Are you saying you didnt know that? I countered.
Yes I am, he came back, immediately. And now the AMIs have it?
I nodded my head. Christine had been cleaned out, I told him. They didnt get anything out of her but a memory of the subjective aspects of her experience but I was still dirty. The stuff they tried out on me was unflushable back in the twenty-third century, so I was frozen down with it. Davida mentioned its mysterious presence when she first talked to me, but she hadnt a clue what it was and she jumped to an innocuous conclusion.
Lowenthal was looking at me just as I had suspected he might.
The Snow Queen cleared it out, I told him. I cant be absolutely certain that Im not still carrying the infection, just as you cant be absolutely certain that Im not a victim operating under its control, but Im prepared to assume that Christine and I are clean. The more important fact is that whether the Hardinist Cabal still has the weapon or not, the AMIs do. For what its worth, I dont think they needed it. If theyd ever intended to exterminate or enslave you, they could have done it. The fact that theyre divided among themselves complicates the situation, but I dont think youre significantly worse off now than you were when this thing started.
Lowenthal obviously wasnt prepared to make that assumption, but he wasnt stupid enough to blame me for the sins his own predecessors had committed.
Who started the war? Niamh Horne wanted to know. What are their objectives?
I dont have the faintest idea, I told her, truthfully. Its AMI against AMI, for the time being. Anything that happens to us, or the rest of humankind, will probably be a matter of being caught in the crossfire. Some of them are trying to absorb or enslave one another, but mostly theyre fighting for control of their stupid kin: the not-so-smart spaceships; the fusers; the factories. They want to be able to determine their own growth, reproduction, and evolution. Its not posthuman rivals for those privileges theyre worried about, except perhaps on Earth; its the balance of power within their own community thats been upset. Secrecy breeds paranoia, and the one habit theyve all elevated to the status of an obsession is secrecy. Their New Era of Openness and Negotiation will begin tomorrow, or the day after, but its birth pangs may be intense.
Can we do anything? Lowenthal asked, speaking very softly.
You tell me, I retorted. Weve already served the various peculiar purposes that were on the Snow Queens improvised agenda, and weve been dumped inside yet another failed project in yet another isolated lump of rock. Can we do anything, to help ourselves or anyone else?
Lowenthal put on a sour expression. Given time, Niamh may be able to rig up a means to communicate with the outside, he said. If anyones listening, we might be able to get through to them but whether theyll be able to respond
Niamh Horne nodded in agreement. Michael Lowenthals expression was as serious and dutiful as hers, but I suspected that he was not entirely displeased to be advised that there was nothing we could do. He was still in possession of the opinions hed expressed in his trumped-up dialog with Julius Ngomi. He thought that Earth was unlikely to be as badly hit in any AI war as any place where posthumans depended on machines for the most elementary life-support. Horne, who had reached exactly the same conclusion, had far more cause to be deeply anxious about her nearest and dearest, and about the possibility of having a life to return to if she ever got out of Polaris.
Were vulnerable here, she said. We have to do what we can to secure the position. It might be a long time before we can get out, unless we can reach Charity and even that might be a case of leaping from the frying pan into the fire. Can we reach Charity , do you think?
She was hoping that Polaris might actually have landed on the comet core in which the Ark had hitched a ride back in the 2150s, and might still be close at hand. The fact that the supplies had been transferred lent some hope to that hypothesis, but the fact that we were spinning presumably while moving at a constant velocity while Charity had been accelerating under fuser power
suggested otherwise.
I doubt it, I admitted. I doubt that we can even get out to the surface to look around, unless someone took the trouble to leave a cache of spacesuits behind when the would-be colonists left.
Id feel a lot safer if we could find smartsuits of any kind, Lowenthal put in. Do you know whether we have any IT?
I shook my head, wearily. I shouldnt have been tired, given that Id been in a VE cocoon for days and that the pull of gravity was so feeble, but I felt exhausted in body and mind alike. I dont feel like a man with good IT, I said. I suspect that the bots la Reine pumped into us suffered the same disintegration of control as her other subsidiary symptoms. Itll take a couple of days to piss them all away, but thats probably all theyre good for. Again there was room for hope but not for overmuch optimism.