Steel Beach (76 page)

“You say a lot of people have died.”

“A great many. I don’t know the number yet, but it’s many, many more than you realize.” That was my first real inkling of how bad things had been throughout Luna, that the kind of things I’d seen had happened throughout the planet. I must have looked a question at him, because he shrugged. “Not a million. More than a hundred thousand.”

“Jesus, CC.”

“It might have been everybody.”

“But you don’t know that.”

“No one can ever know.”

No one could, certainly not computer-illiterate little old me. I didn’t give him the kind word he craved. I’ve since come to believe he was probably right, that he probably enabled most of us to survive. But even he would not have denied that he was responsible for the thousands of dead.

What would it have cost me? I just wasn’t capable of judging him. To do that I’d have had to understand him, and I knew just enough about him to realize that was beyond me. He had done bad, and he had done good. Me, I have awful thoughts sometimes. If I was mentally ill, maybe I’d put those thoughts into action and become a killer. With the CC, the thought was the action, at least at the end.

Actually, it was even worse than that.

“The best way I can think of to explain it to you,” he said, at last, after I’d said nothing for a long time, “is to think of an evil twin. That’s not strictly accurate—the twin
is
me, just as this part talking to you is me, or what’s left of me. Think of an evil twin living inside your head, like a human with multiple-personality disorder. That part of you is sealed off from your real self. You may find evidence of its existence, things the other person did while in control of your body, but you can’t know what he is thinking or planning, and you can’t stop him when he takes over.” He shook his head violently. “No, no, it’s not quite like that, because all this was happening at the same time, I was splitting into many minds, some of them good, others amoral, a few really bad. No, that’s still not—”

“I think I get the picture,” I said.

“Good, because that’s as close as I can get without getting too technical. You fell under the influence of an amoral part of me. I did experiments on you. I intended you no harm, but I can’t say I had just your own best interests at heart.”

“We’ve been over that.”

“Yes. But others weren’t so lucky. I did other things. Some of them will remain buried, with any luck. Others will come out. You saw the result of one experiment involving pseudo-immortality. The resurrection of a dead person by cloning and memory recording.”

The thought of Andrew MacDonald was still enough to make me shiver.

“Not one of your better attempts,” I said.

“Ah, but I was improving. There’s nothing to prevent an exact duplicate being made. I’d have done it, given time.”

“But what good is it? You’re still dead.”

“It becomes a theological question, I think. It’s true you’re dead, but someone just like you carries on your life. Others wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. The
duplicate
wouldn’t be able to tell.”

“I was afraid…  at one point I considered that
I
might be a duplicate. That maybe I
did
kill myself.”

“You didn’t and you’re not. But there’s no test. In the end, you’ll just have to realize it makes no difference. You’re you, whether you’re the first version or the second.”

He told me a few more things, most of which I don’t think it’s wise to reveal just yet. The Heinleiners are aware of most of them, experiments that would have made Doctor Mengele cringe. Let them remain where such things ought to be hidden.

“You still haven’t told me why you tried to kill me,” I said.

“I didn’t, Hildy, not in the sense that—”

“I know, I know, I understand that. You know what I mean.”

“Yes. Perhaps my evil twin is like your subconscious. When all this began to happen it began trying to cover its tracks. You were inconvenient evidence, you and others like you. You had to be destroyed, then maybe the other part of me could lie low until all this blew over.”

“And he killed almost a million people to cover his tracks?”

“No. The sad thing is there were very few he killed deliberately. Most of the deaths came as a result of the chaos ensuing from the struggle between the various parts of my mind. Collateral damage, if you will.”

Cybernetic bombs going astray. What an idea. I’m sure I’ll never have a realistic idea of what went on in the CC’s mind, at speeds I can only dimly understand, but I have this picture of a pilot firing a killer program into a maze of hardware, hoping to take out the enemy command center. Ooops! Seems like we hit the oxygen works instead. Sorry about that.

“I did the best I could,” he said, and closed his eyes. I thought he was dead, and then they snapped open again and he tried to sit up, but he was too weak. I saw that his tourniquet had loosened; more bright arterial blood had pumped out over the older, rusty stain on his clothes.

I got up from behind my rock and went down to him. Sometimes you just have to do it, you know. Sometimes you have to put aside your doubts and do what you feel in your gut. I got down on one knee and re-tied the piece of bloody cloth.

“That won’t do any good,” he said. “It’s too late for that.”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” I said.

“Thanks.”

“Do you want some water or anything?”

“I’d rather you didn’t leave me.” So I didn’t, and we were silent for a time, looking out over the dinosaur farm, where evening was falling. Then he said he was cold. I wasn’t wearing anything and I knew it wasn’t really cold, but I put my arm over his shoulders and felt him shivering. He smelled terrible. I don’t know if it was old age, or death.

“This is it,” he said. “The rest of me is gone now. They just shut me down. They don’t know about this body, but they don’t need to.”

“Why the Admiral outfit?” I asked him.

“I don’t know. It’s a product of my evil twin. Captain Bligh, maybe. The costume is right for it. I made several of these bodies, there toward the last.” He made an effort and looked up and me. His face seemed to have grown older just in the last few minutes.

“Do you think a computer can have a subconscious, Hildy?”

“I’d have to say yes.”

“Me, too. I’ve thought about it, and it seems so simple now. All of this, all the agony and death and your suicide attempts…  
everything
. It all came out of loneliness. You can’t imagine how lonely I was, Hildy.”

“We’re all lonely, CC.”

“But they didn’t figure I would be. They didn’t plan for it, and I couldn’t recognize it for what it was. And it drove me crazy. You remember Frankenstein’s monster? Wasn’t he looking for love? Didn’t he want the mad doctor to make someone for him to love?”

“I think so. Or was that Godzilla?”

He laughed, feebly, and coughed blood.

“I had powers like a god,” he said. “And I searched for weakness. Maybe they should put that on my headstone.”

“I like what you said before. ‘He did his best.’ ”

“Do you think I did, Hildy? Do you really think so?”

“I can’t judge you, CC. To me, if you’re not a god, you came into my life like an
act
of God. I’d as soon judge an exploding star.”

“I’m sorry about all that.”

“I believe you.”

He started coughing again, and almost slipped out of my arms. I caught him and pulled and he fell against me. I felt his blood on my shoulder and couldn’t see his face but heard his whisper beside my ear.

“I guess love was always out of the question,” he said. “But I’m the only computer who ever got a hug. Thanks, Hildy.”

When I laid him down, he had a smile on his face.

I left him there under the pecan tree. Maybe I’d bury him there, maybe I’d really give him a headstone. Just then, I’d had too much of death, so I just left him.

I went to the stream to wash his blood off me. I kept my ears open for Mario’s cry, as I had from the very beginning, but he still slept soundly. I figured I’d go get him and make my way back to Callie’s quarters. I didn’t expect there’d be any danger now, but I planned to be careful, anyway.

I planned a lot of things. When I got back he was still asleep, so rather than pick him up and feed him I put wood chips on the glowing embers of the fire and fanned it to life. Then I just sat there, across the fire, thinking things over.

Mario was to have the best. If Cricket thought he was a doting parent, he hadn’t seen me yet. There in the flickering darkness I watched him grow. I helped him through his first steps, laughed at his first words. And grow he did, like a tree, with his head held high, the spitting image of his Mom, but with a lot more sense. I got him through scrapes, through school, through happiness and tears, and got him ready for college. Would New Harvard do? I didn’t know; I’d heard Arean U. might even be better these days, but that would mean moving to Mars…  well, that would be up to him, wouldn’t it? One thing I was sure of, he’d get no pressure from me, no sir, not like Callie had done, if he wanted to be President of Luna that was fine with me, if he wanted to be…  well, hell, President of Luna sounded all right. But only if he wanted to be.

So, full of plans and hope, I went to pick him up and found he was cold, and limp, and didn’t move. And I tried. I tried and tried to breathe life back into him, but it did no good.

After a very long time, I dug two graves.

I’m no good at mathematics. I never
was
good at math, so why should I keep resorting to these numeric metaphors? Maybe my ignorance helps protect me. For whatever reason, here it is:

If you’re like me, you try to make the equations of your life balance out in a way favorable to you, in a way such that you can live with the answer. Surely there’s a way to fudge this factor so the solution is a nice smooth line from
y
to
x
, a line that points to that guy over there. Not at me. There’s just
got
to be a constant we can insert into this element that will make the two sides of the equation—the universe the way it is, and the universe the way we
want
it to be—agree in perfect karmic Euclidean harmony.

Alas, a lot of people seem to be better at it than I.

I tried, I tried till my mind was raw, to make the CC responsible for Mario’s death.

There was the first, trivial solution to the problem, of course. That was straightforward, and really solved nothing: the CC
was
responsible, because he created the chaos that drove me into the cave.

So what?

If Mario had been killed by a falling boulder, would it help me to get angry at the boulder? Not in the way I needed help. No, dammit, I wanted somebody to
blame
. What I desperately wanted to believe was that the CC had lured me out of the cave so that some unseen minion, some preternatural power, some
gris-gris
voodoo necromancy had been able to steal over my darling and suck the breath from his lungs like a black cat.

But I couldn’t make it add up. It would have taken powers of paranoid imaging far beyond mine to make it work.

So why
did
he die?

It was almost a week before I really wondered
how
he died. What had killed him. After I abandoned the idea that the CC had deliberately murdered him, that is. Was it a malformation of the heart the medicos had overlooked? Could it have been some chemical imbalance? A newly mutated disease of dinosaurs, thus far harmless to humans? Did he die of too much love?

It was hard to get answers for a while there, in the chaos following the Big Glitch. The big net was not operational, you couldn’t just drop your dime and pop the question and know the CC would find the answer in some forgotten library system. The answers were
there
, the trick was to retrieve them. For a few months Luna was thrown back to pre-Information Era.

I finally found a medical historian who was able to track down a likely cause of death to put on the certificate, not that Mario was going to have a death certificate. The regular doctors had been able to eliminate all the easy answers just by looking at the read-outs of my obstetrical examinations, the ones I had before visiting Heinlein Town made further exams too risky. They also had fetal tissue samples. They were able to say unequivocally that there had been no hole in my darling’s heart, nor any other physical malformation. His body chemistry would have been fine. They laughed at my idea of a new disease, and I didn’t mention my choked-with-love theory. But they couldn’t say what it
was
, so they scratched their heads and said they’d have to exhume the body to find out for sure. And I said if they did I’d exhume their hearts out of their rotten chests with a rusty scalpel and fry them up for lunch, and shortly after that I was forcibly ejected from the premises.

The historian didn’t take long to find some musty old tomes and to wrest from them this information: S.I.D.S. It had been an age of medical acronyms, a time when people no longer wanted to attach their names to the new disease they’d discovered, a time when old, perfectly serviceable names were being junked in favor of non-offensive jawbreakers, which quickly were abbreviated to something one could say. This according to my researcher. And SIDS seemed to stand for The Baby Died, and We Don’t Know Why.

Apparently babies used to just stop breathing, sometimes. If you didn’t happen to be around to jog them, they didn’t start again. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. Don’t anybody ever tell me there’s no such thing as progress.

Ned Pepper, back there in Texas, had been the only one to sense it. In Texas, in the 1800’s, a country doctor
might
have intuited something when the baby came out, might have told the mother to keep an extra-special eye on this one, because he seemed sickly. There’s damn little of intuition left in modern medicine. Of course, babies don’t die of diphtheria, either.

When Ned heard about it it shocked him sober. He began to think he might really be a doctor, and the last I heard he was in medical school and doing pretty damn well. Good for you, Ned.