Through all this, Ron stood quietly. Kris noticed that the Iteeche Marine threw a concerned look at his human associate. Sergeant Bruce nodded and gave a slight shrug.
“So, what do we do?” Kris asked.
“Sam, what do you think?”
Which drew attention to a large locket at Auntie Tru’s neck. A deep male voice began talking from it. “Nelly and I have been linked since you entered the room, and, except for the time you were going through that ridiculous self-defense drill, we have been doing a series of self-diagnostics. Nelly passes all the high-order tests with flying colors. The low-order tests are taking a bit longer. Her organization and my organization are quite different, as would be understandable to anyone except a control-freak human.”
“Why do I find this picture so familiar?” Kris said.
“Excuse me if I am butting in where I am not needed or wanted,” Ron said, “but exactly why did we come here?”
“Because the last time I was with my dear aunt Trudy, Sam was the very epitome of decorum and gentility,” Kris said.
“If you’d told me your problems earlier, I might have warned you about some of the pitfalls ahead of you,” Auntie Tru said.
“Such as?” Kris asked.
“Well, it was too late to warn you about the effect of interfacing computers with alien technology. We’d already installed that bit of mass storage from Santa Maria into Nelly, hadn’t we?”
“Yes, we had.” That had been one of the rare times when Kris had time on her hands. It had seemed like a good idea to have Nelly try to access the data in her spare time. Matters had quickly returned to their usual frantic pace, and Nelly had hardly seen Auntie Tru since.
Nelly had, however, found a new jump-point map and accessed a whole lot more stars, including Alien 1 and 2. And become . . . strange.
“Well, I thought a really souped-up computer might be helpful for tackling the problems of these new planets,” Tru said diffidently.
“That was why I offered Nelly and my services,” Kris said. Now it was her turn to speak dryly.
“Yes, but your grampa Ray had all sorts of interesting things for you to do.” Most of which involved getting shot at. “And I just happened to win a small lottery pot.” Strange how she usually did when she needed money for research. “And I upgraded Sam before we left Wardhaven. I suspect now he’s even more advanced than your Nelly.”
“Not,” came in duet from both computers present.
“Oh, well, Sam is very advanced, and I tied him into several of the thingamajigs and alien doohickeys, and he managed to get a few of them to do something. Probably not anywhere near what they were meant to do, but anyway, as Sam got deeper into things, I noticed he developed an attitude not all that different from several of the assistants we had helping us.”
“ ‘Several assistants’?” Kris said.
“Yes, five or six, I believe.”
“I worked with twelve different assistants. You go through them very quickly, Professor Seyd.”
“I promote them to their proper level,” Trudy sniffed.
“Thank heaven. For their sanity, she does promote them at a very brisk pace. They’d go crazy, or maybe kill her if she didn’t,” Sam said, and proved that a computer can be very dry.
“Do you humans have an expression for ‘the blind leading the blind’?” Ron asked.
“Yes,” Kris said. “You took the words out of my mouth.”
“I apologize, then. I did not mean to be so forward.”
Kris glanced at Ron . . . and couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to kiss an Iteeche. Strange to have that thought. Even stranger to have it just now.
But there was no time. She had a long list of questions, most attached to an alligator that wanted to chew on her leg. “So, how does it work, dealing with a computer with an attitude?”
“Fine,” said Trudy.
“Not too bad,” said Sam.
“I see,” said Kris.
“No, really,” said Sam. “You just do what you have to do as carefully as you can. Sometimes you give the boss some lip over all she’s asking, but it’s not that important.”
“What if it is important?” Nelly asked in a little-girl voice. “What if the princess is asking you to plan a battle for her or plot intercepting fire on five thousand people being held hostage by mad people. You see, Sam, Kris doesn’t just ask me to open some Aladdin’s cave. Around Kris, people get very suddenly dead. And she needs me to help her do that.”
That brought a pause in the conversation.
“Kris,” Nelly said, “I understand, when you tell me to do something, that’s what you want. But sometimes I can get a few steps ahead of you. Have things ready for you when you ask for them. That always makes you happy. Doesn’t it?”
Kris liked to think she wasn’t the kind of person who had to be slammed between the eyes with a two-by-four. Well, maybe she was the kind of person who, when slammed with a large, thick stick, recognized the error of her ways. That way of looking at it might save some of her self-image.
“Yes, Nelly, I see the problem. I like it when you’re ahead of me. I can’t remember a time when you weren’t ahead of me that I didn’t want to go exactly where you went.”
“Except when I wanted to shoot up those cruisers.”
“Yes, and, of course, that would have to be a big one.”
“So, what do we do, Kris? I want to be part of your team, but the very thought of the mistakes I can make has me wanting to roll myself up in a ball and go back to adding one plus one.”
“You want to be a part of our team,” Kris repeated.
“Yes, just like Jack and Penny, the colonel and Abby. You work best when I’m at your neck. I want to be there.”
“But all of those are grown men and women. They’ve lived in the shadow of horrible choices all their lives. Studied them when they were younger, made bigger and bigger ones as they grew up. And they’ve done the jobs that led them to where they are today.
“Kris, I’ve studied the histories. There’s a lot of stuff that doesn’t make sense in them.”
“Even, Nelly, when you approach them with the powerful rationality that you can bring to them?”
“Yes, Kris, even in the best ones, I spot dozens of conclusions that don’t fit the data or events that just couldn’t have happened that way.”
“And you didn’t have twenty years of believing that stuff before you started doubting it like I did,” Kris said.
“But those are things I can set a tolerance for. That I can stamp ‘don’t use unless you ask Kris first.’ It’s the stuff that leaves people dead that I can’t figure out. Kris, I know I must do anything I can to keep you alive. You, and the team, and Cara, and the Wasp’s crew. Without you, there would be a huge void in my existence. I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t have you. Sam, have you figured it out?”
“No, Nelly girl, I’m afraid that I’m just as lost as you are about that. Trudy here is the center of my life. I like a lot of the people she works with, and a lot of them joke quite seriously about wanting me when she passes on. I know that she is full of years, as these humans count them, and even if nothing goes wrong at the digs, she may ‘pass away’ as these humans put it, peacefully in her sleep. It will leave a huge vacancy in me when it happens, and I don’t know if I will be able to function without her. I really don’t.”
“Sam, I didn’t know any of this,” Trudy said, and stroked her pendant that was her computer. It turned from deep blue to ruby red. Kris wondered if her aunt noticed. Probably not.
The room stayed quiet for a long moment. Then Trudy wiped a tear. “But this doesn’t solve Kris and Nelly girl’s problem. Not unless Nelly wants to retire to the boring life of a computer archaeologist.”