Divergence

Maurice, meanwhile, listened to the clinking of the cutlery on the plates. There had been new dishes in all the kitchen cupboards: beautiful, paper-thin white china decorated with delicate black swirls. Saskia looked out from under her fringe. “There’s nothing much to say, Judy,” she said mildly. “Maurice and I were both on Breizh. That’s a colony planet on the edge of the Enemy Domain. The EA were hoping to bring the colonists to term in about six months, and they had brought us humans there to aid in the final transition. In our free time we used to go to this empty port, about four hundred kilometers from the base. We’d borrow a flier to get us there, anything to get out from under the noses of Social Care…”

Maurice grinned. Saskia didn’t seem to care how rude she was. Or had she forgotten that Judy had told them she was an SC operative? It would be typical of Saskia not to pay that close attention to another person, even one who had arrived on the ship in such a strange fashion. Saskia took another tiny piece of cauliflower and swallowed it. She continued in a careless way.

“One night another Free Exchanger turned up and we played the n-strings game. A few of us made the decision to adopt the FE lifestyle pretty much there and then. Michel was our team leader on Breizh, so he became captain. Maurice here and someone else—Armstrong, his name was—were to be security.”

She seemed to change tack in the middle of her sentence without realizing it. “Donny’s wife had just walked out on him and the kids, so he wanted a fresh start. And my life was getting stale. I felt I needed a new challenge. And so here we are.”

Except that wasn’t the full story. Did Saskia really believe her story explained everything? Judy obviously didn’t think so. She was gazing back at Saskia, drinking in her pose, her expressions, all the words she hadn’t spoken. Maurice realized she was noting the slight tremble in the fork as again Saskia finally cut off the tiniest piece of cauliflower and put it in her mouth. Judy had been a Social Care operative. She was able to read the emotions of everyone present and use them as a chart to plot their course to the Watcher’s version of sanity. There was no lying to an SC

operative.

“I must admit,” said Judy, “a lot of that went over my head.” She turned to Maurice, her dead-white face like a lighthouse beam turning towards him. He felt as if all his secrets were being illuminated by that searching expression. Social Care , he thought, they can never give it up. Then he shivered as he noted how her expression changed, and she regarded him once more as just a piece of meat. When she spoke, it was in the tones someone would use to ask the Turing machine to turn on the bedroom lights.

“I don’t understand what is going on on this ship, Maurice. Why is there no AI on board?”

“FE doesn’t allow AI.”

“Why not? Why are you all here, anyway? What is the n-strings game? I’m not sure that you understand yourself.”

You couldn’t lie to that gaze.

“I’m not sure I do,” said Maurice. “Look, as far as I can tell, there are three rules to FE: no AIs, no self-replication, and everything must be paid for.”

“How do you know that? Who tells you the rules?”

“It’s not like that. They aren’t told to you; you sort of discover them for yourself.”

“How?”

“By playing the n-strings game!”

Judy held his gaze, and Maurice felt himself beginning to blush. She can see the way right through to my ignorance, he thought. She knows that I don’t really understand. And Judy just went on and on staring. He felt such relief when she finally spoke.

“Tell me what you think happened on Breizh, Maurice.”

Maurice had never felt comfortable on Breizh. There were nineteen million human embryos buried somewhere deep underground and, especially when it was nighttime, their potential lives haunted him. Even here, in the little town of Raspberry, ghosts haunted the pretty white houses that clustered on the rocky outcrops overlooking the blue sea. He imagined these ghosts streaming up the long ribbons of the bridges that climbed from the shores to the distant grey mountains, seeking their places at the silver machinery that had been driven into the dark crevasses beneath the peaks.

During his work shifts, Maurice followed Armstrong down through dim portals into underground spaces newly cleared of hostile defense mechanisms, and he would feel the ears of those unrealized lives pressed against the walls that surrounded him. He could hear long dormant fingers scrabbling to catch hold of him, reaching out for help.

The empty planet should have been beautiful; instead, the machinations of the deranged AI that had tried to build a second human empire had given Breizh the feeling of a stillborn