“Okay,” Maurice said stubbornly. “Edward, tell us, what should we do?”
Edward looked puzzled at Maurice’s question. “I don’t know,” he said, frowning. “That’s why I think we should make a plan.”
Judy let go of the ribbon and climbed to her feet. The air was cold in the large hold, sharp like a winter’s morning. Constantine had possessed lungs once; he could imagine what it was like to breathe the air of the hold, to feel it light him up, bright and alive.
“I think Edward has got the right idea,” Judy said briskly. “Look at us. We’ve already spent too long just letting events buffet us around.”
“Look at us ?” said Maurice. “Since when were you part of the crew?”
“That’s not very nice, Maurice.” Edward placed a big hand on Judy’s shoulder. “Judy is our friend. Go on, Judy.”
“Not just me. Aren’t we forgetting somebody?” Judy said. “You’ve agreed to take Constantine to Earth, too.”
All the faces swung towards Constantine. Why were they all so pale? Except for Edward, of course. Did they realize they were all so black-and-white? Just like this ship, of course. Someone was playing games here….
“Yes,” Maurice said. “Why exactly do you want to go to Earth?”
Constantine had been waiting for this question.
“Because I have a message for the Watcher,” he replied.
Constantine Storey didn’t mind the rain. Up here in the mountains the spaces defined between the sheer peaks and rough-hewn walls seemed to be completed by the lashing downpour. Or at least that’s what Constantine thought.
But what does it mean to think? he wondered. No one else came up here amongst the newly born peaks, raw and cracked and splintered and perpetually washed with cold rain. No other mind, so far as he knew, had ever looked upon the hidden valleys, had climbed the columns that rose up here, pressed against the sky.
Coldness, wetness, the feeling of vertigo from clinging to harsh rock and looking down into the pitiless depths below, all of these things were just random patterns that fluttered through the currents of his mind.
…and if those thoughts were to cease?
He stepped from the ledge and began the long fall into the shadows. The feel of the downpour lessened on his back as the speed of his descent approached that of the raindrops around him. He waved his arms and fancied he could touch the individual drops that hung in the darkness around him. There is a pattern to these drops, he thought, defined by their size and purity and their distance between each other. The pattern is affected by wind resistance and minute changes in air pressure, even the increasing effect of gravity as they grow closer to the planet. Weyl and Ricci distortion. There is a pattern here that is probably unique throughout the universe…and when they hit the rocks below, that unique pattern will be lost and no one will mourn its passing.
Buffeted by wind and rain, his body reached terminal velocity. Shadows raced upwards around him, the pale moon lost high above.
And yet, when I hit the ground, what would people mourn? Not the loss of my body but rather the unique pattern that represented my thoughts; the potential which that unique pattern had to go on unfolding, to become me. What is the difference between the pattern of my mind and the pattern of the rain? At what point does a pattern assume significance? At what point can it be labeled thought? Maybe tonight I will have the answer.
But not by dying.
Constantine Storey was a human mind alive in a robot’s body. At one point in his life, the unique pattern that had been his self at that moment in time—burning brightly amongst the neurons of his brain—had been carefully lifted from his head and dropped into a processing space within a robot’s body. Virtual neurons had gone on firing, following in the unfolding symbolic series that his human brain had defined, and a new Constantine had come into being. Only this Constantine was alive in an enhanced body.
He allowed the reflexes of his new body to take over, and he reveled in the sensation of becoming a superman.
A sheer cliff face approached in the darkness, steeply angled. Robot legs kicked out and changed his angle of descent, increasing the horizontal component of his motion. Constantine held his arms wide as he dived across a narrow valley. Hands slammed onto
