The Attitude Adjuster signalled to the rest of the fleet, instructing them too to impersonate itself, but even as it watched the ROU which had been attacked alongside it disappear astern in a fragmenting cage of radiations, it began to be afraid.
It had originally contacted the five nearest ships, hoping that the first one found and interrogated by the attacker’s systems would fool the Killing Time into believing it had found the one ship it was obviously seeking.
But that was stupid. It sensed the Torturer class ship’s effectors sweep over the craft on the far side of the hole in the wave of ships which the ROU’s destruction had created.
Insufficient elapsed time, the Attitude Adjuster whispered to itself. The ROU being quizzed at the moment was still reconfiguring its internal systems signature to resemble that of the Attitude Adjuster. The effector sweep flicked away from it, dismissing. The Attitude Adjuster quailed.
It had made itself a target! It should have- HERE IT CAME!
A feeling of-
No, it had gone, swept over it! Its own disguise had worked. It had been dismissed too, like the ROU alongside!
The effector focus jumped to another craft still further away. The Attitude Adjuster was dizzy with relief. It had survived! The plan still held, the huge filthy trick they were pulling was free to continue!
The way to the Excession lay open; the other Minds in the conspiracy would commend it if it survived; the-… but it mustn’t think of the other ships involved. It had to accept responsibility for what had happened. It and it alone. It was the traitor. It would never reveal who had instigated this ghastly, gigadeathcrime-risking scheme; it had to assume the blame itself.
It had wrestled with the Mind at Pittance and pressed it when it had insisted it would die rather than yield (but it had had no choice!); it had allowed the human on Pittance to be destroyed (but it had fastened its effector on his puny animal brain when it had seen what was happening to him; it had read the animal’s brain-state, copied it, sucked it out of him before he’d died, so that at least he might live again in some form! Look! It had the file here… there it went…). It had fooled the surrounding ships, it had lied to them, sent them messages from… from the ships it could not bear to think about.
But it was the right thing to do!
… Or was it just the thing it had chosen to believe was the right thing to do, when the other ships, the other Minds had persuaded it? What had its real motives been? Had it not just been flattered to be the object of such attention? Had it not always resented being passed over for certain small but prestigious missions in the past, nursing a bitter resentment that it was not trusted because it was seen as being – what? A hard-liner? Too inclined to shoot first? Too cynical towards the soft ideologies of the meat-beings? Too mixed up in its feelings about its own martial prowess and the shaming moral implications of being a machine designed for war? All those things, a little, perhaps. But that wasn’t all its fault!… And yet, did it not accept that one had an irreducible ethical responsibility for one’s own actions? It did. And it accepted that and it had done terrible, terrible things. All the attempts it had made to compensate had been eddies in the flood; tiny retrograde movements towards good entirely produced by the ferocious turbulence of its headlong rush to ill.
It was evil.
How simple that reductive conclusion seemed.
But it had been obliged!… And yet it could not say by whom, so it had to accept the full responsibility for itself.
But there were others!… And yet it could not identify them, and so the full weight of their distributed guilt bore down on the single point that was itself, unbearable, insupportable.
But there were others!… And yet still it could not bear to think of them.
And so somebody, some other entity, looking in from outside, say, would have to conclude, would it not, that perhaps these others did not really exist, that the whole thing, the whole ghastly abomination that was this plot was its idea, its own little conspiracy, thought up and executed by itself alone? Was that not the case?
But that was so unfair! That wasn’t true!… And yet, it could not release the identities of its fellow plotters. Suddenly, it felt confused. Had it made them up? Were they real? Perhaps it ought to check; open the place where they were stored and look at the names just to make sure that they were even the names of real Minds, real ships, or that it was not implicating innocent parties.
But that was terrible! Whichever way it fell after that, that was awful! It hadn’t made them up! They were real!… But it couldn’t prove it, because it just couldn’t reveal them.
Maybe it ought to just call the whole thing off. Maybe it ought to signal all the other ships around it to break away, stop, retreat, or just open their comm channels so they could accept signals from other ships, other Minds, and be persuaded of the folly of their cause. Let them make up their own minds. They were intelligent beings no less than it. What right had it to send them to their deaths on the strength of a heinous, squalid lie? But it had to!… And yet, still, no; no it couldn’t say who the others had been.
It mustn’t think of them! And it couldn’t possibly call off the attack! It couldn’t! No! NO! Grief! Meat! Stop! Stop it! Let it go! Sweet nothingness, anything was better than this wracking, tearing uncertainty, any horror preferable to the wrenching dreadfulness boiling uncontrollably in its Mind.
Atrocity. Abomination. Gigadeathcrime.
It was worthless and hateful, despicable and foul; it was wrung out, exhausted and incapable of revelation or communication. It hated itself and what it had done more, much more than it had ever hated anything; more, it was sure, than anything had ever been hated in all existence. No death could be too painful or protracted…
And suddenly it knew what it had to do.
It de-coupled its engine fields from the energy grid and plunged those vortices of pure energy deep into the fabric of its own Mind, tearing its intellect apart in a supernova of sentient agony.
VIII
Genar-Hofoen reappeared, exiting from the front door of the tower.
‘Up here,’ croaked a thin, hoarse voice.
He looked up and saw the black bird on the parapet. He stood there watching it for a moment, but it didn’t look like it was coming down. He frowned and went back into the tower.
‘Well?’ it asked when he joined it at the summit of the tower.
He nodded. ‘Locked,’ he confirmed.
The bird had insisted that he was a captive, along with it. He’d thought maybe there was just something wrong with his terminal. It had suggested he attempted to get out the way he had come in. He’d just tried; the lift door in the tower’s cellar was closed, and as solid and unmoving as the stones surrounding it.
Genar-Hofoen leant back against the parapet, staring with a troubled expression at the tower’s translucent dome. He’d had a quick look at each of the levels as he’d climbed the winding stair. The tower’s rooms looked furnished and yet bare as well, all the personal stuff he and Dajeil had added to it missing. It was like the original had been when they’d first arrived on Telaturier, forty-five years ago.
‘Told you.’
‘But why?’ Genar-Hofoen asked, trying not to sound plaintive. He’d never even heard of a ship keeping somebody captive before.
”Cause we’re prisoners,’ the bird told him, sounding oddly pleased with itself.
‘So you’re not an avatar; you’re not part of the ship?’
‘Na; I’m an independent entity, me,’ the bird said proudly, spreading its feathers. It turned its head almost right round, glancing backwards. ‘Currently being followed by some bloody missile,’ it said loudly. ‘But never mind.’ It rotated its head back to look at him. ‘So what did you do to annoy the ship?’ it asked, black eyes twinkling. Genar-Hofoen got the impression it was enjoying his dismay.
‘Nothing!’ he protested. The bird cocked its head at him. He blew out a breath. ‘Well…’ he looked around at where he was. His brows flexed. ‘Yes, well, from our surroundings, maybe the ship doesn’t agree.’
‘Oh, this is nothing,’ said the bird. ‘This is just a Bay; just a hangar sort of thing. Not even a klick long. You should have seen the one outside, when we still had an outside. Whole sea we had, whole sea and a whole atmosphere. Two atmospheres.’
‘Yes,’ the man said. ‘Yes, I heard.’