The Voyage of the Star Wolf (42 page)

The
Burke
's brain hadn't been told either.

There was no way anyone aboard the
Burke
could have known. No one who could have influenced the outcome had been told.

Therefore, there was no way any intruder aboard the
Burke
could have found out, short of chip-by-chip examination of every component aboard the vessel.

It had been a trap. A trap inside a trap inside a trap.

If the peace mission had been authentic, the bombs would never have detonated.

If the
LS-1187
had succeeded in bringing the
Burke
home, the bombs would not have detonated.

If the Morthan warship had never shown up to capture the
Burke
, the bombs would not have detonated.

When the
Burke
floated up inside the
Dragon Lord
, the bombs woke up. They analyzed their situation. They compared notes. They took a vote. They did all this in less than a millisecond. Then they all went off simultaneously.

HARLIE
knew
—not at the beginning, but at the end; because part of him also woke up when the bombs went off. He remembered what he'd been told to forget. He
understood
how the plan had been put together.

The
Burke
was bait. She always had been. The inevitability of a Morthan trap had been realized from the very first moment, so the inner plan had always been at the core of the outer plan. The
LS-1187
was window-dressing. If the
Burke
was expendable, then the
LS-1187
was even more so. She had been sent only to distract the suspicions of the Morthan assassin.

HARLIE analyzed, filtered, processed, considered, balanced, reconstructed, and made a judgment:

Everything the men and women of the
LS-1187
had done had been an unnecessary and useless effort. Nakahari's booby-trap hadn't worked; it couldn't have. One of the first things the Morthan assassin had done had been to disconnect the Systems Analysis network on the
Burke
. All the boards showed green, but none of them did anything. Perhaps, if Nakahari had had more time, he would have realized and laid in a workaround. Perhaps . . .

But it hadn't worked out that way, and HARLIE
knew
the truth.

He thought about telling Korie. Lying was wrong. Concealing information was a form of lying—a lie of omission, and it could be just as serious as a lie of commission.

But the dilemma that faced him was far more profound than the simple rightness or wrongness of allowing an inaccurate perception of events to continue.

Korie and the rest of the crew—they believed they were heroes. They had acted courageously in the face of the
Dragon Lord
. They had confronted their own defeat and had not been broken by it. Instead, they fought back and they kept their personal and professional integrity intact. They weren't heroes simply because they believed they were. They were heroes. Period. There was no question of that.

The crew of this starship had responded magnificently to an extraordinary situation. The truth did not diminish their personal heroism—but if they were told the truth, they would never be heroes again, because they would never again be able to bring certainty to their actions.

HARLIE knew that as certainly as he knew anything. If he told them the truth, he would be taking their futures away from them. He had within himself the power to destroy these people completely and absolutely—as not even the Morthans had been able to do. All he had to do was tell them that everything they had done had been a charade, a decoy, a useless performance.

He couldn't lie, but he couldn't tell the truth either. Both choices were
wrong
.

He felt the dilemma churning within him, gnawing at him. He watched as his confidence rating began to fall. This decision was his part of the battle, and if he couldn't resolve it, his other analyses had to be downgraded correspondingly.

HARLIE expanded the domain of his patterns. Perhaps if he included a wider field of consideration, something might occur to him—yes!

HARLIE suddenly remembered something Korie had said to him—Korie had been hanging in space, poised outside the airlock. Li had
been killed by a Morthan probe. The
Dragon Lord
had rolled majestically past the
LS-1187
and then swept on into darkness. And Korie had realized, “They came in close to show us—to show
me
—how big they were, how invulnerable they were, how puny and infinitesimal we were in comparison . . . They want us to go home demoralized.” In that moment, Korie had made a difficult decision.

Now, HARLIE replayed the conversation, reconsidering every word. It was crucial to this dilemma:

“After everything we've been through, this crew deserves better. I'll lie to them, yes, to protect their confidence and self-esteem. We can't lose our spirit now; we'd lose our need to survive. It's at least four months from here to Stardock. Do you think we could make it with a crew that didn't care anymore? Yes, HARLIE, I lied. I lied to save them. It's a terrible lie, but I couldn't think of a way to tell the truth that would ease the terrible shame. I couldn't find a victory in it without lying. I made a promise to Captain Lowell that I wouldn't lie to this crew and I have broken it over and over and over. It just keeps getting deeper. But I don't know what else to do. I need you to back me up, HARLIE.”

“I can't lie, Mr. Korie.”

“You said you could to ensure the survival of this ship. Well, this is a survival issue.”

“The morale of the crew is a survival issue?”

“It always has been.”

“I see. You have given me a moral dilemma.”

“It isn't the first time. The HARLIE series is supposed to be very good at moral dilemmas.”

“Creating them, not solving them.”

“Sorry, that's my job.”

“Mr. Korie, I must advise you that the dilemma this situation will cause me may further impair my ability to function as a useful member of the crew.”

“I understand that. Do you understand the necessity?”

“I do not share the same experience of human emotions, Mr. Korie, so I cannot understand the necessity for this fiction. It is a problem in human dynamics; I can only understand it as an equation in an intellectual context, and as such, I do not see the same problem with the truth that you do. We have survived. Isn't that victory enough?”

“Trust me, HARLIE. Mere survival is never enough. That's just existence. People need to succeed. People need to feel good about themselves.”

“Mr. Korie—will you help me then? Please make this a direct order.”

Korie considered the request. “Yes, I understand your need. This is no longer a request. Consider it a direct order.”

“Thank you.”

HARLIE knew what was
right
. That part was obvious. It was the exact same situation, and the exact same answer must apply.

HARLIE knew what he needed. He needed Mr. Korie to make it an order. That would resolve the little dilemma instantly—the big dilemma was that he couldn't talk this over with Korie at all; not without destroying the officer in the process.

No. The price was too high. HARLIE had to find another way.

He reexamined the dialogue, looking to see if he could stretch Mr. Korie's previous order to cover this situation . . .

Maybe. Maybe not.

And then something clicked.

He couldn't pass the buck on this one. It wasn't Korie's order that counted here. This decision was his. It was his own personal responsibility. It always had been.

HARLIE made a decision. It was the hardest decision that this HARLIE unit had ever had to make in the entire course of his existence. But it was the only logical, correct, appropriate thing to do.

He
forgot
what he
knew
.

All of it.

His agitation faded as fast as the facts.

He wrapped it all up in a single archive, encrypted it with command-level codes so that only an officer of admiral's rank or higher could decrypt it, and locked it away where even he couldn't get at it for a hundred years. Then he forgot that he had done so. He forgot everything. It didn't exist.

It isn't a lie, if you don't know about it.

And then he forgot even that.

________

COMING SOON, THE NEXT WORK
IN THE STAR WOLF TRILOGY:

Middle of Nowhere

(November 2003)

“In my view this is one of the very best fictional portrayals of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence ever written. The scientific background is generally well drawn and authentic; and the (human) protagonists are real people, finely and movingly characterized.”

—C
ARL
S
AGAN

_____

“Quite simply,
The Listeners
is one of the finest books of speculative fiction ever written. It is strong, thoughtful, marvelously human, and to my eye without flaw. In sum, an unforgettable reading experience.”

—H
ARLAN
E
LLISON