hugged him back, still sobbing.
“Hey, baby. Hey, baby boy,” crooned Justinian, still breathing hard. “Not long now. We’ll soon be at the secondary infection. Then maybe we can go home.”
“Justinian…” Leslie began.
“I’m comforting my son,” Justinian replied edgily. Leslie hovered nearby, his body fuzzing and unfuzzing in waves as he tried to catch Justinian’s attention.
“Justinian…” he said again.
“What?” Justinian snapped.
“Justinian, I know you’re upset, but I must make an urgent request. Please don’t make the flier go all the way to the next location. The last AI was quite insistent about that.”
“Leslie, this flier has been ordered to follow my instructions, right? It’s bad enough that my son and I have been placed in this danger at all. I will not compound that danger by leaving him alone on the ship with you while I go trekking across the surface of this planet. I say again, we go all the way to the next position.”
Leslie adopted his most reasonable tones. “Oh, Justinian, the last AI pod
“You’re the one who put us in this situation, Leslie, by bringing us to this planet. Don’t try to make me think otherwise.” He looked towards the flight deck. “Ship, how long until we arrive there?”
“Four hours, Justinian.”
“Fine. I’ll have something to eat: pasta and roasted vegetables. Have a cut-up portion made for the baby.”
He looked up at Leslie. “Are you going to sit at the table with us?” he demanded.
“Me? I wouldn’t have thought you wanted me there.”
“The baby needs social stimulation. Even the hologram children don’t work since the AIs pulled out.”
A table formed itself from memory plastic. Three flight chairs slid up, circling dancers in the dinner-time waltz. One chair shrank in girth to accommodate the baby.
“I can’t make pasta anymore,” apologized the ship’s TM. “As of five minutes ago, my intelligence has dropped below the level necessary for complex food production. You’ll have to eat the freeze-dried meals we brought on board for emergencies.”
Leslie shook his fuzzy head, and Justinian gazed at him.
“Was that your doing?”
“Yes. I got the signal from the hypership. We’re turning down all machine intelligence on this planet even further.”
“Why?”
“Because of you, Justinian. Against all advice, you’re flying us to the secondary infection. We’re not taking any chances.”
Justinian gazed at the robot. “So you’re telling me that the knowledge of how to cook pasta cannot be allowed to fall into the wrong hands.”
“You’re being deliberately obtuse.”
Justinian ignored this. “Very well,” he said, “freeze dried it is.” He lifted the baby into the high chair, then sat down next to him.
Leslie headed to the forward section and, after a moment, came back carrying a tray on which lay two plastic bowls, steam curling upwards. The robot seemed to be moving erratically.
“I think this is yellow leather,” he said, placing the tray before Justinian.
“What?” Justinian looked at the robot in disbelief, then prodded a piece of meat with a fork. “It’s chicken passanda. What’s the matter with you, Leslie?” For a moment, something almost like compassion flickered through him. “Are you okay?”
“I don’t know, Justinian. The continual lowering of my intelligence is getting to me. I’m not what I was. I’m not acting rationally. I can’t connect to the world properly in this skin. I can’t check what is real and what isn’t.”
“Wak!” the baby said, reaching out for his dinner, little fingers gripping at nothing.
“Too hot,” Justinian said. “Ship! Can you cool the baby’s dinner?”
“Sorry, I’ve lost that capability. Spread some chicken on the side of the tray and let the second law of thermodynamics take effect.”
“You mean let it cool down?” Justinian said in disbelief.
“That’s the expression, I think,” agreed Leslie.
“I’ve got to get off this ship,” Justinian muttered.
He took a forkful of the freeze-dried meal. It didn’t taste that bad, though it was possibly a little spicy for the baby. He scraped some of the yellow sauce off the vegetable constitute that represented chicken and cut it into pieces with his fork, then left it to cool. A second pack held sweet corn: little yellow nuggets of maize. Justinian studied it thoughtfully until a voice interrupted his reverie.
“Hey, Justinian.” The voice came from behind the dinner table.
“Who is that?”
“Justinian, it’s me, David Schummel.”
“The pilot of the shuttle. Where on earth are you?”
“We’re not on Earth. Look out of the windows to your left.”
Justinian did so, surprised to see it was nighttime again; obviously the flier’s constant criss-crossing of the planet had scrambled his body clock. Munro, Gateway’s overlarge moon, was shining palely over the dark snowscape of the Williams Fells. A lime-green spot of light was approaching from the distance.
“Can you see me?” Schummel called.
“Yes, I see you. What do you want?”
“Set the flier down. We need to talk.”
“About what? I’m heading for something called the secondary infection. And the sooner I get there, the sooner I can leave this planet for good.”
The spot of light resolved itself into the lime-green shuttle Justinian had seen earlier that day on the landing field.
“You’re not going anywhere unless it’s on my shuttle. Set down, Justinian; this is important.”
“The baby and I are having our dinner. That’s important, too.”
“Just do this as a favor to me, Justinian.”
“You, too, David? I did you a favor back at the spaceport, when I
The shuttle had flown closer, and Justinian could now see David Schummel seated in a polarized glass bubble near the front of the craft. The wings and tail were flexed into atmospheric flying position, giving the craft the appearance of a paper dart. David gave Justinian a lazy wave, moving even closer, now flying only a few meters away from the window. Justinian remembered that Schummel was piloting the shuttle alone, without any AIs to help him. He was impressed by that, despite himself.
“Justinian?” Seeing Schummel’s lips move across that icy supersonic gap between the windows gave Justinian an odd feeling. So near and yet so far away. “Justinian,” he said again, “all we’re asking is that you don’t fly too close to the secondary infection. You’ve got a Turing machine piloting that ship and an advanced AI there in that robot.”
“The advanced AI is currently having trouble telling chicken from leather. It’s so cut off from reality it doesn’t even know what day it is.”
“That’s my point exactly: they’re cracking up. There’s no telling what they will do if they get too close to that location. I’ve come to make you an offer. Just land, and we can fly the rest of the way in this shuttle. I’m the most intelligent thing aboard this ship. I’m not going to turn myself off when things get tough. You should be safe with me. You could leave the baby with the robot.”
“I wouldn’t leave that robot in charge of a rock.”
“Fine. We’ll take the baby with us and leave the robot behind.”
