An unanswered question was what environment to put them into, or how to construct the feeding whiskers so that things human beings needed, like oxygen, would be left alone. He could think of nowhere on Earth safe to unleash a Van Neumann machine. The nightmare hazard of Van Neumann replication growing out of control had been known and feared so long before the technology was possible, that a complete, if imaginary, vocabulary existed to describe the various forms of threat.
But he thought she was referring to his other project.
“I have several very promising lines of inquiry,” he said, “and I just translated a section from the Omicron Segment which seems to be a direct run-down of the mathematics of self-correction in multicentric medium-knit self-referencing systems of holographic memory. In other words, since part of you was made right, I think I can reverse-engineer the rest of the instructions on how to make you, and get a set of morphic intermediaries. I can fix you without changing you, if you see what I mean. I want to test it on an emulation first, an Iron Ghost of you.”
“And create a rival for your affection? I would be unhappy as a machine, so she would be unhappy if I made her like me, and if I made a version of me that was so different from me that I would not be unhappy as a machine, I suspect it would hardly be me. I would not bring a child into so dangerous a world: if the Hermeticists made a copy, they would download her into their grotesque gladiatorial games.”
“Why do they do that?”
“Because the human conscience is not infinitely malleable. Despite what you’ve heard, neural tissue changes, or changes in environment or background can only alter the human conscience somewhat. It snaps back: the conscience reacts, and exacts revenge. Not everyone lives by the same rules, but everyone lives by the same spirit.”
“What the pox does that mean? Spirit?”
“In this case, a myth about evolutionary superiority is the tale the Hermeticists told themselves on the ship to soothe their consciences—that the Iberians are superior to the Indians. You see? The ship was awash with blood clouds, and engineering was damaged in the fighting. Corpses were floating everywhere. The slaughterhouse smell could not be cleaned from the ventilation, which was not designed to scrub such volumes. The human mind has only a finite possible set of neurolinguistic responses to deal with death, murder, gnawing guilt.”
“They said that they were the preferred darlings of evolution,” he guessed, grimacing.
She nodded, looking as if she felt ashamed for the men who raised her. “The fact that the noble Kshatriya and peaceful Brahmins died proved that they were never fit to survive: so runs the myth. That myth means the Hermeticists must kill themselves in proxy in their mental wars in dataspace. Such is the Hermetic spirit.”
Something in her poise and expression seemed odd to him. “There is something else.”
Her sea-gray gaze was upon him, glancing from the corners of her eyes, beneath heavily lashed lids. She said nothing.
“They’re fighting over you, aren’t they? In their electronic gladiatorial games. They are all in love with you, not just Del Azarchel. Well…? You don’t seem to be in any hurry to deny it.”
“What do you remember?”
“Nothing. It ain’t coming back to me. But I can picture it in my head. Since you was the only girl, with your girly scent and dancing eyes and your pheromones clogging the ship’s ventilation system, there you must have been, all bobbing around in zero gee, round and curving and giggly. For a while you were a sacralicious fourteen-year-old, then a coltish seventeen-year-old; just a curious, impish, playful, coy, smarter-than-all-get-out cute little package. Next you were a superintelligent, glittering nineteen-year-old, and the only one really fun to talk with, since you made each of them feel special. I seen you got that gift about you. Also, aboard the submarine-like conditions, the nineteen-year-old had to press up too close to them to see the view screens and work the controls and so on. And of course aboard the ship they are either half-nude to save on mass, or wear nothing but ultraskintight web suits which show off a girl’s extremely well-formed buttocks, and, in the cold, I’m thinking your nipples would…”
She hit him with a slab of ham before he could say more. “Men are disgusting creatures! Who in their right mind would design women to be attracted to them!”
But by that point, he had taken a handful of potato salad to her face in counterattack, and then there was nothing to do but settle the matter by wrestling.
“You better let me up,” she said. Her bottom lip was sticking out as she tried to huff and puff and blow a curl of her hair up out of her eyes. She was nonchalantly watching the lack of success with the stubborn hair strand, not looking at his blazing pale eyes, even though his face was inches from her face, his lips inches from her lips. “You’ll make my protectors nervous. Lèse majesté is a still a crime in these hey-ah parts, pardnah.”
“You trying to make fun of the way I talk?”
“Not trying.”
“What’s that crime again with the French name?”
“Lèse majesté. It is the crime of violating majesty.”
“I add it to the list of crimes I’m saving for our honeymoon.”
“Let me up. Let go of my wrists.”
“Say ‘please.’”
“You issue unlikely commands. Remember who is smarter between us.”
“I remember your belly being ticklish.”
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“A girl will only say that when she secretly wants you to dare. I keep this feather in my hatband just for times like this. Oh, now she struggles! Say, missy, writhe around and toss your hair some, and I am sure you can break free. I bet you could bite my nose if you tried harder. Sure. I feel my grip weakening. Writhe more and arch your back.”
He folded her wrists atop each other, so he could pin them with one hand. With the other, he drew the feather, and it twitched with playful menace in his fingers.
“It’s an ugly hat,” she pouted.
“Oh, you’ll pay for that comment, girl. This hat has sentimental value. It means I don’t need to comb my hair so often, and that means a lot to me.”
“And I am not a girl. I am a celestial maiden: the first exosolar posthuman chimera created from alien gene codes. Practically an angel!”
“No argument there.”
“What else do I have to do so you don’t think of me as a girl?”
“You’re still a girl. Human nature snaps back and exacts revenge. Not everyone lives by the same rules, but everyone lives by the same spirit.”
By then she was giggling too hard to catch her breath, and as predicted, her troopers came forward at a quickstep, railgun lances ready, to see what was causing the shrieks.
After explanations and apologies, they were left alone again, and he was lying on his back, and she was using his armpit as a pillow, and they both looked up at the high blue sky, and sought fractal patterns similar to Monument segments among the clouds.
She sighed, “I truly and deeply hope, my scarecrow of a suitor, that you do have a cure for the flaw in my design. I feel there are things buried, enjambed, structurally encoded in the Monument that are waiting inside me to wake. A destiny. I was meant for something. Do you believe in evolution?”
“I believe it exists,” he said. “I don’t believe that whatever comes next is any better than what comes before. It is non-directed, random, cruel.”
“I was not evolved, though. I was made. My makers followed instructions even they did not understand, from minds not human, not limited to human thoughts. It was directed. Perhaps it is not random, which means that I alone of all Mankind have a destiny and a purpose. Perhaps it is not cruel.”