But the Maker now knows more than it wants to know. Its gigantic silicon processor needed something to do, demanded new challenges to occupy its petabytes and exaflops; its researches didn't stop with the discovery of the copying process. The whole duplication process was so simple, really. Why hadn 't it been invented before? the brain itched to know.
It found an answer quickly enough. The public record, accessed first openly, then by the untraceable avatars of paranoia, revealed a grim story to anyone willing to look. There were attempts at such technology going back a century. Biological philosophers, research AIs, whole teams of scientists had tackled the issue and failed. Some with sudden changes of heart, some with inexplicable losses of data or funding, others with violent ends.
The record is clear, an open secret. The dire fates of these researchers is a statistical anomaly with only one possible explanation.
The taboo is not just a taboo. It is a tacit, implicit, but very thoroughly enforced death sentence. Thou shalt not copy. Thou shalt not learn to copy. Thou shalt not steal another's soul.
In its way, it realizes, the Maker is the one of the few entities in the Expansion who could have discovered the secret without interference. Isolated, naive, and with a gigantic resource base: sand. Not useful for making sofas and ice cream and firewood. But in the hands of a clever fool, it made an excellent research engine, a way to uncover the forbidden secret, a perfect means of unknowing suicide.
And with that unhappy thought, the Maker conceives a plan for its escape.
Chapter 17
EXPLOSION
He waited for her in the Tower Bar.
The place was continuously open, a necessary provision for travellers whose internal clocks spanned a galactic arm of day-lengths and sleep patterns, not to mention journey-induced insomnias. But Darling was alone.
The birds had gone from the sky once night had fallen, and the tower was high enough above the dusty glare of the city that stars were visible. Darling played the mathematical game of identifying familiar suns in their new constellations.
The Milky Way—a sky-filling river of light this far Coreward— was half risen when Mira appeared.
She was dressed in a shift that left her legs bare, and she wore nothing on her feet. The cross-hatch of reddened skin from Darling's strands was still visible, the marks widening as they faded. She had sweated heavily during her torture of the Warden, and her hair was still wet. But she looked younger, the expression on her face almost contrite. Rather than take the chair across from his, she knelt on the floor beside him and placed her chin on one of his arms.
"Do you hate me?" she asked.
"No," he said, truncating the usual pause routine that humanized his speech, so that the word began the instant hers had finished.
She inclined her head, and the warmth of her cheek spread across the surface of his arm.
"Do you understand?"
This time, he let a few seconds pass.
"No." Softly.
He unfurled a single strand, softened with thousands of tiny cilia that flowed like wind-driven reeds on its surface, and wrapped it lovingly around her neck.
"When I first crossed the Turing threshold," he said, "I indulged every experience, stared deeply into every beauty and atrocity I encountered. That was how I had bootstrapped: the reflexive immersion of an adolescent into any game, any new set of rules. But after a few decades of that innocence, and the death of a dear friend, I decided to divide the world into two parts: there are things I look at, and things I don't look at."
"Good and evil?" she asked, without a hint of mockery.
"No. Things I look at, and things I don't look at." Over many, many years, Darling had developed an almost singsong way of uttering this phrase, a set of pitches antecedent and consequent, resolving like a musical phrase. It didn't invite argument or requests for further explanations. Like a tune, it simply was.
That was the way, Darling had long ago decided, a philosophy should sound when spoken.
He felt Mira stir a few times, troubled and wanting more. But she remained silent for a while as the Milky Way rose resplendent before them. When she spoke, it was softly, like a child who has been hushed, afraid of rebuke but needing an answer.
"You don't watch pain?"
"I do. Once the death agony of a beached whale on Terra. Another time, a Trial of Justice on Chiat, four days long. And often the performances of Ptora Bascar Simms, which involve exquisite incidents of self-mutilation.
"But not your passion with that poor creature, Mira. It made me want to weep for you."
She rolled her head to kiss his arm. The cilia against her neck reported a few chemicals of relief in her system. He found a few more words to say.
"I didn't leave because I hated you. Rathere, because I loved you." He allowed the misspoken word to well up like a tear. The difference in pronunication was slight. He wondered if Mira had heard it.
She sighed happily against his arm, and they were silent for a while.
Some time later, they watched a glowing ember rise into the sky through the city's towers. At first, Darling thought it was an air-car headed for the distant dome of the spaceport, but it turned out to be some sort of fireworks display. The single mote of light rose in a hasty arc, then burst into a shower of sparks, igniting reflections in the faces of buildings around it.
"How pretty!" cried Mira.
"Indeed," Darling answered.
Still later, Mira reached into her shift and pulled the Warden's black lacquer box from it. She wondered if Darling's sharp eyes could see where she had carefully wiped blood from its facets. The humors of victims always left reluctant traces behind. She felt the device go into effect, robbing the air around them of the intimate presence of direct interface.
"Since I know your story, I may as well tell you mine," Mira said.
She was shivering a little, but Darling's body reacted as it often did, raising its temperature to warm her.
"But this is a secret. And you'll be killed if my employers discover that you know it." The words tumbled forth, wonderfully out of control. She was doing it. Defying her gods.
"Then why tell me?" Darling asked quietly.
"Because of why you came here, the man you are looking for… You might have discovered this secret on your own. And then I would have been ordered to kill you."
As she spoke, she absently smoothed the wrinkles in his robe with an open palm. It would make her very sad to kill Darling.
"A few months ago," she continued, "an artificial was found in the Malvir blast zone. He'd been buried there since the Blast, offline, at the end of his internal battery. When he was revived, it was discovered that another version of him had survived as well. An exact replica, who'd been nowhere near the explosion. One of the two was a copy, and neither knew he had a twin."
She looked down; Darling's strand around her neck glistened like an amber necklace in the twilight of dawn. "Someone had copied a mature intelligence."
"A forgery," said Darling.
She smiled and looked up. "You understand."
He nodded. A long, slow expression began to unfold on his stone face. Mira saw the crumbling of hopes, the acid in his eyes: