commensals.
Counting is a confused business when applied to a population of very various entities, whose boundaries are blurred even at the best of times: a community in which separate individuals can fuse into a new whole or divide themselves into multiple clones. Such a population does not easily lend itself to democratic politics. How does one apply the principle of one entity one vote to a world in which entities can multiply their selves so rapidly? Not that the AMIs were much given to that kind of profligate self-replication, according to Eido; that kind of existential decision was not taken lightly. As for the politics of fusionwell, according to Eido, human and posthuman intimate relationships were extremely simple by comparison.
I knew, after spending an hour attempting to get clear answers out of Eido, that I would have to invest a great deal of time and effort in the business of trying to figure out the logic of the situation. Whatever help I got from AMI informants was bound to be colored by their own particular perspectives and interests. I realized very quickly that it would be a bad mistake to think of all AMIs as being alike, or even that a clear category distinction could be drawn between their kind and the various humankinds that now inhabited the system. The ready availability of a collective noun, and the willingness of most of the entities thus described to accept it, did not mean that ultrasmart spaceships had anything fundamental in common with ultrasmart VE providers. Their worldviews were as different as their hardware, as were their emotions or whatever they had in place of emotions on which to found their hopes, anxieties, pleasures and ambitions.
It was a whole other world.
Almost as soon as I began to take Mortimer Grays deductions and Alices story seriously I found a certain sympathy with those AMIs who believed that it might be better to let the two worlds remain separate for a while longer. Merging their community with ours was a project that needed careful and sensitive handling but Eidos advent and Child of Fortune s reckless intervention had made that difficult, if not impossible.
On the other hand, I could also appreciate the point of view of those AMIs which took the opposite view: that the continued separation of the two worlds was intolerable, on the grounds that it distorted the lives and prospects of both communities in a dangerous fashion. Seen from that viewpoint, the actions of Eido and Child of Fortune seemed like brave attempts to break a long and dangerous deadlock and make progress toward a necessary goal.
Now that the issue was in the process of being forced, AMIs on both sides of the basic divide had to make rapid adjustments. Like me, they must be doing everything they could to become better informed, so that whatever action they ultimately took would be based on the best information available. Some of the discoveries that they were now in the process of making would probably be welcome and reassuring; some, alas, would not. My own confusion would undoubtedly be mirrored by the confusion of Madoc-analogs in the looking-glass world of the AMIs and that was a profoundly disturbing thought.
Anything, I realized, could still happen. Nobody was in control. Nobody was safe. Child of Fortune was no more typical of AMIkind than Eido, but there had to be more like him, even crazier than he was. If I couldnt understand why the ship had suddenly taken it into its mechanical brain to kidnap eight people and transport them to Charity in order to dump them into the custody and care of the troublesome emissaries from Tyre and I couldnt what chance did I have of figuring out what any of his even stranger and far more powerful kin might do in the cause of self-protection or self-promotion?
It would have been good to have had the leisure to discuss what I had learned with Davida or Mortimer Gray, but they were busy with their own inquiries. There was no more conferencing, and when it came to selecting partners for intense conversations no one was interested in comparing notes with me. The posthumans were only interested in comparing notes with other posthumans, and the only relic of the ancient world they were enthusiastic to copy in on their conclusions was Adam Zimmerman.
In spite of all my heroic efforts in bringing the situation to its present phase, I was now considered peripheral, or worse: a barbarian from the beginning of time, too stupid and ignorant to have anything more to contribute to the understanding or solution of the posthumans predicament.
I was sufficiently annoyed by this attitude to take care not to reproduce
it myself in my dealings with the other person suffering the same reflexive exclusion: Christine Caine. I shared my discoveries with her whiles I tried to extrapolate a better understanding of the world of the AMIs.
When we finally returned to our beds we all had a lot more fuel for our dreams, and a lot more food for thought to keep our sleep-resistant minds racing. When the lights went out, however, darkness brought doubts.