metallic-looking man called Stal who sat in on these interviews, and sometimes the stocky young goodlife woman whose name Michel still had not heard. Only on rare occasions did the thinner, more Oriental-looking woman take part. Once, Michel heard Stal call her by the name of Hoshi.
Rare occasions? How many occasions, how many conversations with the Co-ordinator, had there been in all, if a group of more than one of them could be called rare? Michel couldn"t remember. Time was getting away from him.
Was it because the berserker was drugging him, or hypnotizing him somehow? After some consideration, Michel didn"t think so. He thought that it must want to handle him as delicately as possible, keeping him at Michel-normal if it could, until it got him to where the Directors were waiting to provide him with that long and happy life. He decided, too, that the machine"s conversations were intended more as a monitoring of his mental condition than as serious efforts to convert him to willing goodlife status.
"Tell me a story," Michel probed at it once, when there was no one else in the control room.
"What shall the subject of the story be?"
"Goodlife."
After a hesitation lasting only a few seconds, it began. The story it related was a horrible thing, about people who took great risks and underwent great torment at the hands of badlife in order to help some berserker machines slaughter a great number of other people.
"I don"t want to hear any more," Michel interrupted firmly. The relation stopped in mid-sentence. Nor was the conversation immediately resumed.
When he was next summoned to the control room, Michel found Stal there with the commanding machine. "Tell Michel of the goodness of being goodlife," the Co-ordinator ordered its living servant.
"Of course." Stal paused briefly, like a man marshaling his thoughts. But Michel got the feeling that the pause, like the speech that came after it, had been rehea.r.s.ed.
Stal began, "Insofar as life can be good in any sense, it is so only in serving the cause of death."
"Why is death good?" Michel interrupted.
Stal indicated astonishment at the question. His manner seemed to say: If you cannot see that for yourself, nothing that I can say will help. At last he replied, "If you had seen more of life, young sir, you would not ask me that."
"Have you seen much of death?"
"Death is the final goal of us all, the gift of peace. It-"
"But you are still alive, yourself. And the two women."
The gray-white man looked at Michel benignly. "We are needed, to help in the great cause. For the time being we are denied our rest."
"Co-ordinator?" Michel looked at the machine. "Does this man really want to die?"
Somewhere in the control room, something electronic made the faintest of musical gurgles; otherwise an intense silence held.
"I am needed," Stal repeated smoothly. "Do you see, Michel? And you are needed too. In this way, good can come from even a very long life, if it is spent in the service of the proper cause; a life filled, in its own way, with satisfactions." A sort of ripple of expression pa.s.sed over the man"s eyes, giving Michel the impression that Stal had almost winked at him.
"Co-ordinator?" In the middle of the word, Michel"s voice threatened to crack. "If this man wants to die, kill him right now. It"ll make me happier to see him dead. It"ll keep my mind more stable."
The man started a movement toward Michel, and like a broken robot stopped in the middle of it. The mask-like expression of his face had broken also, in an upwelling of fear, and for a few moments he had to struggle to maintain control.
"It is improbable, Michel," the Co-ordinator commented, "that you have ever ordered a human life-unit"s termination before. Therefore I compute that your mental stability will not be served by such an action now. Therefore your order will not now be obeyed." And with that, the day"s interview was at an end; and it was a long time before Michel saw Stal again.
Even before that incident, he had rarely encountered Elly and the goodlife in the same room. It had to be that the machine was, for whatever reasons, keeping them apart. Elly, like Michel, had some choice of movement about the ship, and like him she was always escorted by at least one robot. No sudden attempt by either of them to launch the ship"s lifeboat, or disable a control system, was going to have the least chance of success.
By mutual unspoken agreement, Michel"s conversations with Elly were always guarded, as it was certain that the Co-ordinator would always be listening by one means or another. Outside of their imprisonment, nothing grossly horrible was being done to either of them. But Elly, at least, no longer looked healthy. She had lost weight, so that the gray Temple clothes hung loosely on her body. When Michel mentioned this, she calmly agreed. But she did not seem to think it mattered much.
"How areyoubearing up?" she asked him, reaching to cup a hand under his chin and tilt his face up to the light. At this gesture their respective guardian machines each leaned a few centimeters closer, presumably ready to block any attempt at strangling the Co-ordinator"s prize specimen.
"Well enough," he answered readily. And he really was; he didn"t know why or how, but it was so. "You know, I think I"m growing. This suit is starting to feel tight." The orange gym-suit, run through his cabin"s laundry ducts at intervals, was still the only clothing that he had.
"Yes, I suppose you are." Elly sounded as if her own idea of time had grown as vague as his. She looked at him strangely. "But your hair is shorter than it was."
"The machines cut it." Reducing the length of each strand by what Michel had decided must have been a standard number of centimeters. "Elly, if you"re really my mother-"
"Yes?"
"Who"s my biofather, then?" He had decided that the machines must already have got some answer from her to that question; he couldn"t see how it was going to matter that they would overhear her repet.i.tion of the answer now.
But the Co-ordinator, speaking through one of its robots, immediately warned her: "Give no answer."
Elly looked wearily away, kept silent.
Michel raised his eyes. "Why shouldn"t I know?" he demanded of the low metallic overhead.
"The future only is alterable. What is past cannot be changed."
A few hours after that-or was it a few days, perhaps?-Michel was alone in his cabin when one of the robots brought him new clothing, evidently just fabricated aboard. It was a somewhat miniaturized Stal-outfit, even including metallic-looking boots. Casual dress on shipboard did not usually include footwear of any kind, and these . . . Michel considered refusing the whole package. But then another idea suggested itself.
He changed into the other new garments, a loose shirt and short trousers of bright gray. Then, carrying his old orange garb in one hand and the rejected new boots in the other, he walked out of his room without being stopped. With his metal attendant staying just a pace behind him, he paced the few meters of corridor and entered the control room.
"Here," he said, as casually as possible. "I don"t need these." And with a double toss he lobbed the boots at the foot of the Co-ordinator"s console perch, and the orange suit right at the captain"s chair. On that chair Lancelot still lay, unchanged, wave-complexes shimmering through the seamless fabric of entwined forces.
The boots thunked lightly on the deck, the suit came down right in the outstretched hand of the robot standing protectively beside the chair, the robot that had been behind Michel when the toss started.
He was learning a few facts here and a few there. The only attack he was ever going to be able to make on the Co-ordinator would be of a non-physical kind, through what pa.s.sed for the Co-ordinator"s mind.
We"re human beings. We"re the bosses when it comes to any kind of partnership with machines. And also we"re gonna win the war. If anyone should ask you.
But first, Frank, I am going to have to learn enough.
"Do you wish to put on Lancelot again?" the Co-ordinator asked Michel suddenly.
"Will you let me, if I do?" And now, he thought, I predict that it will counter with yet another question of its own.
"Not yet. I am not authorized to do so. Perhaps the Directors will allow it. What did you think of, when you first wore Lancelot?"
It had asked him that at least once before, at a time that now seemed long, long ago. What had he answered then?
"I thought of a time when I was in a play." Having given this answer, Michel was asked to explain briefly what a play was. He did so, though he was not at all sure that his questioner did not already know.
"And what role in the play was yours?"
"I was Oberon."
"On a stage you played the role of the fifth major satellite of Ura.n.u.s?"
"No, of a-creature. I guess the one the satellite was named for. A story-creature. Fiction. And in the play I wore these robes that looked something like Lancelot. Quite a coincidence."
"What is coincidence?" the berserker asked.
"You must know the answer to that one better than I do," he told it. "Why do you keep on asking me questions where you already know the answers?"
"As you know, I am concerned that your mind does not change a great deal while you are in my care.
Therefore I test your responses. Repeat, what is coincidence?"
Therefore you are losing, he thought. I couldn"t keep my mind from changing even if I wanted to. "I guess," he said, "coincidence is things happening at the same time without any good reason for it."
"Was the story-creature Lancelot in the same play as Oberon?"
"No, in another story. And Lancelot never wore robes like-"
"Here there will be no play."
"I never thought there-"
"In approximately fifty-five standard minutes this ship will dock at a facility where you will be thoroughly examined. Then within a few standard hours our voyage will resume, with a stronger escort, and aboard a different ship where you will have more room and be more comfortable."
A dozen tentative plans, more gossamer than Lancelot"s outermost fringes, were dissolved to nothingness by a few words. He had not foreseen this. Maybe there was some excuse for the failure and maybe not, but he just had not foreseen this at all. Yet there was nothing illogical about it; berserkers must have their bases, just as did the human fleets. And there was no reason why the first base their flight came to should be the one at which his ultimate interrogators were waiting.
All Michel said was: "Elly? What about her?"
"Do you wish that your mother continue the journey with you?"
It seemed obvious what was likely to happen to Elly if he saidno; what was not so obvious was whether or not she would be ultimately better off that way. "Yes," said Michel at last. Then he asked the machine, "What is this facility like, where we are going to dock?"
"I will clear a screen and you can observe it as we approach."
If he had asked for a screen a standard day or a standard month ago, might it have cleared one for him then? But they had been in almost continuous c-plus travel anyway, and there would have been nothing to see but fireworks.
A few minutes later, making adjustments on one of the control room"s large screens (while his guardian stood motionless exactly between him and the captain"s chair), Michel discovered a darkly ma.s.sive body at a distance of about two hundred thousand kilometers and closing rapidly. Too big to be any ordinary ship, the object radiated enough warmth to be plainly visible in the infrared, while remaining obscure even under magnification in the ordinarily visible wavelengths.
The goodlife ship, having slowed drastically from interstellar speeds, was approaching the thing now at about a thousand kilometers per second, and still decelerating strongly. The image of the berserker base waiting ahead was still largely obscured by dust and noise; and this, Michel was thinking to himself, must be what gave him the sense, in observing it, of something . . . not as it should be.
Something out of phase.
Something-wrong?