Level nine was true artificial intelligence: machines that were human. The robots of story and legend, the ones that pondered on their metaphysical condition and tried to take over the world.
And level ten was utopia, the pinnacle of achievement, the Highest Possible Level of Development. Genetic science that cured every illness, regenerated every deformed body into perfection. Ships that made their own nodes. Gravitics that fit into shoes, so man could fly as easily as walking. Nano-scale machinery that made wealth out of dirt. Free energy. Immortality.
“You’re a starship captain,” Mauree said earnestly. “You’ve been to many worlds. Some are behind and some are ahead. In all the many worlds of man, there must be one who has gone all the way ahead. Beyond technology, to spirituality.” Mauree was citing the Doctrine of Transcendence, the mystical philosophy that claimed technology would eventually transform human beings into gods.
Consciously, she took her hand away from her throat, to argue. “Then why don’t they do something? Why don’t they share their knowledge? Altair conceals trade secrets for profit, but why would your angels care about profit?”
Mauree nodded. “Yes, why? Why indeed? But the answer is inside us. We are not ready for such power. We would destroy ourselves. Science brings knowledge to all, but wisdom must be cultivated in each individual. When our hearts are ready, then they will take us away from all this.”
They would never take Jelly away. They would never do any good for the thousands that had died on Kassa. For the millions that had died in the flames that haunted her past. That Jelly’s salvation should be denied because an aging con man was still struggling to purify himself was a cosmic injustice of unforgivable proportions.
Someday, when she found her mother’s world, the place that made the nanosharp knife that hung around her neck, she intended to demand an explanation.
For now, she confronted Mauree with her own doubts.
“What if tech-ten isn’t transcendence? What if it’s not
perfect,
just
better
?” What if people were still people, even though they could fly? What if utopia offered no improvement on the human soul, no protection from evils that ordinary men and women could give birth to when driven by greed, fear, selfishness, and indifference?
Mauree shrugged, undefeatable. “Then tech-eleven. It doesn’t matter what the number is, you see. All that matters is that everything can be fixed, even people. And if it can be fixed, then surely it must have been. Humanity is less than a million years old. The galaxy is billions. Some alien race must have already evolved to the end, already solved everything. We don’t need to struggle to develop new technology, my dear. We only need to develop ourselves, our own inner lights.”
Prudence imagined a two-meter-wide spider biting off Mauree’s head and looking for an inner light. Petty, yes, but it put things into perspective.
“I don’t think it’s that simple, Mauree.” She settled for dry exasperation. It was the only compromise between rage and grief that let her speak.
“Of course you don’t. You’re too successful. You have your own starship, the respect and admiration of your fellows. You have too much attachment to this world. But you must not let your imagination be stifled, or you’ll turn out like that poor fool Rama Jandi.” Mauree was trying to remain noble, but the flush of animosity crept through.
“Who’s that?” she pressed. Prudence was currently not very sympathetic to Mauree’s feelings.
With the tortured sigh of the persecuted genius, Mauree launched into an answer. “An academic, of great stature and honors, but cold and dead inside. He has taken his hope and imagination and killed it. Now he lashes out at anyone who dares to reveal a true human soul.”
All she had to do was quirk an eyebrow, and Mauree was happy enough to dish out more slander. Perhaps he needed to spend more time meditating over his crystals.
“He had me thrown off Altair, can you believe it? Hounded out by threat of prosecution. Me! For doing no more than selling hope. A few paltry artifacts to the university museum, a pathetic handful of credits, and he cried bloody murder. Said he could prove they were not really alien. Said he could prove I knew it. Called me a fraud!”
Since Mauree had just confessed that everything in his shop was junk, Prudence found his outrage remarkably misplaced. She didn’t remark on it, though. “He sounds like a terror. Altair, you said?”
“I used to run my shop there. It seemed like a nice place, but what kind of intolerant planet would let retired professors ruin businessmen?” At least Mauree didn’t describe himself as an honest businessman.
“Is he aligned with the League?”
Now it was Mauree’s turn to ask. “The who?”
If Mauree thought Altair had been intolerant before the League, he would be in for a terrible surprise now. However, it was a good sign for Prudence. If this Jandi person predated the League, he might not be in on their plot. If there was a plot.
She’d gotten all the help out of Mauree she could hope for. If Jandi was in the business of examining alien artifacts, then that was the lead she should follow. Even if it meant risking a return to Altair.
Speaking of risks, she should repay the favor, and try to return a little guidance. “Mauree, promise me something. Promise me you won’t try to sell any Kassan souvenirs. Or buy any. Just stay out of it, okay?”
He looked at her curiously.
“Trust me on this, Mauree. The violence was terrible; people’s reactions are going to be dangerous.” If there was a plot, and Mauree got on the wrong side of it, they would destroy him without hesitation. And if Mauree got involved in any way, it was inevitable that he would wind up on the wrong side. Even without a plot, he could only suffer from their attention. Prudence had gotten angry enough to want to clobber him over his eccentric philosophy. The League would consider him an active traitor to their triune god of Progress, Development, and Security.
She needn’t have worried. Mauree’s instincts were sound. “I don’t think the energy coming out of Kassa is conducive to my program of gentle development,” he agreed. “It’s exactly the kind of negative tech I’m trying to rise above.”
Prudence remembered the image of the alien warship in the snow. Negative tech, indeed.
TEN
Crumbs
He was Robert Anton Wilson for less than an hour. Most of that was in a cab.
Going to the spaceport was a risk, but it was the only place in the city that rented rooms without asking for ID. People in spaceports didn’t necessarily have Altair-recognized identification.
The cabbie didn’t ask. The scanner at the spaceport gate was automatic, recording his name but not checking the picture on the card against the man carrying it. The hotel clerk was bored and didn’t care.
Kyle spent less than thirty seconds in the room. He ruffled the bedsheets, programmed the computer to hold all calls, and flushed the toilet. Then he left, checking that the door was locked behind him.
Spaceports were interesting places. Kyle had only been to a few, and none of them compared with Altair’s. Soaring glass and concrete towers, gently lit in pastel colors, pronounced Altair’s wealth and sophistication, but that wasn’t what made it impressive. The way you could tell that Altair was an important planet was that its spaceport was always busy. Even in the middle of the night.
Ships came out of the nodes at all hours, and their occupants could be at any point in their daily schedule. Thus, you could buy breakfast, dinner, or a night of heavy drinking at any time of day in the spaceport. Often in the same establishment. The handful of people in the city who worked unusual schedules, like ambulance drivers and such, tended to come to the spaceport to socialize. As did hip young people, quirky retirees, and pretty much everyone who didn’t fit seamlessly into Altair’s social net.
Including, of course, those up to no good.
That was the thing about being an undercover cop. You learned how people got along, undercover. Under the radar, off the grid, behind the shed door, or whatever metaphor you wanted to use. And it wasn’t as simple as snitching somebody’s ID card. It took planning, money, or sheer desperation. Fortunately, he had all of those covered.
Five minutes of walking brought him to an automated storage locker. This was the most dangerous moment of his journey. The storage locker itself was harmless. It didn’t even ask for ID, just a password. It didn’t check what you stored, as long as it fit into a single cubic meter. And you could pay for the space as much as ten years in advance, using anonymous credit sticks issued by any of a dozen planetary banks.
This made it the ideal place to store illegal things, like drugs, weapons, or even inconvenient bodies. Kyle had busted plenty of thugs doing exactly that, as had almost every detective on the force. If there were any cops actively staking out the spaceport, they’d be here. The danger was that one of them might personally recognize Kyle.
The place was also under automatic surveillance, but that wasn’t important, either to Kyle or the hoodlums. People’s ability to outwit cameras was an evolved response, always one step ahead of automation and authority. Kyle didn’t even try. He didn’t care about leaving a record. It would be days before anybody checked the files, and by then it wouldn’t matter.
He called up his cube and waited patiently for it to be delivered. This was the kind of job that automation was good for. Everything was in its place, nothing changed, so there were no judgment calls. A task like driving a ground car was an insurmountable nightmare, from a robot’s point of view. Anything could happen. Kids and dogs in the road; ice, gravel, or glass; mechanical failures of the vehicle; or just lousy weather. But the storage system was sealed. Nobody could get in or out, so nothing unexpected could ever be in the way.
Come to think of it, it sounded a lot like how the League thought the rest of the city should be.
His cube contained a briefcase. The briefcase contained a change of clothes, a handful of credit sticks, a very expensive fake ID, and a gun.
The gun bothered him. It was unregistered, completely illegal, and he’d stolen it from a crime scene. The League had asked him to, of course. Some low-level blackmailer had gotten popped on a contraband charge. The League had made sure he was on the first team of detectives into the guy’s apartment, so he could remove the weapon before it was entered into evidence.
He had almost blown his cover then. No amount of investigation could justify destroying evidence related to any kind of crime that involved a gun. Even as he stood at the door, waiting for the building super to unlock it, he had considered doing the opposite—making sure the gun was found and not lost by some other League stooge on the team.
But inside it had become obvious the contraband was a plant. Kyle figured the gun had to be a plant, too. They were just testing him again.
So he kept his mouth shut. The unlucky blackmailer plea-bargained a deal, sparing Kyle the need to perjure himself in a trial. Kyle rationalized his participation in the frame-up. The amount of time the guy got for the contraband was a lot less than he would have gotten for blackmailing. The government didn’t have a strong moral stance against people poisoning themselves. But blackmail, that was different. That tended to piss
important
people off.
Now he tucked the gun inside his jacket. A nasty little thing, made off-world. His service pistol could fire a variety of ammunition, including stunners and narcos. A thousand-volt discharge or a quick-acting drug could solve a lot of problems, usually without killing people. But this gun only fired one kind of round. Shredders. Horrible little projectiles that came apart when they hit something soft. They turned people into hamburger.
Walking back to the hotel district, he checked in to the one across the street. An equally bored clerk gave him a room that overlooked his last room. If a security team swooped down on Robert Anton Wilson, Kyle Daspar wanted to know.
Having set his snare, he settled down to wait again. This was where he would be smarter than the fugitives he routinely caught. He had the patience of a stone.
Sitting in his room, he thought about loneliness. He had been insulated from the feeling. Staying in the same apartment, seeing the same faces at work, he had not noticed. There was a vase in his living room, a present from a woman he had dated a few times. It was a nice vase, although it didn’t really go with the rest of the room, and he never put anything in it. The vase was three years old.
No one had moved it, replaced it, or even commented on it. For years he had buried himself in his work, both his day job and his secret job. Wary of every person he met, assuming any woman who showed interest in him was a League spy, treating every man as either a League stooge or a League victim, he had ceased to be human. He wasn’t much better than the robot at the automated storage locker. Everything was in its place, nothing changed, and no one could get inside.
He woke up with a start. It was midmorning.
If a security team had come looking for Wilson, they must have been remarkably discreet. Flashing lights and door-breakers should have woken him up. So either the doctor was on the level and really covering for him, or the League had sent an assassin to silence him on the sly. In that case, the assassin would still be out there, waiting for him.
The ghost of the possibility that they might have sent Prudence made his heart thud. Her perfect cover act hinted at hidden skills. She would be incalculably more dangerous than a common thug.
His mission was bigger than arresting assassins. He checked out and left the building by a back entrance, avoiding visual contact with the other hotel.
The first thing he had to do was find out if the League was against him, or if it was just Rassinger’s faction. Paradoxically, the best place to get accurate information about the League was his network of anti-League agents. People in the League were either too stupid or too fearful to do any fact-checking.
He tossed the gun in a trash can before queuing up at the spaceport exit. There was no way he could sneak it past the sensors. It had served its purpose, bought him a night of security. Now the tool had become a liability, and he discarded it without sentiment.