“This interaction is terminated,” said a voice inside my head, and I opened my eyes.
To nothing. Our drive was off, the ship hung motionless in space. As my eyes recovered their sensitivity I saw the forlorn bodies floating in space; but the Ark had gone.
Knudsen was gabbling into the transmitter. “Gone, it’s gone, we’ve lost contact. There’s no sign of the Ark. It just disappeared. We’ll keep on looking.” And then, something that I’m sure he didn’t intend to be sent out, “Oh my God, we’d have been better off if we’d died with the others. Simonette will flay us alive when he finds out.”
“Aye,” McAndrew said softly, as Knudsen gazed aghast at the transmitter and realized what he had just said into it. “We’ll look, but we won’t find the AI.”
“Of course we will,” I said. “When the other ships get here they’ll comb in every direction. You told Knudsen it couldn’t travel far.”
“No, I never said that. I told him” — he jerked a thumb toward Knudsen, who seemed to have gone into a catatonic trance — “that the drive engines on the Cyber Ark couldn’t move it far.”
“Those were the only engines it had.”
“The only ones that humans think of as engines. How did the AI hold the Ptarmigan in place? How did it hear our messages when the transmitter was off? Did it speak inside your head, the way it did mine? If the AI is what I think it is, our rules of thought simply don’t apply.”
“Mac, it can’t be that smart.”
“Why not? Because we’re not that smart? Jeanie, the AI isn’t like us. It’s not even like it was, a couple of months ago, when we were at the Ark last time. It was a baby then, with a lot of growing up to do. It’s smart enough to know that it can’t do that safely if it stays close to the Solar System. We’d hunt it down, and do our best to destroy it.”
“Mac, I’ve changed my mind again. We have to kill it.”
“I don’t think we can. And I’m not sure we need to try. It knows what it did.” He gestured to the display, with its forlorn multitude of drifting corpses. “The AI left, but it gave us back our dead. Maybe those deaths were an accident, maybe it’s sorry. As sorry as we are.”
He turned away from the screen and moved across to the observation port. He was looking out, staring at the stars, silent, searching.
I know McAndrew, better than any person alive. He spoke the truth. He was sorry, deeply sorry, by the deaths of so many innocent victims. Of course he was. McAndrew is human, I know that, even if most people in the Solar System think of him as intellect incarnate.
But he is also McAndrew, and they are right, too. He was mourning, for his dead human fellows; and also he was mourning for the loss of the other, the permanent loss of an alien intelligence that he would never again have a chance to meet with and strive to understand.
Then he turned around. He didn’t look at me — at anyone. His eyes were a million miles away.
Mourning? Certainly. But I knew that expression. He was also planning, estimating, calculating.
I went over and grabbed his arm. “McAndrew, don’t even think of it. It’s gone. Get it? It’s gone.”
He returned to the world of the Ptarmigan. His limbs jerked and his eyes blinked like a wind-up toy. “Uh?” he said. And after a few moments, “Gone? Yes, yes, of course it’s gone. I know it is. But Jeanie, if we go back to the exact place where the Ark was when we found it, and make an appropriate set of measurements… we wouldn’t need to tell the USF what we were doing, and of course we’d take every imaginable precaution…”
I hate to admit it, but the others are right. When science is on the agenda, McAndrew doesn’t qualify as human at all.
NINTH CHRONICLE: McAndrew and the Fifth Commandment
What do the following have in common: Aristotle, Confucius, Cleopatra, Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, Einstein, and Madame Curie?
The answer is, each of them had a mother. And if that seems like a stupid and trivial response, I offer it to make a point. Every famous man or woman has a mother. More often than not, we never hear of her. How much do you know about Hitler’s mother? Not a thing, if you are like me.
So it was a shock one morning to come to the Penrose Institute and learn that McAndrew’s mother was expected to arrive there later the same day. He had a mother, of course he did, but she lived down on Earth and I hadn’t heard him say much about her, except that she had no interest in space or anything to do with it.
“Did she say why she’s coming?” I asked.
McAndrew shook his head. He looked nervous. He may be one of the gods of physics, the best combination of experimenter and theorist since Isaac Newton, but I had the feeling that might cut little ice with Ms. Mary McAndrew. Probably, she still thought of him as her little boy. I imagined a darling and elderly Scottish lady, grey-haired and diminutive, summoning up the nerve at long last to travel beyond high orbit and pay a visit to her own wee laddie.
“Writing her will.” McAndrew spoke at last. “Something about changing her will.”
If anything, that confirmed my impression. Here was a nervous old dear, worried about the approach of death and wanting to make sure that all her affairs were properly in order before the arrival of the Grim Reaper.
I said as much to McAndrew. He looked doubtful, and rather more nervous. I didn’t realized why until I went with him to the docking port, where the transfer vessel from LEO to the L-3 Halo orbit was making its noon arrival.
After a five-minute wait, four people emerged from the lock. The first two were Institute administrative staff, returning from leave and laden down with trophies of Earth including a basket of pineapples and a live parrot.
The third one I also recognized. It was Dr. Siclaro, the Institute’s expert on kernel energy extraction. He too had been on vacation. He was wearing a flowered shirt and very short white shorts, revealing tanned and powerful legs. The fourth person was a glamorous redhead, dressed to kill. She was right at Siclaro’s side, chatting with him while frequently glancing down to eye with interest his calves, muscular thighs, and all points north. From the look on her face he had been protected from direct physical assault only by the new-grown and loathsome mustache that crawled like a hairy ginger caterpillar across his upper lip.
I was looking past those two, waiting to see who next would emerge from the lock, when McAndrew stepped forward. He said weakly, “Hello, Mother.”
“Artie!” The redhead turned and gave him a big hug, leaving generous amounts of face powder and lipstick on his shirt.
Artie? I had never expected to live long enough to hear anyone call Arthur Morton McAndrew, full professor at the Penrose Institute and a man of vast intellectual authority, Artie.
“Mother.” McAndrew awkwardly disengaged himself. “You look well.” She looked, I thought, like an expensive hooker. “This is Jeanie Roker. I’ve told you about her.”
That was news to me. What had he told her? She took my hand and gave me a rapid head-to-foot inspection. “The mother of Artie’s bairn,” she said. “Now, that’s very convenient.”
I couldn’t tell from her expression if she approved or disapproved of the fact that Mac and I had had a child together, but I was doubly glad that there had been a lunchtime ceremony honoring old Professor Limperis and I was dressed in something a lot fancier and more formal than my usual crew’s jump-suit.
Why, though, was it convenient that I was at the Institute?
“The three of us will talk later.” Mary McAndrew was as tall as I, and big blue eyes stared straight into mine. So much for my bent and tiny Scottish elder. “First, though, I need to unpack, freshen up, and maybe have a wee nap.”