I didn’t say anything, didn’t even nod, though I easily could have. I only smiled.
Coincidence? Of course. A well-controlled coincidence.
Slovoban had hit the nail on the head. A future that neither Makrow nor Vasily had foreseen, a chess move that neither of the two great egotists expected.
A sacrifice. But not the queen sacrifice that Makrow had attempted by abandoning the Chimera; a total sacrifice. King sacrifice. A king to be avenged.
It was a matter of reflexes; I went first. One leg, then the other, finally a shot to my own head. I could have ended it all quickly just by shooting myself in the torso, but I didn’t. I’ll never know why. That’s the downside of not being a creature of logic. Was it from fear of ceasing to exist, what humans call the instinct for self-preservation, or was it to give Vasily more time to understand our plan?
Who could say? And who would care?
The main thing was that when Slovoban sacrificed himself, El Afortunado already had gotten the whole picture; he was alert, ready to make maximum use of that unforeseeable, extraordinary, foolish act, which introduced a new variable in the equation of the thousand possible futures that had been at play, the equation in which Makrow 34 had been beating him.
The Cetian, for his part, didn’t expect it at all. Perhaps because suicide is so extreme among living creatures that it’s not the sort of act anyone usually imitates just because they see it done—especially not a mere second later.
Coincidence or symbolism? I guess the almost impossible bounce of a dai-katana forged by the almost mythical Japanese swordsmith Masamune served Vasily’s purposes as well for the occasion as a twin pair of meteors would have if they had sliced through all the shields of the Burroughs and pierced both of the Cetian’s twin hearts at once. The fact that the sword blow was much more symbolic doesn’t count for much when there are so many probabilities at play.
I don’t think he even had time to choose.
Thirteen
Vasily recovered from his exhaustion and stress after a couple of days. Then, surprise of surprises, the aliens awarded him a supreme honor, one no human had ever been given before. In addition to granting him the practical equivalent of conditional freedom, they invited him to visit the Grodo home world, no less.
Well, invited is a polite way of putting it.
To be more precise: they ordered him.
Actually, every alien who knew anything at all about Psi was very interested in the curious form of synergy manifested in his probabilistic duel with Makrow 34. So the Cetian and Colossaurian scientists also “extended their invitations.” But Escamita’s people were able to push the fact that Lofty Sniffer-Out of Commercial Possibilities That Will Leave His Adversaries Weeping Over Their Empty Coffers had been the victim of criminals from the other two species. In other words: all three species of aliens trying to screw each other over, as usual.
In short, life on board the Burroughs seemed to be returning to its normal rhythms.
With a few notable changes. For example, the Grodos insisted on having Einstein accompany Vasily to their planet. Not exactly as a bodyguard, either.
Who said an artificial intelligence can’t feel genuine scientific curiosity? My buddy seemed to have devoted himself wholly to physics and related sciences.
After a couple of conversations with me, in which he was skeptical of the temporal chaos I told him about, Einstein finally had the (brilliant!) idea of replaying the Module 14 holotapes at ultra-slow speed, slowed by a factor of ten thousand. That was what it took to make the scene of our double sacrifice, Slovoban’s and mine, entirely visible, and to convince Einstein that no tricks were involved. The clashing powers of two Gaussicals could produce the same time dilation effect generated by transit through a hyperspace portal.
I admit, I didn’t get much out of his enthusiastic explanation—but it seems that the Grodos did. A little of it got through to me, though:
Broadly speaking, it seems that there had been a couple of important empty boxes in the general framework of Psi phenomena. Among all the races of the galaxy, no beings capable of teleportation or of foreseeing the future had been found.
But the probabilistic duel between Makrow and Vasily had led first Einstein and then the alien specialists to hypothesize that perhaps there was a way (rather twisted, but a way after all) to get around the Law of Causality and catch a little glimpse of the future.
And my friend might be the key to that way.
So: almost a happy ending, at least for him and Einstein.
In any case, nothing could alter the fact that they will be, respectively, the first Homo sapiens and the first positronic robot to pass through a hyperportal and leave the Solar System. I hope all goes well for them.
In other words, I hope that they can both return (someday), that my buddy doesn’t get dismantled, that instead he gets his secondname (I suppose he’ll pick Bohr or Newton or some such), and that El Afortunado gets treated better than the average guinea pig.
The last time I saw him was at the ceremony where we scattered Old Man Slovoban’s ashes. Not in orbit around his beloved planet Earth, as the indomitable Romani probably would have preferred, but out of a hatch on the Burroughs. But something’s something, isn’t it?
El Afortunado was wearing a space suit and I wasn’t, so naturally we didn’t speak. Nor did we say goodbye. Maybe it was better that way. Man-to-man conversations, or even man-to-positronic robot, are never easy. I know we had a lot of things to say to each other—and I also know that neither of us would have known how to
