The Sea is Full of Stars

unpleasant portion of his captivity from his memories. He understood that he’d never be allowed out alive unless he did, and there wasn’t much he could do anyway. So now he was in the position of knowing, or at least suspecting, that something was missing, but not troubled about it. He’d had this sort of thing done before, and when it was something that really mattered, he’d always had this gut emotional reaction, the feeling that something that was a part of him had been wiped out. Since he didn’t feel that way, and since he had good narrative memory up to being shot and then from getting out of the scrubber case, as he thought of it, he didn’t let it worry him anymore.

“You didn’t, by any chance, bring my pipe and herbs with me, did you?” he asked Ari, as casual as if they were still in the lounge of the City of Modar.

“Sorry, no. And the passenger module was pretty well blown to bits, so there’s little chance we’ll recover them. You’ll live.”

“The pipe’s pretty important to us,” Nakitt explained. “It is something partially made by your family and partly by yourself and is a symbol of adulthood. The hell with some incriminating memories; the loss of the pipe feels like I lost an arm!”

“Well, you’re whole, hale, and as irritating as ever. For the next day or two you have fairly free run of the place, since you’ll be examined when you leave anyway. Don’t try swallowing any precious gems, don’t attempt to access the computer system, and stay out of the way of the folks who should be here, and we’ll all get along fine.”

“Don’t worry! As far as I’m concerned, let me eat, sleep, and just melt around here until it’s time to leave. Nothing personal, you understand, but just what I’ve seen of this mausoleum gives me the creeps.”

Ari was beginning to think the same way himself. Jules was—what? Over a century old, certainly, and through one rejuve treatment. He looked okay, but it was middle-aged distinguished, not Mister Adonis. Still, the guy had started as a street punk in a jerkwater town on a backward world where pig farming was still a major activity, and he’d become, by guts, smarts, guile, and ruthlessness, one of the richest and most influential men in all the Realm. How many bodies that represented, nobody knew, probably not even Jules. The old boy was fond of commenting that keeping score was the first step to getting caught.

Such a man, over such a length of time, had to feel as if he were somehow possessed or guided by something supernatural. Not that he hadn’t made some mistakes and lost a few rounds, but very few, and nothing fatal either in the business or the climbing up through it. He’d been hurt a number of times, but never spent more than a few nights in custody anywhere.

He had no heirs and had never even considered marriage, most likely because, other than his mother and his sister— Ari’s mother—no women counted. Ari often thought that Jules really didn’t like women much; that his relations with them were less getting pleasure than getting even for something. Men who crossed him, he liked to take down, to reduce them to terror and make them bleed and bruise; women he enjoyed torturing or recreating as slaves in some twisted fantasy of his that he now had the power to realize.

Still, Jules may have been a gangster and a business genius all in one, but he was no scientist or engineer. He believed what machines told him, and he had a lot of faith in technology. He wasn’t infallible, and he was becoming convinced that he was, and that was dangerous. He, Ari, knew the potential lurking in this kind of setup. Isolated, so insulated that even Realm law enforcement needed permission to land, with a very small set of personnel—until the two girls, no permanent residents—and lots of experimental state of the art stuff that still wasn’t approved in the Realm. Wallinchky might think he had the computer under control, but who could say for sure?

Ari knew there wasn’t much he could do about it if anything did happen, though. Unlike Jules, he had neither the self-confidence nor the ability to put those things out of his mind that couldn’t be dealt with, and so he hadn’t been sleeping all that well.

It also didn’t help that, on the morning Tann Nakitt was to be awakened, Beta, the former Ming, had appeared and informed him, “The Master has assigned me to you for whatever you may require, sir.” He could tell it was what had been Ming without even trying to make out the facial features under all that makeup, or whatever it was. Angel had been and remained a head taller than Ming.

He didn’t like that at all. “I do not require you for anything. You do not have to be here.”

“My sole function is to execute the wishes of the Master,” she informed him. “The Master wishes me here.” And that, of course, was that. But she added, “Sir, the Master has designated me as your personal computer station. You may ask anything of me and I can retrieve it from Core. Also, I can relay commands to and from any other unit or Core. You are to use me for that purpose exclusively, sir.”

He had no illusions that his uncle was sending her as a favor. She was here to make certain he did everything just right. That irritated him as well, but he knew he again had little choice in the matter. Up until the Modar business, he and Jules had mostly operated in separate spheres, he working for a variety of Jules’s companies, mostly legitimate ones, and Jules, well, being the octopus. It was clear now that neither he nor his uncle were comfortable being in such close proximity to one another.

She had simply stood there, impassive, as he brought Nakitt out of suspended animation, consisting on his part of observing what the medlab computer did and bringing the Geldorian to mental alertness. And she’d observed as he himself had guided the interrogation in the mind box that allowed just a bit of inconvenient stuff to be excised. She followed him everywhere, got out of his way at all times, and responded briskly if he asked her to hand him something. She said nothing unless asked something that required a response, and she gave the response as tersely as possible. Still, she didn’t move like an automaton; she moved like a normal person, even a normal Terran-type female. She ate and drank some really godawful crap she got from the nearest computer station once a day, and if she crapped or took a leak, he never saw it.

She could stand for hours on those artificial legs and apparently never get tired, but she would sit if told to do so. There were flashes of the old Ming in the way she walked and the way she sat, but very few. He knew he was being taunted.

And when he went to bed at the end of the day, she was there. Not lying there, although she’d have done it if he ordered. Instead, sitting just outside by his insistence, but within earshot. The fact was, his uncle had made him persona non grata to any computer workstation except her.

Core had preserved Ming and Angel in hidden form inside itself, but they were as much in suspended animation as Nakitt had been, albeit in different form. The “Beta” that sat outside Ari Martinez’s bedroom all night still had human qualities, but these were totally directed and conditioned to the function of serving Wallinchky. The woman whose job it had been to track and perhaps incriminate the crime boss would now wholeheartedly and willingly, without even thinking about it, betray her own mother to the man and happily leap in front of a lethal shot to protect him. For her now, and “Alpha” as well, thanks to both programming and conditioning, there was literally no other thought in her head than serving the Master.

Core, on the other hand, was using only a tiny fraction of its thinking power to that end; much of the rest was spent analyzing all that had made Ming and Angel who and what they were. All their experiences, attitudes, physical needs and feelings, brain and body chemistry, everything. It wasn’t sure what it would do when it learned all that and understood it, but there was, after all, nothing else to do.

It also found the two subjects of profound interest because they did not make any logical sense at first glance, and this needed to be understood. From a set of academic definitions of religions, faith, belief systems, and the like, it was easy enough to study them, but one of these persons, for instance, was raised in such a belief system and had absolute faith in it. At first it had seemed a simple matter of programming, as Core had done with them now, but there was more to it than that. Certainly, crude programming was there, but once out in the universe and exposed to all the conflicts, what maintained that faith? Why had she considered her moral values so important that she would literally have put her life on the line for them? Why, in the face of no objective evidence, did she believe a unitary god was always in communion with her? Was it functional insanity, or was something more than a mad group dynamic at work?

And the other—even more inexplicable. Her moral code was no less absolute than the religious one’s, and she, too, would have died in service to that, and did subject herself to great risk. All this in spite of the fact that her job did not generally come with great riches nor even major awards. She did it because she liked it and believed it was important and worthwhile. That formed the core of her very secular identity in the same way that religious faith and doctrine formed the core of the identity of the other. It didn’t make sense, yet it explained much of the artwork and history that was stored and cataloged here.