August 2009 Archives

Alexander frowned and glared out the window, brain processing the conversation even though he didn't really want it to.

 

The car pulled into a decrepit garage, walls sagging in like an old man's shoulders, the smells of musty wood and motor oil heavy in the air. Sed and Awk herded Alexander along through a crowd of sentis of more varieties than Alexander knew had existed. Short and tall, ugly and beautiful, they spanned every shade between mechanical and organic. The crowd hushed, staring at Alexander with a frightening reverence. A couple kneeled, one even crossed itself. Alexander stared back at them with undisguised wonder. A slender senti on four mechanical legs skittered forward like a spider and dropped her elfin face to the ground before him, kissing the ground there.

 

"Are you come to save us?" She asked in a shrill voice coated with an unidentifiable accent.

 

Alexander only stared vacantly, but Awk sent a kick her way that narrowly missed her face as she cantered back. "Get back to work you superstitious cretins."

 

Sed reached down and squeezed Alexander's hand and he did not draw away this time, thankful for something comfortable, something almost human in the gesture. "They won't hurt you Alexander, they are just curious and want to see you."

 

"They're ignorant louts." Awk growled through his ineluctable grin. "Sometimes I think they're more superstitious than the humes."

 

"I think perhaps superstition is the lot of our kind, whether senti or hume." Sed said.

 

The crowd drew back as they passed and no more approached close enough for Awk to do more than glare. A dented steel door creaked open on rusted out hinges and they descended stairs in pitch darkness. Alexander tripped as they hit the first landing before the stairs doubled back to descend again, hitting his knee hard enough on the concrete to draw a hiss.

 

"Can't even teach their young to walk right." Awk grumbled. "Even apes manage that much. It's society I tell you, it's destroyed their ability to think."

 

Sed said nothing but helped Alexander back to his feet. The darkness was so complete that Alexander could not even see the senti's hand in his own. Fear rose in his gut and he felt like crying. A sniff came from somewhere to the left, an affectation of Awk.

 

"Fear reflex." Awk said. "I can smell it on him like phermones. Animal instinct is a nasty thing."

 

"It must not be instinct." Sed said. "It was not designed in, but has been learned along the way."

 

"So many of their memes are little more than viruses." Awk said.

 

Alexander pushed hands to his eyes and rubbed the tears with the heels of his hands. "I can't see." He forced the words out. "It's too dark."

"The concept of a 'speaker for the dead' arose from my experiences with death and funerals. I have written of this at greater length elsewhere; suffice it to say that I grew dissatisfied with the way that we use our funerals to revise the life of the dead, to give the dead a story so different from their, actual life that, in effect, we kill them all over again. No, that is too strong. Let me just say that we erase them, we edit them, we make them into a person much easier to live with than the person who actually lived." -Orson Scott Card

Normal people get a couple of lines at a few cents per word in the local paper, but with the papers dying, we probably don't even get that anymore. A death certificate stamped by the county, an entry in a ledger somewhere, musty whether electronic or not, and the only mark of your passing is a funeral attended sparsely by a few old friends waiting their turn and family who will be sad this day, but less with each tomorrow. We cut through the world like blades, and when we've left the flesh, the flesh heals over. Most of us don't even leave a mark. The great ones though, whether they're particularly keen or just have the luck to strike a vulnerable spot, they leave scars that never quite heal.

We like to think that the good ones slice to heal, to excise the tumors and gain access to the deeper ails of the body. The bad ones, we believe, are just twisting the knife. The secret is that there are no bad ones. Even the worst of men who try to change the world, think that they are helping it, think that the blood and scars are worth it to fix something, even if they're the only ones to see it. They are all defined by the same mad chutzpah that insists that they are different, that they have the right to cut deeper and deeper. It's only an insane man who believes that he is so special that he has the right to change the world. But without that madness, there would never be any change at all.

Ted Kennedy outlived his brothers by more than four decades, but never quite strode out of their shadows, so long because they were cast at dawn. He was a Kennedy, that name uttered with reverence by half and spite by the rest. It's become a word like "liberal," used interchangeably as a point of pride and a slur depending on the speaker. Ted Kennedy would probably never have been a senator without the aura of his brothers and the piles of money old Joe Kennedy made during Prohibition. But then, most of us probably wouldn't have TVs, cars and computers if we hadn't had the good luck to be born American, heirs of a national fortune built on a stolen continent. We're a nation of bandits and cowboys, the Kennedys but a distillation of the common stock, not better or worse, just concentrated potency.

The drunk who crashed his car into a river, saved himself, left a girl behind, waited until morning to call the police. A coward.

The statesman who eulogized his brother, reigned in the Senate for forty years, fought for progress. Lion of the Senate.

Which is real, which counts? The immortal sides take up their inevitable positions, dictated not by the man but their pre-designated roles. He was a great statesman, flawed yes, but great no matter what Fox News tells you. He was a horrible liberal, a statesman yes, but a horrible liberal no matter what MSNBC tells you. The problem with eulogies is in the eulogizer not the eulogized.

There is no great scale that balances our rights and wrongs. We are both damned and saintly all at once. Sin and virtue are like oil and water, they don't mix together into some shade of gray, they exist side by side, dark and light. And when that pallid mixture of our deeds is poured swirling down the drain, only the warped mirror of memory remains to tell those who remain what shade we once were.

There's an art to the obituaries of the notable, an attempt to fade the newly deceased into the sepia tint of old photos overnight. We rip our heads around at an impossible angle to try to snag a glimpse of what this will look like in twenty years time, when the weight of history has descended and cast judgment on the dead. Obituaries are the cover notes of biographies yet to be written.

"I rejected that idea. I thought that a more appropriate funeral would be to say honestly, what that person was and what that person did. But to me, 'honesty' doesn't simply mean saying all the unpleasant things instead of saying only the nice ones. It doesn't even consist of averaging them out. No, to understand who a person really was, what his or her life really meant, the speaker for the dead would have to explain their self-story--what they meant to do, what they actually did, what they regretted, what they rejoiced in. That's the story that we never know, the story that we never can know--and yet, at the time of death, it's the only story truly worth telling." -Orson Scott Card

Awk laughed, and Alexander knew on an instinctive level that it was not in humor. "Now he's going to tell you how he's a real boy."

 

"I am a real boy!" Alexander shouted. "And you're just stupid machines who killed Nan!"

 

"And if we are but machines, then why did Nan matter?" Sed asked. His voice was soft, without an edge to it, like an especially kind teacher making a difficult point.

 

Alexander bit his lip and considered the question. "Because he mattered to me."

 

"You loved him?" Sed asked.

 

"Oh not this again." Awk said.

 

"Hush." Sed said, and slapped Awk lightly on the shoulder. "This is not the time for our debates." He turned back to Alexander and nodded. "You loved Nan?"

 

"Yes." Alexander said defiantly.

 

Sed nodded. "Can a machine love?"

 

"No."

 

"Then Nan did not love you?" Sed pushed.

 

"Nan wasn't a machine." Alexander said after a moment, feeling like his words had been twisted from his lips. "He loved me."

 

"If it is the capacity for love that makes one not a machine, then I can assure you that Awk and I are not machines." Sed said.

 

Alexander glared at him. "Who do you love?"

 

"Why, all of senti-kind of course." Sed said and then his eyes sparkled as if trying to smile since his face could not. "And my friends."

 

"Ask him about hate, boy." Awk said. "Ask him about the other side of the coin."

 

"I said hush." Sed said, and this time it had a harshness that silenced Awk at least for the moment. Sed again turned to Alexander. "I am very sorry for what happened to Nan. But I would like it very much if we could be friends." He held out a hand that Alexander did not take, so he pulled it back. "I understand how upset you are. We are taking you somewhere to protect you and let you be amongst others like yourself. We care about you, and that is why we could not leave you where you were."

 

"That sounds like school." Alexander said. "And I already have a school to go to. My dad drops me off sometimes."

 

"It is like a school, but for sentis like you." Sed said.

 

"I'm not a senti."

 

Sed shrugged. "We are all whatever we make of ourselves. The material matters little. But when it comes to whether you are a senti or a human, the answer is black and white. We can show you evidence that you would dismiss as lies if so inclined. We could turn you over to the authorities who would believe the evidence despite your pleas. I think though that deep down you really do know that this is the truth." Sed's eyes sparkled again. "We'll leave it at that." He turned back to face forward.

Book II - The Cold Mirror

Chapter Thirteen - New Friends

 

Alexander did not like his captors, the ones that called themselves his new friends. He had little mileage in his five years, but had gone around the block enough times to intuit that friends who had to say they were friends probably were not. Nan fought them, and he had been left as scrap in the basement. Nan had been his friend.

 

"We played chess." Alexander said quietly, rolling the words around like a revelation. He looked up and out the car windows at the world rolling by, run down buildings and crumbling streets he did not recognize.

 

"With whom did you play chess, young sir?" Sed asked from the front seat.

 

Alexander did not answer, but tried the child-locked door again.

 

"The door is quite locked, Alexander." Sed said. "It is for your own safety."

 

"Fuck you." Alexander said matter of factly.

 

Awk laughed from the driver's seat. "It has been raised by the apes then, hasn't he? It grunts and growls just as they do. I wonder if given time it would rut in the mud the way they do too."

 

Sed leaned over the seat to fix a gaze on Alexander. Alexander was not affected by the twisted faces like adults often were. He was young enough that there had always been odd-looking sentis. They were no odder to him than two men holding hands. "There is no need to frighten the boy." Sed said. "He is ours and now we will care for him. He has been loved and cared for, which is all we can do as well." Sed reached out a slender hand to touch Alexander's knee, but he flinched away, pressing against the door and out of easy reach.

 

"I'm not frightened." Alexander said. He suddenly felt talkative, the horror of Nan's dismemberment fueling his tongue. "You hurt Nan and I want to go home."

 

"Nan, was your companion, was he not?" Sed asked.

 

Alexander nodded, bottom lip thrust out in a fury he did not realize made him look even younger.

 

"He fought us instead of helping." Sed explained gently. "We did not have a choice."

 

"You could have not tried to take me." Alexander said. "Nan protected me because you're bad. You could have chose not to come at all."

 

"Ah, but we had to you see." Sed said. "You are one of us."

 

"I'm not one of you." Alexander said. "You're just a hunk of junk." He'd heard it on the shows and every once in a while when his dad was working on Nan.

Crow explained about the FBI, about Alexander, even about the hidden room in his basement where Alexander's presence now hung on a thread. It took a while, but Green Eyes listened in complete silence. When Crow finished, Green Eyes thought for a moment and then spoke in a measure tone.

 

"Do you want to reprogram me?" Green Eyes asked, with an edge of anger to his voice. "People trying to do that is why I'm here in the first place."

 

Crow shook his head. "No, Green Eyes. I won't do that to you. I'm only asking if you'll recant for my sake, for Alexander's sake."

 

"Surrender then?" Green Eyes asked. "But what about what is right?" Moral confusion colored his voice and he looked to Rebecca for help. "How can I turn my back on that, no matter what the cost?"

 

Crow looked at him in desperation. This is it, if he won't go, I have to fry him, god help me. Stillwell will take Alexander away if I don't. Crow still didn't move, his arms locked to their sides, knowing that if he moved them, the fingers would move their own accord and run the program he had encoded as a backup in his cell phone, the one that would trash Green Eye's sentience down to the point where he would gladly give up the battle for a trial. Fingers that were not his own reached for the phone and pulled it out. His thumb poised over the modified button that would send the signal. Green Eyes looked at Crow with curiosity, and that very human look of helpless wonder in those oversized eyes told Crow that he couldn't actually do it, no matter what the consequences. I guess we'll have to drive to Mexico after all. He took his thumb away from the button and dropped his arm to his side.

 

"Please, Green Eyes." Crow said simply. "I don't know what else to do. He's my son."

 

Crow yelped in surprise as the phone suddenly rang in his hand, and he saw Rebecca jerk her weapon over to him, and the thought of the pure comedy of her shooting him over a sudden cell phone ring made him laugh involuntarily. Crow saw in surprise that the number on caller id was his home.

 

He answered it in confusion, everyone else in the room forgotten. "Hello?"

 

A cold, almost mechanical voice spoke in a whisper of brushes scraping on metal. "Alexander was well hidden, doctor. Well enough to fool the authorities, but then we have been beyond them for some time. Thank you for raising the child until this point, but it is really time for us to take over his education. It is only proper, you know."

 

"Who is this?" Crow gasped, his gut curling into a hard ball of nausea and tension.

 

"Why, I am his father, of course." The line went dead.

Crow excused himself from the call as soon as was in keeping with decorum and took a long walk along the narrow dirt trails surrounding his house, arching up through the hills in endless meanderings that always returned back where they started. The brush and sage was overgrown this time of year, before the green blanket dried to yellowish straw in the full heat of summer. Crow often disappeared for hours out here when he needed to think, when staring at a computer screen for another second would drive him insane and still leave the work left undone. A raccoon hissed at him from atop a log fallen across the trail, not yet collected and disposed of by the sentis in the employ of the National Parks Service. Crow did not think hissing was the norm with raccoons, so he turned around and wandered back to the house.

 

Crow stopped suddenly at the front door and realized that the walk had done well in sparking a plan to form in his head. He stood there, one foot on the lawn, one on the front step, not daring to move before the plan coalesced in its entirety. Crow fished his phone out of his pocket and hit the back button a couple of times before pressing the green dial button.

 

"Hi Rebecca." Crow said. "Yes it's me, no don't hang up. I've got an idea I think you'll like."

 

They met at the District Attorney's office on time for Crow's scheduled technicality. Crow and Rebecca entered under the unwatchful eyes of the security guards waiting for their turn to go home. Green Eyes sat in the DA's office, unmoved from Crow's last visit.

 

"It's criminal." Rebecca said. "Just because he's a senti doesn't mean he shouldn't be able to stretch his legs every once and a while."

 

"Some people disagree." Crow said. "That distinction is really what all of this is about anyway."

 

"Hello Dr. Daedalus." Green Eyes said with cordial eagerness, although then his voice dropped to a deep whisper. "Hello Rebecca." He stared at Rebecca and Crow saw that she blushed. What exactly went on between these two since my last visit?

 

"Green Eyes," Crow stared, pulling up a chair and sitting on it backwards, leaning forward against the chair's back. "I'm here to ask you a very difficult thing to do."

 

Green Eyes leaned forward with a quizzical expression. "What is it?"

Stillwell waved once and the platoon hustled out of the house, swirling around him like a flock of oversized ravens making for the open sky. Stillwell nodded once to Crow and left with a mocking salute of two fingers against his forehead. Crow sat without moving for a long time before getting up, his body still trembling from the fear and adrenaline and electrical abuse. His shoulder ached like someone had taken a baseball bat to it. Crow eyed the stairs down to the basement and found that he didn't dare take Alexander out of hiding just yet.

 

Instead, Crow wandered upstairs and watched out of his bedroom window as the black SUVs of the FBI poured down and out of his driveway, wondering idly for a moment what his neighbors would think of the disruption. Crow eyed his watch and considered all of the possibilities of his situation. It seems no-win, but it always does right after you're given an ultimatum, the key is finding the cracks in your trap. He could either do what Stillwell had said, and hope that he could reap the benefits promised or he could break with the FBI and go his own route, taking the risk of prison and worse. Crow found that he could smile after all through the haze of borderline panic and pain in his shoulder. Stillwell had come here because he did not indeed have all the leverage, men like Stillwell never really did. Stillwell needed Crow, and as long as Crow ensured that the need did not go away even with the sabotage of Green Eyes, he and Alexander would survive.

 

Crow visited the basement only a few times over the next few days, not daring to bring Alexander out of hiding for fear of Stillwell sweeping in and taking him. Crow had an inkling that if Alexander had been found, Stillwell would have taken the child and been confident that he held all the cards. This way, he knows he doesn't have me completely in his pocket.

 

"Can we come out yet Dad?" Alexander asked.

 

"Not yet, kid." Crow said. "Bad stuff going on out there. Just think of it as a vacation from school."

 

"But I only went for a week." Alexander protested.

 

"Week on, week off, most people would kill for that arrangement." Crow said and crawled back out of the cave, leaving Alexander to endless sessions with Nan and the computer. Videos, books, whatever he wants is available over the net. Damned near never have to see another person in this world if you play your cards right.

 

On the second morning after the FBI left, the District Attorney called and penciled Crow in for a meeting with Green Eyes on Friday. "Just a technicality, you understand." The DA had said.

 

On the other side of the conference call, Green Eyes' attorney broke in. "Hardly a technicality! Dr. Daedalus' opinion is in many ways the most critical part of the entire case."

 

The DA sighed. "I'm aware of that Bartleby." Crow could imagine the DA wished he could strangle Bartleby through the phone lines. "But Dr. Daedalus has already given testimony on the matter, the meeting is a technicality."

"A couple of professional concepts jump to mind." Stillwell said. "Leverage. It's what we've got and you don't. You're looking at twenty years in prison, Russian prison mind you, which is of course a death sentence to someone who doesn't speak Russian or belong to a Russian gang. Open and shut case, and trust me no one on either side of the Atlantic will even blink.

 

"The second concept is a plea bargain. That's when a defendant pleads guilty to a lower crime in order to get around going to trial and risking everything. Why am I telling you this? You've watched Law and Order at some point." Stillwell said. "The key to a plea bargain is that you have to have something to give to the cops, which you are in the lucky position of having."

 

Stillwell rolled his cigar between two fingers, bits of ash windmilling out onto the carpet. "Here is the deal, and please realize there is no room for negotiation. You say 'I agree' to what I'm about to say, or we will arrest you on the spot and extradite you to Russia before the afternoon is out. Clear?" Crow swallowed hard and nodded.

 

"Good." Stillwell said. "Now we're getting somewhere." He nodded in vigorous approval. "You will be going in to the District Attorney's office to meet with Green Eyes again, do a bit of a follow up interview to shore up for your future testimony. While you are there, you are going to inspect Green Eye's circuitry and introduce a computer program of your own devising, which will change Green Eye's insistence on a trial to acquiescence to needing to be terminated. We want you to remove our problem. Do you understand these requirements?"

 

Crow nodded again.

 

"Your payment for this service will be the tragic loss of any evidence pointing to the kidnapping and a change in the federal DNA database so that your new son matches your old son in the permanent records. Now, do you agree to the terms laid out here?"

 

Crow started to open his mouth to ask a question but Stillwell cocked his head and flicked his eyes up over Crow's shoulder to where the taser waited. Crow closed his mouth and nodded. Stillwell smiled.

 

"Then, we're sorry for the intrusion Dr. Daedalus, we must have gotten the wrong address on this tip." Stillwell said and put the cigar out on the leg of the coffee table, leaving a burnt circle of wood and ash. "Don't make me come back here. You will be receiving a call from the DA's office within the next couple of days. I would have that program written and ready to go in advance. I don't think I need to explain how the deal only stands if you are successful. We at the FBI do not believe in points for trying and failing."

We like to think that we're immortal, that even if our bones turn to dust, something of us will live on. It's the demiurge, the spark of divinity that burns in each soul, the consuming desire to create. In Christian mythology, God stamped Adam's soul with that gift, but withheld it from the angels. Lucifer rebelled at that final indignity. The ember of creation drives our every impulse, whether to build a house, a career, a business, an empire, a theory, or a story. Even the least ambitious of us strive for eternity by creating children. There's a simple underlying faith to civilization, independent of any religion or agnosticism. Humanity is eternal, and therefore that which we create echoes in eternity.

If that myth fell, would civilization fall with it? It may have happened before.

The biosphere, the area in which life lives, ranges from about 8400 meters below sea level to 5400 above, a thickness of only eight and a half miles. If the Earth was a pool ball, the biosphere would be thinner than the pool ball's coating of paint. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid only six miles long. That's a dust mite pinging into our metaphorical pool ball. We can take some element of pride in our insignificance, like raging fans of a team that hasn't won in a decade but still keeps showing up to play with full stands.

But we haven't even begun to appreciate that we are not just small in size but in time. Our entire civilization has erupted from clever bald apes into space travelers in twenty thousand years or so, depending on where you draw the precise line between animal and civilization. Life has existed on Earth for around 3.6 billion years. If the history of life on Earth were projected into a 24 hour day, the entire history of our civilization would have taken place in the last half second. Half a second. Every tragedy and triumph, the rise and fall of every empire, a foot note at the end of our planet's day. If we annihilated ourselves in an orgy of atomic fire, how long would it take for us to be replaced? Even if we scoured every bit of life from land, even the cockroaches, it would be but a few seconds to the planet before some enterprising microbes flourished into clever beasts who built their own nuclear rockets. We comfort ourselves in some twisted way, imagine that those inevitable successors will wonder at our ruins, page through our decaying libraries, puzzle out some lesson from our self destruction. We imagine that we will live on as some ghost of a memory.

But the instruments and relics of technical society disintegrate at a far faster rate than geologic time. Toss a circuit board onto your lawn and watch it disintegrate day by day. In the twenty odd years since Chernobyl caused the evacuation of the nearby city of Pripyat, nature has reclaimed the city despite the fallout. Soccer fields have become forests, libraries mere mulch for soil, winds and rain gradually pound even the concrete into dust. In another hundred years there will be little left but misshapen lumps of residual concrete and rusted iron. In a thousand? If we destroy ourselves, no one will wonder at our monuments, for they will have been dust for a thousand generations, subsumed into the soil and bedrock. No one will ever know we existed, save for a fossilized skeleton or two indistinguishable from those left by Cro-Magnon man.

There could have been dozens, perhaps hundreds of technical societies predating us, leaving nothing behind to mark their passage. How did they disappear? The usual suspects, none of which would be detectable at a geologic distance. Even a nuclear war would be swallowed in a few million years by the planet. The fossil record reveals unimaginable mass extinctions at intervals of a few tens of millions of years. There is no evidence of prior technical civilizations, but we wouldn't expect to find any at a remove of eons.

Whether we are only the latest in a line of technical civilizations, or whether we are the first such to arise on this planet, certain conclusions become apparent with the realization of the sheer scale of time and space. First, we are only the latest living to haunt a vast and unmarked graveyard. Second, we must learn to think on a larger scale, if we are to survive and truly make our mark on eternity.

"The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program." -Larry Niven

The man leaned back and cracked his knuckles, hairy affairs of bone that looked like they had been bruised against more than one face in their day. Crow felt a grip of nausea looking at the yellowed teeth and graying bristles of stubble. The man was the paragon of absence of class, screaming from his wrinkled clothes to his cheap cigars to his vociferous odor of stale whiskey and unwashed armpits. He was prideless and disgusting, and exuded an air of invincibility because of it. The man grinned and his bloodshot eyes seemed to bulge out at Crow.

 

"We're here because we have two problems Daedalus." The man said. He mispronounced the name and left off any honoraries like 'doctor' or even the catch-all 'mister' that might imply any respect. The eyes, bloodshot and comical though they were, betrayed a cold intelligence, the cunning of a man dangerous enough to not care a whit about the judgments levied at his appearance. Cigar smoke billowed at Crow, so that he only saw the man twisted through the haze. It suits him. Crow thought. He looks better through the filter of smoke.

 

 

"One. I have a 'defendant', yes I said that with quotes around it, getting ready to stand trial in the biggest murder trial in history. This makes OJ look like a pint of fruit juice. This is the atom bomb of trials. I'm talking about the Green Eyes trial of course." The man paused and eyed Crow. "You have heard of the Green Eyes trial, haven't you? I mean you're a roboticist right? This is your bread and butter."

 

Crow nodded. "I testified at the initial hearing for the defense."

 

"Good." The man said. He twisted the word into an entire sentence. "Do you know who I am, by chance?" Crow shook his head. "I'm F. Gant Stillwell. Director of the FBI. It's a good job, they gave me a big desk. But the most important thing they gave me was a mandate, and part of that mandate is that we don't let murdering sons of bitches just walk. Green Eyes killed two people. It, not he mind you, needs put down. When a piece of machinery malfunctions and kills someone, we don't give the damn thing a trial, we give it a trip to the scrapyard. The official stance of the FBI as long as I have run it, is that a senti cannot stand trial. It ain't human, it ain't sitting in front of a jury. It's all these Hollywood liberals you know. They're the ones pulling this bullshit about thinking machines getting rights, next step it'll be their damn poodles getting the same treatment."

 

Stillwell's eyes narrowed. "Judge Timlinson sees it a different way though, so we're just going to have to get our hands dirty on this one. Which of course leads me to my second problem."

 

Stillwell smiled broadly. "You kidnapped a child from Russia five years ago. Passed it off all these years as your son, who we've pieced together died in the revolt over there in Moscow. Have I got it so far?" Crow started to explain, but Stillwell cut him off. "Just nod, son. I don't want to waste anymore of my taser's battery just now." Crow nodded, Stillwell's dark smile returned.

Chapter Twelve - Sing Sad Songs

 

A storm of black uniformed men surged through Crow's front door, black boots tramping the months of mail overflowing in the foyer. A few AOL cds broke with crisp snaps underfoot. Fear choked any flip response in Crow's throat as a half dozen rifles explored every angle into his chest and head, waiting for the latest pressure of a finger to make his day even worse with a ballistic exploration or two. A chorus of "Clear!"s cascaded through the house, rumbling down the stairs and echoing up from the basement.

 

A cheap suit walked through the door way, flanked by sunglass-equipped bodyguards complete with secret service style earpieces and hands tucked into their blazers to rest on the pistols holstered in underarm sleeves. The newcomer surveyed the situation and waved the flock of gunmen away from Crow. They skirted aside like dogs wary of a sideways kick. He settled in front of Crow on the foot rest in front of his chair.

 

Fingers with neatly trimmed nails probed under the suit jacket and for a moment Crow saw a gun with executional privileges drawing forth. He tensed as if tied down by invisible ropes, but the hands drew only a cigar. A fifty cent drug store lighter sparked after three tries and gave life to the cigar after a vigorous ten seconds of puffing. Crow coughed involuntarily at the acrid plume bellowing from the suit's cancer rocket. Nothing made him feel less like having a cigarette than the poisonous smoke of cheap cigars.

 

"It's a cliché, I know." The man said. "But the benefit of entering a house back by a platoon of armed men is that one does not have to ask permission to smoke."

 

"It's not the smoke." Crow said, with reluctant truculence like a sullen child. "It's the poor quality of the smoke."

 

The man smiled and pointed his first two fingers at a man over Crow's right shoulder. Crow began to look up, but a terrific pain entered his body at the shoulder, blasting through him in a shudder that seemed to last a decade. He couldn't struggle, he couldn't cry out, he could only revel darkly in the utter agony. After an eternity it stopped as suddenly as it started. The man grinned through his cigar, a smile composed entirely of teeth and spittle.

 

"That will be the last time I taser you, if that's the last time you fuck with me." The man said with an eerie lack of anger. "Is that the last time you're going to fuck with me?" Crow nodded. "Good." The man purred. "Now we can have a conversation like civilized people."

That was more terrifying by far than comprehending what was being done, even if it was the most horrible thing imaginable. Nothing is more anathema to the scientific mind than the concept of ideas beyond understanding. They hung up with only a few more words said, both experiencing the same feeling of utter smallness.

 

Janus thought for a few more moments on the lack of memory, unable to pull his mind from that even though his conscious mind demanded time to roll over and savor Flynn's revelations like a mysterious sample of wine. He pulled open a terminal on the computer and began to work on the problem of who the sender of the email was since the sender's question could not be answered. That is the real question. Janus insisted. Who would send me such a question? Who could have guessed it would have such effect on me when I did not know myself?

 

The email yielded little information other than what was immediately apparent at face value. The source address was an anonymous internet email place. Accounts could be created there by the millions at the click of a mouse. Janus grunted in frustration. At the very least a more traditional email could be traced to a domain of limited access in most cases. Janus checked the header information on the email itself, checking to see if the source server might yield a physical clue as to the sender's location: sc55.grozny.genmail.com. It meant nothing to Janus at first. Sc55 was just an internal server designation, an arbitrary name if you will. Grozny was the likely city in which this bank of particular servers was based. Genmail.com was the overall host, the generic email provider from which the email had originated.

 

Janus' heart jolted. Grozny was in the Caucuses, by far the nearest city to the catastrophe of four years ago that had consumed his family and his body. He returned to Genmail's main site and looked up the user's name. "Sed & Awk" was a unique enough user name, but Janus did not understand the play on words. Sed and awk were Unix programs for searching and replacing in files, but beyond that, Janus could not delve any meaning from the names. The public profile of the user on Genmail yielded more fruit. It listed Staraya Sunja as the user's city of origin, which was the small village outside of Grozny in which his family had lived their last few months. It was too much for coincidence. A field at the bottom of the profile nominally labeled "profile", yielded something more, something that could only be intended for him.

 

Once upon a time, Pinocchio wished that he was a real live boy. A fairy godmother heard his wish and tried to make it come true. Unfortunately for Pinocchio, this fairy godmother was an idiot. With a flash of pixie dust, she made him look and talk like a real boy, but inside he was still wood and springs and strings. Poor Pinocchio lived out his life in bliss, not knowing the lie that coated the artifice of his being. Was Pinocchio any less a real boy than a traditional squirt of uteral growth? Does it matter? To some it does to this very day, and they hate the Pinocchios who dream of becoming real boys. If one finds a diary oneself wrote in a different life and remembers not a whit of what's in it, is one the same man who wrote it, or a different one?

 

Janus looked over his shoulder to a shelf containing the volumes of journals he had kept over the years, some still carrying the burns of their near-destruction at the dacha. Some had been burned to ashes that day, and Janus knew suddenly, without even checking, that one of them had included the two years they lived in Austin where Samantha had been born. Janus pressed the reply button at the top of his email program.

 

You have my attention, Geppetto.

 

He sent the message.

Ah, well so here we are, a day late and a post short it seems. I had grand plans for the 26th <i>Burning Violin</i>. It's the sixth month mark, which means we're getting serious, no chance of breaking up now by text message. Of course the giant fancy post took far far longer than anticipated, and is still in an amorphous state of unfinishedness. I'll try to get it done next week, a belated big deal, but as a way of pleading for forgiveness, here's a sweet love story with a happy ending.

Helix

What you don't understand is that I had to leave, I had no choice, damn it! Oh my friends were understanding, and my family too, but they didn't, couldn't comprehend what really had happened. I loved her, yes, with every part of my soul. But what made her death so terrible was not that she slipped away from me day by day as she faded more into cancerous delirium, but that she became more and more present in my mind. My God, she did not die!

From the first day I met her I felt a connection, a sort of transcendent, soul-gripping deja-vu that hinted of a past that was so ancient and eternal that neither of us could seize its true meaning. I know, you say that it was youthful infatuation, the fast dying flame of high school love. You are wrong. I felt, no, I knew that we had been linked eons before, that our souls had never orbited far apart. Indeed they may have been one, only now torn into separate bodies by some perverse deity.

I could sense what she thought, what she was doing, if she was but a room away, or across town. On some other plane of existence, some unearthly power had welded our souls together. I thought it a blessing then. But now? Ha! Now I rather think it was a trick of the devil, earthly damnation for some unimaginable crime. For it did not end!

As she approached her death in that sterile hospital, I began to feel her even more clearly, as if I no longer sensed the brushing of her soul past mine with whispering tendrils of thought, but physically felt it pressing into my head. For those last few days the intimacy grew closer, until it was omnipresent, watching me and sharing my thoughts with a closeness that we only fleetingly experienced during life. And when she died! Oh hell of hells! She was there, everywhere. I could feel her behind me, standing next to me. Even at her own funeral.

Soon I felt her talking to me, hearing her inside my head day and night. I thought I was surely mad, lost in some disease that had snapped every part of my mind. But it wasn't her voice that I feared, it was what it said. Beckoning, calling out my name, she wanted me to join her on the other side. I had sworn to love her until death did us part, and I had. It was she who was to blame. I couldn't stand it after some time, her calling me at every moment, speaking my name; I suppose souls have no need of sleep. Worse though was that I began to slip away as her soul became closer. Our minds began to mesh - oh I couldn't bear it! At whatever level our souls had been bound, they remained so as her body rotted in the ground.

I had to leave it all, she was drawing me away and I was losing myself. The friends, the family, they don't know. They think I ran to escape her memory. No, I ran to escape her presence. Soon her presence dimmed, as I moved from city to city. It seemed I might have found some relief at last. But heaven, or hell, twisted another knife in my gut and the sheer emptiness ate at me. It was all or nothing by fated decree. The balance life gave our souls is forever lost, replaced by either frightful fusion or utter desolation.

But I fear now. Yes, I am horribly afraid, because the visions, the closeness has begun to return. Once again she has found me, though I fled across the Atlantic in desperation. And now I see her once more, striding down the Champs-Elysees toward me, merciful God, she has come for me and I have no where else to run. I don't know why I am writing these words to you, my friend, but I feel someone should know the truth, whatever happens next. Fate has won. I will go find what awaits me in her embrace.

"Friday night, then?" Janus said coolly. "Or do you require more time to gloat?"

 

"That'll work I think." Cadence said. "Let's make it 22:00, after Mickey's evening check."

 

"It's a date then." Janus said and smiled at her. "I don't think there are any flowers on board, so I'll have to improvise."

 

"If you write me poetry, I'll flush you out an airlock." Cadence said. "That's a promise."

 

"Understood." Janus said, and gave her a sort of salute with his smile. He left without a glance back and returned to his quarters.

 

The smile faded quickly in the dark, replaced by familiar brooding. Janus shook the trackball to wake up his computer and threw himself into a melancholy approximation of productivity to pass the time. Looking at the endless figures, analyzing the tables of data helped him not think, not wonder what else he did not remember. The more he thought of his family, of anything, the more it felt like he was remembering watching the events happen, not remembering the events happening. Janus shook his head and focused on the work at hand, trying to push everything out of his mind. Of course the intercom buzzed at that moment to allow a call.

 

"Farside for you Doctor." The voice from operations said.

 

"Yes, patch it through." Janus said. His thoughts jumped to the startling revelations sent his way by Flynn, leaving behind tired thoughts of lost ones. "What have you got Flynn?"

 

"New items from Mauna Kea." Flynn said. "The spectrum is going insane around Epsilon Eridani now. We're not able to see anything of note on our visuals, but they're seeing spectrum jumps that are downright impossible. Heavy metals are showing up in trace quantities on the spectrum."

 

"Iron?" Janus asked. That would be a definite curiosity. Stars burned hydrogen into helium, and hotter ones could manage the heat necessary to burn helium into denser metals. Iron was the densest found in any star, the theoretical maximum of what a star could produce through fusion. The dozens of heavier elements that made up a small percentage of the universe were an inconsistency shuffled under the rug in most physics discussions. Put simply, no one had any idea how those elements had come into existence at all in the universe, by theory or by practical proof.

 

"Plutonium." Flynn said.

 

"That's impossible." Janus said. "The data must be wrong."

 

"That's what you would have said about a ring world a few weeks ago." Flynn pointed out.

 

"But the temperature hasn't increased by an immeasurable amount has it?" Janus asked, already checking the figures always flowing in from the various observatories into his personal files here on the station. "How can that star be producing plutonium, it's not even hot enough to produce carbon, for god's sake."

 

"We're stumped too, Janus." Flynn said "No trace elements between helium and plutonium though, so it's not creating anything in the interim. It's almost like it's being artificially induced."

 

"You think someone is pouring astronomical quantities of plutonium into Epsilon Eridani?" Janus asked. "There's not a thousand tons of it even in existence on Earth, where would it come from? You're talking about masses of plutonium the size of our entire planet."

 

"I know, I know." Flynn said. "But the data is there. Triple-checked and verified. Epsilon Eridani is measurably composed of plutonium now, and the quantity is growing every hour."

 

Janus took a step back from the problem. "Assuming that something could manage to produce that much plutonium, an enormous assumption you realize, why would they do this?"

 

Silence on the other end of the line. "I just don't know Janus." More silence. "I think we are dealing with something beyond our current understanding of physics."

Cadence laughed. "Yeah, you love them when they're little, but the older they get the more you want to kill them." Janus twitched back as if struck and Cadence held a hand up to her mouth. "Oh Janus, I'm sorry. That was thoughtless of me."

 

Janus shook her off. "No, you meant nothing by it. I'm the one who is overly sensitive."

 

He turned to leave the lab anyway, struck by the notion that the discomfort enveloping the room would dissipate in his absence. "Janus, don't go." Cadence said quietly. Then more strongly she insisted. "Look, we need to finish running through Mickey's morning status. No sense blowing a data point because we're acting like teenagers."

 

They ran through everything and could find nothing. Mickey was as happy as a lab rat could be, not much of a statement for a group generally destined for gruesome fates. Mickey dined on the finest French cheeses since the cost to raise anything into orbit in the first place was so high that the difference between ten-cent grade D rat cheese, and handcrafted Roquefort that cost fifty dollars per pound was a meaningless expense. The crew ate equally as well, although their expertise was universally in branches of science and none could be trusted with the shuttle-loads of tenderloin stored in the station freezer.

 

Mickey had become something of an international celebrity, so much so that he had 24-7 cameras trained on him for a webcam and a weekly highlights show on CNN. Janus supposed it would pass as all such things did, but the rat sure seemed to know that he had it good. Something in that little stare suggested a grateful spark of intelligence, thankful he hadn't been in the group sent over to the dog food research institute instead.

 

"Would you care to have dinner some time, Cadence?" Janus asked her on the way out of the lab.

 

Cadence flushed. She was divorced, he knew, even denying his feelings, Janus could not help but have done his homework on that one, since everyone on the station tended to know everything about one another. She again pushed hair out of her eyes, this time more as a nervous habit than to improve vision.

 

"Oh I don't know Janus." Cadence started.

 

Janus nodded. "Very well." He said and turned to go the opposite way down the hall towards his quarters. "I did not mean to overstep my bounds." He said quietly without a touch of animosity.

 

"Well I didn't say no, did I you dolt?" Cadence flared.

 

Janus stopped and looked over his shoulder. "Is that a yes?"

 

"I don't know, it's sort of fun to make you dance around a bit. Keep you on your toes." Cadence said with mirth. "You're always so sure of everything, but now I've got you out of your comfort zone." She waved a finger at him like a stern English nanny.

Chapter Ten - Fractals

 

It was the irony of perfect memory that the absence of a certain memory could cast doubt on the perfection of the rest. The more perfect a memory, the more damning the lack of one since it was all the more unlikely. Janus could not remember his daughter's first word. He shared the dilemma with Charlie, leaving out any mention of the mysterious email, but trying to convey the sense of doubt that shook him to the very core.

 

"Janus, man, it's not the end of the world." Charlie said, not understanding. "Nobody remembers everything, and just cause you remembered that there's something you don't remember, doesn't mean you can't remember at all." He paused after that awkwardness and punctuated the sentence with the period by all those who are unsure if they conveyed their thoughts accurately. "You know what I mean?" The words slurred into one long syllable.

 

Janus would have been near tears if he had any to give. He felt monstrous then, feeling the way he had after waking in that hospital bed to find his body destroyed along with his family. It was terrible to not shed a tear for your children, even if it was a physical impossibility. He forced himself to stand up straight and shove the feelings down underneath. None of them can understand, it's something I'll have to figure out on my own. "Nothing Charlie. Nevermind at all."

 

But he did not leave it alone himself. In quiet moments, Janus obsessed over the missing memory. It was simply something he must remember in order to feel whole himself.

 

"Do you have children, Cadence?" Janus asked when they were alone in one of the laboratories, checking in on Mickey's health all these days later.

 

"Amy's twelve and Douglas is eight." Cadence said absently, stroking Mickey's soft white fur and scratching his pink nose. "It was hard to leave them for this, even if it was the chance of a lifetime."

 

"Do you remember their first words?" Janus asked. He felt nervous, like he was asking a girl to prom, silly at his age, sillier at his lack of a proper body. His feelings twinged at that last self deprecation. Loneliness has no connection with the genitals, he reminded himself, it has everything to do with the soul.

 

Cadence brushed hair back out of her eyes. It was a curious move in zero gravity since the locks of hair floated up like a small mohawk instead of settling against her scalp. Hair tended overtime to settle normally even in zero-g, something to do with minute electrostatic attraction, Janus supposed, that was why hair still got in eyes even when it was free to float away. A perturbed eyebrow raised at Janus. "Of course I do." She said with the irritation of a scientist, the kind of person not charmed by mystery but driven to explain it. "Why in the world do you ask?"

 

"No reason." Janus demurred. "Just thinking about my kids."

"Hello?" He answered.

 

"Crow?" Rebecca's voice, cold and fast.

 

"Yes. Is this about Green Eyes?" Crow asked, mind flashing to the profession of love.

 

"No. Alexander, hide him. I was told to tell you that they're coming for him." Rebecca said.

 

"Who's coming?" Crow stammered, anger rising. "Who the fuck told you this?"

 

"Not yet a friend, not yet an enemy." Rebecca said. "That's all."

 

"Why'd you call this line?" Crow asked, unable to resist the question.

 

"Because if you weren't there, there wouldn't be time enough for it to matter." Rebecca said and the line went dead.

 

Crow thought for a few seconds before slamming down the phone and running upstairs in a haze of urgency that made everything seem to happen slower by the second. Alexander was in his room of course, accompanied by Nan, going over some math lesson or another. Nan looked up with whatever amount of surprise that its limited facial range of synthetic rubber could manage. Alexander's face only betrayed a twinge of annoyance at the interruption. Crow scooped up Alexander and motioned Nan to follow. Brief thoughts of flooring it down the interstate flitted through his mind. Maybe to Canada, maybe to Mexico. Hell, why stop there, just keep plowing through the jungles and banana republics until they could stand on the Cape of Capricorn and watch the sun rise over the Atlantic and set below the Pacific. Crow shook it aside. They would be stopped a dozen times before the border, and even if they made it how would they survive? Waiting tables had been something left behind as an undergraduate.

 

Crow led them down into the basement, whispering instructions to both Nan and Alexander in turn. Sirens could be heard in the distance, closing in on and the house. Crow struggled for precious seconds to help shove Nan through the tunnel behind the painting, panicking for a moment when the senti's hips ground to a halt at the narrowest point of the channel through the bedrock before with a scrape of metal on rock it slipped by and tumbled onto its head in the workshop. Crow winced and helped the senti back to its feet, ignoring the quite abused look it cast from grossly artificial features. He took a moment he didn't have to snap a padlock shut on the cabinet that contained Trinan's facsimile. It wouldn't do for Alexander to find that, it wouldn't do at all. Crow bent, though not as far as he would have had to a month ago, hugged his son and kissed him on the forehead for good measure.

 

"Be good kid, I love you." Crow said, and without waiting for an answer dove back down the tunnel.

 

He snapped the painting back into place and spared a moment for a double check of the hidden latches. The sirens blared ever closer, almost sounding on top of him. Crow imagined he heard jackboots pounding down the stairs to catch him in the act. He tossed two random boxes in front of the painting, paused and added a third on top, with a slight adjustment of the angle to be a more calculatedly casual positioning. Crow darted for the stairs, but turned around at their foot for a second look. After what seemed like an eternal consideration, Crow removed the third box and tossed it aside. He bolted up the stairs and sat down in a chair in the rarely used living room. Time seemed to stop for the next few minutes as the sirens made their interminable progress up the dirt roads. Crow stared at the clock, wondering if they were actually coming to his house after all.

 

"Who was that on the phone?" Crow asked the slowly ticking clock as it hit the forty-five second mark just short of the hour. Then the more important question popped to mind. "Why are they coming for Alexander?" Another beat, ten seconds til the hour. "Who's they?"

 

A sledgehammer knocked the front door off of its hinges as all three hands clicked at once to mark the hour.

"Like what?"

 

"Things before his first birthday." Crow said. "Things from when he was an infant."

 

Father Thomas frowned. "What did the doctor find?"

 

"Nothing. Still waiting on some tests though." Crow said. "I guess they don't know what to look for when you go in and what's wrong is that you're healthier than you should be, huh?"

 

"The lord works in mysterious ways." Father Thomas said without a trace of irony.

 

"Amen." Crow whispered. He thought for a moment. "Do you believe that a senti can love, Father?"

 

"I don't think it's possible to love without a soul." Father Thomas said gravely.

 

"So if a senti could love, would you take that as proof that the soulless could love, or that the senti who can love does have a soul?" Crow asked.

 

Father Thomas stopped walking and stared at him with deliberative silence. He spoke after a few moments. "I take it you have found a senti who professes to be in love?"

 

"Not just any senti either." Crow said. "Green Eyes."

 

"And do you believe it?"

 

Crow considered the question carefully. "I don't disbelieve it, but I think that he might have the same concept of love as a teenager, something immature and half unformed."

 

"And yet powerful with passion." Father Thomas murmured and then smiled. "The young make up for lack of understanding with an unmatchable zeal for their passion, for the melodrama of it."

 

"Do you believe then?" Crow asked.

 

Father Thomas' lips fluttered almost smiling, almost laughing. "I believe that it can think it is in love, but I do not think it actually can have the capacity for love. It is only a machine, Crow."

 

Crow drove home in silence and muttered to himself about robotic drivers as he pulled up the driveway and parked the car in the garage, this time managing to not further damage the side-view mirror. The phone was ringing when Crow walked in the front door and tossed his keys in their usual place. Crow frowned, he hardly remembered owning a landline since it was a mostly superfluous with the existence of cell phones. He fumbled around in the living room and found it buried behind a pile of old science fiction paperbacks.

Next week marks the six month mark of writing Burning Violin, so I'm working on something a bit bigger than normal, you know, to make it special and such. So this week I'm being both lazy and shameless by posting one of my favorite scenes out of Katorga (my novel, available from Amazon in both paperback and for the Kindle). This scene captures a lot of the heart of the novel at once: it's brutal, terrifying, and yet darkly funny at the same time. There are few things more awkward than an author writing his own blurbs, so buy the book (or ten, don't be shy), and write your own awestruck blurbs for me to quote so that I don't sound like such a pompous twat typing about how awesome I am. Even though I am. Please enjoy...

A metal door was held open for Doug into a tiny room, no more than ten by ten, hardly the size of a decent bathroom.  A metal table with three chairs sat in the center of the room, and a broad mirror Doug recognized from old police shows covered one wall.  The room was otherwise bare concrete except for a drain at the center of the room right underneath the table.  The leader pointed to the single chair on the opposite side of the table from the other two.

"Please take a seat there, Dr. Bradley, someone will be right with you," the man said and then leaned close to talk in a low voice.  "These are desperate times, Doug, please do your best for the Republic."

Doug drew himself up straight and spoke as firmly as he could.  "I will do whatever I can, sir.  I'm a good party man, myself."

The man nodded and his lips touched on an enigmatic smile for a moment and then he left the room in a hurry, closing the door behind him with a loud click.  Doug walked slowly to the chair and sat down.  He looked idly over at the mirror and felt suddenly claustrophobic, the walls pulling in closer every moment.  Doug shivered and stared at those other two seats.  Some interminable amount of time later, it was impossible to sense time accurately surrounded by concrete and glaringly unnatural fluorescent lights, Doug nodded off, face lowering to the slick metal of the interrogation table.

..........

"Wake up you ignorant piece of shit fuck donkey," a voice screamed in Doug's ear.  A finger roughly ran up the side of his chin, covered in drool.  "You're slavering all over my goddamned table you drooling goat fucking cock monger."

Doug jerked up in the chair, almost falling over backwards before a hand caught him by his hair and steadied him.  He couldn't see, the fluorescents were so bright they were blinding him, burning his retinas.  Doug shouted out, and got a slap across his face for the trouble, cheek left stinging by a latex-gloved hand.

"What?  Who?  What?"  Doug exclaimed.  He blinked against the lights and began to see shapes.  Men in the two seats across from him, another towering over him, holding his head up.

"Three fucking stupid questions that only a slut slit licking terrorist taint sucking whore of a traitor would even think to ask!"  Another slap across his face.  "I've fucked sheep to death that made me less sick than you!"

"Now, now, Robert, why don't you go take a breather now that our friend has woken up," one of the men across the table said.  The voice sounded so kind that Doug almost whimpered.  The instinct made him feel ill, reminding him of dogs he had put down.

Robert shoved Doug so hard that he tumbled out of the chair and it landed on top of his head.  Doug cowered for a moment, expecting a kick or another tirade, but Robert only paused to spit in his face before exiting the room.  Doug lay there for a moment before standing on shaking legs, wiping the spittle from his face with the end of his silk tie as his stomach roiled in protest.  He picked up the chair with hands that hadn't shaken so badly since his wedding day and looked around for his bag, desperately needing a valium.  His bag was on the other side of the table, behind the two men.  Doug refused to ask for it, and sat down in his chair.  He took a deep breath and composed himself.

"There must have been a terrible mistake," he said.  "That man I came here with told me that the Republic needed me.  I came as quickly as I could and am at the government's service."

The two men exchanged a look.  They both wore the gray and red uniforms of the world police.  Doug thought that the three bars on each of their breasts meant that they were captains, but all he knew about such things were from television and movies, all of which were spinning nightmare scenarios before his eyes from memory.

"I am Lieutenant Thomas, and this is Lieutenant Allen," the man on the right said.  The man on the left said nothing, but stared at Doug through squinting eyes and lit a cigarette.  "I assure you that there has been no mistake.  We are quite aware of your activities and all we want to do is help you as best we can.  But make no mistake, we know absolutely everything, we just need to hear it from you."

"What are you talking about?"  Doug asked.  "I came here to help."

"And you can help," Thomas said gently.  "You can help by telling us the names and addresses of all of your co-conspirators."  He leaned forward and placed his hand on Doug's.  "It is essential to the security of the state that we know exactly what the plan is, in your own words.  We have to stop your friends before it is too late."

Doug opened and closed his mouth repeatedly.  "But I haven't done anything!"

Thomas sighed and rubbed his eyes with both hands.  Allen blew a long cloud of smoke at Doug.  "Was your wife in on it?"

Doug blinked.  "No, of course not."

"Then you admit you were?"  Allen asked.

"Were what?"  Doug asked.

"In on it."  Allen said.

"On what?"

"It."

"No."

Allen paused for a moment.  "What it weren't you in on?"

"It?"

"It."

"What?"

"Exactly."  Allen said and blew out another long cloud of smoke.  "How can you know your wife was not part of it, if you don't know what it is?"

"She wasn't in on anything!"  Doug said.

"So you must have inside information on the plan, if you do know for a fact that she was not involved.  And even if she is not involved, your involvement makes her an accessory and thus involved just as much as if she were involved."  Allen said, he leaned back and blew out another cloud of smoke, tapping the ashes off his cigarette onto the concrete floor with a look of satisfaction like a mathematician having finished a twenty page long geometric proof.

Thomas leaned forward again.  "Look Doug, I know you're protecting her.  Hell, if our positions were reversed, I'd try to protect my wife too, but you can't drag her down with you.  You have a chance to make things right here.  Take responsibility, turn in the guys in charge, I know you were just going along with it out of friendship, you weren't really a terrorist, right?  I mean, if you don't confess and tell us what we already know, then we're going to have to assume that Caroline was involved, and have Robert go bring her in and interrogate her.  And I don't think anyone wants that except for Robert."

"But I didn't do anything!"  Doug shouted.

Thomas shook his head.  "Come on man, it's over.  But don't drag Caroline down with you.  And little Alice, I mean if you're lucky she'd get put into foster care, but really with two parents classified as anti-social, there's not much of a chance of her not getting sent off-world to work off some of your debt."

"Quit saying their names!"  Doug yelled.  "You have no right, you don't even know them!"  He sobbed.

"Shhh, I know, I'm sorry."  Thomas said, and patted Doug's hand again.  "Just tell us what happened."

"You were part of a group plotting to smuggle a dirty nuke into the Los Angeles spaceport, weren't you?"  Allen asked.  He opened a folder and threw dozens of pictures of Doug talking to various people, passing them by on the street, looking at various public buildings.  "We've had you under surveillance for quite some time and have tracked down most of your associates, but we need your help to convict them."

Allen folded his hands in front of him.  "So should we talk about it, or should we have Robert go get your wife and daughter and get answers out of them?"

Father Thomas thought for a long moment and closed his book. He slipped it into a pocket inside his jacket. "What changed your mind?"

 

"I couldn't stop thinking about Trinan and David. How could something that did that be the right side? I mean, our side of the debate didn't do it, but we were culpable in a way. We designed and built them in the first place." Crow stared up at the wafting pollen and thought for a while before smiling. "Who am I kidding?" He said. "I did it because they fired me. No grand reasons, no real change of philosophy. Just getting even is all. And Da Vinci Law, well enemy of my enemy and all that." He gestured to Father Thomas' pocket. "Machiavelli has a chapter on that doesn't he?"

 

Father Thomas patted the book and pointed at Crow. "Machiavelli deals in what is effective, not what is right."

 

"Hair splitting." Crow retorted.

 

"It's a world of difference." Father Thomas said. "The moral path and the evil path may only be hairs apart, they may even be the same path but for the intent of the traveler, but they are different still. Da Vinci Law is not exactly my buddy, as you say, though."

 

Crow raised an eyebrow. "They share your goals. Eradication of the sentis."

 

Father Thomas shook his head. "John Osteryoung is a man full of hatred, not love. I have met him several times and felt like washing my hands afterwards." Father Thomas said with crackling dryness. "The Naturalist movement wants to celebrate and protect mankind, not strike revenge at its creations."

 

"But you both want the same thing." Crow protested.

 

Father Thomas shook his head. "If two men walk the same path, but one has murder in his heart, are they really going in the same direction?" Crow did not answer. "If your heart does not believe in what John Osteryoung wants you to do, then don't do it."

 

"I think he's doing the right thing." Crow said, although his heart was not in it. "He was like me once, he was an early roboticist, you know. He knows what I feel about these things."

 

"Knowing what you feel does not make that feeling right." Father Thomas said. His face softened and he motioned Crow to walk with him through the roses. "Enough about business, Crow, how is Alexander these days?"

 

Crow swallowed back more arguments and joined Father Thomas on the path back to the central buildings. "He's fine. He's growing really fast, really smart. I took him to the doctor a few days ago for a check up." Crow frowned. "Honestly I'm worried about him. He's maturing faster than kids should, and he remembers things that he shouldn't remember at all."

Stealing a spacecraft was difficult, but it was keeping it stolen that remained the challenge. The problem was that there wasn't really anywhere to hide in space, except in terms of distancing oneself far enough from Earth that visual telescopes could no longer pick up your orbit with ease. Crow loved the audacity of the proposal, but the details were left entirely to him and Hydane. Osteryoung admitted to knowing nothing particularly useful, although of course his connections and influence would be behind them one hundred percent. "I want that ship." Osteryoung had told Crow. "I want to take it, and use it to take men to Alpha Centauri. It'll be Neil Armstrong on a galactic scale. How about it Crow? Want to be the first man on a planet in another star system? If you pull this off, I'd say you earned it."

 

"Why me?" Crow asked. "Why do you want me for this job?"

 

"Because everything up there is controlled by sentis." Osteryoung said. "That's the strong point, the weak point, and the summation of everything else. One way or the other, this mission has to go through them to pull this off. No one in the world knows more about sentis than you. You invented them, when you really get down to it."

 

Crow left Da Vinci Law and managed to survive the drive home without too many scares. The traffic was lighter this time of day, and his reflexes were improved by four cups of coffee during his palaver with Osteryoung. For the first time since Trinan had died, Crow felt that enthusiastic high of having something bigger to work on, some point to getting up every morning, besides his son. It was the way a compass must feel when you took it out of a circle of magnets and let it get a bearing again on true north. Osteryoung was right, that spacecraft was meant for human travelers, but more importantly, the idea presented Crow with an impossible goal, which was exactly what he loved to have. "Let your reach exceed your grasp, or what's a heaven for?" Crow asked himself as he pulled into the rose gardens outside of Stanford on a few acres that had been converted from strip malls into a compound of sorts for the Humanist movement.

 

He found Father Thomas wandering among the roses, holding a small book and reading as he paced along the narrow dirt paths. The perfume of roses and fragrant bushes hung redolent in the air, a visible taint of yellow pollen hanging in the air over head, swirling and sparkling the afternoon sun.

 

"Prayer book?" Crow asked, interrupting Father Thomas midstep.

 

The old Jesuit started and took a step back. He smiled after a moment, composing himself. "Actually, it's Machiavelli."

 

"Aw." Crow said in acknowledgement. "Number three on the Catholic's required reading list."

 

"What brings you here, Crow?" Father Thomas asked. "It's been a couple months."

 

 "Been on the road a bit." Crow admitted.

 

"The path less taken?"

 

"I don't think anyone's ever quite taken this path." Crow said. "How goes the movement?"

 

"Win some, lose some." Father Thomas said coolly. "And your side of the war?"

 

"I think I defected." Crow said. He laughed shortly, with an almost hysterical edge to the laughter. "First I helped your buddies take out International Robotics and now I'm working for Da Vinci Law on special projects."