It took minutes that dragged like hours, but Jarvellis eventually reached the lip of the metal box and looked back. She made the final effort and dragged herself in. The Outlinkers were back against the walls now. Jeth held out her narrow hand in which lay the flattened sphere of the nerve-blocker.
'Will you keep still for me?' she asked.
Jarvellis coughed. Her lungs were filling with fluid. Her entire body ached and her left side was a wide line of pain. She felt dizzy and sick. She nodded her head, then turned it to one side. Jeth cautiously stepped in close and pressed the blocker to the back of her neck. The fibres of neural shunt went in, and blessed numbness rolled down her body in a wave. Tull pressed buttons on a small control panel. Jarvellis did not feel the elevator move. She only knew it was coming to the centre of the station, when panic that the floor had fallen away pulled her out of the haze. She was weightless.
Now the Outlinkers felt safe, they quickly got hold of her and manoeuvred her through the sliding door into a tubular tunnel. Even this exercise was difficult for them, for though she was weightless she still had inertia. It took the both of them hauling at her to overcome it and get her moving. The walls of the tunnel were diamond-patterned to offer grip for feet and hands. Interspersed at regular intervals were rails and catch-loops. Sinking back into the haze, Jarvellis watched the little robot swinging past on the latter of these like an iron gibbon.
They brought her eventually to a curved room with no definite floor or ceiling. There was equipment on every surface and she was relieved to see a modern medbot, cell-welder and all those other devices that equated the repair of the human body with that of any other machine. They pulled her to the weightless version of a surgical table, a frame ringed with adjustable clamps, and there secured her in place. Tull pulled back the dressing on her breast, while Jeth set the medbot to work on her thigh.
Til do my best, but you'll need to see a cosmetic surgeon,' he said. 'You'll need regrowth and reconstructive surgery. Too much mammary fat is missing.'
Jarvellis tried to speak, but hardly anything came out of her dry mouth. Tull leaned closer and she tried again. Eventually he got the gist of her request. She heard him speak hurriedly to his wife, but could not distinguish the words. There came a humming sound: some sort of ultrasound scanner.
'Still alive,' Tull said. 'We'll make sure the foetus stays connected.'
Jarvellis tried to speak again, and once more he leant in close to hear her.
'All right,' he said, and made an adjustment to the nerve-blocker. The numbness rose from her neck and rolled her into oblivion.
An area two-thirds of a kilometre in diameter had been cleared, and the bedrock fused to obsidian and levelled. The containment sphere rested between the two cylindrical tanks of the buffers seemingly placed to stop it rolling away, and from it an enclosed walkway led to the surrounding complex of newly erected buildings. The buildings were domed and apparently made of native materials. Prefabricated sections had been joined, then sealed, with a composite of crushed rock and epoxy resins. Vapour jetted from them as they were heated and the moisture and excess CO2 was pumped out. The whole complex was knitted together by more enclosed walkways, pylons carrying's-con cables, ground-level pipelines, and by a nimbus of electric light. Beyond the perimeter was impenetrable darkness.
Night had come to Samarkand.
The minishuttle rested in the twilight at the perimeter and, as he disembarked, Cormac had a good view across the complex. He paused for a moment on the CO2 slush, his visor polarizing as the containment sphere emitted a flash of orange light. After fooling with the directional gain of his comunit, he heard Chaline bawling out one of her technicians.
'Dave! I said ninety gigahertz not megahertz! You're not going to get anywhere near alignment - What? What did you say?'
'I said why not leave it to the AI.'
'Because we are here and the AI isn't. Now, ninety gigahertz. Try to get it right this time.'
Cormac's visor polarized again as a tower of rainbows rose from the sphere and stabbed into the starlit sky. As it flickered out, he heard Chaline speaking in a somewhat happier tone.
'That's it: the spoon's in, close as we're going to get. The AI can lose the light-show.'
Cormac looked round as Jane disembarked, carrying a small suitcase.
'Seems they're ready for you,' he said. 'I heard. A good thing too.' She patted the suitcase. 'It's getting impatient.'
They set out for the runcible, where figures could be seen gathered around one of the buffers. 'That you, Jane?'
'Yes.'
'Good. Head for control. Everything's set up.' One of the figures detached from the group and headed for the building nearest to the runcible. Jane and Cormac headed there also, and were soon inside, removing their masks. The temperature was twenty below, so they kept their suits on.
'There you are,' said Chaline, and gestured to the device in the centre of the room. It had the appearance of a font made of glass and chrome pipes. A duct crossed the room from it, heading in the direction of the runcible. Next to it stood a pedestal-mounted console Cormac could not help comparing to a lectern. Here was the chapel. The god was about to be installed in his rightful home.
'I presume you have no more use for it now, and we can get on,' was Chaline's acid comment to Cormac.
'Of course,' said Cormac equably, refusing to rise to the bait. Chaline had been spoiling for a fight for the last three days.
Jane walked to the console, rested her case on it, opened the case and removed the Samarkand runcible AI. It was a squashed bronze cylinder with rounded ends, its dimensions being thirty centimetres by fifteen by ten. It was one of the most powerful minds known to the human race. Jane took it to the glass font and placed it into the receptacle made for it. Then she returned to the console and began working on the touch-controls, like a concert pianist. From the rim of the receptacle rose thousands of contacts to access the rim of the AI. It seemed for a moment as if it was surrounded by an army of platinum ants. Lights nickered in the glass column.
'On-line,' said Chaline, detaching the receiver from her comunit and holding it to her ear. 'Tuning… singularity developing… We're in - that's it, we're on the grid.' Chaline grinned happily at Cormac, her resentment forgotten. Then her grin changed to an expression of astonishment. 'Wait a minute… there's a transmission already. How the hell did they manage it that quickly?'
Cormac was through the interior door to the covered walkway before he knew what he was doing. Chaline and Jane came after him. In a moment they stepped into the containment sphere. Between the horns of the runcible the cusp was shimmering like a sheet of mother-of-pearl. A man stepped through it; an old grey-haired Japanese dressed in stained and baggy monofilament overall.
'Horace Blegg,' said Cormac. 'That's all I need.'
24
Horace Blegg: The immortal wanderer has long been a set piece of human myth, and how much more do we want him to exist in this age, when many feel that humans are no longer the arbiters of their own destiny? Blegg, so the story goes, is a man with supernatural powers that enabled him, in the twentieth century, to survive the destruction of his home city of Hiroshima by a primitive fission bomb. He is then said to have meddled with human destiny to the extent of insuring our spread across the galaxy, and the governance of us by AIs. Of course, we want this to be true! The myth assures us that we are greater, through him, than those silicon minds that do govern us. The whole story is of course absolute rubbish, and just a more modern version of Arthurian Romance.