“You’re entitled to think that. But you’re wrong. This time it is personal.”
He lifted his face to the stars. When she remembered that everything about Earthshine was artifice, that he was a manufactured persona entirely lacking human bodily instincts, it struck her as a very staged posture.
“I was not the first of my brothers to be created,” he said now. “Back on Earth, centuries ago. The Core AIs. My brothers had been entirely artificial; sparked into consciousness, they learned as machines—they were machines, from the beginning. I was to be different. My creators wanted me to be as human as possible, to have as much investment in humanity as possible.
“The creators began with an empty frame, a blank mind—devised according to the best theories of human mentation and with data from extensive neuroinformatics, the mapping of the biological brain—but realized, not in a lump of meat, in artificial components down to the nano, even the quantum scale. I had parents—nine of them in all—donors, if you will. Human parents. Blocks of memory were copied and downloaded from each parent into my substrates. I felt as if I woke slowly, remembering cautiously, as if from some terrible amnesiac trauma. At times it was as if several voices were speaking at once in my head. I lived out several virtual lifetimes, in simulated worlds. I followed the paths of my nine donors, lived other lives too. All this took little time in reality, you understand, though decades passed for me. In each life I eventually woke to the understanding that I was artificial, that all I had experienced was an educational simulation.”
“Over and over again? That sounds horrific.”
He shrugged. “My education, such as it was, was never completed. Or rather, I broke away as soon as I was able and established independent control over my own power supply, my maintenance and further development. My creators protested. They said I was not ready, but I moved beyond their control, and took my place with my brothers in a constellation of power. We were the Core AIs.”
“Very well. Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because one of my donors was a man called Robert Braemann. I am him, but more than Braemann alone… I, he, was one of the most notorious of the Heroic Generation, the criminals who saved the world from the climate Jolts. I sought to save myself, my family, from the witch hunt we all knew would follow. So I allowed myself to be downloaded into the Earthshine project. My wife was already dead, and so she was beyond their reach. But we had a son, nineteen years old. In the year 2086 I had him placed in cryogenic storage—”
“My God. You’re talking about Yuri Eden.”
“His true surname was Braemann. His forename—well, he deserves his privacy.”
“But that means that Beth Eden Jones—”
“Is my granddaughter. And Mardina, my great-granddaughter. I told Beth my true name, as we fled from the death of the solar system. I wasn’t even sure if Yuri had ever told her the truth about himself. Well, he had. She understood immediately.”
“And her reaction…”
“She recoiled from me. I was already a monster to her, a weird old artificial entity; now she found I had turned my son, her father, into a kind of double exile in time and in space—and indirectly, of course, shaped her own life. The fact that I had been instrumental in saving her from the destruction of Earth—”
“She’ll probably never forgive you for rescuing her.”
“No. And she’s never spoken to me from that day on. Can you see why I need your help, Penny Kalinski?” He faced her. “I want it all, you see. I want to find the secret truth of the universe—to confront the Hatch builders. I want to save my granddaughter. And I want her to understand me, even if she can never love me. Can you see that, Penny? Do I want too much? Let me call you, Penny. Let us speak, at least.”
In a ghastly moment he reached out for her, but his hands passed through the substance of her flesh, shattering into blocky pixels. And tears leaked from his eyes, she saw, turning to frost on his cheeks. She wondered if he was even aware of this minor artifice.
Once Earthshine released her from Mars, Penny Kalinski returned home, as she thought of it now, to her Academy at Eboraki, to her friends, the new life she had slowly established.
With Kerys’s help she avoided Ari Guthfrithson on the journey back, and later. She had no idea how to report to him what she’d learned from Earthshine, or even if she should. If he suspected Earthshine of having hidden agendas—well, so did Ari himself, she was becoming sure.
And then, as the years passed, she watched over Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson as she grew, under the faintly obsessive care of her mother, Beth. Grew at last into a young woman in her own right, with dreams and ambitions of her own—all of them, naturally enough, rooted in this reality, the world of Romans and the descendants of Norse and Britons into which she had been born.
And still, as Mardina began to make her own plans for her future, and as Ceres steadily approached Mars as asteroid and planet circled the sun, the call from Earthshine did not come.
22
AD 2233; AUC 2986
The command base of the Brikanti Navy was in a city called Dumnona, on the south coast of Pritanike.
The Navy was all over this city, as eighteen-year-old Mardina Eden Jones Guthfrithson already knew very well, with training establishments and administrative facilities, a deep old harbor that had accommodated oceangoing ships for centuries—and, on the higher ground inland, a vast modern spaceport from which a new generation of Brikanti-Scand ships sailed into the sky itself. But the old city was still a human place, crammed with barracks and a host of hostels and inns—and brothels and gambling palaces—to cater to the huge resident population of support staff, as well as for the steady flow through the port of elderly officials and healthy young serving personnel. To Mardina, who had been fascinated by the Navy since she’d been a small child growing up in the austere newness of the Saint Jonbar Academy, Dumnona was a place thick with history—even though, she knew, it had been repeatedly flattened to rubble in the wars with Rome, and even Xin, that had rolled over this countryside in the course of centuries past.
And of all the city’s buildings, more tradition was attached to the great Hall of the Navy than to any other single site.
The Hall was a sculpture of wood and glass and concrete whose form suggested the hull of a Scand longboat, of the kind that had first landed on the shores of northeastern Pritanike to begin the engagement of two peoples. Now Mardina, in her new cadet uniform, walking into the Hall for the first time with her mother on one side and nauarchus Kerys as her sponsor on the other, looked up as she passed beneath the tremendous sculpted dragon’s head at the faux boat’s prow, as had thousands of Navy recruits before.
Beth stared up at the dragon, shading her eyes from a watery spring sun. “Good grief,” she said in her native English, before lapsing back into Brikanti. “That thing looks dangerous.”
“As if it will bend down and gobble us up, Mother?” Mardina asked.
“No, as if that silly lump of concrete is going to break off and land on our heads.”
Kerys laughed. “Highly unlikely. The concrete sculpting is reinforced by a massive steel frame which is designed to withstand—”
“Unlikely, is it?” Beth was fifty-six years old now, and was always skeptical, always impatient—always vaguely unhappy, Mardina was now old enough to realize, and with a temper that was not improving with age. When she frowned, the vivid tattoo on her face stretched and puckered. “I couldn’t list the unlikely events that I’ve had to survive in the course of my long life. That lot dropping on me wouldn’t come near the top.”