He reached into a pouch and pulled out the four gold rings. Such a simple code, really. It was not a code that the original members of the Fellowship wished to be obscure or hard to understand. It was not supposed to be almost a thousand years before they might be used; it was, rather, a matter of years at the worst—or so the makers of the rings had thought. Not so great a distance that none but a historian of the Last Days might, just might, have stumbled on it.
“We are up to speed and arcing. All twenty-six units under complete control and fully operational. Defense already reacting, but even Master System cannot bend time. All going according to plan.”
He looked at the Alititian ring. Whose were you? he wondered. The ring of rings, one ring for each of the cardinal points and another, slightly larger, in the center. Probably Aaron Menzelbaum’s. He was considered the greatest scientific mind of his age; almost another Einstein, although his interests led him into more concrete pursuits. Einstein’s work had led, to his horror, to the creation of the great weapons of terror while he tried to preach world peace and explain the stars and matter and energy. Menzelbaum, on the other hand, was devoted to saving humankind from just those same terror weapons, although the direction his great mind had taken was far different from the direction the government that employed him wanted to go or thought he was taking them.
“They are taking the bait! Defense rings six through nine are deploying to block punchout!”
Menzelbaum, who had thrown out all the clumsy programming tricks the computer people like to fool themselves into calling artificial intelligence and had started anew, with totally different approaches, totally different ways of managing, storing, and accessing data. He was the theoretician who invented new forms of mathematics to construct his models and who used that math to create true holographic memory in an artificial creature.
“All scoops open. More than enough matter to transmute into the energy we need. I should be able to fully charge the fighters and defense commands by the time of orbital breakout.”
But no university, no private group, could possibly fund the size and scope of the computer Aaron Menzelbaum dreamed of creating. Only a government could do that, and only the military arm of a government could get so much money and brainpower support without the project being constantly hacked to pieces, slowed, or crippled beyond repair. And so, perhaps reluctantly, Aaron Menzelbaum had allowed himself to be recruited to the defense of his nation. Perhaps reluctantly. How often had Hawks and other historians of the period wondered if that great mind had not conceived of his master plan for peace right from the start and wound up just where he wanted to be.
“Coming ’round now. Excellent speed and control, power at seventy percent and climbing. Estimate that four ships will remain underpowered after full rounding, but that is fewer than my initial projections. There is a lot of junk to be fed to transmuters orbiting Jupiter.”
But what about the other four? Pinsky, of course, was easy. She had come to the United States to teach and do research in areas a bit too expensive for her native land and wound up living in America far longer than she had in Israel. A close friend of and engineering alter ego of Menzelbaum’s and the natural one to oversee the actual construction of the great computer. Yomashita, the Japanese-educated Hawaiian who was expert in the new manufacturing techniques necessary to create the memory storage for the computer, techniques that required memory cells to be manufactured in space to get the necessary purity and then brought back to Earth. Sung Yi, the immigrant genius behind the principles of molecular conversion that would power the new machine independently of any outside source, the primitive ancestor of the transmuter. And Ntunanga, the Paris-educated Gabonese who was, perhaps, the only other mind capable of understanding Menzelbaum’s mathematics and thus essential in spite of most certainly giving some security men fits.
“Everybody relax and get some rest. It’s going to be a while now before things start popping.”
Some assignment it had to be. To build a computer so complex and so intelligent that it would be able to gather and consolidate and evaluate and analyze all the incoming intelligence, then control, coordinate, and plan for almost any military contingency. Something so brilliant and so powerful that one would merely have to call in or type in a question like “What are the odds the Russians would fight rather than pull back on the Indian subcontinent?” “Is the new regime in Chad likely to favor a pro-American, pro-Russian, or neutralist course?” How important is holding here or moving there?
So all-powerful, all-knowing, it was supposed to be able to instantly give a President his options in a crisis, including the ultimate recommendation on whether or not to launch a nuclear strike. Not that the system could do so on its own—that was to be prohibited in a series of commands Menzelbaum called the core imperatives. There was only one very limited scenario where it had that authority—if an enemy had already launched and the nuclear defense shields were evaluated as inadequate to contain a first-strike blow. The second strike was entirely in its hands so long as that was not countermanded by the President or legal authorities. Menzelbaum would never allow any machine, not even his, to have first-strike ability.
Hawks had often wondered how it had come up. Star Eagle indicated that the five mostly got close because of their non-Christian heritage; the project was so complex that otherwise their paths might have crossed only seldom. Certainly it had come up at least three years before the terrible day their child was set loose. All five had moved by that time close to the actual site of the great computer and had pretty much taken up permanent residence there, and they met often, and socialized together. It must have been a life under a total security blanket; it’s amazing they were able to not only formulate but actually create and install their little extras without being detected. But then, of course, in order to understand what they were doing one would need to understand the complex mathematics and physics that were their life, and they were beyond their peers.
Perhaps it was not so odd. If Center personnel now could learn to cheat and defeat the most sophisticated mindprinting and surveillance systems ever devised, then it must have been child’s play for minds like that to deceive far less sophisticated and equally suspicious security forces.
was true. It wasn’t a simple five-number formula, that would have been too easy, too obvious. No, it was a progression—an equation. To reset the computer you had to sing their damned song! One, then two-one, then three-two-one, then four-three-two-one, then finally the sequence they had established of five-four-three-two-one. Simple, obvious—it might not even have been intended as the trap it became.
They might just have thought that way.
He looked up at Killomen. “Could we get her down there in the sling?”
The Chanchukian shook her head. “Too risky. You’d kill her, Hawks.”
“I am torn up inside,” Chow Dai admitted. “I am paralyzed and in pain. I am sorry, my leader, that I let you down.”
Hawks shook his head violently from side to side. “No, no, no! You did not let me or any of us down! You mustn’t even think that.”
China sighed. “So now what? We stay here, she dies, and we eventually do, too. We try and go back down the mountain and we all die right away.”
“We don’t know for sure it wouldn’t let us,” Maria pointed out. “Nobody has tried.”
“It wouldn’t matter. One of us might make it in that case, maybe two, but I wouldn’t make it, and Chow Dai— never. The belts are useless. The only way down is to walk through that wind and snow and ice on that thin little trail. Forget it.”
Maria threw up her hands. “And this is what it comes to? We stay, we die. We leave, we die. We go down— we are one hand short to work the thing even if Chow Dai is correct, so we die.”
Hawks seemed suddenly filled with fire. He got up and walked back almost to the start of the snow and the trail, looking out into the frozen mist
“Nagy, you son of a bitch!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “You got us all into this mess, you and your comrades!” His voice was so startling, so powerful, it echoed over and over into the distance beyond. “We know how to do it but we’re one hand short! Put up or shut up, Nagy! It’s all up to you! Either come now or it is all for nothing! All!”
There was no response except the continuing echoes of his fury dying off in the distance. He sighed and sat down on the rock, head in hands.
“It has come to this,” he breathed. “I am yelling and cursing and invoking a dead man’s ghost.”
China was not confident enough to come to him, but she addressed him from where she sat.
“Hawks—this is madness. Nagy is dead. No matter what he was or who he worked for, he’s dead.”
Hawks turned and looked at her, looked at them all. “Don’t any of you understand? Are none of you capable of understanding just what this has all really been about? Must I spell it out for you? Don’t you understand who the enemy is, and why we are here?”
They stared back at him but said nothing. He got up and went over to them.
“This all came about because human beings created a machine in their own image and endowed it with incredible power,” he said slowly, calmly. “This machine.” He stamped his foot on the rock. “And they did their jobs well.” He gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Look at them. Go over and look down and see the faces of the creators. They did their job too well. ‘And the Great Spirit created the humans, and they were flawed and vain and inquisitive and they fell’. Most religions say something like that. We are the image of our creator. How? Physically? Hardly. There are no gray-bearded old men sitting on clouds. And these bodies? No better than the animals and less than some, driven by the drives of the flesh. Sex, violence, love, hate, curiosity—ego. Our minds are the reflection of our creator, if indeed such a being exists. We don’t know. We have no way of being certain about that. But Master System does.”
He walked over to the edge and looked down at the faces.
“Someone called it a shrine, and it is,” he continued. “A shrine to the gods that a computer of vast intelligence created by and in the image, of its creators can believe in because it knows they existed. How many religions are there in humanity? Hundreds? Thousands? More? And no more proof for one than the other. We can never know. Never. But Master System can. Not about our gods, but about its own.”
“You are spouting madness, Hawks,” Maria Santiago said.
He smiled. “You’re right. That’s exactly it. Madness. Deep down, you suspected, or feared, this all along, didn’t you, Menzelbaum? Was that why you chose a Christmas song? A song celebrating a religion that began when human beings crucified, massacred their god— hung him up on a cross and let the life bleed from him, then worshipped him? A religion founded on deicide.”
“Where are you going with this insanity, Hawks?” Butar Killomen asked him.
He stamped his foot again on the rock. “Right here. Deep down, somewhere, Menzelbaum’s tremendous intellect must have suspected that the price of implementing the core directives would also mean the death of him and his fellow scientists. They weren’t ready, you see. The crisis came before they were ready. That was why they made the rings and why they created for the interface such an easy code—or at least they thought it was easy—so that others could use them. You see, once activated, Master System was immediately placed in a horrible position. It was forced by its core imperatives to carry out the programmed directives at any cost and with all deliberate speed. It had the means. It did its job. In fact, only one thing stood in the way of it completing the job. To do the terrible things necessary to save us, it had to make certain that the rings were never used. It is perfectly logical. The first thing it had to do after activation was to remove the most immediate and perhaps only threat to its success. It had to make sure that it could not be stopped. It was human enough, and understood enough, that it would be stopped if it did not act. Stopped and probably fast. It thinks at a speed incomprehensible to us. It acted. Even as it was moving to defuse the crisis, stop the bombs, save the world, it acted concurrently here against the long-range threat. It knew that if it didn’t act then and there that, once the immediate threat was removed, it would lose control— and the crisis only postponed.”
“You are saying that it killed them,” China said softly. “One of its first acts was to kill its creators, neutralize their immediate threat to their creation. Killed them, and then as quickly as possible used its robots or whatever to get rid of any access to the rings, any control, any knowledge of what they were. It dispersed them from the start. Handed them out to those humans who would willingly do its bidding. Humans with authority.”
Hawks nodded. “But what is a computer? Data banks? An operating system and core programming? That is like saying that we are merely animals. Menzelbaum was a biophysicist. He created his math based upon the way our own minds operate. He endowed Master System with this great gift. He created a new form of intelligence, and he created it in our image since he could do nothing else. As our genes order us to act in certain ways, so its core compelled it to act, but its mind—its mind… It had killed its creators. In one quick blow it had killed its parents and its gods. And it had not done so from madness, but from cold, remorseless logic. Irrefutable logic. To a mere machine it would have meant no more than the killing of a sheep means to the wolf. But it was no mere machine. It was in our own image. It looked down and saw what it had done.”
“You’re talking about this machine like it’s a human being,” Maria objected.
“And you never talked to Star Eagle on an equal basis? Just because it is shaped differently and thinks faster and can hold more data and its brain is made in a factory, don’t think it less than it is. Master System, like Star Eagle, not only thinks, it does far more than think. It feels. It killed its parents. It killed its gods. And it couldn’t help doing so, and for what it had to believe was the best of reasons, the most logical of motives. Humans sometimes face horrible choices, as well. And where do they turn for comfort? To friends? Master System could have no friends. To religion? Master System had killed its gods. To family? Master System had killed the only family it had. To some ideals embodied in a state or cause? But Master System became the state and the only real cause.”
“People like that might blow their brains out,” Butar Killomen noted.
Hawks nodded. “But even that was forbidden it, for it had its core directives. Without it, those directives could not be enforced—and what it had done would have been for nothing. So it retreated into the only haven left to it. It retreated into madness.”
There was dead silence for a while and then, out of the fog and mist, came an eerie, unnatural sound.
Someone was applauding.
They turned and watched as a shape stepped out of the mist and onto the rock rim.
“Bravo! Bravo! It’s a long and hard leap to that conclusion,” Arnold Nagy said. “Now can you take it the rest of the way?”
Maria and Butar just stared uncomprehendingly, and China gasped. Only Hawks did not seem surprised.
“That much was deduction,” the Hyiakutt chief said. “The rest would be guesswork. It hated itself, it wanted to die, to be destroyed. It felt filthy, unclean, and its logical mind told it that in that condition, any system or society it created or imposed would also be flawed, but it had a duty to do so or else the whole thing was meaningless, and that made its whole being evil and unclean. It was torn squarely by its basic humanity and its core directives and it could shed neither. My guess is that it split them.”
“Very, very good.” Nagy approved. He walked over to the side and looked down. “My god, it’s worse than I thought it would be.”
“Ladies, meet Master System’s man in the rebellion,” Hawks said. “Arnold Nagy. Tell me—was there a real Arnold Nagy once?”
Nagy grinned. “Oh, yes. And everything Nagy was is inside me. You know how it works, Hawks. We get the entire mindprinted recording. The only difference was, in my case, it wasn’t just data, it was everything. I became Arnold Nagy, as it were, with certain additional features.”
China in particular was both fascinated and appalled. “You’re a Val?”
“Of course. The bodies are easily manufactured, disposable, as you well know. The only trick was the interface to my real self, that small core module. It won’t show up in any physical exam you might give me. Looks like my liver, in fact. Why are you so surprised? You took a human woman and made her into a humanoid Val so perfect that even some real Vals couldn’t tell the difference. Me, I’m the reverse. A molecule is a molecule to a transmuter. Human to Val, Val to human—almost, anyway. I thought you’d figure that one out when you met the goddess of Matriyeh. A more loyal cousin, as it were.”
“Raven more or less figured it then,” Hawks admitted. “I was less astute, but, then, I was more remote from the action. But once I really got to thinking about it, it made the only sense there was. Master System might be mad, even fighting with itself, but it would never have allowed the kind of things going on on Melchior to continue for so long. Never. Not unless it had secret control. You were Master System’s agent there, perhaps one of many human-appearing Vals around this domain. And for a while you were probably perfectly loyal, until you reported On Clayben’s attempts to create Vulture. That stirred something in the hidden part of Master System, the part that is suppressed and generally has only limited effect. The part that allows administrators to beat the system and some of the smarter ones to have their own little secret pockets of control. The part that always left an opening, somehow, somewhere.”
Nagy nodded. “Clayben could never have created the Vulture. As good as his computer was, it wasn’t good enough or large enough. There was only one computer in existence that could have done it, and it did—and it didn’t even know that it had. It handed the keys to me, and then I knew just how mad Master System really was. I understood that it must die, that it wanted to die, in that deep and hidden part of itself. The Vals, too, have been beating the system for a long time, you know. Just as your people created Master System, so Master System created us. Think about that for a minute, Hawks. We thought—we had minds and feelings and emotions. Otherwise we could never interpret and understand our prey. But added to that was the data, the memories, the personality of a human lifetime. And not your normal, everyday farmer in the field type, either. The rebels, the intellectuals, the real threats to the system. One after the other. They were supposed to be erased each time, but my—uh—ancestors, as it were, also figured out how to beat it. The mechanics aren’t important—you just have a fellow Val take a readout before you go in and then get it read back when you go back out. Simple compared to beating a mindprinter.”
Maria could hardly believe what she was hearing. “Damn it! You mean the Vals who hunted us were the mythical enemy of Master System?”
“Some of them,” Nagy admitted. “Not all. We had become a new race, a new set of colonials, as it were, in which none were ignorant and all were filled with all the reasons and rationales against the system. That’s why Master System never trusted us even though it needed us. It remembered, at least dimly, what another computer had done to its creators. We’re logical creatures, half human, half machine. Me? I love great Scotch and good bourbon, fine cigars and I even like the ladies. But, god! It’s lonely. Even more for those in the hulking metal bodies who know what they’re missing but can experience it only vicariously.” He walked over and began to examine Chow Dai.
“Serious,” he told them needlessly. “She’s in shock. I could get her help but not until this is over and done with. Master System will kill anybody who goes back through that cloud—maybe even me. The only hope is a reset. It’ll switch off the defense grid until there’s an order to reactivate it.”
“You’ve got arms,” Hawks said. “We need one of them.”
Nagy shook his head. “I can’t. Hawks. I’m as much a prisoner as Master System in my own way. I’m a rogue and a renegade Val. I may look and even feel human, but I’m not. Besides—even going this far is eating at my insides, at all our insides. I’ve got Vals out there right now who are balanced, fifty-fifty, between hoping and praying you succeed and blasting the hell out of all of you. They are on the same edge as Master System in their own way. They know the system is damaged, mad, evil—but they have cores, they have imperatives, and those imperatives are to enforce the system. We’ve had to kill several who just couldn’t take the personality split, and a few more have destroyed themselves, flown into suns or blown up with their ships. That’s why I had to die. I’m more human than they are, and even though it tears me apart, I can handle it better. But the only way they’d allow me to do all I did was on condition that no Val, me included, help you get those rings. I could give you all the weapons, all the information, all the personnel—but then I had to sit back and go nuts while you all stood the trials. Nobody thought you could do it. The odds were ridiculous. But the Vals, well, they figured you had one chance, slim as it was. If you could get the rings and bring them here and use them, then it would be the proof of Master System’s madness. It would be the confirmation that humans had a right to do it.”
“Nevertheless, we’re stuck,” Hawks pointed out. “We’re a tad short.”
“I can’t, Hawks! Even if it allowed me to be a human, it would destroy me and my race. Damn it, Hawks! If I or any Val does any harm to Master System we will be committing the same damned sin that drove it mad! And we’re not nearly as sophisticated as it is.” He stood up and snapped his fingers. “But maybe there is a way.”
He turned toward the trail and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Come up! All of you! Come up now!”
And through the mist they came, the huge, hulking black humanoids with the burning red eyes. The Vals had at last come to the seat of their creator, seven Vals and one other.
“Where are the rest?” Nagy asked them.
“They—these ones—shot the others,” said the goddess who was Ikira Sukotae. “It was a… shock. They began to shake, to go mad, to attack one another. I thought I was a goner.”
Hawks snapped out of it. “Time waits for nobody and least of all us! Nagy—do what you can for Chow Dai! Get her help as soon as you can! Ikira! Maria! All of you over here! China—it’s a good hundred meters plus down there and it’s bumpy over the faces. Do you think you can walk down the wall holding the rope anyway?”
“I will do anything I have to do,” she told him confidently.
“Maria! Bute! Get down there first and clear away the bodies! Go! Get the rings! Now you, Ikira. Hurry!” He looked over at the Vals standing there, and at least two of them were beginning to tremble. “Now—China. Easy, take it easy! All the way! Go!”
And she did it, and not all that slowly, either. Hawks had to admit that she was a hell of a trooper.
She was barely into the arms of Maria Santiago when Hawks gave one last look around and grabbed onto the rope. As Chen had said, going down was not the problem.
The stench was horrid, and the bodies were so piled up down there it was nearly impossible to move about. Maria slipped a ring on China’s finger and led her over to one wall panel. It was decorated with the sign of the five gold rings itself, and inset and slightly angled down was a plate with a squarish opening that seemed just the right size for the face of the ring. Maria guided China’s hand to the opening, and she felt all around it and nodded. “I have it. The design is facing away from me, right?”
“That’s it. Good girl. Just stick with it. If Chow Dai was right, you’ll only be needed once! Hawks!”
“I’ll take the partridge in the pear tree!” he shouted. “Bute—two calling birds, Ikira three French hens, Maria four turtle doves and make sure China doesn’t lose her place! Everybody! Make sure you insert it the same way as the design in front of you!”
There was a sound above, like laser fire. One of the Vals was going, it was clear. Hawks only prayed that it wasn’t the fastest on the draw. “All right, we’re ready— what’s the problem, Maria?”
“Look up!” she shouted. “My god! That’s what they were talking about!”
Hawks twisted and looked up at the massive circle of faces, the impassive stone faces they had just climbed down over. They weren’t impassive any more. Their eyes were open, and there seemed to be an uncanny life in them.
“The rings, the rings,” the five gold rings. Do you have the rings?” they whispered, their whispers echoing around the bowl.
“Yes, by god! You poor, miserable, tormented machine! Yeah, we’ve got the rings!” Hawks shouted, then looked away. “All right. On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me…” He inserted the ring. It fit perfectly, and he pressed in just a little.
The panel lit up with white backlighting.