“Good afternoon, Henry Jeremiah Kirkham. My name is Robert Johnston. I work for the Environment Agency.”
Herb slowly straightened up. He felt naked and exposed.
“What are you doing on my ship?” he said, the faintest tremor in his voice.
Robert Johnston gave a sad little shrug of his shoulders.
“Oh Herb, I don’t like this any more than you do, but, well, I have no choice. You have put me in this position; your actions have led me to this juncture. I’m afraid that I am going to have to punish you for the destruction of this planet.” He shook his head in regret.
Herb frowned back at him. “No, that’s not what I meant. I meant, how did you get on my ship? You can’t have stowed away; it’s too small. I’d have heard the alarms if you tried to come through the airlock.”
Herb bit his lip in thought. “Ergo, you can’t be here,” he murmured. “What are you? Externally projected V-R?”
“Sorry, Herb, no.” He suddenly became more animated. “I’m as real as the next man. I’m here in person, in the flesh. Accept no substitutes, the One and Only, the real McCoy, the Cat in the Hat.” At this he skimmed his broad-brimmed hat across the room toward Herb, who ducked quickly to avoid it. The hat spun over Herb’s head and hit one of the glass ornaments on the sideboard, knocking it over. It fell to the floor and shattered. Herb ignored the noise. His anger was building, his arrogance asserting itself. He fanned it, forced himself to hold Johnston’s gaze and speak with a level voice that belied the tension that was building in his stomach.
“Okay, if you’re real, how did you get in here? The ship’s integrity has not been breached since we left Earth, or I would have known about it. Every particle of onboard matter will have been tracked by the ship’s AI since it was loaded, and you are to be found nowhere on the manifest. You cannot be here. I can only surmise that I am hallucinating.” He looked thoughtfully for a moment at the bottle that sat on the floor near his feet and murmured to himself, “Possibly drugged by this vanilla whisky that I don’t remember putting out here on the table…”
He frowned. Robert Johnston tilted his head back and laughed. His neatly knotted green-and-pearl tie shimmered in the light.
“The lengths some people will go to to avoid the simple truth! The whisky has been tampered with, but only to the extent of adding a mild sedative. That is what allows you to stand there arguing rationally with me, rather than following the more natural urge to crouch shivering in the corner. Anyway, if I’m a hallucination, how could I have put the whisky bottle there in the first place?”
Herb frowned thoughtfully. He did feel a lot calmer than he would have expected to under the circumstances.
“Why have you drugged me?” asked Herb, after a pause.
“The EA is concerned about your health. The shock of me suddenly appearing in your ship could have had severe consequences.”
“Good for the EA. So how did you get here? Matter displacement?”
“No. Nothing so exotic. I came down the secret passage.”
Herb was silent for a moment as he considered the statement. When he spoke, it was with icy calm.
“You don’t have secret passages on spaceships.”
“Yes, you do. There’s one underneath that armchair. Look.”
At that, Johnston walked across the room, the heels of his shoes clicking on the polished wooden floor. He seized the armchair by its back, his fingers making deep dimples in the soft white leather, and pulled it to one side. The outline of a trapdoor could be seen, a knife line through the contrasting colors of the parquetry. Johnston pressed one corner of the outline with an elegantly manicured finger and the trapdoor popped up with a soft sigh. He pulled it back to reveal a long metal tube dropping away into the distance. Herb felt the gentle pull of air leaving his lounge, sighing its way down the dark, yawning passageway.
“I don’t believe it,” whispered Herb softly. “Are you sure you’re not a hallucination?”
“I feel it in my bones,” said Robert Johnston.
They both crouched down by the edge of the secret passageway, staring into its depths.
Johnston stroked his chin. “The floor of your lounge is built into the port wall of your ship. I attached my ship to yours just after you completed your first jump from Earth. The pipe you can see is the connection between us. A simple deep scan ensured that the hatch was located beneath your armchair for concealment.”
Herb gazed at Johnston in disgust. He hated being patronized. “What are you talking about? How could you attach your ship to mine without me noticing it? I’d have picked it up the first time I scanned any system on reinsertion from warp.”
Johnston shook his head sadly. “Oh, Herb. And you’re supposed to be quite intelligent.”
“What do you mean,
quite
intelligent?” snapped Herb.
“Do you find that offensive? I’m sorry.” Johnston gazed at the tips of his fingers for a moment, an enigmatic smile playing around his lips, then continued.
“What I mean is that I’m surprised you haven’t worked it out. Surely you have heard of stealth technology?”
“I have. I don’t believe it is sophisticated enough to fool my scanners,” replied Herb shortly.
“Oh, it is,” Robert Johnston said softly. “It is.”
They crouched by the hole for another moment in silence. Herb’s pale blue eyes locked with Johnston’s dark brown gaze. Herb was used to playing this game, and usually he was the last to look away. Not this time. He blinked and looked back down into the shadows.
“Okay,” he muttered softly, “I believe you. You attached a stealth ship to mine.”
“I didn’t say that,” said Johnston.
Herb jumped to his feet in anger. “Hell’s teeth!” he shouted. “What is your problem? Why do you keep playing games with me?”
The smile vanished from Johnston’s face, and Herb found a very different person looking at him. There was no emotion in his face, just the cold certainty that Robert Johnston—and only Robert Johnston—was in charge of the situation.
Johnston spoke in the softest of tones. “I just wanted to establish, right at the beginning of our relationship, that I could. I’m not one of your father’s lackeys, paid to be pushed around.”
The smile snapped back onto his face, and Herb felt a rush of relief.
“However, let me explain. I did not say that I used a stealth ship, I merely pointed that out as a possible solution to the problem: namely, how did I attach my ship to yours without you noticing?”
Johnston rose to his feet and walked across to the sofa facing the viewing field that Herb had opened earlier. Herb paused to run his finger along the rim of the hatch Johnston had opened in his ship. The parquetry was joined to the metal of the hatch like the crust on a loaf of bread: one material faded into another without any definable boundary. However the join was achieved, Herb had not seen the effect before. Reluctantly, because Johnston was waiting, he pulled the hatch shut and went to sit on the sofa opposite him.
When Herb had designed the lounge of his spaceship, he had intended it to be light and airy. White leather furniture and slabs of glass sat above the nonrepeating, tessellating pattern of the parquet floor. The walls were left quite plain, only the occasional tall ornament or sculpture set out around the perimeter of the room acted to relieve their blankess. The ceiling was hung with the fragile white balls of paper lanterns that gently illuminated the room. To Herb’s eyes, Robert Johnston, sitting on the white sofa, stood out like a turd in cotton wool. His dark suit may have been immaculately tailored, his sharp starched cuffs may have slid from the sleeves of his jacket as he smoothed a crease on his trousers, but as far as Herb was concerned, there was something jarringly wrong about the man sitting opposite. As he was thinking this, the answer to the problem occurred to him.
“You suppressed my ship’s AI, didn’t you?” Herb said. “My ship is completely under the control of your ship’s AI. Your ship has processed every command I’ve made and filtered out any information it didn’t want me to see.”
“Very good. You
are
intelligent, but I knew that. However…I want you to understand that everything you have done over the past six months has been catalogued by the EA. We have the proof you destroyed this planet.”
“It was an accident.” Herb narrowed his eyes. “If you’ve monitored everything that I’ve done, you will realize that.”
Johnston smiled sadly.
“Oh, I realize that. But Herb…it’s not an excuse. You’ve still destroyed a planet.”
“It was completely lifeless. I checked first.”
Herb knew that it was the wrong thing to say as soon as the words left his lips. Johnston’s eyes darkened and the smile snapped away again to be replaced by an expression of pure anger.
“You checked, did you? Ran a full spectroscopic analysis of the atmosphere for airborne plankton? Performed a high-resolution deep scan in case microbes were clinging onto life beside hot vents deep at the heart of the planet?” He flicked his right hand in a dismissive fashion. “Or did you just run a five-minute local sweep for Earthlike life-forms?”
Herb opened his mouth to speak but Johnston interrupted.
“Don’t!” he shouted, holding up a hand. “We both know the answer to that, don’t we?”
Herb cringed. Johnston remained perfectly still, his arm raised as if to strike, the edge of one perfectly pressed and gleaming white cuff emerging from the sleeve of his jacket, the tide line between the pale and the midnight black skin that traveled around his hand, dead center in Herb’s vision.
Johnston held that position, held it and held it, then his eyes moved slowly to the left to gaze at his own hand. His mouth creased back into a wide smile and he relaxed. The upraised hand was dropped.
“…but that’s all in the past now. A crime has been committed, and now we must decide upon the punishment.”
Herb felt his stomach tighten again. Maybe the effect of the drugged whisky was wearing off, because he felt more panicky than before.
He began to babble. “We don’t have to do this, you know. My father is a very important man. I’m sure we can come to some arrangement. Besides, I’m sorry. I’ve learned my lesson. I won’t do anything like this again. Look, face it, I’ve got a lot to offer society. I put together those VNMs to my own design. My technical skills have got to be worth something; it would be a real waste to lock me away where I couldn’t achieve anything worthwhile…”
“Preemptive Multitasking?” said Johnston, innocently.
Herb paused in mid flow, his mouth moving soundlessly.
Johnston began to adjust the viewing field. The greyish square hanging in the air above the coffee table began to grow.
“I mean, I know that it reduces the overall intelligence slightly, but it does mean that a perfectly good brain can work on five or six different jobs at the same time.”
The viewing field had now expanded to a square about three meters across the diagonal. Johnston began to apply a slight curve across its surface, continuing to speak as he did so.
“So, we could have your body locked up in a nutrient vat in a station in the Oort cloud, while we apply your intelligence to controlling five or six different maintenance craft.”
The viewing field darkened and a few stars began to appear.
“We could leave you a time slice of consciousness for your own use: a time for you to think and dream, to be yourself. Depending on how you cooperate, we could locate that consciousness inside your body, in the vat…though that would be very boring—” Johnston turned from the viewing field to smile at Herb “—or maybe controlling a robot with the run of the station. That way you could get to mix with some members of the crew.”
Depth was added to the picture in the viewing field. A section of a black sphere grew in the lounge, diamond stars winking into existence inside it. Herb was looking at a star field. His mind, however, was far away across the galaxy, trapped in a tight-fitting metal coffin filled with lukewarm nutrient soup, while his eyes stared into infrared and the empty drones under his control crept and crawled beneath the cold remnants of starlight.
“I don’t want that,” Herb said softly. His eyes were filling with tears.
“What makes you think you have a choice?” Johnston asked. “You’re not a child anymore; your father isn’t going to come along and say, ‘Okay, maybe not this time if you really, really promise not to do it again.’ We’re dealing with cause and effect here. You do the crime, you do the time. That’s it; you can’t go back, any more than we can restore the life to this planet that your self-replicating machines have just spent the last few months destroying.”
“Oh.” Herb couldn’t think of anything else to say. He looked around the lounge of his spaceship and already it seemed to belong to someone else. He had passed from one world to another. He sat down heavily on one of the sofas and put his head into his hands.
“Will you tell my father?”
“You will have the opportunity to do that yourself. You will have access to a public comm channel. That’s a basic right of any intelligent being.”
Johnston continued to manipulate the viewing field. Stars began to move across it. He appeared to be searching for something. Herb said nothing. He began to run his fingers over the soft white leather of the sofa, enjoying the sensation of luxury while he still could.
Johnston paused in his search and glanced toward him. “Don’t you want to know how long your sentence is?”
The thought that a finite sentence made any difference to his current circumstances hadn’t occurred to Herb. The thought of going to the Oort cloud was too big. Coming back was too remote a possibility, be it in ten or a hundred years’ time. He just shrugged.
Johnston grinned as he brought the stars’ movement to a halt.
“That’s an unfair question, of course. We don’t know the answer. How long will it take for you to atone? Only the EA knows. We don’t get that many cases of planetcide—one a year, if that. I’d guess your sentence would probably be more than your natural lifespan. We’d probably have to take an e-print of your consciousness.”
“Are you deliberately tormenting me?” asked Herb, a feeble twist of anger gently uncurling in his stomach. Johnston turned toward him again with an approving smile.