I stared at her, shaken despite myself. ‘I’ve done nothing out of personal malice,
nothing
I’m ashamed of, and nothing that goes against the true knowledge.’
Mary-Lou shook her head slowly. ‘There are two sides to the true knowledge, and you have forgotten one of them, despite your name. There is not only
amandla
—power. There is also
ngwethu
—freedom.’
‘I know that,’ I said calmly. ‘And we’ll lose both if we throw away our last chance to destroy the Jovians while we still can!’
For a split second, Mary-Lou literally staggered, as though I’d hit her. Then she said:
‘All right. Let me speak to you in a language you understand. We are not throwing away our last chance to destroy the Jovians.
There never was a chance
. As soon as a stable, reality-oriented Jovian culture emerged, there was
no chance
that it could be destroyed by anything we could throw at it. These are beings whose
evolutionary ancestors
disintegrated Ganymede and punched a hole through space! How many
hours
do you think it would take for them to develop some response that could swat aside your comets like flies? And as soon as you brought back the first pictures, and the first messages, there was
not a chance
that the people of the Union would react to the Jovians’ emergence with anything but hope, and to their destruction with anything but horror. You’ve seen how a typical Union member, Suze, a typical tough-minded non-co, Dr Malley, and even your own Command Committee have reacted. They’ve all drawn back from the brink, to varying degrees, and they’re right! Our only
chance
of survival is to survive
with them
, and the only effect of attempting to destroy them would be to
make
them the deadly enemies you seem to take for granted they are.’
She turned to Tatsuro. ‘Which reminds me,’ she said. ‘I heard no dissent from my instruction, except from Ellen. Do you wish to take a vote?’
Tatsuro nodded wearily. ‘Those for accepting the delegate’s instructions.’
All the hands on the other side went up, except Joe’s.
‘Those against.’
Me, and Joe. I smiled at him. He shook his head, lips compressed in a thin line, and drew a finger across his throat. I don’t think anyone else saw the gesture. Behind me, I distinctly heard Yeng say: ‘Shit.’ No one else spoke.
‘Carried,’ said Tatsuro. He took his control panel from its strap around his neck, and jabbed in a long series of firing-codes.
‘It’s done,’ he told Mary-Lou. ‘The jets are firing, the nukes are flaring. The cometary masses have been shifted to the orbit you requested.’
‘Let me confirm that,’ she said. ‘No offence, neighbour.’
She spoke briefly and quietly into a personal phone, waited a few seconds, then nodded.
‘OK,’ she said. ‘The local observatories have confirmed it.’
Her shoulders moved as though a weight had been lifted from them. ‘And now,’ she said, ‘Ellen. Let me try to reassure you about the Jovians.’
My heart was thudding, my mouth dry.
She sat down on the edge of the table, leaning on one hand, twisting her body a little to face me, in a pose of casual conversation. ‘They’re not
monsters
, you know. Why should you expect beings more powerful and intelligent than ourselves to be worse than ourselves? Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to expect them to be
better
? Why should more power mean less good?’
I could hardly believe I was hearing this. Glancing quickly over my shoulder, I saw Andrea, Jaime and Yeng working at their screens but listening intently, and the rest giving Mary-Lou all their attention. I searched for my most basic understanding, and dragged it out:
‘Because good means good for us!’
Mary-Lou smiled encouragingly and spoke gently, as though talking someone down from a high ledge. ‘Yes, Ellen. But who is
us
? We’re all—human, post-human, non-human—machines with minds in a mindless universe, and it behoves those of us with minds to work together
if we can
in the face of that mindless universe. It’s the possibility of working together that forges an
us
, and only its impossibility that forces a
them
. That is the true knowledge as a whole—the union, and the division.’ She laughed. ‘So to speak! In fact, exactly so—the Union, and the Division!’
Images of the Jovians, in all their multifarious forms, processed through my mind. My skin felt as if small, chill, unpleasant things were crawling over it. I remembered the cold, lively metal of the robots, the warm flesh of Dee’s fingertips; and I knew that my response to those machines, however edgy, however suspicious, however prejudiced it might be, was not the same as my cold intellectual loathing of the Jovians, beautiful though they were. The robots and the gynoid and all their kind, conscious or not, had become part of
us
, whereas the Jovians—
‘You mean you would contemplate a union—with
them
?’
Mary-Lou nodded briskly. ‘Of course. With those who wanted to. You may not know this, but the Jovians have the true knowledge, in their own terms. Some of their practices are even socialist!’
God help us all, I thought, heretically. ‘That,’ I said, ‘only makes them more dangerous. More powerful, because more united, like we’re dangerous to them, or
were
until
you people
—’
I stopped my words, too late. Mary-Lou chopped her hand downwards.
She pushed herself off the table, a slow, graceful motion in Callisto’s low gravity, and brushed her hands together as if to remove some light dust.
‘That’s it,’ she announced. ‘End of discussion. If we are now
you people
, then we aren’t in any kind of union
with you
. I have nothing more to say to you, Ellen.
Go away
. Just keep out of trouble, don’t make any more trouble for us, and let someone else sort out your head, because I won’t. Goodbye.’
She raised her hand above her shoulder, glanced at Tatsuro, and snapped her fingers impatiently. Tatsuro gave me a last, helpless look, reached for something out of sight, and the screen went dead.
It was all down to me now, I thought. Time for Plan B.
I rolled in the air and grabbed a stanchion. The comrades, and Malley, were all staring at me, or at the blank screen. The command deck had never sounded so quiet.
‘So that’s it, I guess,’ I said.
‘And very glad I am,’ said Malley. Suze looked at him, looked at me, and nodded.
‘It’s over,’ she said. ‘Come on, Ellen. The decision’s made. The die is cast. The comets won’t crash, and Mary-Lou’s won the Committee to her way. All right, there are risks, but she’s right—there’d be more risks in yours. We’ll just have to accept it, and hope they made the right choice.’
‘Hope,’ I said.
Hope was there, lighting up the eyes of Suze and Malley. The faces of the five other comrades didn’t show hope, nor share the dread I felt. They were lost in their own thoughts, the worst of which may have been that they might have to choose between me—between us, the team—and the Union, or even the Division. For all our fierce individualism, we’d all—consciously or not—drawn strength from the Union, not only in the obvious objective sense but also in our selves. Mary-Lou had been right about that, at least: ‘good for us’ had two sides.
Now I’d have to work with this feeling, get it on my side—and so on everybody’s, whether they knew it yet or not.
‘Nothing’s over,’ I said. ‘We have
not
been expelled from the Union, or even from the Division, and whatever Mary-Lou may think, I’m
still
on the Command Committee until I hear otherwise.’ I waved behind me at the blank screen. ‘If the comrades choose to throw me out, fine—the first thing they’ll do is tell us. They haven’t. Until they do, I’ll carry on as a member.’
Malley scowled, Suze shrugged, the others brightened slightly.
‘OK,’ I went on. ‘There’s something I have to tell you. For a long time now, Tatsuro and I have had … an understanding. We both knew things
might come to this, and we knew we’d need a fall-back position if even the comet-strike were … struck out!’ I smiled, and coaxed some flickers of response. ‘Whether by the Jovians, or by our own decision. We knew we might come to that decision. We knew we might even agree with it ourselves. We weren’t—I wasn’t—as dogmatic about the Jovians as Mary-Lou made out.
I
was the first to argue for attempting contact, remember, against a fair bit of opposition.’
‘Come off it,’ snapped Malley. ‘That was just to get my cooperation.’
‘Of course,’ I said. ‘But it was hardly an act of blind hatred, was it?
I
risked my own mind making the first contact. You know how I feel about back-ups, and whatever you may think of that view, it’s sincerely held. The risk was real, to me. I trusted them enough to take their path through the wormhole—a risk we all shared, yes, but I sure wouldn’t have taken it if I thought the Jovians were
monsters
.’
‘You’ve made your point,’ said Malley. ‘So why didn’t you make it to Mary-Lou?’
‘I know a hopeless fight when I see one,’ I said. I shrugged. ‘She has her point of view, fair enough, but I think she’s biased towards a non-violent resolution, and blinded to the other possibilities. Don’t get me wrong—nothing would please me more than to find that she’s right, that we and the Jovians can coexist and cooperate and so on. That they won’t turn out as bad or mad as their predecessors. But until I’m convinced of that, until we all know we’re safe, I am going to do my best to ensure that we do have a last resort.
Only
as a last resort, and
only
if it’s them or us, and everyone for themselves. And it’s one that
won’t
threaten, won’t even worry, the Jovians, until or unless they threaten us.’
Jaime and Andrea glanced at the screens at which they’d been working, then smiled at me with dawning comprehension.
‘This is what Tatsuro and I agreed,’ I went on. ‘The real reason we came here. Because here we have comet-trains all set up for us—ones the Jovians need never see, and which can strike at them without warning. We can send comets through the wormhole.’
‘But the comets aren’t—’ Tony began.
Malley shot him a dry smile, and to me, one of grudging respect.
‘Very elegant,’ he said. ‘Relative motion.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’re going to move the
wormhole
.’
It wasn’t as simple as that, but the process of setting it up convinced the comrades that at some level I still had authorization for what I was doing. And I had; in as much as Tatsuro and I had indeed privately agreed on this contingency plan before I’d even set out to find Wilde or Malley.
The fact that the Division’s fighter-bombers, around both ends of the wormhole, responded to my requests was evidence enough (not least to myself) that I hadn’t been thrown off the Command Committee. Not yet, anyway.
I sat beside Yeng while she sent the encrypted instructions, to the squadron on our side and to the
Turing Tester
on the other. The action of the latter was crucial, but it passed almost unnoticed in the general redeployment of fighter-bombers around the Malley Mile, on which—ironically enough—it was Mary-Lou who had insisted. The
Turing Tester
pulsed its own instructions to the wormhole Gate’s attitude-control rockets, which fired off in a sequence of brief puffs. Slowly, over several hours, almost imperceptibly, the great rainbow ring swivelled on its axis to face the surface of Jupiter.
Meanwhile, we drifted closer and closer to the daughter wormhole Gate. Neither our fighters nor the lone, auto-piloted sentry—which, I was amused to note, actually did belong to Reid’s Mutual Protection company—challenged us. Jaime and Andrea steadily mapped the incoming stream of cometary fragments, which fell almost hourly on uninhabited parts of New Mars, after perhaps decades of slow, directed infall from this system’s equivalents of the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud. We calculated that we could reach a sufficiently high speed to make an effective bombardment within anything from thirty minutes to two hours, with the ship dragging the wormhole at up to thirty gee if we had to pick the shorter approach: the maximum tolerable acceleration for that length of time, even with full use of the support capacity of our smart-matter suits.
‘How do we grab the wormhole?’ Malley asked.
‘It’s been done before,’ I said. ‘It’s set up. The little attitude-control drones were designed for the original orbital shift we gave the Malley Mile back home. They’ve clamped around it, and they have secondary clamps that can grab on to the ship’s lifting-gear cables. We can do it—the gate will be tilted at an acute angle behind us, we’ll be at its centre of gravity, and our jet will be firing into it, going—’
I raised my eyebrows. Malley shrugged: ‘Who knows?’
Just before the encounter, we’d have to cut the drive, disengage from the wormhole’s perimeter and fire the drones’ attitude jets to fine-tune the angle of the wormhole, so that the comets would follow the same course as had the departing ships, and explode out of the other side on a straight course for the surface of Jupiter. The combined velocities of the daughter wormhole Gate and the comet fragments would deliver enough kinetic energy to spread devastation for tens of thousands of miles around their points of impact. It would be best if we could simultaneously get the ships on the other side to move the far mouth of the wormhole, sweeping it like a gun
muzzle across Jupiter, and preferably on a course that would take it all the way round, but we couldn’t count on that best-case scenario. Nor could we count on the configuration lasting for a Jovian nine-hour day, carrying the exit gate around the planet. What we could count on was hitting the Jovians hard.