Faith (47 page)

The voice did not immediately reply.

One of the screens in the Command Centre showed a live address from the President of Sakhra, appealing for calm. The irony was not lost on Swann. Apart from the disturbing but still largely isolated incidents shown on various other screens, calm was what Sakhra still had. Things were falling apart, but calmly. Since the
Charles Manson
’s departure from Sakhra—if
She
ever came here, would
She
cause as much chaos?—the disturbances had increased, but they were still apparently unconnected, and hard to read. The humans on Sakhra seemed to share the Sakhrans’ sense of separation, of having turned away from each other. Election turnouts were small. When Swann gave interviews, which he had done frequently in the last few days, he got ten times the President’s coverage.

Or maybe these events were the tip of a larger pattern, as were the events in the Gulf with Foord and Her. Maybe—Swann immediately regretted this thought, because its afterecho wouldn’t go away—maybe they weren’t just hard to read, but too big to read.

“No, not two opponents,” said the voice, eventually.

“What do you mean?”

“Not two opponents, Director. Foord is still attacking Her.”

“Attacking?”

“She’s been damaged: nobody has ever done that before. She’s fighting back, so the
Charles Manson
is still attacking Her. We don’t fully understand what She’s doing, but She’s fighting back.”

“You don’t know, do you?”

“I told you, Foord has killed communications with us.”

“But you have your devices. Do you or don’t you know what’s happening in the Gulf?”

“We don’t know. He seems almost like
Her.
”

“I met him here, remember. And dealt with him over Copeland. He was always like Her.”

“But we know he’s damaged Her, Director, and we know he’s trying to finish Her. We can’t read Her responses. But we don’t interpret it as any joining of forces.”

“You’ve contradicted yourself at least three times, but let that pass. We can agree that he’s damaged Her, and that nobody else has done that.” Despite what he felt for Foord, he remembered the genuine sense of wonder he’d had on hearing that. “So why isn’t anyone helping him? Does
all
of Horus Fleet have to remain around Sakhra?”

“Director Swann, believe me. If Foord fails, you’ll need the entire Fleet.”

“Not even the
Charles Manson
could take on the entire Fleet. Are you saying
She
can?”

“If Foord fails, She’ll come for Sakhra. It may be over-provision, but it’s better that Sakhra’s defended with the whole Fleet.”

One advantage of the microphone was the amount of sceptical expressions Swann could safely direct at it. Not even the voice seemed to believe that last answer.

Swann let the silence grow long enough to become uncomfortable. “If,” he said, “they’re so closely matched that one Outsider can damage Her, how many would it take to be sure of defeating Her?”

“What do you mean by that, Director Swann? Specifically?”

“One Outsider’s damaged Her. Two or three more could finish Her. Send us two or three more. Is that specific enough?”

“No. Outsiders don’t fight in teams, they fight alone. And if She defeats Foord and comes to Sakhra, the Commonwealth will need all of them for what happens next.”

7

Foord stood in the mouth of the midsection crater and looked across the gap, blinking, at his ship.

He felt cold. He held his hand in front of his face and flexed his fingers. There were veins and tendons and nails—immaculate nails—but the flesh tones were gradations of grey and silver. He felt cold, then it occurred to him that he was standing open to space and didn’t have a suit. He was standing—gravity worked here—and breathing; he took in what felt like air through his open mouth, and his chest rose and fell. I’m a construct, he told himself, a construct of liquid silver made by whatever lives in this ship, but I’m also
me
, with all my memories and motives. I’ve just woken to life, but I remember all my life leading up to this. Why didn’t they just make something that
looked
like me? Why did they make me like this, full of everything I am? It seems like overengineering.

He looked down from his raised hand, along his arm, to the rest of his body. Large, heavily muscled; toned and tidy; everything I’ve woken up to, every day, over there on the
Charles Manson
. How did they know it all? And why have they put me here? He felt cold.

Outside the mouth of the crater, between him and his ship, floated nearly three hundred dark gunmetal spiders. They’d been about to pour into this crater, this open wound we made in Her side. They’d been about to enter Her and attack Her, like She had sent Hers to attack us, but when this cold light filled the crater I told Cyr to hold them back. (Did he remember that, or just assume it? He didn’t know.) And behind him, in the crater’s deepest recesses—behind the swirling darkness which hid those recesses from the
Charles Manson
—were the giant coils and festoons of The Rope, the thing She’d made by joining pieces of them and Her, and had then taken into Herself.

He felt cold. Not because he was standing open to space—that was a cold he’d never have had time to feel, he’d have died from it instantly, if he’d been alive. The cold was inside him. He knew he couldn’t possibly be alive, but he avoided the temptation of trying to define Alive. I have motives and memories and sensory inputs and outputs and a sense of myself, just like me in my ship over there. Maybe more so. I’m almost more than me. I must be looking across from the Bridge and seeing me here, but I can’t look back and see myself over there because I’m hidden in the Bridge and I don’t have a screen that gives me magnifications of things moments before I ask for them. The grammar doesn’t work, it’s too clumsy. Words don’t work. I’m here in the crater and I’m over there sixteen hundred feet away in my ship. I can’t call the Foord over there Him, it’s Me.

Self-referential, like a book reading a book. Same software, different hardware. The software is all my memories and motives, everything I am, but I’m made of liquid silver which remains solid while it keeps my shape. I’m not organic—no, don’t go there either, don’t try defining that. I’ve been
made.

I grew out of a pool of silver on a floor somewhere behind me on this ship. I’ve been made by the people who live in this ship. (Yes, People. Who Live.) I know them as Them and People, not Her or It, because there’s more than one and they interact socially, but I don’t know what they look like or why they made me or why their ship has done these things. I know less about them than a hammer knows about the owner of the hand holding it—less than an atom in the handle of the hammer—but they made me like this, and put me here, for a reason.

And that’s what it is,
he thought, looking out at the spiders floating between him and his ship. They were motionless, dark against the silver of the
Charles Manson
. They floated in a narrow compressed formation so that he only saw the front five or six bodies but saw hundreds of limbs, some broken, sprouting from those behind, like figures of Kali. He knew he would try to stop them when they entered the crater. He neither wanted to nor was aware of being compelled to; it was just how he was made. It was inevitable, like breathing, though he stood open to space and wasn’t alive.

Something made him turn round and look back into the recesses of the crater. He wasn’t surprised at what he saw coming out of it to join him and stand by him, in the crater’s open mouth, facing the spiders.

•

On the Bridge they were dumbstruck as they looked at the single figure which stood, looking back at them, in the mouth of the midsection crater. The others saw what the figure looked like, but Foord saw what it
was.
He took in every detail of its body-language and posture and demeanour. He knew what was behind its eyes.

The Bridge screen patched in a closeup of its face.

“That isn’t just…” Foord began, then his throat closed up. He took a deep breath through his open mouth, his chest rising and falling.

“That isn’t just a replica. It isn’t just a construct. It’s
me
, everything I am, soul and self-awareness and everything.”

“How can you know that?” Smithson asked.

“The same way you’d know, if that was you standing there. It knows it’s everything I am, but it knows it was made, and it’s trying to understand why. Not It,
Me
. I know I was made, and I’m trying to understand why…There aren’t words for this, words don’t work.”

Foord looked through the Bridge screen into his own icy silver soul. He felt cold.

On the screen, the figure turned round to look back into the recesses of the crater. Other figures were walking out to join it, one by one, and to stand at its side.

•

Foord turned to see them walking out of the crater to join him.

Cyr was first. She too was silver and grey, the grey ranging from almost-white to almost-black. She raised a hand in greeting. Her fingernails, immaculately manicured like his and dark blue back on the
Charles Manson
, were here almost black, at the tips of long silver fingers. Her tunic and shoes, dark blue on the
Charles Manson
, were here dark grey. Her skirt swung gracefully as she walked, just as it always did, and Foord could feel himself getting the first stirrings of an erection, just as he always did.

They even let me have erections, he thought. He wanted to take it out and look at it, but thought it probably wasn’t the time. He expected it would be silver and grey.

She smiled at him. “Commander.”

“Hello, Cyr.”

And they’ve let me hear spoken words, open to space. You can’t hear noises in space. But you can’t stand in it or breathe in it either, and Cyr was breathing like him; her chest rose and fell under her tunic. And her voice sounded just like it did on the
Charles Manson
, just like he remembered.

He looked her up and down. “I know you wear that to arouse me,” he said, “and it does. It looks good on you. You’re beautiful.”

Before she could reply they were joined by Thahl, Kaang and Smithson. Thahl, slender and graceful like Cyr but slighter. Kaang, pleasant but unremarkable, a little plump, and looking terrified. And Smithson—

Smithson was the strangest of all, because back on the
Charles Manson
he was naturally grey. Only his eyes really differed; normally they were warm and golden, here they were mid-grey. When he extended a limb in greeting, Foord heard the wet plop.

They all had self-awareness. As Foord on the
Charles Manson
had realised when he first saw himself, something about them made it obvious. They had everything, physically and spiritually, which they’d ever woken up to every morning of their lives; yet they knew they were made, and knew they would defend the crater. They knew also that they should go back into the ship and find the people who made them, but they knew they never would.

They came and stood at Foord’s side in the mouth of the crater, imagining (they could also imagine; they’d been given that too) what their other selves on the
Charles Manson
—no, their
selves
: words didn’t work properly for this—would be thinking.

•

“You see?” Foord said to the others on the Bridge. “They’re
us.
They’re everything we are. Tell me they’re not.”

“What are we going to do, Commander?” Kaang said. She was looking at herself and the other four figures in the crater, and sobbing.

“What are
they
going to do?” Cyr asked. She too was unable to take her eyes off the crater.

“You already know,” Foord said. “She made them and She put them there. Put
us
there. To defend the crater against our spiders.”

“But She could have made ordinary devices,” Kaang said. “Ordinary synthetics. Even if they
looked
like us, they didn’t have to
be
us.”

“Yes they did,” Smithson said bleakly. “That’s the whole point. Make us fight them and kill them.”

The silence returned. The way they each thought about family and loved ones, if they had any, varied with their biology and culture and circumstances, but the way they thought about
themselves
did not vary. Some of them could even imagine killing loved ones or family, but this was worse. Worse than suicide. Deliberately killing something with sentience, when that sentience was your own, and when you knew—unlike suicide—that you’d still be alive and aware of what you’d done….

“We have to attack the crater,” Foord said.

“I know, Commander,” Cyr said. “And if they defend it we have to kill them. Kill
us.
I wish the words would work better.”

“She never did anything like this,” Thahl said, “when She last came to Sakhra.”

“You said we’d find out new things about Her.”

“Yes, Commander, I did. But this…”

“This is because we hurt Her. Made her fight for Her life. Nobody’s seen this, because nobody’s done that before.” He took a long breath, and felt it rasp through his throat. “We have to watch ourselves die.” He nodded to Cyr, who sent out the signal to the spiders.

•

They stood together in the open mouth of the midsection crater, and watched as the spiders started moving towards them.

“Why have they brought me here, too?” Kaang asked. “I’m nothing to do with this, I’m only a pilot. We’ll die here.”

Foord laughed. “Are we alive enough to die?”

“Commander, we’re only five against…how many?”

“Nearly three hundred,” Cyr said.

“And we’re unarmed,” Smithson said. “Not even sidearms.”

“Five against three hundred or three thousand. It hardly matters,” Foord said. “They didn’t make us like this and put us here just to be wiped out.”

“Didn’t they?” Smithson said. “Maybe that’s the whole point. Make us, over there, kill ourselves over here.”