More Tales of Pirx the Pilot

you want to know?”

“You competed with humans in various mock-up tests. Did you always outperform the others?”

“The greater the challenge in algorithmic, mathematical terms, the better I performed. I’m most vulnerable when it comes to intuition. That’s when my computer ancestry begins to tell…”

“Meaning?”

“As soon as things become too complicated, when the number of new factors exceeds the norm, I’m lost. A human can rely on guesswork, sometimes even with success, but not me. I have to calculate all the odds, precisely and methodically; if I can’t, I’m done for.”

“What you’ve just told me is very important, Burns. So in an emergency…?”

“It’s not that simple, Commander. Yes, I’m immune to fear—human fear, that is—but not to the threat of imminent disaster. Even so, I never lose my, as you say, head, and the equilibrium gained can compensate for my lack of intuition.”

“You keep fighting to stay on top of the situation…?”

“Even when I realize I can’t win.”

“But that’s irrational, isn’t it?”

“No—just purely logical, because I will it.”

“Thanks, Burns. You may have been a big help to me,” said Pirx. “Oh, just one more thing. What are your plans for after our return?”

“I’m a cyberneticist-neurologist, and a pretty fair one … though, without any intuition, not the most creative. But I’ll find enough interesting work.”

“Thanks again.”

Burns rose, made a slight bow, and left. The door had no sooner closed behind him than Pirx sprang up from his bunk and began pacing the deck.

“What the hell! Either he’s a robot as he claims or—He sounded sincere enough. But why so talkative? The history of mankind—‘with commentary.’ Suppose he was on the level? If so, the emergency will have to be a tough one. But authentic, not faked. The real thing. Meaning dicey.”

He slammed his fist into his open palm.

“But what if it was just a ploy? In which case I hang both myself and my fellow humans, and the ship will be brought back to port by those … robots. Wouldn’t that make their owners happy! What better way to advertise the safety of robot-run ships! And all by buttering me up with that ‘Confidentially…’ routine!”

He was pacing faster and faster.

“I must find out which is which. OK, suppose I do. There’s a first-aid kit on board. I could spice their food with a little apomorphine. The humans would get sick, the others wouldn’t. But what would I gain? They’d all know who did it. Besides, even if Brown proves to be human and Burns not, that wouldn’t mean everything they said was true. Maybe they were being honest about themselves, and all the rest was self-serving. Wait a sec. Burns tried to steer me right with all that talk about intuition. But Brown? He just pointed the finger at Burns. Then who should come bouncing in but Burns—who confirms the suspicion! A bit much, no? If, on the other hand, none of it was planned, if each was acting on his own initiative, then both— Brown’s casting suspicion on Burns and Burns’s dropping by to confirm it—could have been a coincidence. If it was a set-up, they wouldn’t have timed it so obviously. I’m running in circles. Hold on. If someone else comes now, that will mean it was all a snow job. Sham. But no one will come; they’re not that dumb. OK, what if they were telling the truth? One of them might…”

Pirx banged his palm again. “Anyone’s guess, all right. Take action? Hm. Wait it out? Yeah, best to play the waiting game.”

Silence reigned in the mess during mealtime. Pirx spoke to no one; he was still flirting with the idea of running an experiment. There were only four at the table—the fifth, Brown, was at the controls—and all were eating. They’re doing it for the sake of pretense, thought Pirx, somehow appalled by the idea. No wonder Burns needed a sense of the absurd: as self-defense. That’s what he meant by the conventionality of everything; for him, even eating was a convention! He’s lying to himself if he doesn’t think he hates his creators. I sure would. Still, their lack of shame is disgusting.

The silence, which lasted the entire meal, was unbearable. It was a silence dictated not so much by a desire for privacy or by the wish to honor the pledge of secrecy, thus satisfying the conditions of the flight’s sponsors, as by a certain mutual hostility, or if not hostility, then mistrust: the humans wanted no part of the nonhumans, who, in turn, played the very same game for fear of being unmasked. And if he, Pirx, made even the slightest move to break the ice, he was bound to cast suspicion on himself. Hunched over his plate, he took in everything: how Thomson asked for the salt, the way Burton passed it him, how Burns passed the vinegar bottle to Thomson, the brisk handling of forks and knives; the chewing, the swallowing, each trying to avoid the others’ gaze. They made a funeral of their meal of marinated beef. Pirx, without finishing his dessert, got up, nodded, and returned to his cabin.

They were cruising at course velocity. Around 2000 hours, ship’s time, they passed a couple of supertankers and exchanged the usual signals; an hour later, the on-board daylight was dimmed. Pirx was just on his way out of the control room when it went off. Darkness, perforated by neon-blue, swelled the spacious center deck. Guide lines, hatch rims, handles, bulkhead arrows, and inscriptions glowed phosphorescently in the dark. A ship so still it might be in dry dock. There was not the slightest vibration, only the purring of the air-conditioning vents, and Pirx passed through invisible currents delicately laced with ozone.

Something grazed his forehead with a perverse buzz: a fly. He winced in disgust—he hated flies—but immediately lost track of it. The passageway narrowed around the bend, skirting a stairwell and an elevator shaft. Pirx grabbed the stair railing and, without knowing why, climbed topside. He was not deliberately in search of a stellar port. He didn’t doubt there was one, but he came upon the large, black rectangle almost as if by accident.

Pirx was not particularly moved by the stars. Other astronauts, apparently, still were: theirs may not have been the conventional romantic attitude of yesteryear, but a public opinion shaped by film, television, and literature demanded of these extraterrestrial sailors something like a cosmic nostalgia, compelling each to feel a sort of intimacy in the presence of that luminous hive—which sentiment, along with all disquisitions on the subject, Pirx, no friend of the stars, privately suspected of being a lot of bull. Now, as he stood with his head pressed against the pane’s protective foam-rubber tubing, he spotted the galaxy’s nexus below, or, rather, its general direction, somewhat obscured by the huge white cloud mass of Sagittarius. For him, Sagittarius was more than just a constellation; it was a road sign, now blurred and almost illegible, a throwback to his patrol days, when the cloud of Sagittarius was identifiable even on a small scanner. The tight visibility had made navigating by the constellations next to impossible from those one-man trainers. Still, he’d never thought of that cloud as a mass of blazing worlds and myriad planetary systems—and if he had, then it was only in his younger days, before he became accustomed to the vacuum and his adolescent fantasies vanished, so imperceptibly that he couldn’t say exactly when it happened.

He moved his face up closer to the glass, slowly, until he felt it with his forehead, and so he remained, not really attentive to the riot of motionless sparks, which in places blurred to an incandescent vapor. Seen from inside, the Milky Way was the product of a fiery dice game with a billion-year history. And yet order reigned in the galaxies, on a higher scale, visible in the photographs. The negatives made the galaxies out to be tiny elliptical bodies, amebas in various stages of development—which were of little concern to astronauts, for whom nothing but the solar system mattered. Maybe one day the galaxies would matter, thought Pirx.

Someone was coming. The footsteps were muffled by the foam-padded deck, but he soon sensed another presence. He pivoted his head and beheld a dark silhouette against the phosphorescent stripes marking the juncture of overhead deck and wall.

“Who’s that?” he asked, without raising his voice.

“It’s me—Thomson.”

“Off duty?” he asked for the sake of conversation.

“Yes, sir.”

Neither of them moved or spoke. Pirx was itching to go back to his window, but Thomson lingered, as if waiting for something.

“Something on your mind?”