Take No Prisoners (26 page)

I'd started off being deliberately patronizing. Now my voice was beginning to rise. Ah, but what the hell? I'd been putting this off for far too long.

"They grew me so that I was a human first, a machine second. I'm a living creature that happens to be better adapted for survival than you. As you know, I can go for hours – forever, if I wanted to – without breathing. I can stand heat and cold and radiation that would kill you. My body's as near as dammit indestructible, whatever it looks and feels like – you could hit me with a hatchet and the blade would just bounce off. It'd hurt me like hell, but it wouldn't damage me. My reflexes are perfect, and faster than you could even conceive. My brain has a capacity several times yours ... I'm cleverer, more agile, faster, more intelligent, more
everything
than you are. But instead of thinking 'My God but I'm lucky to be drifting through space with a drunkard's dream like this' you blinker yourself into seeing me as a bloody
machine
!"

It was all the truth, as I knew it.

Silence for a minute or two.

"And furthermore," I added grumpily, "I have an advantage in arguments as well. Other people have to pause for breath from time to time."

He giggled, like a schoolboy who's just thought of a Terribly Filthy Joke. The sound was delicious: it'd been years since I'd heard it. He looked as if someone had just given him a transfusion of youth.

I didn't sleep alone in the bunk that night. To be precise, I neither slept nor was alone. Come to think of it, quite a lot of the time I was only partly in the bunk.

~

The next few decades were very happy ones. At ninety Andrew seemed to look younger than he had when he'd been forty. In part this was due to the fact that he was using the ship's facilities to maintain his health, but I'm fairly certain it was mainly due to the relationship we'd built up together. The only real sign he was getting older was that he made silly mistakes from time to time, but it was easy enough for me to quietly correct them.

~

τ Ceti is rather larger than the sun, but less massive and quite a lot less luminous. As we came closer to its red globe the instruments began to tell us that it did indeed have the planetary retinue the astronomers had detected, and soon more specific details began to come through. There were seven planets, three of them gas giants, and a horde of small bodies gathered together into two fairly well defined belts. Most important of all, there was a planet of about twice Mars-mass some fifty million kilometers out from the primary. It had an atmosphere. It was our obvious destination.

We spent a few weeks of gradually mounting excitement. We went into orbit, and found that the atmosphere was primarily an oxygen-nitrogen mix – although of course we'd no way of knowing what other ingredients there might be in the soup. Surface temperatures were perfectly reasonable for human habitation, except near the equator. The world had four large continents and many scattered bracelets of islands, an intricate and ever-changing pattern of clouds, bright blue-green oceans ... Away from the equator many of the land areas were covered with vegetation, literally teeming with it: great plains of the green that bespoke photosynthesis.

This was not all undilutedly good news, of course. Where there's life, some of it's going to be in the form of microorganisms, and those little bastards can have really lethal effects when they get their teeth into the human cell. If you're lucky, they're so alien that they don't have any effect at all; but the very fact that a planet has Earth-style vegetation would suggest there's a good chance the microorganisms will have similarities with terrestrial bacteria and viruses. From up here you couldn't tell if this was going to be a minor problem, a major problem, or something a lot worse than that.

The world had mobile lifeforms – we could tell that from orbit. Andrew insisted on calling them "animals," and we joked about it, me maintaining that "animals" is strictly a Solar System term until you've had a chance to dissect. Some of these ani ... mobile lifeforms were of quite a reasonable size: evolution had obviously gone a fair distance. We were of course too far out to be able to discern individual creatures with any degree of clarity, but we could see great herds of the dominant species crossing the plains of one of the continents, like spilt ink on a baize tabletop. They were quadrupeds and appeared to be herbivorous; they were the prey of various smaller quadrupeds. All shared a curious purple skin coloration. None of the lifeforms we observed seemed to display much by way of intelligence.

We accumulated more and more data about the planet turning beneath us, and the computer and I duly processed them. But it hardly needed an artificial brain to tell us that this could well be a future home for humanity.

We couldn't allow ourselves to get too ecstatic about the possibility, though, because at the back of our minds there was a constant foreboding, a nagging gloom that just wouldn't go away. As each of the planet's days passed (16.08739807 standard hours, to the nearest meaningful figure) the time was approaching when we'd have to make the critical test of the environment beneath.

There's only one really foolproof experiment you can do if you want to find out if a planet's got poisons in its atmosphere or killers among the microfauna. Mission Control had sent along a uniquely sensitive piece of testing equipment as part of the expedition.

This device was called Andrew.

The logic was impeccable. Andrew had by now outlived any usefulness he might once have had: he was old, and an untamed world is no place for old people. Our computer was filled with billions of bits of information, now, about Andrew's World – as I sentimentally insisted on calling it; his own name for it was, for some reason, Starveling – and soon these would be sent back to Mission Control in a series of complicated, highly energetic pulses. There was just this one final experiment to perform ... before the apparatus became obsolete.

So much for logic. A lot of it had been programmed into me, but the clever people had had to make room in the subroutines for a good deal of illogic, too. I hate them for it.

"Don't go," I'd urge him. "There's no way that Mission Control can make you. We're too far from home for them to be able to come here and force you."

And:

"Qinefer," he'd reply, "don't be so bloody stupid. If I don't go down there someone else will have to. Do you think I want to live out the next few years knowing I'm breathing someone else's air? No, I'm going down. Tomorrow."

And tomorrow and tomorrow. Human beings aren't ever really heroes, no matter what they tell themselves. Quite a lot of reasons turned up to delay the date of the experiment. What made it worse was that he cottoned on to the fact that one of Mission Control's motives in sending me along was so they could have a detailed report of his terminal illness, if any. I felt like a vulture. Andrew knew this, and sympathized; the trouble was that he couldn't help beginning to think of me as a vulture, too.

Tomorrow came one morning.

We made love very slowly, and then Andrew threw back the covers and went straight to the rack of spacesuits. There was no need for him to tell me he'd decided the time for procrastination was over. Wordlessly I climbed into my own suit, thinking all the time that the grief I was feeling was a folly, a subprogram that had inadvertently become corrupted, that the chances of his survival were so high as almost to constitute a certainty. He kissed me just before he put his helmet on. I put my own helmet on, having fisted away the shattered visor. He smiled reassuringly, but there was a white edge to his mouth.

Out through the airlock, and we were floating alongside the ship. Then dragging ourselves along the hull to the dimple that showed where the little two-person shuttle was stowed. The hatch rolled back as I pressed the relevant studs, and the rather dainty craft was revealed. Hydraulics slowly raised it until it was flush with the hull of the mothership. We swam into it and drew the canopy over us.

"You don't need to wear that suit," Andrew said. It was the first time he'd spoken this morning.

"The radio," I muttered. "I need the helmet for the radio, so we can speak to each other." Even if I hadn't thought I needed it I'd have worn the suit – just to keep him company.

And that was all we said until, a few hours later, the shuttle came screamingly to rest on a rolling plain. In the distance a small group of the herbivores we'd seen from orbit were grazing; they didn't seem to be too interested in us.

Andrew had a look at them through his binoculars.

"Damn!" he said. "They're just that bit too far away for me to see them properly."

I said nothing. I could see them perfectly clearly. No binoculars.

The shuttle cooled down, popping and crackling as it did so. We clambered out and stood there savoring the thrill of standing for the first time on a new planet. The "grass" around our ankles was tough and ropy, and at the end of each strand of it there was a little barbed ball, which scratched at our legs. The smell of the place was unlike anything I'd ever encountered before. That's not to say it was a
bad
smell: just that it was totally different – a smell which humanity could never have created. I analysed it automatically, and was interested to find some quite arcane molecules mixed in with the normal organics.

At length, without any sort of ceremony, Andrew shrugged and stripped off his suit. He was quite unselfconscious in his nakedness. I followed his example.

He took a deep breath.

"Smells good," he said. "Strange, but good."

After a pause: "Actually, better than anything I can remember smelling on Mars. Probably because it doesn't come out of a tin can."

I breathed deeply, imitating him. This may sound as if I were being condescending; in many ways I was. Now that we were down on a fresh virgin planet it was no longer a case of my being reminded occasionally that he was old; instead I was constantly conscious of it. His hands were shaking, as if the wind were catching them, and I realized they'd been like that for quite a few years now; of course, I'd known it all along, but I'd simply been storing the information rather than letting it come to my main attention. His body was slightly hunched over; I wanted to run naked through the grasses of the plain, but I didn't, because I also wanted him to be beside me. Like a fool I allowed myself briefly to remember what he'd looked like when we were both in our twenties, and the pain of the recollection made me turn instantly away. The poor man stood there, confident of his
possession
of me, sniffing the wind and expecting my approval of him, and I loved him for it because that was what I'd been told to do.

We strolled around for an hour or two, pretending to each other that this was just a casual afternoon amble.

Eventually Andrew said: "Qinefer, this is long enough for the first time down here. We'd best get back up to the ship and see if I've caught anything exciting."

I agreed. We turned back towards the shuttle.

~

If you've ever seen a man die slowly then you'll know what I saw over the next few weeks.

At first there was nothing but the frequent forgetfulness.

Then there were the times when he saw – quite plainly saw, much as you might see your hand in front of you – all the foulest demons of humanity's imaginings pouring like a gelatinous liquid down the walls of the control room. And then he saw me for what he thought I truly was: an amalgam of metal and fiberglass and plastiflesh, a mechanical skull gazing at him, wires and chips positioning themselves in order to produce a sad caricature of affection. The time that the ship became a great throbbing womb, desiring all, bearing the seed of all life within it; the time that the universe was a mouth, uvula trembling eagerly in readiness as the teeth closed around him; the time that ...

Oh but I found it less than worthwhile living during the ponderous weeks before he died.

~

We said goodbye to each other in one of his lucid moments. I stood by the bunkside, looking at the pale imitation of a man I'd once loved. I saw his lips working as he weakly mouthed the syllables, and yet I found that
I could feel nothing
. I was remote from this: this was merely a human being, a short-lived parasite on the flesh of spacetime. He was moving through a stage, the one that lies between existence and nonexistence. He was dead as he lay there, but his body had yet to realize it.

I went through the motions. I drew on a subroutine and spoke the words that a lover would have spoken. They seemed empty pretenses to me, but he accepted them as genuine.

At length he died. It was a relief.

Over a couple of days I dissected his body, analysed what I found, and dumped the bits into a large plastic sack. I carried what had now became just a weight, no longer a human being, over to the airlock. Outside, I quickly located a small rocket that had been built into the hull for precisely this purpose. I attached the sack to it and came back inside. I booted up a viewing-screen and watched the flame spit from the rocket's tail. I saw the final moments as the remains of Andrew's body plummeted away from me down through the atmosphere, glowing momentarily even brighter than the rocket's exhaust.

The sight was very interesting. I made sure that every scintilla of it was permanently recorded inside me.

Then a question I hadn't expected came into my mind.

Can you remember who you are?

Of course I knew who I was. I was an android, that was all. I'd been created out of protoplasm, "clever" plastics and metals, and the ingenuity of human beings. I was a woman.

Can you remember being grown?

Of course I could. I saw again the laboratories, the kind but unaffectionate technicians, the instrumentation that was my mother's womb. I drew these memories to the forefront of my consciousness and displayed them to myself, as if I were watching them on a viewing-screen.

But the memories were being eroded at the edges; the picture was not as clear as it should have been, and I saw the artifice of it.