The Peace Authority vessel drove Earthward at half a gravity.
She was big, with space for some cabins. Kenmuir had been put in one by himself. The door was locked. His guards had told him that if he needed anything he could ask for it through the intercom, but thus far he had not. What he most wanted was to be alone.
Well, he would have liked a viewscreen, that he might look out upon the stars. Cramped and barren, the room crowded him together with his thoughts.
For the hundredth or the thousandth weary time he wondered how all this had come to pass, how he turned into a rebel and a killer. Why? He never intended or foresaw it. Events seemed to have acquired their own momentum, almost a will of their own. Was that the nature of human history? Chaos—strange attractors—how much did the Teramind itself understand? How much did God?
The door spread. It reclosed as a blue-clad figure stepped through. Kenmuir rose from the unfolded bunk. For a few seconds they stood motionless, two men tall and lean, one dark, one pale.
“Greeting, Captain Kenmuir,” the newcomer said in Anglo of the eastern hemisphere.
“You’re Pragmatic Venator, aren’t you?” the prisoner replied. “So we meet at last.”
The officer nodded. “I want to talk with you while we can be private.”
“Private? Your machines are watching and listening, I’m sure.”
“They’re your machines too.” Humanity’s.
“We’re both in error. They’re nobody’s.” Robots reporting to sophotects that ultimately were facets of the supreme intellect.
“No contradiction,” Venator said. “Your partner is yours, and you are hers, but neither is property.”
Something stirred in Kenmuir. He had felt emotionally emptied; but he found that he could again care. “What about Aleka? What can you tell me?” What will you?
Venator raised his brows. “Aleka? … Oh, yes. Alice Tam. She’s alive and well.” A smile flickered. “Inconveniently much. That’s what I mainly have to discuss with you, if you’re able.”
Kenmuir shrugged. “I’m able, if not exactly willing. The constabulary on Luna were … not unkind. I’m medicated and rested.” In the body, at least. The mind, the soul—Anxiety died. He returned to the detachment that had possessed him of late, whether because he had been unknowingly tranquilized or because his spirit was exhausted; he stood apart from himself, a Cartesian consciousness observing its destiny unfold.
“Shall we sit?” Venator suggested.
“No need.” Nor wish.
“Do you care for refreshment? We’ve much to talk about.”
“No, I don’t want anything” that they aboard could give him.
“Pray rest assured you’re in no danger,” Venator said. “You’re in civilized keeping.” The features bleakened, the tone flattened. “Perhaps more civilized than you deserve.”
“We can argue rights and wrongs later, can’t we?”
Venator went back to mildness. “I believe we’ll do more than argue, Captain. But, true, we’d best get the empirical out of the way first. Would you tell me why, m-m, Aleka didn’t take you along when she escaped?”
“Isn’t that obvious? I’d have had to retreat to a safe distance, then run to the ship, after which she’d have had to lift. It could have cost us as much as an hour. We didn’t have that long.”
“Obvious, yes. An hour at two gravities means an extra seven kilometers per second. I was probing the degree of your determination. I don’t suppose you’ll tell me where she’s bound?”
“I can’t. She and the ship decided it between them after letting me off.”
“As I expected,” Venator said calmly. “What you don’t know can’t be extracted from you. Not that it matters. One may guess. The goal clearly isn’t Mars, which would be a hazardous choice in any case. Several asteroids are possible, or conceivably a Lunarian-colonized Jovian satellite. She’s running on trajectory now, conserving her delta v and thus her options. Unless she comes to fear we may close in, and accelerates afresh, it will take a while for her to reach whatever goal she has in mind.”
Whereupon she would be in communication range. Kestrel’s antiquated laser wouldn’t carry an intelligible message across two or three astronomical units; her radio would require a high-gain receiver; and who yonder would be listening for either? Close by, Aleka’s intent to signal would be unmistakable. She might perhaps land.
“Your scheme worked, fantastical though it was,” Venator continued. “I think it worked precisely because it was fantastical. We can’t overhaul her before she completes her mission, and we aren’t trying any longer.”
Yes, Kenmuir thought, he and she had estimated a reasonable probability of that. The ships of law enforcement were few and widely scattered through the Solar System, because their usual work was just to convey personnel or sometimes give aid to the distressed. Besides, even today, the Falcon class counted as high-powered. It had become mostly robots and sophotects that crossed space. They seldom demanded energy-wasting speed. It was humans who were short-lived and impatient.
“You see, we don’t want to provoke her into haste,” Venator explained. “We want time to persuade you two of your folly, so you’ll stop of your free choice.” He frowned. “Consider. Do you imagine the revelation of a minor planet out among the comets will make you heroes? Think about it. Your brutal destruction of the Beynac download will shock the world.”
Kenmuir sighed. “I told the police and I told them, she made me promise.”
“Need you have kept the promise?”
Kenmuir nodded. “She’d been betrayed once.”
Venator’s smile was briefly unpleasant. “To your benefit, as it turned out.”
Kenmuir made a grin and gestured around his cell. “This?”
“I didn’t mean you were after personal gain,” Venator said. “I confess that your motives puzzle me, and suspect they puzzle you also.”
Once more Kenmuir had the sense—nonsense, cried his rationality, but the feeling would not go away—that he and Aleka had been the instruments of some great blind force, and it was not done with them yet, and they themselves were among its wellsprings. But he had better stay with immediacies. He could take advantage of the huntsman’s desire for conversation.
“What’s the situation on Luna?” he asked. His interrogators there had given him no news.
Venator’s voice and bearing eased. “Well,” he said as if it were interesting but of little importance, “the lady Lilisaire caused us considerable trouble, in which several of her colleagues gleefully joined. Fortunately, we avoided significant damage or casualties on either side, and things are quiet now. Officially they’re under house arrest. In practice, what we have is an uneasy truce. The outcome of that will depend largely on you, my friend.”
“How?”
Venator turned serious. “You can still halt what you’ve set moving. Tam has ignored our calls, but Kestrel must have taken note of them and will doubtless inform her of any that come from you.”
“What could I have to say?” Not, in the presence of machines, that he thought he loved her.
“You, and you alone, can make her come back, keeping the secret of Proserpina.”
“Why should I?”
“Criminal charges can be dismissed, you know, or a pardon can be granted.”
Emotion stirred anew in Kenmuir. The sharpest part of it was anger. “See here,” he stated, “I never proposed to serve as a martyr, nor does she. If and when the news comes out, the Solar System will decide whether we did wrong. In spite of—” his voice faltered “—the download—when that story too is made clear … I dare hope for pardon from the whole human race.”
“Spare me the rhetoric, please,” Venator scoffed. “You’ve calculated that the government will be in so awkward a position that its best move will be to quietly let infractions go unpunished, while the more radical Lunarians prepare to emigrate to Proserpina. In exchange, you won’t emphasize any irregularities we may have committed.”
Kenmuir nodded. “Yes, that’s approximately what we’re trying for.”
“I’ve gathered you’re a student of history,” Venator said. “Tell me, with how many governments of the past would that calculation have been rational?”
Surprised, Kenmuir stood wordless before he muttered, “I don’t know. Perhaps none.”
“Correct. You’d have been dead by now, unless we chose to torture you first. If our secret got released, we’d put down the restless Lunarians by force, exterminating them if necessary. We’d tell people that the revelation was a falsehood concocted by you evildoers. We’d go on to tell the people, at considerable and emotional length, what a service we had done them, suppressing these enemies of the state. But most of the propaganda we wouldn’t issue ourselves. Plenty of journalists and intellectuals would be eager to curry favor by manufacturing and disseminating it. Many among them would be sincere.”
“Yes …”
“As it is, you are safe, while Tam runs loose because we did not expect that major weapons of war would ever be needed again. You have the cybercosm to thank, Kenmuir. You might show some trust, some gratitude.”
“But you violated the Covenant!” the spaceman protested. “And—and—” And what? How horrible an offense, really, was the hiding of a piece of information?
“Exigencies arise,” Venator said. “My hope is to convince you of that, before it is too late.”
“Suppose you do,” Kenmuir retorted wildly. “How can I convince Aleka?” Any passwords or the like could have been drugged or brainphased out of him. Any image of him could be an artifact, in this world where so much reality was virtual.
Venator hesitated. When he spoke, it was slowly, and did the thin face draw into lines of want? “She ought to listen to you and have faith in you, ought she not? As for how she shall know that it is in truth you—” He looked away, as if he wished to see through the metal to stars and Earth. “My intuition is that you two are lovers. All the little intimacies, body language unique to the pair of you, incidents forgotten by one until the other reminds of them, the wholeness arisen in even as brief a time as you’ve had—if we wrung that quantity of data out of you, the process would leave you a vegetable. And could we write an adequate program to use it with a generated image? Perhaps the Teramind could. Perhaps not. I daresay it could reprogram your brain, so that you would become its worshipper and ardently do, of your own volition, whatever it wished.”
He lifted a hand. “Have no fears,” he said. “Besides the morality of destroying a mind, we are barred by the fact that we haven’t time enough, neither to make a convincing imitation of you nor to make you over. You are not electrophotonic, you are organic, with the inertia of all material things. Molecular interactions go at rates constrained by the laws of the universe, and the Teramind did not write those.”
His fists clenched at his sides. “Explain that to your Aleka. She will know you by what you share, everything that I have denied myself.”
He smiled and finished lightly, “Ironic, isn’t it, that at this final hour the cybercosm must appeal to the oldest, most primitive force in sentient life?”
Kenmuir ran a tongue gone dry across his lips. “If you can indeed recruit me.”
Venator gazed straight at him and answered, “I can’t. I am bringing you to the Teramind.”