Something made him turn round and look back into the recesses of the crater. He wasn’t surprised at what he saw coming out of it to join him and stand by him, in the crater’s open mouth, facing the spiders.
•
On the Bridge they were dumbstruck as they looked at the single figure which stood, looking back at them, in the mouth of the midsection crater. The others saw what the figure looked like, but Foord saw what it was. He took in every detail of its body-language and posture and demeanour. He knew what was behind its eyes.
The Bridge screen patched in a closeup of its face.
“That isn’t just…” Foord began, then his throat closed up. He took a deep breath through his open mouth, his chest rising and falling.
“That isn’t just a replica. It isn’t just a construct. It’s me, everything I am, soul and self-awareness and everything.”
“How can you know that?” Smithson asked.
“The same way you’d know, if that was you standing there. It knows it’s everything I am, but it knows it was made, and it’s trying to understand why. Not It, Me. I know I was made, and I’m trying to understand why…There aren’t words for this, words don’t work.”
Foord looked through the Bridge screen into his own icy silver soul. He felt cold.
On the screen, the figure turned round to look back into the recesses of the crater. Other figures were walking out to join it, one by one, and to stand at its side.
•
Foord turned to see them walking out of the crater to join him.
Cyr was first. She too was silver and grey, the grey ranging from almost-white to almost-black. She raised a hand in greeting. Her fingernails, immaculately manicured like his and dark blue back on the Charles Manson, were here almost black, at the tips of long silver fingers. Her tunic and shoes, dark blue on the Charles Manson, were here dark grey. Her skirt swung gracefully as she walked, just as it always did, and Foord could feel himself getting the first stirrings of an erection, just as he always did.
They even let me have erections, he thought. He wanted to take it out and look at it, but thought it probably wasn’t the time. He expected it would be silver and grey.
She smiled at him. “Commander.”
“Hello, Cyr.”
And they’ve let me hear spoken words, open to space. You can’t hear noises in space. But you can’t stand in it or breathe in it either, and Cyr was breathing like him; her chest rose and fell under her tunic. And her voice sounded just like it did on the Charles Manson, just like he remembered.
He looked her up and down. “I know you wear that to arouse me,” he said, “and it does. It looks good on you. You’re beautiful.”
Before she could reply they were joined by Thahl, Kaang and Smithson. Thahl, slender and graceful like Cyr but slighter. Kaang, pleasant but unremarkable, a little plump, and looking terrified. And Smithson—
Smithson was the strangest of all, because back on the Charles Manson he was naturally grey. Only his eyes really differed; normally they were warm and golden, here they were mid-grey. When he extended a limb in greeting, Foord heard the wet plop.
They all had self-awareness. As Foord on the Charles Manson had realised when he first saw himself, something about them made it obvious. They had everything, physically and spiritually, which they’d ever woken up to every morning of their lives; yet they knew they were made, and knew they would defend the crater. They knew also that they should go back into the ship and find the people who made them, but they knew they never would.
They came and stood at Foord’s side in the mouth of the crater, imagining (they could also imagine; they’d been given that too) what their other selves on the Charles Manson—no, their selves: words didn’t work properly for this—would be thinking.
•
“You see?” Foord said to the others on the Bridge. “They’re us. They’re everything we are. Tell me they’re not.”
“What are we going to do, Commander?” Kaang said. She was looking at herself and the other four figures in the crater, and sobbing.
“What are they going to do?” Cyr asked. She too was unable to take her eyes off the crater.
“You already know,” Foord said. “She made them and She put them there. Put us there. To defend the crater against our spiders.”
“But She could have made ordinary devices,” Kaang said. “Ordinary synthetics. Even if they looked like us, they didn’t have to be us.”
“Yes they did,” Smithson said bleakly. “That’s the whole point. Make us fight them and kill them.”
The silence returned. The way they each thought about family and loved ones, if they had any, varied with their biology and culture and circumstances, but the way they thought about themselves did not vary. Some of them could even imagine killing loved ones or family, but this was worse. Worse than suicide. Deliberately killing something with sentience, when that sentience was your own, and when you knew—unlike suicide—that you’d still be alive and aware of what you’d done….
“We have to attack the crater,” Foord said.
“I know, Commander,” Cyr said. “And if they defend it we have to kill them. Kill us. I wish the words would work better.”
“She never did anything like this,” Thahl said, “when She last came to Sakhra.”
“You said we’d find out new things about Her.”
“Yes, Commander, I did. But this…”
“This is because we hurt Her. Made her fight for Her life. Nobody’s seen this, because nobody’s done that before.” He took a long breath, and felt it rasp through his throat. “We have to watch ourselves die.” He nodded to Cyr, who sent out the signal to the spiders.
•
They stood together in the open mouth of the midsection crater, and watched as the spiders started moving towards them.
“Why have they brought me here, too?” Kaang asked. “I’m nothing to do with this, I’m only a pilot. We’ll die here.”
Foord laughed. “Are we alive enough to die?”
“Commander, we’re only five against…how many?”
“Nearly three hundred,” Cyr said.
“And we’re unarmed,” Smithson said. “Not even sidearms.”
“Five against three hundred or three thousand. It hardly matters,” Foord said. “They didn’t make us like this and put us here just to be wiped out.”
“Didn’t they?” Smithson said. “Maybe that’s the whole point. Make us, over there, kill ourselves over here.”
The spiders were moving slowly towards the mouth of the crater; so slowly they were almost drifting.
“I think,” Thahl said, “that when they made us, they must have given us some special abilities.”
“I think,” Foord said drily, “that you have them already.”