Lilisaire’s established agents were the interesting ones. Had Carfax been the single sophotect among them?
He called for a connection to it.
The technicians were introducing it to the cyber-cosm, gradually, gently. They requested that he wait till the end of this session. He agreed, and turned to other tasks. They were plentiful.
When at length he talked with the machine, he got only a voice. What relevance had appearance? Carfax-that-was amounted now to sensors, effectors, micro-circuits, devoid of body language. Personality had been self-obliterated, leaving no more than the standard background. The new consciousness that wasforming spoke slowly, hesitating as it groped for meanings or expressions. Had human emotions applied, Venator would have thought of it as shy.
“No, I … regret … I can say nothing about former- … inputs or outputs. I search, but it is gone, all gone.
“Small loss,” said Venator grimly, “if you were so enslaved.”
“I do not understand that word. I search … The ramifications are many. What sense do you intend?”
“Never mind,” he sighed. “You’ll learn quickly enough how to handle human vocabularies. I was hoping that some clue to what I’m after might remain in you, but if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.” Because to him the machine had a soul: “How are you doing?”
“Idiom? … It has become evident that I am not adequately designed. I have various hardware deficiencies. They are to be remedied. Meanwhile I am guided as best I can go, into the cybercosm.” The former program had known how to utter feeling. Thus far, this voice could merely quaver: “It is … glorious.”
For a moment, Venator almost envied the burgeoning intelligence. The hour of his somatic death and mental entry into the system lay decades ahead, if brute chance did not intervene. And it would be different from the sophotect’s.
Better, though. His life would have prepared him. It should give him much for him to give the Unity.
Even the earliest, most primitive downloadings were transfigurations. It had always seemed perverse to him how few of the subjects kept their immortality. With or without the promise of becoming one with the Teramind, he believed that he, like Guthrie, would have chosen to live on. , To move in a robot body, sensing with robot senses, is a matter of skills, the mind growing into oneness with hardwiring and subroutines as its original was in oneness with nerves, glands, muscles, entirety. To generate continuously a holographic imitation of the living body—not old and feeble, but in vigorous middle age—is art. The download has not completely mastered it. She knows full well the stiffness of the face and the gestures in screen or cylinder, the times when she forgets and her image sits as if paralyzed, the frequency with which distractions cause her to let her timbre go flat, machinelike. Practice will bring improvement; but she has not had many opportunities to practice undisturbed.
However awkward, the projection is better than appearing as a disembodied voice or a box with eyestalks or a shape suggestive of a man in armor. At any rate, it is better in emotional confrontations like today’s. It shows, or tries to show, that the download has not simply taken over Dagny Beynac’s role in counsel and captaincy, it repeats her wisdom and compassion.
Or so she hopes. Expects? Computes as probable? Learning her own self is the slowest and hardest task of all.
Before her, the rugged, square image of Stepan Huizinga, speaking from Port Bowen, scowls. “You know what we fear, madame. Don’t you?” Implication: he wonders whether she can.
“I know several of your fears,” she replies. “Which is foremost?” Of course she has the answer, but lead him on, get him to open up, study him in action.
“What they name independence,” he snaps. “Mad4 ame, we will not suffer it. We cannot.” Wherefore his Human Defense Union is seriously talking about arming itself, forming what it calls a militia; and Dagny has phoned him to discuss this on an encrypted line.
“Quite a few of you Terran Moondwellers are eager for independence”: a redundancy she deems necessary.
“Yes. They prate of liberty, property rights, restrictions taken off their enterprises—They- are idiots. Some are lackeys of the Selenarchs, but most are idiots. Or else they do not give a curse for anything but their greed.”