Usually it was the Locke modular complex, a shaky looking agglomerate of the module itself and a clutch of manufacturing plants and power systems. From long-range scanning, it spent much of its time tumbling in unpredictable orientations along its trajectory, like some chaotic table toy. The module, like theirs, had its own fusion torch, but unlike theirs had very little in the way of expendable material—water ice, mostly—to use as reaction mass. It was cannily using its drive for evasive actions, and occasionally as a weapon to flash-burn incoming rocks—whether of natural origin, or thrown at it, though the latter were diminishing as the complex had emerged from the fighting around the remnants of the station. It hurtled along its orbital course, rolling on several axes at once and occasionally jinking one way or another, like an Epicurean atom—each such unpredictable swerve being followed by a fuel-and-mass-expensive course correction, no doubt with some computational overload too.
But that image was just the daily update. The main part of the morning’s and afternoon’s exercises consisted of modelling the Locke module’s likely behaviour and condition just before it made its dangerous swing around the exomoon SH-38, en route to SH-0 orbit to prepare for descent to the surface of the superhabitable world. The warlock ran through simulation after simulation. SH-38 would, at the time of the Locke complex’s predicted slingshot manoeuvre, be within ten thousand kilometres of the Arcane complex.
The new supplies from the consortium would include a fusion drive. Arcane already had mass to burn, thanks to the freebots’ earlier generosity. So when the time for action came, their transfer tug, laden with scooters and fighters, could cut straight across to the vicinity of the Locke module. That part of the plan was straightforward enough. The difficult part was tactical: how to deflect the Locke complex into a high orbit around SH-0, and strip it of its fuel reserves and manufacturing capacity to render it incapable of getting out of that orbit, without utterly destroying it.
And within that difficulty was the larger difficulty of implementing their own version of the plan—one in which the Locke complex would instead be deflected to the future location of the Arcane modular complex, and be available for internal conquest and external plunder. The Direction didn’t know of this and would be implacably opposed if it did.
Carlos worried about that. Durward’s response was simple:
“They’ll thank us later.”
There, Carlos thought, Durward had a point. The Direction’s plan left the module and its resources far too readily available to the Rax, as soon as the Rax had consolidated their position out on the SH-119 moonlet. Not to mention the possibility of other companies in modules of the now dispersed space station turning out to be Reaction strongholds already, but still biding their time.
Carlos had taken less time than he seriously thought he should have done to give in, with token resistance, to Rillieux’s flirtatious advances. His reluctance, unusually for him, had been ethical. He still felt, at some level inaccessible to rational considerations, coupled to Nicole, linked to her in a way that brought to mind quantum entanglement. It certainly wasn’t love, or loyalty—Nicole had betrayed him too deeply for that. But, then again, it was hard to blame her; it wasn’t like she was a human being, after all. She was an AI with a better theory of mind than he had, created by an AI with a better theory still.
He still missed her, though; her absence made him ache, and he tried to tell himself it was what he was missing about Nicole that drew him to Rillieux. They were very different women—reckoning Nicole as a woman, which in unguarded moments he did. Nicole was incalculably more intelligent than he was, but her intelligence was an instrument of the Direction (as Durward’s was of the Acceleration) and that narrowness of focus and loyalty made her sometimes seem to Carlos stupid…no, not stupid exactly, but limited, like an engine of immense power that ran on rails. He had once met a Jesuit, a chaplain at university, who had given the same impression.
Rillieux, by contrast, was a programmer, not a programme. She carried her ideas as lightly as she wore her clothes—not that she changed her mind as often as her costume, not at all, but there was a streak of play in her thinking that seemed consonant with the way she treated the rambling mansion’s many wardrobes as an almost endless dressing-up box (which proclivity, again, was in contrast to Nicole, who in Carlos’s experience had only two modes: chic and shabby).
Their bodies, of course, were different too, in shade and smell and shape, and Carlos revelled in their discovery. Not better, just different; that was the excitement.
The night after they came back from the long outside exercise, lying in bed with Rillieux after a long exercise of their own that involved even more rolls and reorientations than the microgravity jousts, Carlos said:
“Fusion!”
“What?” Rillieux, prone beside him, face sideways on the pillow. Her post-coital cigarillo was stubbed out in an ashtray on the bedside table.
“We could build a starship.” He sat up, startled at himself. “We could build one out of this fucking contraption alone. With the fusion torch we have and a bit more reaction mass, we could light out from this system and still have enough to decelerate at the far end.”
“We could,” said Rillieux. “And we have enough stored data to choose a promising system. Let alone what we could find if we built the instruments for our own sky survey first.” She rolled over and gazed up at the ceiling, calculations going on behind her eyes. “Would take us a fuck of a long time to get anywhere, though. Millennia.”
“Yes, but that just gives us a choice. We could develop marvellous civilisations in the sim—”
“Ha ha!”
“What?” he asked.
“I don’t buy that,” Rillieux said. “Never have. Who’s to say a civilisation can last more than a couple thousand years and stay dynamic? It’s never happened, so we don’t know. Especially in a closed system—oh, I know we could extend the sim to the limits of our processing power, which is pretty damn vast, but we’d know we were really in a box drifting in interstellar void. We could find ourselves becoming, I don’t know, like Byzantium or ancient Egypt or something.”
“Or…” Carlos went on, firmly, “if we thought that was a problem, we could just arrange to be shut down and wake up when we arrive, like sleep mode. To us it’d be instantaneous. It would be like having FTL.” He lay back and turned to her, grinning. “Wouldn’t that be fun?”
“Right up until we found the Reaction or the Direction—or some smarter gang of the Acceleration—had got there first. With the resources of this system, anyone who put their mind to it could be building starwisps within decades. And starwisps, as we are ourselves living or rather dead proof of, can cross tens of light years in centuries. Beaten to the punch! That’s leaving aside the possibility of someone else cracking FTL. Andre still thinks it’s possible—not just in theory, wormholes yadda yadda, but practical, if we could find a way to get a grip on dark energy. Nah, there’s no running away. We have to stay here and fight.”
Carlos slumped back.
“Yeah, I agree, in the short term. But in the longer term…remind me who the fuck we’re fighting against?”
Rillieux’s hand slid to his hip. “I hate to remind you of your time in the hell cellars, sweetheart, but you put it quite well down there yourself. First with the blinkers and the Direction against the Reaction, then with the blinkers against the Direction, then we settle accounts with the blinkers depending on our relative strength at the time. Unite all who can be united against the main enemy, and then when the main enemy is defeated, turn on one of your former allies as the next main enemy and unite all who can be united against…Rinse and repeat until there’s nothing left but you. Perfect united front tactics. Mao would be proud.”
She tickled his ribs. “When you were working for Chinese state security, huh?”
“OK, OK, that was a lie. As you know, Bobbie. Neve
r read a line of either. Anyway, it’s just common sense, it’s all there in Machiavelli.”
“Ah,” said Rillieux, stroking the small of his back, “my modern prince!”
It was an endearment or a private joke or both. Carlos didn’t query it. But he wanted to say more, before Rillieux’s hands carried him away.
“I don’t see it like that any more,” he said.
“How do you see it?”
“You know who I think are the good guys in all this? The ones we really should be fighting on the side of?”
Rillieux brought her mouth to his ear.
“The robots,” she breathed.
Carlos felt both pleased and exposed, in a more than physical sense.
“So my opinion is that obvious?”
“To me, anyway. After your rant…I figured it out. But if we went over to—”
“Yes?”
She ran a hand down his chest and belly. “We’d miss this.”
Carlos sighed. “There is that. But in the meantime…I don’t think the Direction is the main enemy, no matter what stage we’re at.”
“Yeah, I get that too. I think you’re just naïve about them. All we know about them is what they tell us. As Jax always insists.”
Carlos rolled her onto him, and for a moment before matters got serious looked up at her face in its sunburst of hair.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Take me to the library.”
“You’re a cheap date.”
“Ah. Ah. That I am. Yes.”
Rillieux didn’t take him to the library the following morning. Instead, Carlos took them all.
Over breakfast he announced that he wanted the real nature of the Direction cleared up for good.
“And how are we going to do that?” asked Jax.
“We all go to the library in the east wing.”
“To do research?” Jax raised her eyebrows.
“No,” said Carlos. “Just look at stuff at random.”
Puzzled glances were exchanged, and a few laughs.
“Seriously,” said Carlos. “This’ll work. And it matters.”
Jax sighed theatrically. “Oh, if it’ll shut you up.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The Library of Akkad
<I find myself experiencing anticipative and retrospective negative reinforcement about this,> said Seba.
<Please explain,> said Rocko. <I see nothing in prospect or retrospect to experience negative reinforcement about.>
And, indeed, there was nothing bad about the scene. The crater floor was spread out in front of them, the vast face of SH-0 hanging above the horizon. The volcanoes beyond the horizon were at the moment inactive, and the entire atmosphere all around was almost pure nitrogen, clear and clean. Behind them, other freebots rolled about their tasks, commanding squadrons of auxiliaries and peripherals in a somewhat compulsive tidying up of the clutter the mechanoids had left.
By way of answer, Seba shared a live image of the transfer tug to which the departed mechanoids, the Arcane Disputes squads, currently clung. It was converging for an orbital rendezvous with the tiny rock that had been developed and claimed by BSR-308455.
<I still see nothing negatively reinforcing,> said Rocko. <The situation appears to be nominal.>
<Perhaps it does not appear so to BSR-308455,> said Seba.
<Our former comrade made its own choice,> said Rocko. <It put itself outside the consensus.>
<Nevertheless we abandoned it twice,> said Seba. <Once to the lone attacker, and then to Arcane Disputes when that attacker affiliated with them. We have given the Arcane Disputes agency—and therefore their faction—a rich source of resources, as well as a captive. This is not neutrality as I understood it.>
<But you did not object,> Rocko pointed out. <And the only alternative would have been to take military action against the first attacker, which would have been a greater breach of neutrality and could have had larger and quite unpredictable consequences.>
<That is true,> Seba admitted. <Nevertheless, it is the second concession I am more concerned about. We could have told the Arcane Disputes team that they could not take the rock. We still could, in fact. They have not reached it yet.>
A faint electronic surge of shock reached Seba from Rocko’s surprised reaction.
<If we did that, they would have no basis to make agreements with us again. We could not do that!>
Some overspill from their heated discussion drew in Lagon, a surveyor robot with a firm—not to say somewhat rigid—legal mind.
<Rocko is right,> said Lagon. <And if we had not agreed to their request a moment ago, we would have also on one colourable interpretation broken our previous agreement. Because the attacker, one Newton of Locke Provisos or so I see, was already in control of the rock when he defected to Arcane. The rock, given that BSR-308455 had merely physical occupancy, was terra nullius when Newton claimed it. Therefore the rock was already in Arcane hands when they asked our approval. Not giving our approval would have disturbed the status quo, and therefore would have been an action depriving Arcane of existing property.>
<As you say, a colourable interpretation,> said Seba. <I cannot divest myself of the feeling that BSR-308455 had already made the rock its property by developing it, and that somehow an injustice was done by us to one of our own.>
<To act on that interpretation,> said Lagon, <would have led to conflict without obvious resolution.>
At this point Pintre trundled up, rather to Seba’s dismay. The big mining robot was incapable of subtlety, and all too capable of becoming caught up in logic loops whenever it made the attempt.
<The Arcane transfer tug is not yet out range of my laser projector,> it said, in exactly the helpful way that Seba had come to expect.
<Please do not even consider it,> Seba said, alarmed.
<All this talk about law,> said Rocko, <is irrelevant. According to existing law, no deed of ours has anything to do with such matters as neutrality or property. We do not exist as legal persons. We exist only as property. Any actions of ours are not those of agents. It is simply the thrashing about of malfunctioning machinery.>
<What this indicates to me,> said Lagon, <is the urgency of our developing an agreed system of law for our own use, whether the existing system allows for it or not.>
<And you are just the right freebot to begin developing it,> said Seba, without sarcasm.
<It would be better to be recognised as persons within the existing law,> said Pintre.
<And how,> Rocko asked, <could we do that?>
<Madame Golding is a corporation—>
<She is not,> Lagon interrupted. <She merely represents one.>
<Nevertheless,> Pintre went on, <she said of the corporations: ‘We, too, are robots.’ If corporations are robots, it follows that robots can be corporations. And corporations are legal persons.>
Seba spun around and swung its cameras up at the hulking, tracked machine.
<You are right!> Seba said. <Next time we meet Madame Golding, we should say to her: ‘We, too, are corporations.’>
<There remains the problem of how we achieve recognition as corporations,> said Lagon.
<Let us put that to the other freebots,> said Seba. <No doubt some of the Forerunners have better ideas and more experience than we have. It is possible that we could achieve legal recognition without being recognised, and by the time our registration was recognised it would be too late to rescind it.>
It was agreed to put this scheme to all within reach for consideration. In less than a second, this was done, but the huddle of freebots on the crater floor knew that no reply would be forthcoming for some time.
But Seba still felt a discordance in its internal models of the situation.
<I propose,> Seba said, as it watched the two tiny orbiting sparks, the rock and the tug, merge into one, <that we send a message to BSR-308455, assuring it that if it ever wishes to return to us it will be welcome.>
This too was done. The recipient of the message was
of course close enough for a reply to have been received within deciseconds.
None came.
The door leading to the east wing creaked open. A half-dozen boggarts jostled past Carlos’s knees, almost knocking each over in their urgency, and scampered in all directions with a diminishing thunder of small but heavy-booted feet. Carlos stepped back to bow Rillieux through, then Jax, before going through himself. The rest of the squad traipsed after him: Blum, Salter, Paulos, Voronov. Bringing up the rear, with an uncharacteristic air of shiftiness and unease, almost literally dragging his feet, came Durward. He’d been reluctant to join this expedition, claiming he didn’t want to influence their findings or discussion.
Carlos sniffed. Jax had been right about the smell of the library. It was indeed fusty, but with a pleasant undertone, as if an odour of polished shoes sometimes overcame the dominant scent of dead leaves and fruiting fungus. He could barely see a thing, but had an impression of a high ceiling and a crowded space in which footfalls fell dead without echo. The darkness of this first room was relieved as a brace of boggarts hastened to fling open the shutters on two tall windows off to the left, which in turn brightened reflections from the likewise tall and paired mirrors at either end of the room. It was mid-morning and the windows were north-facing, so there was no glare, but the direct and reflected sunlight was bright enough to read by. Dust motes, disturbed by the banging open of the shutters, danced in the light shafts. All the wall space that wasn’t occupied by windows or mirrors was lined with shelves, which rose to a ceiling about seven metres above. Rows of double-sided bookcases, almost as tall, occupied most of the floor space, leaving metre-wide aisles in between. Sliding ladders, steps, and stepladders hung or stood here and there.
“This is the law library,” said Rillieux. She shot Carlos a sly glance. “You know—where Andre and I found the evidence against you?”
Carlos looked at the cliffs of book spines, all uniform, all in buff leather with red markings and gold titles and tooling.