I snorted. Sandra tensed against me. I patted her back, trying to relax her again. This man was a master at ruining a good mood.
“What’s the problem, Crow?”
“You’ve gone and overstepped yourself. Grossly. I’m in charge of this fleet. You know that, right?”
“That was the deal.”
“Well, then why are you negotiating a new force of star marines, or whatever you want to call them, without my approval? Why are you offering to give away one of our most amazing technologies without even telling me?”
I pursed my lips. “I have to admit, you have a point. I was too focused on solving the problem to worry about approvals.”
“Well, tell me why I’m not going to cancel all your arrangements and rip some stripes off of you.”
This was more than Sandra could take. Throughout the conversation, I could feel her body getting more tense against mine. She had a temper. And she seemed particularly defensive when it came to me. I supposed that was a good thing.
“What do you want his stripes for, Crow? You sew new ones on yourself every other damned day. Did you run out?”
There was a moment of silence. I looked down at Sandra. She was lovely, wet and naked. There was a wild look in her eye. I should never have agreed to talk to Crow, I decided.
“Is that Sandra? Ah-now I get it!” he burst into laughter. “That is a shower I hear running, isn’t it? I need to figure out how to get video feed out of this communication setup.”
27
After an irritatingly long talk, Crow came to see things my way. I agreed at length to consult with him before proposing things like new armies or technology giveaways. By the time Crow and I had finished talking, Sandra and I were dry, dressed and out of the mood. At least, she seemed to be. I hoped I hadn’t gotten myself kicked out of her shower stall for good.
I played it cool, however. Exhaustion helped with that strategy. I was simply too tired and hungry to care much. I ate a big meal of chicken, cottage cheese, canned peaches and cold broccoli. It was filling, but lackluster. I resolved to have the camp people build a better eatery. Maybe I could put a real kitchen aboard the Alamo as well.
After I ate, I slept for a good dozen hours. Sandra startled me by curling herself up against my chest, about half-way through my sleep. I figured this had to be a good sign. I felt so tired however, it was like being drugged. Maybe the Nanos had drugged me, for all I knew, as part of their ministrations. Or maybe it was just a natural reaction to exhaustion and gross injury. In any case, I fell back asleep again without so much as molesting her. Hours later, when I woke up, she was gone.
I awakened with a fuzziness in my mind. I’d had strange dreams and even stranger ideas in my head. I’d dreamt of the home planet of the Nanos. They’d been created-in my dreams-by blue men with huge eyes and even huger skulls shaped like inverted pears. It left me with the thought when I awoke that I needed to know who had sent these machines to Earth. Who, and why.
I’d tried to get this information from Alamo before. It had come up many times over the last month or so. But the ship had been programmed to avoid answering such questions. It was part of the Nanos’ internal, unchangeable programming to keep their origins a secret. Either that, I thought, or the ship truly didn’t know.
“Alamo? Are you listening to my thoughts?”
“When your mind forms word-thoughts, they are transmitted to my receptors.”
“Yeah, close enough. What did you think about my dream? Did you see the blue men, with the big heads?”
“Visual imagery is not relayed.”
“Hmmm. Let me describe them, then. They were blue guys, about four feet tall. They were humanoid, but blue-skinned. They had big eyes and big heads. Very big heads, as if their brains could hardly be contained within them. Do the creatures that created you look anything like that?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
“So, your creators are not blue-skinned?”
Hesitation. This, I’d come to recognize, signaled deep thoughts were going on inside whatever served the Alamo for a CPU.
“No,” the ship said at last.
I stood up suddenly. I took a deep breath, and almost whooped aloud. The Alamo had answered a question on this taboo subject. I was onto something.
“Alamo… your creators are not machines, are they?”
“No.”
A smile split my face. Stupid machine. It had been programmed not to answer any questions about the creators. But it hadn’t been programmed not to answer questions in the negative. In other words, it could talk about what they were not.
I began pacing. I should have thought of this before. It was like hacking. There was almost always a work- around. When you programmed a machine, it was hard to think of all the possibilities. You might create what seemed like a perfect set of instructions, but given input you never thought of, the program behaved in a fashion you had never intended. Anyone who has ever had to unplug their computer after a particularly bad crash knows something about that.
I thought over what I had gotten out of the Alamo so far. The people who created the Nanos were not machines. That seemed pretty obvious. The ship had admitted they didn’t have blue skin, either. Big deal. But what were they like? Where were they from? Certainly, if they wanted their identity kept secret, it seemed likely they were afraid someone might come looking for them. Maybe the Macros didn’t know where they were. Maybe the Macros would like to exterminate the biotics who had had the gall to build ships like these and send them out to help other races fight against their invasions.
“Your creators are not in this solar system, are they?”
“No.”
Big news, there. They were interstellar. That was the first concrete evidence. It was one thing to suspect something like that, it was another to know it. I was excited. You couldn’t compete with beings you knew nothing about. I was desperate for information.
“Your creators don’t come from a planet like Earth, do they? It’s not a warm, wet world, is it?”
“No.”
I blinked at that. Life, but not from a water-world. What other kind of life was there? This might be harder than I thought to figure out, if they were something weird like a silicon-based rock-creature.
“Are they from a planet with higher or lower gravity than Earth?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
“Of course. Forget that question. That was a mistake. What I meant to say was that your creators do not live on a gas giant, like Jupiter, do they?”
“I am not permitted to describe my creators.”
I frowned. Had I made a mistake? Had I tripped some warning line? Had the Alamo learned from my repeated questions what I was after and adjusted itself to keep me out? I decided to repeat a previous question to see if I could backtrack to where it was answering informatively.
“Your creators are not machines, are they?”
“No.”
I heaved a deep breath. I had not blown it. The ship had not locked me out. I had just asked something the wrong way. But what was it? Then, after thinking about it, I thought I had it. The ship couldn’t answer in the affirmative about its creators. It could only answer negative questions, with a negative response. Anything else would be blocked. This conclusion brought my smile back, because it meant that a negatively worded question that
