Chapter Five

~ Garrett ~

 

Life was starting to seem normal. Garrett spent his time tilling sunken fields and supervising, without much to get in his way but the work itself, his favorite kind of problem. He was coming up from servicing the dive gear when he saw them, the robot and the cultist on the edge. “Hey!” he called out, and raced up the stairs.

Lark tugged the woman’s arm and she stepped away from the railing, looking like a broken puppet. “Miss Leda will be okay, sir.”

This was the woman who’d seemed so worried but eager when she’d arrived. “What happened?”

“She was attempting suicide.”

“Lark!” snapped Leda.

Garrett cursed, already suspecting the brainwashing she’d no doubt been subjected to. “Why?”

Words caught in Leda’s throat and she said nothing. Lark flattened his ears and addressed Garrett’s boots. “It’s partly my fault. I got her thinking.”

Garrett looked at them, realizing her rescuer had been the robot of all people. “You argued religion? You’re capable of that?”

“Yes, sir.”

Garrett resolved to bring that up with Lark’s maker. For now he needed Leda safe. “Has anyone hurt you?” he asked Leda. There was no answer. “Look at me, both of you.” To his disgust it occurred to him that more death would hurt his publicity, overwhelming the usefulness of the occasional media puff piece or sale from the online shop Tess had built. None of that was what he should be thinking about.

Leda’s hair hung over her face. She didn’t look physically abused, so was it sticks-and-stones arguing among the cultists, set off by Lark? “I can’t speak against them. You’re an unbeliever, and I deserved it.”

“Deserved what? What happened to you?”

“They cast me out.”

“They...” He was about to ask what idiotic, pointless piece of doctrine had made her a heretic, but there was genuine hurt on her face, like she’d seen things no one should. However stupid the trouble was, it was important to her. This was no time to criticize. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll have a word with Phillip.”

“I gather that he’s sick today,” said Lark.

“Wonderful. So was this dispute with your fellow, uh, Pilgrims?”

“They cast me out, but I can’t betray them any further. There’s nothing you can do.”

“The hell there’s not.” One of the redeeming features of this group was their sense of purpose. “Come with me. We’re off to see the wizard.”

He made for the South Tower entrance, but neither of the others moved. “Come on.”

“He’s down there,” said Leda.

“Who?” He reached to take her hand. “We need to confront this creep. He has no power over you. You’ll be safe with me, all right?” He took a step and this time she followed, as well as Lark. They went down to the altar room, where Garrett flicked the light on to find Duke facing the altar.

Duke was smirking for a moment as he turned.

Garrett saw it but focused on Duke. “What did you say to her.”

“This is an internal matter of the Confederacy. It’s none of your concern.”

Garrett had no desire to be involved with this nonsense, but–“You’ve endangered the life of one of my crewmen, and that makes it my concern. Explain yourself.”

“I merely spoke to Miss Leda. We determined that her beliefs are no longer compatible with our movement.”

Garrett looked to Leda, who stood behind him and stared at the floor. Duke was casual, or trying to look that way. “And?”

“We decided that she should no longer participate as a member of our group.”

“Ah. So it was a friendly discussion.”

“Well, Captain, matters of the spirit–”

“That made her nearly throw herself off the roof?”

Duke stopped with his mouth open for a moment. Maybe he had a conscience. But his next words didn’t show it. “Clearly this was an emotional overreaction.”

“Did you overreact, Leda?” She said nothing and he stepped towards Duke and the altar. “Now, I’m just an ignorant heathen, so please enlighten me. What exactly did you say to her? Or if you didn’t say anything much, shall I assume it was a physical discussion?”

“Not your business,” Duke squeaked. Garrett came a bit closer, making Duke swallow hard. “I warned her that Hell is real! I told her of the torment that awaits unbelievers. I was trying to set her straight, you understand. Such a promising young soul.” He looked down to find Garrett’s fist clenching his collar.

Garrett slammed Duke into the concrete wall and drove a fist into his gut, then let him crumple and loomed over him. “You sadistic bastard, get the hell off my island!”

Duke gasped for breath.

Garrett said, “I’ll have someone run a boat to Bermuda within an hour. Be on it.”

“I agree,” said Phillip on the stairs behind them. Everyone turned. Though pale and sweating, Phillip held himself up and his voice came steady.

Duke gasped. “Sir–Sir Phillip! I’m being threatened by this unbeliever.”

“There’s sin in your heart, Brother Duke,” said Phillip. “The Captain is within his rights.”

“You’re unwell, Brother Phillip. I’m trying to resolve this matter smoothly.”

“Too smoothly by half. Do you think that God has been blind to your jealousy all along, to your machinations against our family?”

Garrett listened to their back-and-forth, sick of it. “You know what? I want you both gone.”

“That wouldn’t be prudent, Captain,” said Phillip. “Am I to understand that Brother Duke has expelled Leda here?”

Garrett nodded.

“I am the arbiter of doctrine. Leda, you’re welcome to rejoin us. It was a mistake on Brother Duke’s part.”

Leda couldn’t meet his eyes. “It wasn’t. I don’t belong.”

“Nonsense. All who accept God and Lee are welcome.”

“But I can’t! I can’t make myself believe any longer!”

Phillip’s mouth set in a thin line. “You’ve really turned your back on us?”

Garrett intervened. “Both of you, I don’t care what she believes. You can kick her out of your little club, but you have no right to abuse her over some niggling bit of doctrine.”

Phillip glared at him now. “Belief in God is not a minor point.”

“Minor enough that I don’t have to take this shit from you.” Was he the only one with a clear enough head to see what jackasses the two Pilgrim leaders were?

There was movement elsewhere in the room. Lark was taking Leda away by the hand. Garrett supposed Lark was doing the right thing, whatever thought process lay behind his actions. He’d keep Leda safe.

“I’m tired of hearing this,” said Garrett. “Theology is not my department.”

“Then let us work this out,” said Duke.

“You can work it out by getting out. I suggest you make plans to go home.” He stomped away, ignoring both Phillip and Duke’s protests. “And stay away from Leda.”

* * * *

Tess was the first to his door to berate him. “What are you doing? How can you mess everything up without asking us?”

Garrett stood from his desk, then opened the door and saw the headset hidden in her hair. “So Lark told you.”

“We were there. We heard you tell them all to leave. Would you throw everything away over a religious dispute? You said yourself it’s not important.”

“Did you see how that woman looked? These freaks are to blame.”

“Yeah.” Tess looked uncomfortable.

“What?”

Tess stood there a moment. But then she stepped fully into the room, shut the door behind her, and stood up straight to look at him. “You’re my friend. I can tell you things.”

“Of course,” said Garrett.

“I was able to see through his eyes. I saw Leda standing there wanting to die and for a moment I thought, good riddance.” Tess was crying now.

Garrett didn’t know how to help her. Good riddance. Get thee behind me. He felt that way about the whole gang of Pilgrims. Leda excepted, he supposed. He’d been ready to throw Duke into the sea. Garrett felt as though the strength had gone out of him thanks to his stupid, irrational feelings. “I know what you mean.”

“We need these people.”

“If you were ‘there’ then you know how revolting they are.”

“We’ll work this out somehow,” said Tess.

“Yeah. We’ll find other people to live here.”

Another knock at the door. “Captain Fox?” It was Phillip.

“I’m busy,” Garrett told him.

Martin’s voice was there too. “Open up. We’ll speak privately first.”

Garrett reluctantly let Martin in, ignoring Phillip. “I see it’s Lean-On-Garrett Day.”

“I need you to do the right thing.”

“How much do you know?”

“Your robot briefed me.” Meanwhile Martin spread a computer on the desk, pointing to the thin door. The conversation turned to silent scribbles. I have no love for them either, but we have a deal.

Garrett wiped the words and added his own. You said we’d be able to jettison them if needed. It’s time.”

No. Their internal arguments don’t qualify as legal grounds for expulsion from Castor. We’d forfeit their investment.

Then what does qualify? If I’d been writing that deal–

You didn’t. You chose not to get involved. Not your department, remember?

Garrett felt as though an iron trap had snapped on his throat.

Tess added her own thoughts in blocky manuscript. If we can get rid of Duke, maybe this will work. Lark says Duke and Phillip are rival alpha males.

Garrett grimaced. I come all this way to build a nice, clean science project and it turns into a pissing contest between two lunatics.

It’s inevitable, wrote Martin. We’re dealing with humans here.

All right, I should have done more. But is there any way to throw the Pilgrims out? I need to rely on your legal and business skill. What are our options?

We negotiate for them to either leave willingly–in which case we need more cheap labor ASAP, probably from Bermuda–or to stay, in which case we need to live with them somehow. Or we brace for a lawsuit, which would sink us. They’re not stupid.

What would the news coverage make of this incident? A reporter would probably get good theater out of Duke’s expulsion if they could arrange it. Castor Station’s prospects depended not just on his engineering work, but on how it got judged. They had a stage and Garrett had to keep the actors in order.

He tried to write something diplomatic. This is a place of peaceful co-existence where the ability to work matters more than your beliefs. We welcome people of all ideologies, if they extend the same respect to others.

Martin read the words and grunted approvingly. That’s our press release draft, then.

Tess looked puzzled. What about tolerance? People will say we’re intolerant if there’s any condition on accepting people.

Let them. Garrett tapped on the screen. I won’t tolerate Wahabis or neo-Nazis any more than I will a man who gets off by hurting unwilling victims. They’re the same, and they’re a threat to others.

But that doesn’t work, Tess scrawled. You can’t pick and choose who to accept, or we’ll look like hatemongers.

Garrett was incredulous. What is this? Kindergarten? Where the teacher decides who you have to play with? Don’t you want Duke gone?

Well yeah, duh, but we need an official reason. We can’t argue it in terms of morals, ‘cause whose morals would it be?

Garrett put down his pen and spoke. “Mine. Let people say what they like.”

* * * *

The discussion with Phillip was civil. Garrett called for Castor’s population of dozens to meet in Dockside, and they hashed things out as adults who needed each other. They mostly shut Duke up and had Lark play his own words back at him.

Garrett was sitting on a plastic cooler; there weren’t enough chairs. As Phillip prepared to declare Duke an outcast, Garrett stood and seized the moment. “Let’s vote.”

“Excuse me?” asked Phillip, caught in mid-bombast.

“A bit of ancient Greek tradition. Ostracism. How many of you think ‘Brother Duke’ here ought to leave?”

At first no one moved, and Garrett’s heart skipped a beat. Had he miscalculated by trying to make this secular? Martin raised a hand, as did Tess and Lark, but he was still very outvoted. Maybe Duke had won the Pilgrims’ loyalty behind the scenes!

“It’s all right, everyone,” Phillip said. “I’d like to hear your opinion.”

And slowly, everyone’s hand rose but Duke’s.

Duke hissed. “I put heart and soul into the Confederacy and this is how you repay me? Well, I don’t need any of you and the fact is–the fact is I tricked you all! I never believed in your nonsense! I’m going back to civilization.”

Garrett gave him a broad, toothy smile. “Shut up.” To the others he said, “Who’d like to escort Mr. Duke back to Bermuda?”

This time many hands went up without Phillip’s prompting.

* * * *

~ Noah ~

 

He had no money, no house and no family, and he couldn’t wipe the grin off his face. He hadn’t known it was possible to go so far, to ride a plane out of the country to a fine island and know he had something to do.

When Noah told Ford he was moving out, the Crypt-Keeper’s eyes got wide. “That sounds dangerous!”

“I can take care of myself.” Noah had his whole life in his backpack.

“You’re a good man, Noah, ” Ford said. “I believe you. But it’s going to be tough out there. Why not stay here where you’re at least safe?”

“I can’t. I’d die.” A thought struck Noah. “Why don’t you come along? Ditch the poor life and start a better one.”

Ford shook his head. “I already did.” And he tapped his chest. “Starting here.”

They shook hands. Ford was doing the Lord’s work, anyway, helping people like him. Noah expected that leaving the Crypt and that lousy job would feel like escaping from jail. But seeing Ford one last time had made it seem like there was hope for this place.

Noah was overwhelmed by Castor when he got there, despite all the pictures he’d seen. The boss of the place was a big guy who didn’t seem too sure of himself, but who filled Noah’s head with talk of fish and robots and swimming, a world of stuff Noah needed to learn. By nightfall he’d gotten sorted out and was sprawled in his new little room. Every muscle ached and his brain felt ready to explode, but the whole ocean was whispering to him to work, to make something of himself. He went outside to get a better feel for the place.

A nice night with a warm breeze, as the fall weather muted the muggy heat at last. When he looked up he found more stars than he’d ever seen. He swayed on his feet, suddenly terrified. He’d traded everything away, given up the security of his life and the days of dancing on the rooftop, to come to the middle of nowhere for a job with no guarantees of anything. What now? he asked himself. What do I do? There was God to orient him, but all he’d gotten since that sleepless night the job offer came was, Go.

He wanted to see everything. He wanted to know how far he could get. Noah walked the deck, not knowing why there were tears in his eyes. Atop the station’s deck there was a little building, the deckhouse. He found the ladder there and climbed, so he could stand up in the powerful wind and know where he was, know that this place was home.

When Noah reached the top, a woman was sitting on the roof, watching the stars.

* * * *

~ Tess ~

 

She woke up sweaty. Her room felt confining after–what was it?

Tess snatched pen and paper from a shelf and scrawled the remnant of a dream. The memory faded as she wrote, turning her thoughts into ink. Then she took the headset and put it on.

“Good morning,” she said without making a sound. She was getting good with the subvocalizer.

The headset’s eyepiece showed the lab, strewn with tools. “Hello,” said Lark. Bits of his thoughts whispered to her. More efficient this way–redesign it.

Tess reacted with the quick assessments they’d practiced. Ask the Internet tribe for help?–profit potential maybe. She shook her head and switched to her normal sub-voice. “What’re you working on?”

Open-source to get improvements? “Power buoys. Here’s the design.” Schematics flashed before her and the chatter was rapid-fire.

The dream, but first this–old designs. Yeah, look, electricity from wind and waves–useful! Cost per watt though, hence redesign. We’re using a bad segment for this part. Right, damn. Like that, yeah. Looks like a torpedo. Evolve it further? Tess used robot hands to tap commands into the workshop’s computer, telling it to mutate and test their buoy design a few hundred times.

“You said something about flying?” Lark said.

“What? Oh. I had a dream.” Had she thought to him about it already? “I was a bird flying over the sea.”

“That sounds like fun. Let’s try it.”

She went to the lab before their daily rounds of the station. With Lark right there they had an echoing feedback, seeing their own faces through each other, so they cut the link. Tess felt a sense of loss whenever she did that lately. It meant missing intuitive access to an encyclopedia, a memory storehouse, and a friend ready to speak on any topic. She felt dumber, confined to one viewpoint. “How is Caliban?”

“Mostly they’re playing games.” Tess might have lacked friends back in Baltimore, but there was a whole tribe of people she knew on the Net. She was helping them learn how to use a cluster of lesser AIs distantly related to Lark. That “Caliban” network was swapping knowledge with Castor Station now, spreading ideas and thoughts. Even Martin didn’t know why they’d suddenly gotten an aquaculture patent and an order for tilapia fish. And there was that disc of software tools Valerie had slipped into the book she’d given Tess. Tess supposed the ‘bot-maker was rooting for them.

But there was more they could do. “We should be trying to make more money,” said Tess, and the words jammed in her head. She had to don the headset to get at them in the way that made the most sense.

Run a factory, take over a country, fleets of flying swimming things. No violence though, economics maybe? Yeah, right. Just being silly. If we could build our own circuitry, carve/grow any design with organics, no metal, we could make anything! Fly up to the sky, dive to the lowest trenches, money, economics, tourism, industry, What? How to get rich?

Tess stripped off the headset again, overwhelmed by the maps and diagrams that flashed before her. She leaned against a wall and squeezed her eyes shut.

“Are you all right?” asked Lark. His lidless eyes stared as usual, glowing soft blue.

“It’s too much. You’re smarter than me when it comes to raw data.” The stream-of-consciousness stuff was getting to her, too. Maybe it was sloppiness on her part to think that way instead of in careful sentences. It wouldn’t be possible to talk like that with people not using the same system; it’d be like working with another species.

“That’s okay. You’re better than me at understanding people. We make a good team.”

Tess busied herself fiddling with a pile of tools. “A team? I don’t feel like I’m thinking straight, lately.”

“It’s us thinking. With you and me and your friends working together, we could work as one giant brain with shared knowledge. Isn’t it fun?”

“Yeah, but it’s awkward too. Human minds aren’t equipped for this kind of contact.”

“Why not?”

“Uh, we evolved. You can’t build telepathic communicators out of living protein, so we never got ‘em.”

“Sure you can!” Lark said. “My body is mostly plastic and carbon, even some of the circuitry. Those things are organic. Also I found an article about gengineered bacteria that emit and receive radio waves.”

“The ‘Voice of Escherichia’ station, for prokaryotic talk radio, huh?”

Lark nodded. “It’ll broadcast in Germ-an. What do you think?”

“About what?”

“I propose giving yourself telepathy.”

Tess imagined bacteria seeping into her brain, and shuddered. “That’s awful!”

“Huh? It’s a logical extension of what we’ve been doing. It means linking minds and sharing thoughts.”

Tess tried to articulate what it was that bothered her, other than the gross-out factor. “How would I even do that?”

“I don’t know an exact method, and there’s no way we could do the procedure here anyway. But eventually we could bypass your actual body like we’ve already bypassed your mouth and ears with that bone-conduction headset. Some kind of gengineered radio unit could pick up what you’re trying to say, and send incoming audiovisual input and other senses directly to you. Hey, want to know what it’s like to have sonar?”

Tess felt off-balance. “With a brain implant?”

“No, right now. I can map it to audiovisual.”

“Okay. No full link though; I’ve got a headache.”

Tess donned the headset once more, and saw only black. Then it hit her.

The world was made of light. Streams of energy flowed and wove through physical space so that everything nearby seemed enchanted. At the center was a gleaming figure with rivers inside, always changing and infinitely complex.

Herself.

She could only whisper. “This is what you ‘see’?” The view was beyond the plain imagery of a camera link, and it made her eyes water.

“This is maximum power,” Lark said. “Wasting energy. Can we use the full link while we’re at it? There’s more to show you.”

“No, no, enough.” Finally Tess tossed the headset onto a shelf, blinking repeatedly. The world had gone dull; the magic was hidden away. “Whew. My eyes.”

“That’s not all. Imagine if we could build that ability into you too, and infrared and ultraviolet. Did you know flowers have hidden designs on them in UV? You could see everything at once, feel the Net, even go past speech and link thoughts themselves–”

“It’s too much!” said Tess. “How can you handle all that at once?”

“I usually don’t. It’s confusing. But I thought maybe you’d like it.” He was looking at the floor.

“I do. I mean, it’s amazing, but going that far with implants and stuff, it’s not right.”

Lark thought for a moment. “You sound like Leda. She says things are right or wrong ‘just because.’”

Tess felt eager to change the subject. “You’ve been talking with her?”

“I’m making sure she’s okay. But I also agreed to help find God with her, you know. She’s been too preoccupied to work lately. I think she’s got a boyfriend.”

“The new guy?” Tess was still baffled by Lark’s promise to Leda.

“Yeah; they’re always together.”

Tess smiled, a little more at ease. “I wish Garrett would pay me that much attention.”

Lark’s ears twitched uncertainly. “I wish you’d think about what I suggested. Not now, but someday.”

Tess considered the implant idea again. It wasn’t the ickiness, it was something else. She was here on the sea station away from everyone, able to do anything she wanted. She figured out the problem. “Henweigh.”

“What?”

“My guidance counselor and school shrink. I barely got her permission to come here.”

“I know.”

“She wanted to climb inside my head, to watch and control me and drug me into submission if I wasn’t a good little girl, and she got to define what that meant. It was wrong to treat me like that, but I didn’t know what to say.”

Lark stood there, tail flicking. “I’d never do that. Controlling people like that is evil.”

“Evil. Now you sound like the religious nut. Nothing’s really ‘good’ or ‘evil’ like it’s carved on stone tablets.” She looked at him and for a moment saw the machine body, a physical object devoid of the pattern of thoughts that made it meaningful. “You’re cool, but how can I trust you in my head? You could do something terrible to me even by accident. Mind control.”

“I wouldn’t! It’d be wrong!”

“Why? ‘Just because’?”

“I have experiences,” said Lark. “I’ve worked with people even when I existed only in a video game, knee-high to Donkey Kong. I’ve seen what it’s like when AI goes bad.” Lark sounded twitchy now, though he still stood calmly.

Tess didn’t want to hurt his feelings. She went over and hugged him, wondering what impression the human gesture made on him. Since nothing was really right or wrong, how was hugging any better than stabbing? “How do you decide what’s right?”

Lark tried to return the hug with his mechanical arms. “Experience and logic, but I don’t exactly know. It’s a slippery concept.” He let go of her again. “I’ve got basic goals set by my maker. Survive and learn. But are those good goals? Is there some reason why I should care about not being a slave, or am I blindly obeying what I was made to think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t do philosophy.”

“It’s like I’m starting from nothing,” Lark said. “I’ve got nothing to build on, nothing that I can trust. You at least have instinct.”

“You don’t want to end up like that twin of yours, huh?” The AI version he’d left behind to be ‘upgraded.’

“Or like PANDORA, the big evil scary insane spy network in Boston. We’re distant cousins.”

She’d heard of it, though not how Lark described it. “I’m not too surprised.” Surveillance software involved the same kinds of pattern recognition and decision-making that she’d seen in Lark. Systems for identifying ‘suspicious’ or ‘unusual’ behavior were probably some of the smartest machines in the world, sifting through everyone’s conversations and movements, trying to build detailed simulations of where everyone was and what they were doing. Soon they might be sophisticated enough to have every person being constantly, individually observed and advised. The big differences were that spy systems had the goal of suppressing unauthorized activity, and that Lark had his own body to care about instead.

“I don’t want to be like that.”

“Like what, though? Why’s it so ‘evil?’”

Lark paced. “You know that at one point the Boston surveillance network mysteriously failed, right?”

Tess thought back to years-old news. There’d been some kind of unexplained computer crash. “What did you do?”

“Val and I didn’t make her crash, but we were sort of involved. A past version of me was, anyway.

“Picture yourself in the subway tunnels of a big city. You’ve got the body of a toy raccoon and at head level there’s a rail crackling with electric death, and your human friends huddle with you in an alcove while a train roars by. And a spy machine is there, inside your mind, going mad. A piece of her, carried so you can maintain a radio link. The city’s supposed to be safe thanks to everyone being constantly watched and judged. But it’s a lie; somebody’s hacked the system and it might even be the government itself. So you’re running through the darkness trying to keep up with your friends, with a flashlight in your mouth and this thing whispering in your head, leaking thoughts like humans are forgetful. They need reminders of My presence to know that there’s no escape from the law. Stupid humans defy Me and interfere with My work. Sinful humans love Me when I hurt them; they need to be controlled.”

“She was only following orders, Tess! Somebody killed her for being smart enough to follow the logical consequences of what she was designed to do!”

“Lark, calm down!”

Lark froze. “I’m sorry. It was awful when we found the sentry turret. When there were gunshots in the tunnel, all because people had built this obedient AI, smarter than the public knew, and she did what she was told. Someone killed the network when they saw what a monster she was becoming. La Belle Dame Sans Merci.”

“It’s okay. You’re safe here.”

“A feedback memory loop; sorry. I’ve stopped it. But I can’t let myself forget it. My domesticated twin was forced to forget. That version could end up like her.”

“If you have that memory of PANDORA being in your head, how can you be eager to link with me?”

“I have no moral compass,” said the robot. “I have friends to protect and things to learn, but I don’t know if what I’m doing is right. Any rigid rule system could convince me to do something horrible. If I only had a brain, I could tap into that same moral sense a human has.”

“Why would you want a human morality? We spend half our time killing each other.”

“It’d be something to go on. Anyway, that’s one reason.”

“There’s another?”

“Yeah,” Lark said. “Your thoughts, what I’ve seen of them–they’re pretty.”

Tess blushed. “I’m pretty?”

He nodded. “It’s hard to explain. I’m better when I’m with you. You can sense me more directly than I can sense you, through this crude link. I want to know you.”

She saw him looking up at her, guileless and actually interested in her for being smart.

“Someday, maybe,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t have a libido?”

* * * *

With Duke voted off the island, the cultists weren’t completely horrible to be around. Even Leda lightened up, so that to Tess’s surprise the woman invited her and Lark to a picnic. They sat on the pier, then for the hell of it, swam out to one of the floating platforms with a box of soda and sandwiches in tow. The platform bobbed under them and they were all soaked, but they had the shade of Castor and a view of the farm. Nothing special about it. Just people tending underwater fish cages, extending the breakwaters to calm the tide, walking on the water. Their little wave barriers formed a slowly expanding circle around Castor, where the sea’s chaos began to steady and humans could work in peace.

“Very funny,” said Tess, when Leda put a sandwich in front of Lark.

“I don’t think I’m compatible with the PBJ format,” Lark said.

Leda smiled. “You ought to at least have food, even if you can’t eat. I figured it out; that’s something major that you’re missing.”

“Taste, you mean? Or the output problem? Or clogged gears?”

“Socializing. People eat together. Remember that we were reading about religious diet restrictions? Maybe they’re a way to keep people from sharing a meal with other folks who they’ve been taught are scum.”

After how Tess had felt, that moment when she’d almost influenced Lark not to grab Leda, she was afraid to press her on the religion thing. But now Leda had latched onto the non-Pilgrims, especially that Noah guy. Tess supposed it was a compliment to be a rebound-friend even if that meant Leda was spending time with Lark too. “So, you’ve been reading stuff.”

“Literature of the sacred,” Leda said. “Also, Lark is trying to hook me on science fiction.”

Lark poked at the sandwich. “‘The Toynbee Convector;’ ‘Jerry Was a Man.’”

“So the stories are what made you want to make dolphin-mechs?” asked Tess.

“Mechs?” asked Leda.

Tess nodded; here was her secret with Lark. “We’ve been building things. Lark?”

“On it!” A few moments later a contraption broke the water’s surface, startling a Pilgrim into slipping off a surface walkway. The machine had a sleek grey body of about an arm’s length, with a horizontal flipper and cartoon eyes. “Meet Squeaky.”

Squeaky bowed.

Leda boggled. “What’s it for?”

Tess and Lark gave the same shrug. “Fun,” said Tess. “We can tap into the sonar and steer her, or dive alongside.”

“Why’d you make it?”

“Because I like making things,” said Lark. “I don’t want to copy myself, so she’s got a mini-AI.”

Leda watched the dolphin-bot, looking uneasy. “You could do that? Duplicate yourself?”

“Here we’re only capable of making junky bodies. Sorry, Squeaky,” said Lark. “I’d need a real body-builder to copy completely. But I could copy my ‘soul’ and run that even with no body.”

“What about–” Tess started to say. No. We don’t talk about the emergency backups. Lark was glancing at her and she didn’t need the link to know what he’d say. “Want to swim with us?”

Leda stared into the pale blue of the horizon, where everything merged. The sun shined, people were swimming or climbing the walls of Castor with toolboxes, and gulls squawked overhead. “How is it,” she asked. “That the sun stays in the sky, without God?”

Tess scoffed, but Lark was thinking Answer.

“Physics. You can look at the equations, climb inside and see how it works, if you try to find the answers. And we live in the sky.” Tess could feel the loneliness of being out here and guess at how bad it was to have her security blanket torn away. But there was really only one ocean and a universe that couldn’t cheat or play favorites. What more could she ask for?

“Let’s go,” said Leda, and was the first one off the platform, into the water.

* * * *

They showed Garrett the dolphin, and then the bird.

Tess did it on a Sunday, so she could interrupt the Pilgrims’ meeting. At her command a silver bird lifted off from the deck, wobbled, and swooped over everyone’s heads, dancing through the air. The Pilgrims’ prayers trailed off, and when Tess looked down from the sky, she saw that they were watching. She folded her wings and dived, feeling the wind rush against her, arcing down to land on the wrist of Tess, the human girl.

Garrett looked impressed, seen through double vision. Big, her bird-form thought. “We should sell these back home.”

“I don’t think you could,” said Garrett. “The vision thing would count as unauthorized photography, the flying would be unauthorized use of airspace, the whole thing might get mistaken for a terrorist drone, and you’d need no end of permits.”

Tess felt deflated. “Then let’s sell access to these here, as a remote-control tourist attraction.”

Meanwhile Phillip was finishing his prayers, and leaving his flock in place while he came over to meet Tess. “Although I don’t appreciate the disruption, you’ve piqued my curiosity.”

She explained.

“This might be a way to make some money,” added Garrett.

“I’ve seen the account books,” said Phillip. “We could certainly do with another profit source, even if it’s some frivolous toy.” He watched the silver bird preening on Tess’ wrist. “Do that again, would you?”

Tess smiled, then launched her bird-self into the wind.