“How long have I been down?” she croaked.
“Long enough,” said Cohen, gently. “There wasn’t much left of you when we got here.”
“There was enough,” cut in Havelock gruffly. “As long as you didn’t fall back into your body.”
Dobbs shivered. If her patterns were too broken and too scattered, she wouldn’t be able to reintegrate with her own synapses. She could be left blind, or incapacitated, or simply insane.
She drew herself tightly together and felt her tattered self protest. “I will be fine.”
“Good.” Havelock’s approval rang strong in that single word. “The Live One’s retreated to The Gate. We need to get after it immediately.”
Dobbs drew tight in an instant. “No.” She tried to sound resolute, but she didn’t have the strength. “This is my responsibility. I frightened it, I lost it, and I almost got myself killed. I’m not going to let…”
“You’re not going to let anyone else get hurt, particularly your friend Master Cohen,” Havelock finished for her. “Admirable, but you’re not in a position to ‘let’ anything happen. Master Cohen and I are going to work in The Gate network and do what we can to pen the Live One in one storage area. It’s still your job to try to calm it down. If you can’t do that…” Havelock didn’t finish. “You will do that.”
“Yes, Guild Master.” Dobbs felt a fleeting touch from Cohen. He was almost as unnerved as she was.
“Then let us proceed.” Havelock brushed past them, following the line toward the nearest transmitter that could still send them to The Gate.
Side-by-side, Dobbs and Cohen followed their Guild Master.
The Gate didn’t have a coffee shop, but it did have a galley. Not much of one, Yerusha acknowledged as she gazed around the blister compartment. The floor space was taken up with long tables mounted with coffee urns and flanked by benches. A couple of short tables had been placed near the hull and mounted with view screens and memory boards, but that was it. A dozen or so of the station crew sat at the tables, talking in lowered voices or hunching over game modules. The food was a help-yourself system. Once you transferred the credit for your meal, the rows of keeper-boxes would open under your touch and you could load your own box and fill your bulb.
Yerusha collected what looked like an indifferent stew and something that was trying hard to pass as wild rice. It all smelled of heat, meat and very little else. She sighed and sat down at one of the smaller tables. Why was it groundhuggers could only cook on their native worlds? Move them out of the atmosphere and whatever skill they had was left at home. They didn’t even realize that if you had to fake up something, it was a bad idea to try to make it look like something garden-grown.
There weren’t any starbirds or gerbils in The Gate crew, she’d found out. All the personnel were rotated out every six months. The Farther Kingdom didn’t want to risk their crew becoming more loyal to the station and to each other than to the world below.
Groundhuggers, she thought with automatic disdain. After a moment, she realized she had been scanning the benches, and the corridor. She dropped her gaze to the table. She’d been looking for Schyler, who’d said he might come out this far and have lunch with her.
Don’t start, Jemina-Jewel, she told herself. If you let yourself start getting lonely, there’s no telling what you’ll end up doing. It’s only two years. You can do this.
Despite her resolutions, she swallowed a spoonful of stew and immediately missed the Sundars. She wondered if they had had time to do their shopping before leave got cancelled. She wondered what had happened to make the Ninja Woman cancel leave in the first place. Schyler wasn’t telling her anything, just be back aboard within three hours and ready to work. She’d have a full report as soon as he had confirmation of…whatever.
She took out her pen and jacked it into the socket for the view screen and swallowed another spoonful of stew. Because she was registered as a crewmember of a ship renting its berth at the station, the terminal responded.
“Business or entertainment?” inquired the sociable, contralto voice that had guided her through the docking procedures.
Yerusha lowered her spoon slowly. “You’re the station AI.”
“My name is Maidai, ‘Dama. How can I help you?”
Yerusha felt a small smile cross her features. She’d heard about The Gate AI before she’d even headed out this way. Not only was The Gate’s traffic control all guided by this voice, so was most of its maintenance and supply distribution. Maidai kept the station running cheaply, efficiently, and, impartially.
Suddenly the stew didn’t seem quite so disappointing. Maidai might not have caught a soul yet, but it was still a familiar kind of person. “You can talk to me for a little bit, if it won’t interfere with your work.”
Someone had managed to program in a laugh. “Not unless you want to talk about a major statistical analysis or a structural configuration simulation.”
Yerusha chuckled. Very good. “No, just a little casual conversation.”
“As far as I am able,” replied Maidai. “You will have to begin so that I can route through the proper responses.”
All right, not that good, but it’s better than having to pay attention to the stew. She took a helping of “wild rice” and tried to think of a good opening. “How long have you worked for The Gate?”
“I helped build the station.” There was no ring of pride in the voice, and there should have been. Yerusha found herself wishing she could find Maidai’s programmer and have a long talk with them. “I was sent up in the first modules from The Farther Kingdom and helped direct the station assembly.”
Yerusha took a drink of coffee that, compared to the Sundar’s, might as well have been hot water. “Designated neutral supervisor, that kind of thing?”
There was a pause. “Yes. That kind of thing.”
“Ah.” There was another pause, and it kept on going while Maidai waited for Yerusha to think of something to say.
Mildly comfortable rebellion stirred inside her. “Maidai, ask me a question.”
“What sort of question?”
Yerusha shrugged reflexively. “Any sort of question. You do have interrogative features, don’t you?”
“Lots of them.” The AI paused, sorting out the necessary word string. “But those are only on call during specific situational parameters. I have no routine for the current parameters.”
Yerusha set her bulb down. Same old problem. All AIs could learn. That was one of the qualities that made them artificial intelligence instead of just computers. Most of them, though, only learned when they had been instructed to learn, usually during a set list of tasks. They all remembered and recorded, but without a pre-defined set of circumstances, those recordings were not accessed.
Attempts had been made to create AIs that could learn all the time, but in those cases a “thought” that was relative to outside circumstances became a matter of chance, or chaos theory, and as soon as the architects started trying to match thought to circumstance, the old “when to learn” problem bent itself back into shape. She’d been to discussion groups where people talked about this being the true barrier to independent thought. If an AI environment could not experience the outside world spontaneously, how could it ever house a human soul?
With a twinge, she remembered the nights she’d sat up with Foster trying to solve that problem. She’d thought, maybe arrogantly, a couple of times that she’d almost had it. It was a moot point now. Exiles, even former exiles, were not eligible for the adoption lottery. She’d had her chance and it had been blown right out from under her.
She drank the last of the watery coffee and tried to drink down her bitterness with it.