As she stepped through the airlock, Chapra caught the tail end of a conversation between the girl, or rather the Jain, and Box. She understood none of it because it ran at high speed. It finished shortly after she and Abaron walked out onto the jetty. She felt suddenly superfluous. Information had already been exchanged, decisions made. The girl turned to her and Chapra saw a girl with her own character and a mind possibly superior to Chapra’s own. Yet the Jain, lying there on the end of the jetty with its weird head turned towards them, was looking through the girl, who to it was just a tool, a lens to bring them into focus for it.
“I have told the Jain of the Separatist ship,” said Box.
“And?” asked Chapra.
“The Jain wishes to be transported to the surface of the planet, which was its wish before I told it about the ship.”
“Why does it want to go there?” asked Abaron.
Chapra glanced at him and saw that he was staring intently at the Jain. His fear was gone. There was hungry fascination in his regard.
“Why I wish to go to the surface is not relevant. Under Polity law you do not have the right to detain me, and I can also demand transport to the nearest habitable planet, which for me is Haden.” Both Chapra and Abaron stared at the girl for a long moment. It was pointless asking how she… it, knew so much about Polity law.
“You are aware of the threat posed to you by the Separatist ship?” she asked.
“I am aware that on this ship I am in greater danger than I would be in the sea below. None of your kind have scanners sensitive enough to detect me in that sea, and should a search be initiated I would much more easily be able to evade it or defend myself.”
“Solves a couple of problems,” said Abaron. “The Jain can hide from them down there and they’ve no reason to attack us without the Jain aboard.”
Chapra glanced at him. He was naïve and in this situation that could be dangerous. “They are not coming here to kill the Jain just because they’re xenocides, but to prevent Jain technology getting into Polity hands, which they’ll view as just a bigger stick for ECS to beat them with. They won’t risk letting us get away. Even with the Jain gone we might already have learned something vital or have acquired some super-science device. There is no doubt that they will try to destroy this ship.”
“Then we have to run,” said Abaron, taking the lecture well.
“After dropping our friend off,” said Chapra, then, “Box, do you have a shuttle ready?”
“Yes,” said Box. “Judd will pilot it. The Jain will depart when its machine is small enough to transport.”
“I do not require a pilot,” said the girl/Jain.
“The shuttle is Polity property and requires a Polity pilot.” Chapra wondered about that. Why did Box want Judd as a pilot? The Golem certainly would not be coming back before the Separatist ship arrived. To try and keep track of the Jain? Or was Judd’s purpose more sinister? Maybe the people on that other ship had come here to kidnap and steal rather than kill and destroy. Chapra was sickened by the thought of Separatists getting hold of Jain technology. How much would Polity AIs dislike that prospect? Would they be prepared to kill the Jain to prevent it?
And who was to say the Jain would not go willingly? What did it care about human politics?
The Jain, through the girl, said no more. Its tentacle detached and it slid into the water. The girl staggered then regained her balance. Her face took on a more juvenile appearance. She smiled at Chapra and Abaron, then sat down on the edge of the jetty and dangled her feet in the boiling water. The Jain wrapped itself around its machine almost as if sulking.
The Vorstra runcible sat under a clear dome in a lunarscape etched with sharp-edged shadows. Lakes of silver dust patched the surface, their source the slow crumbling of crowded rock spires. Normally this was a place of interminably slow change and stillness, but now the lakes were moving under the influence of another moon.
Alexion Smith stood before the bull’s horns of the runcible, a carry sack slung over one shoulder, and his hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers. His associates often said he was as much an anachronism as the things he studied. Such criticism was far from his mind at that moment. He gazed up through the dome at a distant silver sphere, and replayed in his mind a comment made by a harried-looking runcible technician:
“Damned thing’s perturbed our orbit, but they said they’d reposition us before moving off.” The Cable Hogue was huge. Alexion had never seen any ship this size, had thought them only the product of holofiction producers and conspiracy theory junkies. With a shake of his head he stepped up onto the black glass dais and through the shimmer of the Skaidon warp. Shortly afterwards the Vorstra moon shuddered in its orbit and the Hogue moved away. An hour later the burn of Laumer engines lit up the sky. In later years, Alexion was delighted to learn that Jain artefacts had been washed up on the shores of the dust lakes. Providential, somehow.
PART FIVE
Floating in an observation blister Chapra watched an aqua-landing shuttle drop out of its bay towards the blue and white glare of the planet. She watched the triangle of it grow small and dark in silhouette, then glow and trail vapour as it hit atmosphere and slid into its orbital glide. Judd piloted. The Jain crouched in a cargo bay half filled with saline heated to a nice ninety-seven degrees Celsius. In its many-fingered hand it clutched its creation device shrunk down to the size of a human fist. Chapra smiled at that. How we define things: when it was large it was a machine and small it is a device. What then was the girl now the Jain had left her, now she seemed to have some character of her own? Did individuality mean anything when thought of in connection with the Jain? Could she be an individual, or would that be like calling someone with a severed corpus callosum two separate beings, two individuals? Perhaps so. It was too easy to look at her and see a human girl when she was really a mask over something wholly alien.
“Why did it leave her, Box?” she asked.
“To watch, to learn, to gather information.”
As the AI said this, Chapra felt the slight surge as the ion drive ignited. She saw the flare far to her right like a sunrise and watched as the planet, with apparent slowness, slid aside.
“She could be destroyed along with us.”
“The Jain can make another whenever it wants.”
And that brought it home.
“Make another what?” asked Abaron, coming into the blister and catching hold of one of the frame bars as he stepped out of the ship’s artificial gravity. “We’re picking up G,” he observed. Both of them looked to the black macula, in the reactive glass, where the sun was.
“Girl,” said Chapra.
“It’s not so worrying,” said Abaron. “Humans make humans all the time and are they any more responsible?”
“How very mature of you,” said Chapra with a grin, then a wider grin at his irritation.
“I will be starting ramscoop drive in twenty minutes. It would be better if you were inside the ship at that time,” said Box.
Abaron led the way from the blister. They stepped from it into the corridor gravity of the ship and both turned toward the control room.
“How long before we go translight?” asked Chapra.
“Three hours,” the ship AI told them, and as they entered the control room it went on to say, “You may be interested to know that I have received genetic maps of the five seaweeds from Earth and compared them to the samples from the planet and the ones in the isolation chamber.”
“How old?” asked Chapra.
Box went on, “Cross referencing certain structures, and taking into account mutational variables, I have a extrapolation graph that peaks at four point seven three million years. This would seem to confirm that the Jain’s point of origin in the escape pod was this system and that it has been in stasis for the aforementioned time.”