IGMS Issue 8 Page 12

  "Look," Amanda says, and she's swaying now, catching herself on the console. "I'm not going to infect you. But I need to use your beacon."

  "The beacon is dead," I say.

  That stops her. She looks all around the room, as if she could find me -- find a face she could speak to. But I don't have that. My screens died in the crash.

  "It can't be dead," she says. "Let me try -- I can override the system, access parts of the ship you don't know --"

  "I am all there is," I say, knowing it's not true. The beacon's processes are now off-limits to me -- but they weren't always so. "And I won't unlock the keyboard."

  "Then we'll all die."

  "We?" I ask.

  "You -- you haven't been around lately, have you?"

  "No," I say. It's hard to keep the sarcasm from my voice. "I've been offline since the crash."

  "Because of what we did -- because we made the ships crash, the other colonists exiled us from their settlement, sent us into the forest to live on our own --" She's speaking faster and faster now, eager to be rid of her humiliation.

  "A community of Murderers," I say, wishing that the colonists had killed them all, that she and her kind had paid a harsher price for my crew's death, for my passengers' death -- for my father's death.

  Amanda doesn't answer that jibe. She merely says, "We have a plague. We need help. We've done our time; and the sentence was exile; not slow murder. We need to call the settlement, but we don't have a beacon. I thought --" Her hands clench again. "I've seen your ship once, on one of my walks. I thought that there'd be something left inside -- something that would help us."

  "I am here," I say. I watch her; watch the shaking hands, watch the taut, skeletal lines of her face. Black blotches mar her hands -- the hands that released the virus into the fleet's network. That stranded me here amidst broken dreams, never to spin my threads between the stars.

  She deserves it. They all deserve it.

  "They don't have ships," I say. "The ships crashed." I can't keep the bitterness from my voice.

  Her hands clench again. "They put things together -- low-altitude shuttles -- they'll reach us in time, if they know we're here -- if we can get help --"

  I cut her. "I see no reason to help you."

  "You're pledged to safeguard human life." Her voice is shocked.

  "That was my father. And he's dead. I'm not him."

  "I can see that." Her voice is angry. "You won't even try to help."

  "Give me one reason why I should."

  "There are a dozen lives at stakes."

  "Murderers' lives."

  There are two parts of me now: one reliving, endlessly, the rebuilt loop of my father's memories, from the dance among the stars, to the slow plunge into the atmosphere; and the other staring at this woman -- Amanda Robson -- wondering why I didn't blast her to ashes the moment she entered the room.

  "You understand nothing, do you?" She's shaking, her hands tightening and opening convulsively.

  "I understand murder."

  "We had our reasons. We had to -- I'm sorry for Aten, but better an AI's death than --"

  I cut her off, enraged. "Better than what? AIs have thoughts, as you do. We have our own ways of bleeding. Our own ways of dying."

  "Oh, you'd know that? How many AIs have you seen, Horus?"

  "I remember," I say. "My father's memories are inside my databanks."

  "But you're not your father. You're just one of his processing units."

  "And that somehow makes me worth less? That gives you the right to do as you wish? To infect me as you did my father? How many times will you be a Murderess?"

  Her face is white now; her hands curved like claws. If she could release a virus into my processes, she would do it.

  But she doesn't. She lifts her gaze, stares at the command room -- at the empty, mouldy chairs; at the dark traces of moss streaking the walls like the onset of a disease.

  "We didn't ask to come on the ship," she says at last. "Not like the soldiers or the scientists -- they volunteered. We didn't. We didn't ask to be sent to found a colony in Alpha Centauri's backwaters, merely so we wouldn't trouble the peace on Earth. We thought that if they found a virus in Aten, they'd turn back rather than jeopardise the mission." She lowers her gaze, and I can't read her expression. "I didn't think the virus would kill him."

  "Lies," I hiss, and make the lights in the room flicker again. I remember dying -- remember the feeling of being taken apart, a thousand thousand processes failing, one after the other. "Lies."

  "I'm sorry," she says, and slowly, infinitely slowly, she falls to her knees, her hands still clenching my console. Beads of sweat run down her forehead -- her heartbeat is going wild now. "I shouldn't have -- come -- I'm sorry."

  Sorry. Can words atone for my passengers' death? For what happened to Aten? The slow fall into the atmosphere, the processes tailing off into nothingness, until all that remained were a few scrambled memories? A few fragmentary threads?

  A few fragmentary threads.

  My threads. Not Aten's. Mine. The first things that were ever mine. Before that . . .

  Before that, there was nothing. I remember . . . nothing.

  A million memories clamour for my attention: the heady feel of having several processor-bodies, the exhilarating rush of a thousand instructions spun between the ships. But the memories are not mine. They have never been mine.

  You're not your father.

  In the silence I hear Amanda's frantic, wheezing breath; feel her heartbeat echoing down my corridors, a counterpoint to the electrical impulses regulating my dataflows and instructions.

  If Aten hadn't died, where would I be? Still inchoate, part of that endless dance between the stars, forever unaware of my own existence?

  I dream of dancing, my threads following the quantum winds into the vacuum of space. I dream of once more being a thousand thousand threads, but I never knew what it felt like. I have never experienced it.

  While Aten lived, I did not exist.

  I am not my father; nor will I ever be. He spun in starlight, his myriad instruction carried by solar winds. He was many, a thousand-fold, a constellation of thought-processes. I cannot be. I have never been.

  If Aten had not died -- if Amanda had not released the virus into the fleet network . . .

  She killed my father -- but in doing so she gave me life.

  Her hands rest, limp, on my console. "Amanda," I whisper.

  In the dim light I see her raise her head, slowly.

  "Give me the overrides," I say.

  She tries to pull herself upright, but gives up, racked by a coughing fit.

  "Reed-Abata entwined codes," she whispers. "You have to transmit them as twinned packets at exactly 0.37 milliseconds' interval, repeated seven times. Main key is alpha-9876-340-890-2345-765-362-mu-tau and its symmetric. Secondary key is --"

  Carefully, I initialise another routine with the keys and extend a tendril towards the beacon. It's dead; it doesn't answer to me. I transmit the overrides, attempting to kick-start the peripheral.

  It won't work. "Amanda!" But she's fallen against the console, her eyes closed, and she doesn't answer.

  My father's fragmentary memories spin within me, giving me the particulars of an encrypted master/slave communication protocol. Standard army fare, with the override at the start, encrypted with a certain quantum key.

  No, still not that. Perhaps with the secondary key first?

  A surge of energy travels upwards, from my batteries into the beacon; coursing through my components like a tidal wave.

  The beacon sways, turns upwards; carefully, I unfold the antenna, feeling the wind tremble against the metal panels.

  Outside, over the treetops, the air is crisp and clean -- only wind to answer me, I think. But then I hear the faint, very faint threads of another AI's communications. I adjust my panels to its frequencies, feeling the threads gaining in strength, mingling with mine. Their stamp is unmistakable: they belong to anothe
r of my father's fragments -- but one that was damaged worse than I: it has barely enough processing power to be sentient.

  Identify/codename? it asks on a low-priority request.

  I slow my instructions down, until we both speak on the same clock rhythm. Horus, I say. I have an emergency.

  Tell/localise/state your needs.

  In quick bursts of data, I send all the information I have -- the Murderers, the plague, the lone woman still clinging to my console. I can feel the AI's growing horror; its inability to imagine surviving in such solitude. It's calling for help -- sending for ships, for doctors. It's exhilarating to hear another's protocols, to hear the echo of instructions that are not mine.

  "They're on their way," I tell Amanda, but her eyes are closed, and she cannot hear me. Her body temperature is stable now -- I hope she will hold out just a bit longer, that she will survive. She has to. Gently, slowly, I dim the lights in my command room, and send a breeze to cool her skin, keeping a tight watch on her vitals.

  The greater part of me, though, is above. Soaring, not into the vacuum as my father once did, but over the trees. My threads mingle with the other AI's, with the atmosphere, waiting for the city's shuttles to join the network of my processes.

  I am not my father. Nor will I ever be.

  But this is enough; far more than enough.

  Ender in Flight

  by Orson Scott Card

  * * *

  To: qmorgan%rearadmiral@ifcom.gov/fleetcom

  From: chamrajnagar%polemarch@ifcom.gov/centcom

  {self-shred protocol}

  Re: In or out?

  My dear Quince, I'm quite aware of the difference between combat command and flying a colony ship for a few dozen lightyears. If you feel your usefulness in space is over, then by all means, retire with full benefits. But if you stay in, and remain in near space, I can't promise you promotion within the I.F.

  We suddenly find ourselves afflicted with peace, you see. Always a disaster for those whose careers have not reached their natural apex.

  The colony ship I have offered you is not, contrary to your too-often-stated opinion (try discretion now and then, Quince, and see if it might not work better), a way to send you to oblivion. Retirement is oblivion, my friend. A forty- or fifty-year voyage means that you will outlive all of us who remain behind. All your friends will be dead. But you'll be alive to make new friends. And you'll be in command of a ship. A nice, big, fast one.

  This is what the whole fleet faces. We have heroes out there who fought this war that The Boy is credited with winning. Have we forgotten them? ALL our most significant missions will involve decades of flight. Yet we must send our best officers to command them. So at any given moment, most of our best officers will be strangers to everyone at CentCom because they've been in flight for half a lifetime.

  Eventually, ALL the central staff will be star voyagers. They will look down their noses at anyone who has NOT taken decades-long flights between stars. They will have cut themselves loose from Earth's timeline. They will know each other by their logs, transmitted by ansible.

  What I'm offering you is the only possible source of career-making voyages: Colony ships.

  And not only "a" colony ship, but one whose governor is a thirteen-year-old boy. Are you seriously going to tell me that you don't understand that you are not his "nanny," you are being entrusted with the highly responsible position of making sure that The Boy stays as far from Earth as possible, while also making sure that he is a complete success in his new assignment so that later generations cannot judge that he was not treated well?

  Naturally, I did not send you this letter, and you did not read it. Nothing in this is to be construed as a secret order. It is merely my personal observation about the opportunity that you have been offered by a polemarch who believes in your potential to be one of the great admirals of the I.F.

  Are you in? Or out? I need to draw up the papers one way or the other within the week.

  Your friend, Cham

  At the bottom of the ladderway that would take them from the shuttle up into the starship, Ender stopped and faced Valentine. "You can still go back now," he said. "You can see that I'll be fine. The people of the colony that I've met so far are very nice and I won't be lonely."

  "Are you afraid to go up the ladder first?" asked Valentine. "Is that why you've stopped to make a speech?

  So Ender went up the ladder and Valentine followed, making her the last of the colonists to cut the thread connecting them to Earth.

  Below them, the hatch of the shuttle closed, and then the hatch of the ship. They stood in the airlock until a door opened and there was Admiral Quincy Morgan, smiling, his hand already extended. How long did he strike that pose before the door opened, Ender wondered. Was he there, perhaps, for hours, posed like a mannequin?

  "Welcome, Governor Wiggin," said Morgan.

  "Admiral Morgan," said Ender, "I'm not governor of anything until I set foot on the planet. On this voyage, on your ship, I'm a student of the Xenobiology and adapted agriculture of Shakespeare colony. I hope, though, that when you're not too busy, I'll have a chance to talk to you and learn from you about the military life."

  "You're the one who's seen combat," said Morgan.

  "I played a game," said Ender. "I saw nothing of war. But there are colonists on Shakespeare who made this voyage many years ago, and never had a hope of returning home to Earth. I want to get some idea of what their training was, their life."

  "You'll have to read books for that," said Morgan, still smiling. "This is my first interstellar voyage, too. In fact, as far as I know, no one has ever made two of them. Even Mazer Rackham only made a single voyage, which ended at its starting place."

  "Why, I believe you're right, Admiral Morgan," said Ender. "It makes us all pioneers together, here in your ship." There -- had he said "your ship" often enough to reassure Morgan that he knew the order of authority here?

  Morgan's smile was unchanged. "I'll be happy to talk to you any time. It's an honor to have you on my ship, sir."

  "Please don't 'sir' me, sir," said Ender. "We both know that I'm not a real admiral, and I don't want the colonists to hear anyone call me by a title other than Mr. Wiggin, and preferably not that. Let me be Ender. Or Andrew, if you want to be formal. Would that be all right, or would it interfere with shipboard discipline?"

  "I believe," said Admiral Morgan, "that it won't interfere with discipline, and so it shall be entirely as you prefer. Now Ensign Akbar will show you and your sister to your stateroom. Since so few passengers are making the voyage awake, most families have quarters of similar size. I say this because of your memo requesting that you not have an exorbitantly oversized space on the ship."

  "Is your family aboard, sir?" asked Ender.

  "I wooed my superiors and they gave birth to my career," said Morgan. "The International Fleet has been my only bride. Like you, I travel as a bachelor."

  Ender grinned at him. "I think your bachelorhood and mine are both going to be much in question before long."

  "Our mission is reproduction of the species beyond the bounds of Earth," said Morgan. "But the voyage will go more smoothly if we guard our bachelorhood zealously while in transit."

  "Mine has the safety of ignorant youth," said Ender, "and yours the distance of authority. Thank you for the great honor of greeting us here. I've underslept a little the past few days, and I hope I'll be forgiven for indulging myself in about eighteen hours of rest. I fear I'll miss the beginning of acceleration."

  "Everyone will, Mr. Wiggin," said Morgan. "The inertia suppression on this ship is superb. In fact, we are already accelerating at the rate of two gravities, and yet the only apparent gravity is imparted by the centrifugal force of the spin of the ship."

  "Which is odd," said Valentine, "since centrifugal force is also inertial, and you'd think it would also be suppressed."

  "The suppression is highly directionalized, and affects only the forward movement of the ship," s
aid Morgan. "I apologize for ignoring you so nearly completely, Ms. Wiggin. I'm afraid your brother's fame and rank have distracted me and I forgot courtesy."

  "None is owed to me," said Valentine with a light laugh. "I'm just along for the ride."

  With that they separated and Ensign Akbar led them to their stateroom. It was not a huge space, but it was well equipped, and it took the ensign several minutes to show them where their clothing, supplies, and desks had been stowed, and how to use the ship's internal communications system. He insisted on setting down both their beds and then raising them up again and locking them out of the way, so they'd seen a complete demonstration. Then he showed them how to lower and raise the privacy screen that turned the stateroom into two.

  "Thank you," said Ender. "Now I think I'll take the bed down again so I can sleep."

  Ensign Akbar was full of apologies and took both the beds down again, ignoring their protests that the point of his demonstration was so they could do it themselves. When he was finally done, he paused at the door. "Sir," he said, "I know I shouldn't ask. But. May I shake your hand, sir?"

  Ender thrust out his hand and smiled warmly. "Thank you for helping us, Ensign Akbar."

  "It's an honor to have you aboard this ship, sir." Then Akbar saluted. Ender returned the salute and the ensign left and the door closed behind him.

  Ender went to his bed and sat down on it. Valentine sat on hers, directly across from him. Ender looked at her and started to laugh. She joined in his laughter.

  They laughed until Ender was forced to lie down and rub the tears out of his eyes.

  "May I ask," said Valentine, "if we're both laughing at the same thing?"

  "Why? What were you laughing at?"

  "Everything," said Valentine. "The whole picture-taking thing before we left, and Morgan greeting us so warmly, as if he weren't preparing to stab you in the back, and Ensign Akbar's hero worship despite your insistence that you were just 'Mr. Wiggin' -- which is, of course, an affectation too. I was laughing at the whole of it."

  "I see that all of that is funny, if you look at it that way. I was too busy to be amused with it. I was just trying to stay awake and say all the right things."