Firebird

TWENTY-EIGHT

Maybe it fell into a black hole.

“The problem,” I said, “is that there's just too much space to cover. Too much guesswork involved.”

Alex was ready to throw up his hands. “Maybe she was right about the black hole.”

“Anything's possible, boss.”

“I'm serious.”

“I, um, don't think I understand.”

“I'm going to wander down to Survey this afternoon. You want to come along?”

“No, thank you. If you don't mind, Alex, I've had enough astrophysics for a while.”

He hadn't gotten back when I closed the office and headed home. I needed a break, though, so I went partying that night. When I got back, there was a message from Alex. “Got news. Call me.”

It was well into the morning, so I wasn't going to bother him. But it took me a while to get to sleep. The result was that I showed up at the country house next day bleary-eyed and probably not in a good mood. Jacob probably let him know I was there, and I was still getting out of my jacket when I heard Alex's voice: “When you've a moment, Chase, come up.”

Alex maintains a secondary office upstairs. That's where he retires when he wants to do research or simply get his mind away from the day's business. I don't bother him when he's there unless we've caught fire.

When I walked in, he was sipping orange juice and munching on a chocolate donut. He tapped a finger on the display, which was filled with arcing lines and numbers. “Chase,” he said, “I think we have it.” His eyes glowed. “Jacob, show her.”

The room darkened, and I found myself looking across a starscape. A terrestrial planet and its sun floated in the foreground. “Good morning to you, too, Alex,” I said.

“Oh, yes, sorry. Good morning.” He took a deep breath. “I've been locked up with this stuff all night.”

“So what have we got?”

“Did you get some breakfast?”

“Not yet.” The normal routine was to check in and then hit the dining room. But I wanted to know what he had to tell me.

“Do you want to eat first?”

He was being a tease. “Come on, Alex,” I said. “What do you have?”

He waited for me to sit. “Why were Robin and Winter both interested in black holes?” he said.

“We've been over that, Alex.”

“I don't mean the standard fascination by every physicist in the Confederacy. You remember telling me that Winter was tracking the trajectories of some black holes?”

“Yes, of course. You're not going to tell me one of them's coming this way, are you?”

“No, Chase.”

“Kidding.”

“Actually, that was my first thought. That a black hole was headed somewhere. But I checked them as soon as I was able. As far as Jacob can tell, no black hole anywhere is threatening anybody.”

“Well, that's good.”

“Jacob,” he said, “show Chase what we have.”

A planet appeared on the display, with a sun in the background. “The sun is Setara. Do you recognize the world?”

It was mostly ocean, but living worlds all tend to resemble one another. “No,” I said.

“It's Point Edward.” Named for Edward Trimble, and his extrapolation of the quantum point theory regarding why the universe existed. Nobody understood it sufficiently to challenge it until recently. “This is where it was six years ago.”

“Okay.”

A blue line moved out a few inches toward a corner of the room. “This is where it is today.” I heard his chair creak. “Point Edward maintains a Fleet base in orbit. Six years ago, the Abonai left there, made its jump, and, as you know, never arrived at its destination. Oh, by the way-” He offered me a donut. “Chocolate,” he said. “I'm sorry. I'm a bit distracted this morning. Try one. They're good.” He finished off the one he had in his hand.

I took one.

“The Abonai was 1.4 million klicks out from the base when it made the jump. Here.” A silver marker blinked into existence. A white line connected it with the Fleet base.

“Okay.”

“Are you familiar with XK-12?”

“No, I'm not.” I knew the XK designator was used for black holes, but I couldn't differentiate among them.

“This is XK-12 out here.” A red marker lit up. “It's about five light-years from Point Edward.”

“That's fairly close,” I said.

“Fortunately, they're headed in different directions.” A yellow line came out of the black hole and made for one of the windows.

“Now,” he continued, “let me show you where the hole has been.” A second yellow line came back in the opposite direction and passed close to Setara and Point Edward. It intersected with the silver line that marked the course taken by the Abonai.

“All right,” I said. “So the Abonai made its jump from a place where a black hole had been. But you said it's how far away now?”

“Five light-years.”

“So that thing passed through the launch area, what, thousands of years ago?”

“Jacob?”

“Seven thousand, three hundred twelve years, to be precise.”

“And, of course,” said Alex, “Point Edward was nowhere near it at the time.”

“Okay. So where is this headed, Alex? That's not exactly a near miss. What are you suggesting?”

Alex never enjoyed himself more than when he was solving puzzles. “Let's talk about the Fishbowl sighting.”

“The what?”

“There was a sighting at Fishbowl a thousand years ago. Complete with radio reception. But nobody could understand what they were saying. They got a good reading on the vehicle, and if you traced the trajectory back, it leads directly to Cormoral. Maybe it's a coincidence, but a few thousand years earlier, a black hole had passed through the launch area. At Cormoral.”

“Alex, this is crazy. You're saying two ships get lost because a black hole once passed through their launch areas. And there's a connection?”

“You think it's a coincidence.”

“How long had it been since the black hole had passed through the Cormoral area?”

“Half a million years.”

“Okay. Half a million years. So, what are you saying?”

“Chase, you haven't heard everything.”

“There's more?” I tried not to roll my eyes.

“Jacob, show us the XK-12 track.” Another yellow line reached out, crossed the table, and touched the door. “Okay, put Rimway in the position it would have occupied forty-one years ago.”

A yellow marker appeared on the track.

“Alex-”

“Think about it a minute. We have an easy way to determine whether there's anything to this.”

“And what's that?”

“Cermak's brother said they were going out two hundred billion kilometers. Right?”

“Yes.”

“And we assumed they meant two hundred billion klicks in the direction of the target star, Uriel.”

“Yes. What else would we assume?”

“The distance between where Rimway was forty-one years ago, and the nearest approach of the black-hole track, the one made by XK-12, was approximately a hundred eighty billion kilometers. Not two hundred, but close enough. Chase, I think we didn't find the Firebird because we started from the wrong launch point.”

“Alex-”

“All right, look: The track was in front of Rimway. It was closing on it. We'd literally cross it approximately twenty years later.” He stared at me.

My God. That coincided with the loss of the Capella.

“Chase, I've checked out five other sites where interstellars have gone missing. Three of them have black-hole connections. The other two-” He shrugged. “There are probably holes out there that we don't know about. But the evidence looks fairly conclusive. I think what happens is that when a superdense object goes through a region, it damages both space and time. Don't ask me how that happens. I have no idea. But it looks as if these areas constitute dangerous places to initiate a jump.”

“But, Alex, ships would be leaving the area in the middle of the track all the time. How come only one is affected?”

“I can't answer that. Maybe it has to do with the drive, maybe the configuration of the hull, maybe it depends on how much mass you're dealing with. Probably a combination of factors. But I think that's precisely what's happening.”

Charlie was home by then. He told me how much he'd enjoyed the mission with Belle, and said he hoped it wouldn't be their last.

“Actually,” I said, “I don't think it will be. It was, by the way, the first time we sent the Belle-Marie on her own.”

“I know,” he said. “Belle enjoyed the experience. And-”

“Yes?”

“Well, I don't want to make an issue of it, but the ship was in perfectly good hands. You talk as if there might have been a risk involved.”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I didn't mean to give offense.”

“None taken. I suppose I'm accustomed to having been in a place where the Betas were in charge.”

And we can all see how that turned out. But I resisted the urge. “I know,” I said. “I'm sure it's difficult making the adjustment.”

The so-called black-box issue was still a hot topic. Charlie was watching all the shows. “It doesn't look as if the rescue mission will happen,” he said.

“Give it time, Charlie.”

“I'd hoped,” he told me, “that people might have become more reasonable over all these thousands of years. But I'm sorry to say I can't see that much progress has been made.”

“Some has.”

“Not really. Except for the superficial stuff. The language and the way people dress and the kind of music they listen to. That's improved in some ways. But other than those kinds of cultural things, these could be the same people who brought their children to my school.”

Meanwhile, rescuing the boxes had become something of a media joke. “I should have known better,” Alex said, “than to hope we might get some official help. That won't happen unless people get stirred up over the issue. And it doesn't look as if that's very likely.”

“Not your fault,” I said.

Meantime, we lost a couple more clients over the issue. Jacob sorted through the incoming calls to root out the threats, jeers, and profanity. A few wrote or called to tell us they were disappointed in Alex, that they'd expected more. Some were praying for him.

Charlie put a package online in which he offered to join any rescue mission going to Villanueva. “I will show anyone who cares where other Betas can be found,” he said. But there were no takers. That wasn't a surprise. There had never been a time when anybody paid attention to strange voices on the Web.

On the other hand, we did get some supporters. Unfortunately, they included people who also wanted to argue that AIs should be encouraged to join the ministry; that they should be allowed to marry (and, yes, of course, it would be a purely spiritual relationship); and that AIs, when they reached the end of their ability to function, should be disassembled during an appropriate ceremony and buried with all due respect.

Senator Delmar appeared on The Capitol Hour. It had been a slow news week, so inevitably the host brought up Alex and the boxes. “What is your reaction, Senator,” he asked, “when someone like Benedict, who was a major factor in arranging a cease-fire with the Mutes, now thinks we should go rescue a lot of hardware on Villanueva? You've claimed to be a friend of his. Do you support him in this?”

Delmar was a tall, lean woman, who, in Alex's opinion, could be trusted to say what she thought and to keep her word. I don't mean to suggest that I disagreed, but simply that I didn't know her that well. I will say that she seemed to me to be more dependable than the average politician.

“Well, Ron,” she said, “it's true, Alex has always been a close friend. And I respect him. He's a good, decent man. But he's human. Like any of us, he can make mistakes. And he's made one on this. To the best of our knowledge, AIs are not sentient. It's an illusion. We all realize that, because it's one we've deliberately created. And I've no doubt that Alex, when he thinks about it, realizes it, too. The issue is going away, and I doubt very much that he'll bring it up again.

“I mean, look, Ron, his heart's in the right place. We all know that. In this case, he just made a misjudgment. It can happen to anybody.”

The comment played on most of the news shows that evening, and we started getting calls from the producers. Would Alex like to appear on The Morning Roundtable and reply to the senator? Was he available for an interview with Modern Times? Was he interested in appearing on Erika Gorman's Late Night?

“Ignore it,” I told him. “It's dying. Get past this week, and we'll never hear about it again.”

“And the next time somebody shows up on Villanueva the AIs will complain about us.”

“We tried.”

“No, we didn't. I went on a few talk shows. I appealed to our innate sense of responsibility. Now, somehow, the debate has become about my mental stability.”

“Alex, what more could you do?”

Charlie, of course, also felt the frustration. “Put me on one of these shows,” he said. “I can help.”

Alex didn't like the idea. “We'd get picked up by all the comedy shows. The whole thing would be made into a running punch line.”

“Please, Alex. I have a story to tell.”

He took a deep breath and thought about it. “Okay, Charlie,” he said, finally. “We'll try it. I guess there's nothing to lose. But we stay with the box. No holograms.”

“Not a good idea,” said Charlie. “People need to be able to connect with me.”

“It would be perceived as part of the show. All your twenty-year-old hologram would do is make that point.”

“I still think it would be best if they see me. How about if I provide someone older? We had a guidance counselor at the school-”

“Let it go, Charlie. We'd be attacked on the grounds that we were trying to pass you off as something you're not. You're a Beta. Let's play it that way. With dignity.”

Alex and Charlie showed up two days later on The Morning Roundtable. Alex took his seat with another guest and placed the beige cube in front of him. The other guest was Angelo Cavaretti, gray, middle-aged, and unable to hide his amusement that he was participating in a discussion he perceived as absurd. Cavaretti was better known as the unrelenting attacker of religious believers. When the host opened the proceedings by asking the obvious question, “Are AIs alive?” he responded by laughing.

“I don't want to offend anybody,” he said, “but the notion that a piece of machinery is alive is idiotic. You might as well claim that your table lamp is alive. Or your hot-water heater.”

The host turned to Alex.

“I'm not much interested,” Alex said, “in a debate that's been going on for thousands of years and that nobody can prove one way or the other. I could get loud, like Dr. Cavaretti here. But I'd rather just let your audience hear the AI we brought back speak for himself. Charlie?”

And Charlie told his story, as he had told it to Harley Evans, describing the nighttime silences and the long afternoons watching the sunlight brighten and fail. Remembering the children while he waited in a deserted school. Watching flowers bloom and fade and the shadows creep across the floor. Listening to the leaves brush against the windows, and, later, the whisper of falling snow. Enduring the cycle again and again, endlessly, while nothing inside the building ever moved. “I did have company, though.”

“And who was that?” asked the host, Brockton Moore, who had joined the show a month earlier.

“Other Betas. We spoke often.”

“Other Betas,” said Cavaretti. “What's a Beta?”

“I'm a Beta. It's a nonbiological sentient life-form.”

Cavaretti, barely able to contain his reaction to the absurdity of the proposition, shook his head.

“But,” said the host, “they were only voices?”

“Yes.”

Cavaretti was a model of intensity, his face wrinkled, his jaw set, his arms folded, signifying a desire to be away from this pointless discussion. “So what,” he asked the audience, “does all this prove? The box is programed. It can carry on a conversation. It can describe a compelling experience. It can play championship chess. But does it feel anything? Is there really anyone inside this thing? Come on, Alex. Get serious.”

“I wasn't finished,” said Charlie.

“Oh?” Cavaretti sighed. “And what else have you for us?”

“You, sir, have a closed mind. You're unable to question your own opinions. It is the definition of a blockhead.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“One other thing: I know where some of the Betas can be found. I can't pinpoint locations from here, but I can find them. If anyone out there wants to make the flight to Villanueva, would like to demonstrate the humanity everyone is always bragging about, I would be pleased to go along. I can show you where to look.”

The show hadn't gone off yet before Jacob announced that we had a call from Edward Drummond, an MD who normally collected Ashiyyurean War artifacts from interstellars. Through one of our competitors.

“Put him on,” I said.

I heard a couple of clicks as Jacob switched over. Then a deep baritone: “Hello. I'd like to speak to someone about Villanueva, please.”

“This is Chase Kolpath,” I said. “Can I help you?”

“Ms. Kolpath,” he said, “I just watched the program. Can I borrow Charlie?”

Two days later, Drummond showed up at the country house and wasted no time getting to the point. “I can put together a team, mostly ex-Fleet types,” he told me, while we were walking down the corridor to Alex's office. “And I can get sufficient financial backing.”

“The place is dangerous,” I said.

“Ms. Kolpath, we'd like very much to resolve this problem.” He was tall, with a general demeanor that was more military than medical. His black hair was cut short, and there was no hint of the smile I usually get on first meeting guys. He struck me as being stiff, and consequently too inflexible to trust on a mission like this. He'd get everybody killed.

I introduced him to Alex. They shook hands, and Drummond sat down. “We're in the process of assembling a team,” he said. “They're good people, skilled, able to protect themselves, and they want to help. We want to help.”

“Why?” said Alex.

“Why?” His brow creased, and he leaned forward in his chair. “I'm surprised you feel you have to ask that.”

“I wouldn't ask if I didn't want to hear the answer, Doctor.”

“Mr. Benedict, I've watched AIs give everything they had in combat. And you could see them react exactly as you or I would. When things got bad, they got scared. It wasn't just programing. It really wasn't. On one occasion, one of them-his name was Clay-took over control of his destroyer after it had been evacuated and rammed a Mute frigate. I was talking to him until the end, and nobody is ever going to tell me he wasn't alive.”

Alex nodded. “There's substantial risk involved, Doctor. What makes you think you can go in there, manage a rescue, and not get yourself, and whoever's helping you, killed?”

“I've run rescue missions before, Mr. Benedict. For the Patrol. I've pulled people out of places at least as dangerous as Villanueva. And I'll have professional help.” A smile flickered across his lips.

We brought Charlie into the conversation. There was no hologram. No twenty-year-old. Just a stern voice emanating from the speakers. “Do you actually think you can make this work?” he asked.

“I think, with your assistance, Charlie, we will do pretty well.”

“I hope so. If the mission were to go wrong, it might be a long time before anybody else tries to help.”

“I'm aware of that,” he said.

“Okay,” said Alex. “Dr. Drummond, are you sure?”

“Yes. Of course, Alex. We've already decided about this. We're going to make the effort. If Charlie wants to help, we'd be grateful. But with or without him, we'll be going.”

Alex raised his voice slightly: “Charlie? Do you want to try this?”

“Yes. I am inclined to trust Dr. Drummond.”

“Okay,” Alex said finally. “When do you plan to leave, Doctor?”

“We'll pick Charlie up in three days. In the morning. And, by the way-”

“Yes?”

“My friends call me 'Doc.'“

The night before Charlie left, we threw a party for him.