The cardinal shook his head. “And given the latest information from Bakunin, they’re going to have no incentive to move cautiously.” He stopped and faced her. “You’ll receive your usual payment. However, if you’ll forgive me, I need to act on this information.”
The cardinal turned to leave her, walking back toward the Apostolic Palace in a stride just short of a run. She watched him until she lost sight of him in the crowd. Then she smiled.
Adam would be pleased.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Purgatory
Remove the fear of death and you remove the primary constraint on human action.
—The Cynic’s Book of Wisdom
History is nothing but the activity of man in pursuit of his ends.
—KARL MARX (1818-1883)
Date: 2526.03.23 (Standard) 39.7 ly from Xi Virginis
Each jump the Eclipse made ate up 20 light-years and 684 hours from the universe outside the ship. They were between jumps four and five, now closer to Mosasa’s mysterious lost colonies than they were to the rest of human space, and the tiny slice of it Kugara called home. They hung in interstellar space eighty light-years from Bakunin.
“I got something,” Kugara said as the display before her showed a multicolor spike that was stark against the universal background radiation.
“Feed it to my station,” Tsoravitch told her. “I got a console free.”
The redheaded data analyst sat at the secondary comm station at the bridge, and facing her were nearly twenty virtual displays hanging in the air. All showed captured transmissions in various stages of filtering. The two of them spent the downtime between jumps doing what amounted to electromagnetic archaeology. They aimed the ship’s sensors at the cluster of stars around Xi Virginis looking for stray EM signals that they might be able to decipher.
Unfortunately, since none of the signals they picked up were intended to broadcast over interstellar distances, it was not an easy process. Picking up tach-transmissions would be easier for analysis, but actively scanning for them required nearly as much energy as transmitting them, and that kind of power was only really available for a planet-based system.
So they grabbed fragmentary forty-year-old data from a cluster of half a dozen systems—it was close to miraculous that they were able to filter anything intelligible at all—and over two thirds of it consisted of raw digital packets that were meaningless without context. Somehow, though, Tsoravitch was able to occasionally pull snippets of text, audio, and video. She had a knack for correctly guessing what kind of data was encoded in something just by looking at the raw stream.
Kugara was stuck with the much more boring job of looking for artificial signals in the broad spectrum of EM radiation the Eclipse could pick up.
One of her displays flashed at her, and Tsoravitch shook her head. “I just sent him the last dozen signals I was able to filter—”
“Mosasa’s not very patient.”
“I suppose not,” Tsoravitch shook her head, “But if he’s not even waiting for my analysis, then . . .” She stabbed a few controls, and the various displays in front of her winked out.
Kugara leaned back in her chair and turned to look at her. “Then what?”
“I was expecting something different.” Tsoravitch looked down at the control panel.
“From Mosasa?” Kugara asked, trying to keep the incredulous tone out of her voice.
“I think I need a break,” Tsoravitch said, standing up. “We’ll be making the next jump in an hour anyway.”
Kugara watched her go and wondered why she seemed so disappointed. What did she want out of Mosasa? She fingered the bio-interface at the base of her skull and wondered. Even though her own ancestors had been the result of someone exploiting heretical technologies, she felt uneasy around Mosasa. Maybe it gave her a level of perspective that Tsoravitch didn’t have, but Kugara couldn’t help thinking that the woman had wanted to work with an AI.
Mosasa sat in his cabin, staring at nothing. Only a fraction of his attention was spared for the data around his immediate physical surroundings. The signals from the maintenance robots scuttling across the skin of the Eclipse were higher priority. The small six-legged hemispheres crawled across the skin of the ship, checking seams and the integrity of the hull. Other robots crawled inside the tach-drives, insuring every mechanical system was performing optimally.
The robots, even with the bans on true AI, were largely autonomous within their limited sphere; Mosasa only had to override them occasionally. The task was simple, repetitive, and took only a small fraction of his processing capacity.
At the moment, most of his attention was focused in bathing in the stream of data Tsoravitch had sent him. It was spotty and incomplete, a trickling stream rather than an ocean he could submerge his consciousness in. But he needed it. From the Eclipse’s reference frame, it had only been out of the immersive data stream he lived in on Bakunin for a hundred and forty hours.
Already his entire being ached with the need. It took a great measure of restraint for him not to forgo all the maintenance checks and order the crew to the bridge so they could make the next jump toward Xi Virginis now.
The door to his cabin signaled him unexpectedly.
He shifted his awareness back to the physical world around him; at the same time he grabbed onto the Eclipse’s security network to look through the camera in the hall outside his cabin.
Outside his cabin door stood the data analyst from Jokul, Rebecca Tsoravitch. Oh, yes, I did expect this . . .
He only wondered briefly at his initial surprise. The same deeply ingrained software that allowed him to perceive the movements of societies allowed him to understand much smaller units. Given enough information, he could see the dynamics of a group of a dozen as easily as a million.
He stood and faced the door as it opened.
“Ms. Tsoravitch?” he asked.
She frowned at him. “Why am I here?”
“I required the services of a data analyst—”
“Bullshit!”
“Pardon me?”
“You’re grabbing data from me with only a cursory filtering. I’m barely looking at the data, much less processing it into anything useful. My expertise here seems more than a little redundant.”
“I find you useful.”
“Why? Why did you ask me on this expedition?”
“Why did you accept?”
She stood in the doorway staring at him. Mosasa watched expressions play across her face, allowing the flood of data about her internal state to wash over him. He could extrapolate her inner thoughts as she asked herself the same question. In some sense he knew her better than she knew herself, even though his observations of her had been remote until this expedition began.
Like all the science team, she was a personality drawn by the exotic but had been forced by circumstances into using her talents for things prosaic and mundane. In Tsoravitch’s case, she had a job in the Jokul government managing the software monitors that scrubbed the planetwide data network searching for subversive transmissions. Like many stable authoritarian regimes that managed to keep the populace fed and clothed, the vast majority of their subversives weren’t particularly interesting. Not to someone like Tsoravitch.
“I thought I would be working with you.”