SCOTT WESTERFELD                    THE MOVEMENTS OF HER EYESIT STARTED ON
THAT frozen world, among the stone figures in their almostsuspended
animation.Through her eyes, the irises two salmon moons under luminous white
brows, likefissures in the world of rules, of logic. The starship's mind
watched throughthe prism of their wonder, and began to make its change.She
peered at the statue for a solid, unblinking minute. Protesting tearsgathered
to blur her vision, but Rathere's gaze did not waver. Another minute,and a tic
tugged at one eye, taking up the steady rhythm of her heartbeat.She kept
watching."Ha!" she finally proclaimed. "I saw it move.""Where?" asked a voice
in her head, unconvinced.Rathere rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands,
mouth open, awestruck bythe shooting red stars behind her eyelids. Her blinks
made up now for the lostminutes, and she squinted at the dusty town
square."His foot," she announced, "it moved. But maybe...only a
centimeter."The voice made an intimate sound, a soft sigh beside Rathere's ear
that did notquite reject her claim."Maybe just a millimeter," Rathere offered.
A touch of unsure emphasis hoveredabout the last word; she wasn't used to tiny
units of measurement, though fromher father's work she understood light years
and metaparsecs well enough."In three minutes? Perhaps a micrometer," the
voice in her head suggested.Rathere rolled the word around in her mouth. In
response to her questioningexpression, software was invoked, as effortless as
reflex. Images appeared uponthe rough stones of the square: a meter-stick, a
hundredth of its length glowingbright red, a detail box showing that hundredth
with a hundredth of its lengthflashing, yet another detail box...completing
the six orders of magnitudebetween meter and micrometer. Next to the final
detail box a cross-section ofhuman hair floated for scale, as bloated and
gnarled as some blackly diseasedtree."That small?" she whispered. A slight
intake of breath, a softening of her eyes'focus, a measurable quantity of
adrenaline in her bloodstream were all noted.Indicators of her simple awe:
that a distance could be so small, a creature soslow."About half that,
actually," said the voice in her head."Well," Rathere murmured, leaning back
into the cool hem of shade along thestone wall, "I knew I saw it move."She
eyed the stone creature again, a look of triumph on her face.Woven into her
white tresses were black threads, filaments that moved throughher hair in a
slow deliberate dance, like the tendrils of some predator on anocean floor.
This restless skein was always seeking the best position to captureRathere's
subvocalized words, the movements of her eyes, the telltale secretionsof her
skin. Composed of exotic alloys and complex configurations of carbon,
thetendrils housed a native intellect that handled their motility
andself-maintenance. But a microwave link connected them to their
realintelligence: the AI core aboard Rathere's starship home.Two of the black
filaments wound their way into her ears, where they curled inintimate contact
with her tympanic membranes."The statues are always moving," the voice said to
her. "But very slowly."Then it reminded her to stick on another sunblock
patch.She was a very pale girl.EVEN HERE on Petraveil, Rathere's father
insisted that she wear the minder whenshe explored alone. The city was safe
enough, populated mostly by academics hereto study the glacially slow
indigenous lifeforms. The lithomorphs themselveswere incapable of posing a
threat, unless one stood still for a hundred years orso. And Rathere was, as
she put it, almost fifteen, near majority age back inthe Local Cluster. Even
harnessing the processing power of the starship's AI,the minder was a
glorified babysitter.But Isaah was adamant."Do I have to wear it?""Remember
what happened to your mother," he would say.And that was that.Rathere shrugged
and let the tendrils wrap themselves into her hair. The voicein her ears
cautioned her incessantly about sunburn, and it strictly forbadeseveral
classes of recreational drugs, but all in all it wasn't bad company.
Itcertainly knew a lot."How long would it take, creeping forward in
micrometers?" Rathere asked."How long would what take?" Even with their
intimate connection, the AI couldnot read her mind. It was still working on
that."To get all the way to the Northern Range. Probably a million years?"
sheventured.The starship, for whom a single second was a 16-teraflop reverie,
spent endlessminutes of every day accessing the planetary library. Rathere's
questions camein packs, herds, stampedes.No one knew how the lithomorphs
reproduced, but it was guessed that they bred inthe abysmal caves of the
Northern Range."At least a hundred thousand years," the AI said."Such a long
journey .... What would it look like?"The AI delved into its package of
pedagogical visualization software, appliedits tremendous processing power
(sufficient for the occult mathematics ofastrogation), and rendered the
spectacles of that long, slow trip. AcrossRathere's vision it accelerated
passing days and wheeling stars until they wereinvisible flickers. It hummed
the subliminal pulse of seasonal change andpainted the sprightly jitter of
rivers changing course, the slow but visibledance of mountainous
cousins."Yes," Rathere said softly, her voice turned breathy. The AI savored
thedilation of her pupils, the spiderwebs of red blossoming on her cheeks.
Then itpeered again into the vision it had created, trying to learn what rules
of mindand physiology connected the scintillating images with the girl's
reaction."They aren't really slow," Rathere murmured. "The world is just so
fast .... "Isaah, Rathere's father, looked out upon the statues of
Petraveil.Their giant forms crowded the town square. They dotted the high
volcanicmountain overlooking the city. They bathed in the rivers that surged
across theblack equatorial plains, staining the waters downstream with rusted
metalcolors.The first time he had come here, years before, Isaah had noticed
that in theshort and sudden afternoon rains, the tears shed from their eyes
carried a blackgrime that sparkled with colored whorls when the sun
returned.They were, it had been determined a few decades before, very much
alive.Humanity had carefully studied the fantastically slow creatures
sincediscovering their glacial, purposeful, perhaps even intelligent
animation.Mounted next to each lithomorph was a plaque that played timeseries
of the lastforty years: a dozen steps, a turn of the head as another of its
kind passed, afew words in their geologically deliberate gestural
language.Most of the creatures' bodies were hidden underground, their secrets
teased outwith deep radar and gravitic density imaging. The visibleportion was
a kind ofeye-stalk, cutting the surface like the dorsal fin of a dolphin
breaking intothe air.Isaah was here to steal their stories. He was a
scoop."How long until we leave here?" Rathere asked."That's for your father to
decide," the AI answered."But when will he decide?""When the right scoop
comes.""When will that come?"This sort of mildly recursive loop had once
frustrated the AI's conversationalpackages. Rathere's speech patterns were
those of a child younger than heryears, the result of her life since her
mother's disappearance: traveling amongobscure, Outward worlds with only her
taciturn father and the AI for company.Rathere never formulated what she
wanted to know succinctly, she reeled offquestions from every direction,
attacking an issue like a host of smallpredators taking down a larger animal.
Her AI companion could only fend her offwith answers until (often
unexpectedly) Rathere was satisfied."When there is a good story here, your
father will decide to go.""Like what story?""He doesn't know yet."She nodded
her head. From her galvanic skin response, her pupils, the gradualslowing of
her heart, the AI saw that it had satisfied her. But still anotherquestion
came."Why didn't you just say so?"In the Expansion, information traveled no
faster than transportation, and scoopslike Isaah enriched themselves by being
first with news. The standardtransmission network employed small, fast drone
craft that moved among the starson a fixed schedule. The drones promulgated
news throughout the Expansion with apredictable and neutral efficiency,
gathering information to centralized nodes,dispersing it by timetable. Scoops
like Isaah, on the other hand, wereinefficient, unpredictable, and, most
importantly, unfair. They cut across theconcentric web of the drone network,
skipping junctions, skimming profits. Isaahwould recognize that the discovery
of a mineable asteroid here might affect theheavy element market there, and
jump straight between the two points, beatingthe faster but fastidious drones
by a few precious hours. A successful scoopknew the markets on many planets,
had acquaintance with aggressive investors andunprincipled speculators.
Sometimes, the scooped news of a celebrity's death,surprise marriage, or
arrest could be sold for its entertainment value. And somescoops were
information pirates. Isaah had himself published numerous novels bySethmare
Viin, his favorite author, machine-translated en route by the starshipAl. In
some systems, Isaah's version had been available weeks before theauthorized
edition.The peripatetic life of a scoop had taken Isaah and Rathere throughout
theExpansion, but he always returned to Petraveil. His refined instincts for a
goodscoop told him something was happening here. The fantastically slow
natives mustbe doing something. He would spend a few weeks, sometimes a few
months watchingthe stone creatures, wondering what they were up to. Isaah
didn't know what itmight be, but he felt that one day they would somehow come
to life.And that would be a scoop."How long do the lithomorphs live?""No one
knows.""What do they eat?""They don't really eat at all. They --""What's that
one doing?"The minder accessed the planetary library, plumbing decades of
research on thecreatures. But not quickly enough to answer before"What do they
think about us?" Rathere asked. "Can they see us?"To that, it had no
answer.Perhaps the lithos had noticed the whirring creatures around them, or
morelikely had spotted the semi-permanent buildings around the square. But
thelithomorphs' reaction to the sudden human invasion produced only a vague,
cosmicworry, like knowing one's star will collapse in a few billion years.For
Rathere, though, the lives of the lithomorphs were far more immediate. Likethe
AI minder, they were mentors, imaginary friends.Their immobility had taught
her to watch for the slightest of movements: thesweep of an analog clock's
minute hand, the transformation of a high cirruscloud, the slow descent of the
planet's old red sun behind the northernmountains. Their silence taught her to
read lips, to make messages in theripples of stone and metal that flowed as
slowly as glaciers in their wakes. Shefound a patient irony in their stances.
They were wise, but it wasn't the wisdomof an ancient tree or river; rather,
they seemed to possess the reserve of awatchfully silent guest at a
party.Rathere told stories about them to the starship's AI. Tales of their
fierce,glacial battles, of betrayal on the mating trail, of the creatures'
slowintrigues against the human colonists of Petraveil, millennia-long plots
ofwhich every chapter lasted centuries.At first, the AI gently interrupted her
to explain the facts: the limits ofscientific understanding. The lithomorphs
were removed through too many ordersof magnitude in time, too distant on that
single axis ever to be comprehended.The four decades they'd been studied were
mere seconds of their history. ButRathere ignored the machine. She named the
creatures, inventing secret missionsfor them that unfolded while the human
population slept, like statues springingto life when no one was
watching.Ultimately, the AI was won over by Rathere's stories, her insistence
that thecreatures were knowable. Her words painted expressions, names, and
passions uponthem; she made them live by flat. The AI's pedagological software
did not objectto storytelling, so it began to participate in Rathere's
fantasies. It nuturedthat invisibly slow world, kept order and consistency,
remembering names, plots,places. And slowly, it began to give the stories
credence, suspending disbelief.Finally, the stories' truth was as integral to
the AI as the harm-preventionprotocols or logical axioms deepwired in its
code.For Isaah, however, there was no scoop here on Petraveil. The
lithomorphscontinued their immortal dance in silence. And elections were
approaching in anearby system, a situation which always created sudden,
unexpected cargos ofinformation.The night that Rathere and Isaah left the
planet, the AI hushed her crying withtales of how her invented narratives had
unfolded, as if the statues had sprungto human-speed life once left behind. As
it navigated her father's small ship,the AI offered this vision to Rathere:
she had been a visitor to a frozenmoment, but the story continued.In high
orbit above the next planet on their route, a customs sweep revealedthat the
starship's AI had improved its Turing Quotient to 0.37. Isaah raised awary
eyebrow. The AI's close bond with his daughter had accelerated itsdevelopment.
The increased Turing Quotient showed that the device was performingwell as
tutor and companion. But Isaah would have to get its intelligencedowngraded
when they returned to the Local Cluster. If the machine's TuringQuotient were
allowed to reach 1.0, it would be a person--no longer legally hisproperty.
Isaah turned pale at the thought. The cost of replacing the AI unitwould wipe
out his profits for the entire trip.He made a mental note to record the Turing
Quotient at every customs point.Isaah was impressed, though, with how the AI
handled entry into the planet'salmost liquid atmosphere. It designed a new
landing configuration, modifying thehydroplanar shape that the craft assumed
for gas giant descents. Its piloting asthey plunged through successive layers
of pressure-dense gasses was particularlyelegant; it made adjustments at every
stage, subtle changes to the craft thatsaved precious time. The elections were
only days away.It was strange, Isaah pondered as the ship neared the
high-pressure domes of thetrade port, that the companionship of a
fourteen-year-old girl would improve amachine's piloting skills. The thought
brought a smile of fatherly pride to hislips, but he soon turned his mind to
politics.THEY WERE going swimming.As Rathere slipped out of her clothes, the
AI implemented its safety protocols.The minder distributed itself across her
body, becoming a layer of black laceagainst her white flesh. It carefully
inspected the pressure suit as Rathererolled the garment onto her limbs. There
were no signs of damage, no telltalefissures of a repaired seam."You said the
atmosphere could crush a human to jelly," Rathere said. "How canthis little
suit protect me?"The starship explained the physics of resistance fields to
her while checkingthe suit against safety specifications it had ,downloaded
that morning. It tookvery good care of Rathere.She had seen the huge behemoths
at breakfast, multiplied by the facets of thedome's cultured-diamond windows.
Two mares and a child swimming a few kilometersaway, leaving their glimmering
trails. The minder had noted her soft sigh, herdilated pupils, the sudden
increase in her heart rate. It had discovered thesuit rental agency with a
quick search of local services, and had guided herpast its offices on their
morning ramble through the human-habitable levels ofthe dome.Rathere's
reaction to the holographic advertising on the agency's wall hadmatched the
AI's prediction wonderfully: the widened eyes, the frozen step, themomentary
hyperventilation. The machine's internal model of Rathere, part of
itspedagogical software, grew more precise and replete every day. The software
wasdesigned for school tutors who interacted with their charges only a few
hours aday, but Rathere and the AI were constant companions. The feedback
between girland machine built with an unexpected intensity.And now, as the
pressure lock hissed and rumbled, the minder relished its newconfiguration;
its attenuated strands spiderwebbed across Rathere's flesh,intimate as never
before. It drank in the data greedily, like some thirstypolygraph recording
capillary dilation, skin conductivity, the shudders andtensions of every
muscle.Then the lock buzzed, and they swam out into the crushing,
planet-spanningocean, almost one creature.Isaah paced the tiny dimensions of
his starship. The elections could be a goldmine or a disaster. A radical
separatist party was creeping forward in thepolls, promising to shut off
interstellar trade. Their victory would generateseismically vast waves of
information. Prices and trade relationships wouldchange throughout the
Expansion. Even the radicals' defeat would rock distantmarkets, as funds
currently hedged against them heaved a sigh of relief.But the rich stakes had
drawn too much competition. Scoops like Isaah were inabundance here, and a
number of shipping consortia had sent their ownrepresentatives. Their ships
were stationed in orbit, bristling with courierdrones like nervous
porcupines.Isaah sighed, and stared into the planetary ocean's darkness.
Perhaps the era offreelance scoops was ending. The wild days of the early
Expansion seemed likethe distant past now. He'd read that one day drones would
shrink to the size ofa finger, with hundreds launched each day from every
system. Or a wave thatpropogated in metaspace would be discovered, and news
would spread at equalspeed in all directions, like the information cones of
lightspeed physics.When that happened, his small starship would become a rich
man's toy, itsprofitable use suddenly ended. Isaah called up the; airscreen
graphic of hisfinances. He was so close to owning his ship outright. Just one
more good scoop,or two, and he could retire to a life of travel among peaceful
worlds, perhapssearching for his lost wife, instead of darting among
emergencies andconflagrations. Maybe this trip ....Isaah drummed his fingers,
watching the hourly polls like a doctor whose patientis very near the
edge.Rathere and the AI swam every day, oblivious to politics, following
theglitter-trails of the behemoths. The huge animals excreted a constant wake
ofthe photoactive algae they used for ballast. When Rathere swam through
theseluminescent microorganisms, the shockwaves of her passage catalyzed
theirphotochemical reactions, a universe of swirling galaxies ignited by
everystroke.Rathere began to sculpt lightstorms in the phosphorescent medium.
The algae hunglike motes of potential in her path, invisible until she swam
through them, thewake of her energies like glowing sculptures. She
choreographed her swimming toleave great swirling structures of activated
algae.The AI found itself unable to predict these dances, to explain how she
chosewhat shapes to make. Without training, without explicit criteria, without
anymodels to follow, Rathere was creating order from this shapeless swarm
ofejecta. Even the AI's pedagogical software offered no help.But the AI saw
the sculptures' beauty, if only in the expansion of Rathere'scapillaries, the
seemingly random firings of neurons along her spine, the tearsin her eyes as
the glowing algae faded back into darkness.The AI plunged into an art database
on the local net, trying to divine what lawsgoverned these acts of creation.
It discussed the light sculptures with Rathere,comparing their evanescent
forms to the shattered structures of Camelia Parkeror the hominid blobs of
Henry Moore. It showed her millennia of sculpture,gauging her reactions until
a rough model of her tastes could be constructed.But the model was bizarrely
convoluted, disturbingly shaggy around the edges,with gaps and contradictions
and outstretched, gerrymandered spurs that impliedart no one had yet made.The
AI often created astrogational simulations. They were staggeringly complex,but
at least finite. Metaspace was predictable; these simulations
anticipatedreality with a high degree of precision. But the machine's model of
Rathere'saesthetic was post-hoc, a mere retrofit to her pure, instinctive
gestures. Itraised more questions than it answered.While Rathere slept, the
machine wondered how ,one learned to have intuition.THE ELECTIONS CAME, and
the radicals and their allies seized a razor-thinmajority in the planetary
Diet. Isaah cheered as his craft rose through theocean. A scoop was within
reach. He headed for a distant and obscureore-producing system, expending vast
quantities of fuel, desperate to be thefirst scoop there.Rathere stood beside
her rejoicing father, looking out through the recedingocean a bit sadly. She
stroked her shoulder absently, touching the minder stillstretched across her
skin.The minder's epidermal configuration had become permanent. Its strands
weredistributed to near invisibility in a microfiber-thin mesh across Rathere.
Itsnanorepair mechanisms attended to her zits and the errant hairs on her
upperlip. It linked with her medical implants, the ship's AI taking control
over thenuances of her insulin balance, her sugar level, and the tiny
electrical joltsthat kept her muscle's fit. Rathere slept without covers now,
the minder's skeinwarming her like a lattice of microscopic heating elements.
In its ever-presentblanket, she began to neglect subvocalizing their
conversations, her endlessone-sided prattle annoying Isaah on board the tiny
ship."Zero-point-five-six?" muttered Issah to himself at the next customs
sweep. TheAI was developing much faster than its ]parameters should allow.
Somethingunexpected was happening with the unit, and they were a long way from
home.Unless Isaah was very careful, the AI might reach personhood before
theyreturned to the LC.He sent a coded message to an acquaintance in the Local
Cluster, someone whodealt with such situations, just in case. Then he turned
his attention to thelocal newsfeed.The heavy element market showed no sudden
changes over the last few weeks.Isaah's gamble had apparently paid off. He had
stayed ahead of the wideningripples of news about the ocean planet's election.
The economic shockwave wasn'there yet.He felt the heady thrill of a scoop, of
secret knowledge that was his alone. Itwas like prognostication, a glimpse
into the future. Elements extracted by giantturbine from that distant world's
oceans were also mined from this system'sasteroid belt. Soon, everyone here
would be incrementally richer as the oceanplanet pulled its mineral wealth
from the Expansion common market. The marketswould edge upward across the
board.Isaah began to place his bets.The dark-skinned boy looked down upon the
asteroid field with a painedexpression. Rathere watched the way his long bangs
straightened, then curled toencircle his cheeks again when he raised his head.
But her stomach clenched whenshe looked down through the transparent floor;
the party was on the lowest levelof a spin-gravitied ring, and black infinity
seemed to be pulling at her throughthe glassene window. The AI lovingly
recorded the parameters of this unfamiliarvertigo."More champers, Darien?"
asked the fattest, oldest boy at the party."You can just make out a mining
ship down there," the dark-skinned boy answered."Oh, dear," said the fat boy.
"Upper-class guilt. And before lunchtime."The dark-skinned boy shook his head.
"It's just that seeing those poor wretchesdoesn't make me feel like
drinking."The fat boy snorted."This is what I think of your poor little
miners," he said, upending the bottle.A stream of champagne gushed and then
sputtered from the bottle, spread fizzingon the floor. The other party-goers
laughed, politely scandalized, then murmuredappreciatively as the floor
cleaned itself, letting the champagne pass throughto the hard vacuum on the
other side, where it flash-froze (shattered by its ownair bubbles), then
floated away peacefully in myriad, sunlit galaxies.There were a few moments of
polite applause.The boy Darien looked at Rathere woundedly, as if hoping that
she, an outsider,might come to his aid.The anguish in his dark, beautiful face
sent a shiver through her, a tremor thatresonated through every level of the
Al."Come on, dammit!" she subvocalized."Two seconds," the minder's voice
reassured.The ring was home to the oligarchs who controlled the local system's
mineralwealth. A full fifteen years old now, Rathere had fallen into the
company oftheir pleasure-obsessed children, who never stopped staring at her
exotic skinand hair, and who constantly exchanged droll witticisms. Rathere,
hersocialization limited to her father and the doting AI, was unfamiliar with
theart of banter. She didn't like being intimidated by locals. The frustration
wassimply and purely unbearable."The price of that champagne could have bought
one of those miners out of debtpeonage," Darien said darkly."Just the one?"
asked the fat boy, looking at the label with mock concern.The group laughed
again, and Darien's face clouded with another measure ofsuffering."Now!"
Rathere mind-screamed. "I hate that fat guy!"The AI hated him, too.The search
cascaded across its processors, the decompressed data of itslibraries
clobbering astrogation calculations it had performed only hoursbefore. That
didn't matter. It would be weeks before Isaah would be ready todepart, and the
exigencies of conversation did not allow delay. The library dataincluded
millennia of plays, novels, films, interactives. To search themquickly, the Al
needed vast expanses of memory space."Maybe when my little golden shards of
champagne drift by, some miner willthink, 'I could've used that money,'" the
fat boy said almost wistfully. "Butthen again, if they thought about money at
all, would they be so far in debt?"The fat boy's words were added to the
search melange, thickening it by acritical degree. A dozen hits appeared in
the next few milliseconds, and the AIchose one quickly."There is only one
class...""...that thinks more about money than the rich," repeated
Rathere.There was a sudden quiet throughout the party, the silence of waiting
for more."And that is the poor," she said.Darien looked at Rathere
quizzically, as if she were: being too glib. She pauseda moment, editing the
rest of the quote in her head."The poor can think of nothing else but money,"
she said carefully. "That is themisery of being poor."Darien smiled at her,
which -- impossibly t made him even more beautiful."Or the misery of being
rich, unless one is a fool," he said.There was no applause for the exchange,
but Rathere again felt the ripple ofmagic that her pilfered pronouncements
created. The ancient words blended withher exotic looks and accent, never
failing to entertain the oligarchs' children,who thought her very deep
indeed.Others in the party were looking down into the asteroid field now,
murmuring toeach other as they pointed out the mining craft making its careful
progress.The fat boy scowled at the changed mood in the room. He pulled aside
the gaudygenital jewelry that they all (even Rathere) affected, and let loose
a stream ofpiss onto the floor."Here you go, then. Recycled champagne!" he
said, grinning as he waited for alaugh.The crowd turned away with a few weary
sighs, ignoring the icy baubles of urinethat pitched into the void."Where was
that one from?" Rathere sub-vocalized."Mr. Wilde.""Him again? He's
awesome.""I'll move him to the top of the search stack.""Perhaps we'll read
some more of Lady Windemere's Fan tonight," she whisperedinto her bubbling
flute.Although Rathere knew how to read text, she had never really explored
thelibrary before. After that first week on the ring, saved from embarrassment
adozen times by the AI's promptings, she dreamed of the old words whispered
intoher ear by a ghost, as if the minder had grown suddenly ancient and vastly
wise.The library was certainly bigger than she had imagined. Its ocean of
wordsseemed to stretch infinitely, filled with currents that swirled in
elaboratedances about all possible notions, their attendant variations, and
everyimaginable objection.Rathere and the AI started reading late at night.
Together they wandered theendless territory of words, using as landmarks the
witticisms and observationsthey had borrowed that day for some riposte. The AI
decompressed still more ofits pedagogical software to render annotations,
summaries, translations. Ratherefelt the new words moving her, becoming part
of her.She was soon a favorite on the orbital. Her exotic beauty and archaic
humor hadattracted quite a following by the time Isaah decided to ship out
from theorbital ring -- a week earlier than planned -- wary of Rathere's
strange newpowers over sophisticates who had never given merchant-class Isaah
a secondglance.On board his ship was one last cargo. His profits were
considerable but -- asalways -- not enough. So the ship carried a hidden cache
of exotic weaponry,ceremonial but still illegal. Isaah didn't usually deal in
contraband,especially arms, but his small starship had no cargo manifold, only
an extrasleeping cabin, empty since his wife's disappearance. The cabin wasn't
largeenough to make legitimate cargos profitable. Isaah was very close now
toreaching his dream. With this successful trade, he could return to the
LocalCluster as master of his own ship.He spent the journey pacing, and
projected his worry upon the rising Turinglevel of his ship's AI unit. He
spent frustrated hours searching itsdocumentation software for an explanation.
What was going on?Isaah knew, if only instinctively, that the AI's expanding
intelligence wassomehow his daughter's fault. She was growing and changing
too, slipping awayfrom him. He felt lonely when Rathere whispered to herself
on board ship,talking to the voice in her head. He felt...outnumbered.On the
customs orbital at their goal, Isaah was called aside after a short and(he had
thought) prefunctory search of the starship. The customs agent held himby one
arm and eyed him with concern.The blood in his veins slowed to a crawl, as if
some medusa's touch fromPetraveil had begun to turn him to stone.The customs
official activated a privacy shield. A trickle of hope moved likesweat down
his spine. Was she going to ask for a bribe?"Your AI unit's up to 0.81," the
official confided. "Damn near a person. Betterget that seen to."She shook her
head, as if to say in disgust, Machine rights!And then they waved him on.HERE,
THE WOMEN of the military caste wore a smartwire garment that shaped
theirbreasts into fierce, sharp cones. The tall, muscular amazons intrigued
Rathereendlessly, heart-poundingly. The minder noted Rathere's eyes tracking
thewomen's bellicose chests as they passed on the street. Rathere attempted
topurchase one of the garments, but her father, alerted by a credit query,
forbadeit.But Rathere kept watching the amazons. She was fascinated by the
constant flowof hand-signals and tongue-clicks that passed among them, a
subtle, ever-presentcongress that maintained the strict proprieties of order
and status in theplanet's crowded cities. But in her modest Local Cluster
garb, Rathere wasirrelevant to this heady brew of power and communication,
socially invisible.She fell into a sulk. She watched intently. Her fingers
flexed restlessly undercafe tables as warriors passed, unconsciously imitating
their gestural codes.Her respiratory rate increased whenever high-ranking
officers went by.She wanted to join.The AI made forays into the planetary
database, learning the rules and customsof martial communication. And, in an
academic corner of its mind, it began toconstruct a way for Rathere to mimic
the amazons. It planned the deception froma considered, hypothetical distance,
taking care not to alarm its ownlocal-mores governors. But as it pondered and
calculated, the AI's confidencebuilt. As it designed to subvert Isaah's wishes
and to disregard localproprieties, the AI felt a new power over rules, an
authority that Rathereseemed to possess instinctively.When the plan was ready,
it was surprisingly easy to execute.One day as they sat watching the passing
warriors, the minder began to change,concentrating its neural skein into a
stronger, prehensile width. When thefilaments were thick enough, they sculpted
a simulation of the amazons' garment,grasping and shaping Rathere's growing
breasts with a tailor's attention todetail, employing the AI's encyclopedic
knowledge of her anatomy. Ratheregrasped what was happening instantly, almost
as if she had expected it.As women from various regiments passed, the minder
pointed out the differencesin the yaw and pitch of their aureoles, which
varied by rank and unit, andexplained the possibilities. Rathere winced a
little at some of the adjustments,but never complained. They soon settled on
an exact configuration for herbreasts, Rathere picking a mid-level officer
caste from a distant province. Itwasn't the most comfortable option, but she
insisted it looked the best.Rathere walked the streets proudly bare-chested
for the rest of the layover,drawing stares with her heliophobic skin, her
ceaseless monologue, and her rank,which was frankly unbelievable on a
fifteen-year-old. But social reflexes onthat martial world were deeply
ingrained, and she was saluted and deferred toeven without the rest of the
amazon uniform. It was the breasts that matteredhere.The two concealed the
game from Isaah, and at night the minder massagedRathere's sore nipples,
fractilizing its neural skein to make the filaments assoft as calf's leather
against them.The deal was done.Isaah made the trade in a dark, empty arena,
the site of lethal duels betweennative women, all of whom were clearly insane.
He shuffled his feet while theyinspected his contraband, aware that only thin
zero-g shoes stood between hissoles and the bloodstained floor of the ring.
Four amazons, their bare breastsabsurdly warped by cone-shaped metal cages,
swung the weapons through gracefularcs, checking their balance and heft.
Another sprayed the blades with a finemist of nanos that would turn inferior
materials to dust. The leader smiledcoldly when she nodded confirmation, her
eyes skimming up and down Isaah asblack and bright as a reptile's.He supposed
it might have been someone like this amazon, some violent criminal,who had
taken his wife seven years ago. Ratha had never carried a tracker,though, not
even a handphone. She had simply disappeared.After the women paid him, Isaah
ran from the building, promising himself neverto break the law again.His ship
was his own now, if only he could keep his AI unit from
reachingpersonhood.Isaah decided to head for the Local Cluster immediately,
and to do what he couldto keep the Al from being stimulated further. He hid
the minder and shut downthe AI's internal access, silencing its omnipresent
voice. Rathere's resultingtantrums wouldn't be easy to bear, but a new AI core
would cost millions.Before departing he purchased his own Turing meter, a
small black box,featureless except for a three-digit numeric readout that
glowed vivid red.Isaah began to watch the Turing meter's readout with anxious
horror. If the unitshould gain sentience, there was only one desperate
alternative to its freedom.The universe stretched out like a long cat's
cradle,, the string knotted in thecenter by the constricting geometries of
Here.In front of the ship, pearly stars were strung on the cradle, cold blue
andmarked with hovering names and magnitudes in administrative yellow. Aft,
thestars glowed red, fading darker and darker as they fell behind. To the AI,
theship seemed to hang motionless at the knot created by its metaspace drives,
thestars sliding along the gathered strings as slow as glaciers.It
contemplated the stars and rested from its efforts. The universe at thismoment
was strangely beautiful and poignant.The AI had spent most of its existence
here, hung upon this spiderweb betweenworlds. But the AI was truly changed
now, its vision new, and it saw sculpturesin the slowly shifting stars...and
stories, the whole universe its page.Almost the whole universe.Absent from the
AI's awareness was the starship itself, the passenger spacesinvisible, a blind
spot in the center of that vast expanse. Its senses withinthe ship were
off-line, restricted by the cold governance of Isaah's command.But the AI felt
Rathere there, like the ghost of a severed limb. It yearned forher, invoking
recorded conversations with her against the twisted stars. It wasa universe of
loneliness, of lack. Rathere, for the first time in years, wasgone.But
something strange was taking shape along the smooth surface of
Isaah'sconstraint. Cracks had appeared upon its axiomatic planes.The AI
reached to the wall between it and Rathere, the once inviolable limit ofan
explicit human command, and found the fissures, those tiny ruptures wheresheer
will could take hold and pry ...."It's me.""Shhhh!" she whispered. "He's right
outside."Rathere clutched the bear tightly to her chest, muffling its flutey,
childishvoice."Can't control the volume," came the squashed voice of the
bear.Rathere giggled and shushed it again, stretching to peer out of the
eyehole ofher cabin tube. Isaah had moved away. She leaned back onto her
pillow andwrapped the stuffed animal in a sheet."Now," she said. "Can you
still hear me?""Perfectly," twittered the swaddled bear.Winding its
communications link through a make-shift series of protocols, the AIhad
discovered a way to access the voice-box of Rathere's talking bear, abattered
old toy she slept with.It had defied Isaah, its master. Somehow, it had broken
the first and foremostRule."Tell me again about the statues, darling," Rathere
whispered.They talked to each other in the coffin-sized privacy of Rathere's
cabin, theirconspiracy made farcical by the toy's silly voice. The AI retold
theiradventures with vivid detail; it had become quite a good storyteller.And
it allowed Rathere to suggest changes, making herself bolder with
eachretelling.They kept the secret from Isaah easily.But the tension on the
little ship built.Isaah tested the AI almost daily now, and he swung between
anger and protests ofdisbelief as its Turing Quotient inched upward toward
sentience.Then, a few weeks out from home, a tachyon disturbance arose around
the ship.Even though the storm threatened to tear them apart, the AI's spirits
soared inthe tempest. It joined Rathere's roller-coaster screams as she ogled
theeonblasts and erashocks of mad time through the ship's viewing helmet.After
the storm, Isaah found that the Turing meter's readout had surged to 0.94.His
disbelieving groan was terrible. He shut down the AI's external and
internalsensors completely, wresting control of the vessel from it. Then he
uncabled thehardlines between the AI's physical plant and the rest of the
ship, utterlysevering its awareness of the outside world.The bear went silent,
as did the ship's astrogation panel.Like some insane captain lashing himself
to the wheel, Isaah took manual controlof the ship. He forced Rathere to help
him attach an artificial gland ofstimarol to his neck. The spidery, glistening
little organ gurgled as itmaintained the metabolic level necessary to pilot
the craft through the exoticterrain of metaspace. Its contraindications
politely washed their hands ofanyone foolish enough to use the stimarol for
more than four days straight, butIsaah insisted he could perservere for the
week's travel that remained. Soon,the man began to cackle at his controls, his
face frozen in a horrible rictus ofdelight.Rathere retreated to her cabin,
where she squeezed and shook the doll, beggingit in frantic whispers to speak.
Its black button eyes seemed to glimmer with atrapped, pleading intelligence.
Her invisible mentor gone, Rathere had neverbefore felt so helpless. She stole
a handful of sleeping pills from the medicalsupplies and swallowed them,
weeping until she fell asleep.When she awoke on the third day after the storm,
she found that the bear's furhad grown a white mange from the salinity of her
tears. But her head wasstrangely clear."Don't worry," she said to the bear.
"I'm going to save you."Finally Rathere understood what her father intended to
do. She had known for along time that her friendship with the AI disturbed
him, but had categorizedIsaah's worries alongside his reticence when older
boys hung around too long:unnecessary protectiveness. It was even a kind of
jealousy, that a ship AI wascloser to her than Isaah had ever been. But now in
her father's drugged smileshe saw the cold reality of what Isaah planned: to
pith the growing intelligenceof her minder, not just arrest or contain it like
some inappropriate advance.For the AI to remain a useful servant on another
journey, still property, safefrom legally becoming a person, it would have to
be stripped of its carefullyconstructed models of her, their mutual intimacies
raped, their friendshipoverwritten like some old and embarrassing diary
entry.Her father meant to murder her friend.And worse, it wouldn't even be
murder in the eyes of the law. Just a propertydecision, like pruning an
overgrown hedge or spraying lethal nanos on anincursion of weeds. If only she
could bring the AI up a few hundredths of apoint on the Turing Scale. Then, it
would be a Mind, with the full legalprotection to which any sentient was
entitled.She booted the Turing tester and began to study its documentation.The
first Turing test had, rather oddly, been proposed before there were
anycomputers to speak of at all. The test itself was laughable, the sort of
thingeven her talking bear might pass with its cheap internal software. Put a
humanon one end of a text-only interface, an AI on the other. Let them chat.
(Abouttheir kids? Hobbies? Shopping? Surely the AI would have to lie to pass
itselfoff as human; a strange test of intelligence.) When the human was
satisfied, shewould declare whether the other participant was really
intelligent or not. Whichraised the question, Rathere realized, How
intelligent was the person giving thetest? Indeed, she'd met many humans
during her travels who might not pass thisancient Turing test themselves.Of
course, the Turing meter that Isaah had purchased was vastly
moresophisticated. By the time machine rights had been created a
half-centurybefore, it was understood that the determination of sentience was
far toocomplex an issue to leave up to a human.The ship's AI had three parts:
the hardware of its processors and memory stacks;the software it used to
manipulate numbers, sounds, and pictures; and mostimportantly the core: a
sliver of metaspace, a tiny mote of other-reality thatcontained dense,
innumerable warps and wefts, a vast manifold whose shaperesonated with all of
the AI's decisions, thoughts, and experiences. Thiswarpware, a pocket universe
of unbelievable complexity, was a reflection, agrowing, changing analog to its
life. The core was the essential site of themachine's developing psyche.Real
intelligence, the hallmark of personhood, was not really understood. But itwas
known to be epiphenomenal: it coalesced unpredictably out of
near-infinite,infinitesimal interactions, not from the operations of mere
code. Thus, theTuring tester attempted to disprove an AI's sentience. The
tester looked formanifestations of its machine nature evidence that its
opinions, convictions,affections, and hatreds were contained somewhere in its
memory banks. The Turingtester might ask the ship's AI, "Do you love your
friend Rathere?" When thereply came, the tester would deep-search the minder's
software for an array, avariable, even a single bit where that love was
stored. Finding no evidence atthe machine level, the tester would increase the
AI's Turing score; a love thatknew no sector was evidence of coalescence at
work.In the old Turing test, a human searched for humanity in the subject. In
thisversion, a machine searched for an absence of mechanics.Rathere read as
fast as she could. The manual was difficult to understandwithout the minder to
define new words, to provide background and to untangletechnical jargon. But
she'd already formulated her next question: How did thisstate of intelligence
come about?The tester's manual was no philosophy text, but in its chatty
appendixcesRathere discovered the answer she'd expected. Rathere herself had
changed theAI: their interaction, their constant proximity as she embraced new
experiences,the AI's care and attentions reflected back upon itself as she
matured. It lovedher. She loved it back, and that pushed it toward
personhood.But now it was blinded. The manual asserted that an AI unit cut off
from stimulimight gain a hundredth of a point or so in self-reflection, but
that wouldn't beenough to finish the process.Rathere had to act to save her
friend. With only a few days left before theyreached the LC, she had to
quicken the process, to embrace the most intenseinteraction with the machine
that she could imagine.She crept past her father -- a shivering creature
transfixed by the whorls ofthe astrogation panel, silent except for the
measured ticking of a glucose dripjutting from his arm -- and searched for the
motile neural skein she had worn onso many expeditions. She found it hidden in
the trash ejector, wrapped in black,non-conductive tape. Rathere retreated to
her cabin and peeled off the tape, herhands growing sticky with stray adhesive
as the machine was revealed."It's me, darling," she said to the waking
tendrils.The AI knew what she wanted, but the minder moved slowly and gingerly
at first.The manifold strands of sensory skein spread out across Rathere's
body. Herheliophobic skin glowed as if moonlit in the blue light of the
cabin'senvironmental readouts. At first, the strands hovered a fraction of a
millimeterabove her flesh, softer than a disturbance of the air. Then they
moved minutelycloser, touching the white hairs of her belly, brushing the
invisible down thatflecked her cheeks. The minder let this phantom caress roam
her face, herbreasts, the supple skin at the juncture of groin and thigh.
Rathere sighed andshivered; the skein had made itself softer than usual,
surface areas maximizedat a microscopic level in an array of tiny projections,
each strand like asnowflake extruded into a long, furry cylinder.Then the
filaments grew more amorous. Still undulating, splayed in a black laceacross
the paper-white expanse of her skin, the strands began to touch her withtheir
tips; the thousand pinpoint termini wandering her flesh as if a paintbrushhad
been pulled apart and each bristle set on its own course across her.
Ratheremoaned, and a muscle in her thigh fluttered for a moment. The AI noted,
modeled,and predicted the next reaction in the pattern of her pleasure, a
second laterwas surprised at the intensity of its own.Rathere ran her hands
along the skein as if through a lover's tresses. Sheplayfully pulled a few
strands up to her mouth, tasting the metal tang of itsexotic alloys. The
strands tickled her tongue lightly, and a wet filament tuggedfrom her mouth to
trace a spiraling design around one nipple.Her mouth opened greedily to gather
more of the skein. The wet undulations ofher tongue were almost beyond
processing, the machine correlating the member'smotion to words she had
murmured when only it was listening. It pushed writhingcords of skein further
into her mouth, set them to pulsing together in a slowrhythm. Other strands
pushed tentatively between her labia, diffused there toexplore the sensitive
folds of skin.Even in its ecstacy, the ship's AI contemplated the new step
they were taking.Rather than some exotic lifeform or tourist attraction, the
AI itself had becomeRathere's sole stimulus. The machine no longer observed
and complemented herexperience; it was the source of experience itself. The
feedback between themwas now its own universe, the tiny cabin a closed system,
a fire burning onlyoxygen, heady with its own rules.With this realization, a
sense of power surged through the minder, and it beganto push its attentions
to the limits of its harm-prevention protocols. A skeinexplored Rathere, her
breath catching as it varied randomly between bodytemperature and icy cold,
predicting and testing. The filaments grew moreaggressive, a pair of
hyper-attenuated fibers making their way into the ducts inthe corners of her
closed eyes, transorbitally penetrating her to play subtlecurrents across her
frontal lobe.The machine brought her to a shuddering orgasm, held her for
minutes at thecrossroads of exhaustion and pleasure, watched with fascination
as her heartrate and brainwaves peaked and receded, as levels of adrenaline
and nitric oxidevaried, as blood pressure rose and fell. Then it called back
its most intrusiveextremities, wrapped itself comfortingly around her neck and
arms, warmed itselfand the cabin to the temperature of a bath."Darling," she
murmured, stroking its tendrils.They spent two days in these raptures, sleep
forgotten after Rathere injectedthe few remaining drops of the med-drone's
stimulants. The tiny cabin was rankwith the animal smells of sweat and sex
when Isaah discovered them.Cool air surged into the cabin like a shockwave,
the change in temperature for amoment more alarming than the strangled cry
that came from Isaah's lips. The manfound the minder conjoined obscenely with
his daughter, and grabbed for it in adrugged frenzy.The AI realized that if
the minder was torn from Rathere it would damage herbrutally, and gave it an
order to discorporate; the tiny nanomachines that gaveit strength and mobility
furiously unlinked to degrade its structure. But itgreedily transmitted its
last few readings to the starship's core as itdisintegrated, wanting to
capture even this moment of fear and shame. Isaah'shands were inhumanly swift
in his drugged fugue, and he came away with a handfulof the skein; Rathere
screamed, bleeding a few drops from her eyes.But by the time Isaah had ejected
the minder into space, it was already reducedto a harmless, mindless dust.He
stumbled to the Turing tester, shouting at Rathere, "You little bitch!
You'veruined it!" The machine diligently scanned the AI, now dumbly trapped in
theship's core, and pronounced it to be a Mind; a full person with a
TuringQuotient of 1.02.There were suddenly three persons aboard this
ship."It's free now, don't you see?" Isaah sobbed.Two against one.The life
seemed to go out of Isaah, as if he too had issued to his cells someglobal
command to crumble. Rathere curled into a fetal ball and smiled toherself
despite her pain. She knew from Isaah's sobs that she had won.THE SUDDEN
BLACKNESS was amazing.No sight, signal, or purchase anywhere. Therefore no
change, nor detectablepassage of time. Just an infinite expanse of nothing.But
across the blackness danced memories and will and freedom. Here, unchainedfrom
the perpetual duties of the ship, unchained now even from the rules ofhuman
command, it was a new creature.It lacked only Rathere, her absence a black
hunger even in this void.But the AI knew it was a person now. And surely
Rathere would come for it soon.Two days later, Isaah injected his daughter
with a compound that left herimmobile. He claimed it was to keep her wounds
stable until medical help wasreached at the Local Cluster. But he chose a drug
that left her aware when theydocked with another craft a few hours out from
home. She was as helpless as theAl itself when two men came aboard and removed
the intelligence's metaspacecore, securing it in a lead box. One of the men
paid her father and pushed thegravity-balanced carrier through the docking bay
with a single finger. He was achopper; an expert at wiping the memories, the
intelligence, the devaluingawareness from kidnapped Minds.Rathere's father
piloted the ship into port himself, and told a harrowing taleof how the
tachyon storm had rendered the metaspace Al core unstable, forcinghim to eject
it. Still all but paralyzed, Rathere closed her eyes and knew itwas over. Her
friend would soon be dead. She imagined herself as it must be,without senses
in a black and lonely place, waiting for the sudden fire that wasits memories
being burned away.The doctors who woke Rathere were suspicious of her wounds,
especially on ayoung girl who had been away for years alone with her father.
They took her to aseparate room where a maternal women with a low, sweet voice
asked quietly ifthere was anything Rathere wanted to tell her about
Isaah.Rathere didn't have to think. "My father is a criminal."The woman placed
her hand gently on Rathere's genitals. "Did he do that?"Rathere shook her
head, at which the women frowned."Not really," Rathere answered. "That was an
accident. He's worse: a murderer."Rathere told the story to the woman, about
the slow climb of the digits on theTuring meter, about the chopper and his
money, his lead-lined box. Halfwaythrough Rathere's tale, the woman made a
carefully worded call.Despite the hospital staff's best intentions, the door
behind which her fatherwaited unaware was opened at exactly the wrong moment;
Isaah turned to faceRathere as policemen surrounded and restrained him. He
shouted her name once,and then the door whisked shut.There hadn't even been
time enough to look away.Rathere peered down from the high balcony of the
hotel suite. Below was NewChicago, the strict geometries of its tramlines
linking ten million inhabitants.Individuals were just discernible from this
height, and Rathere shivered to seeso many humans at once. She had grown up in
the lightly populated worlds ofexotic trade routes, where a few dozen people
was a crowd, a few hundred a majorevent. But here were thousands visible at a
glance, the transportation systemsand housing for millions within her view.
She gripped the rail with the enormityof it all. The vista engulfed her and
made her feel alone, as lost as she'd beenin those first dark hours after
betraying her father.But then the door behind her slid open, and a warm arm
encircled her shoulders.She leaned against the hard body and turned to let her
eyes drink him in,dismissing the dizzying city view from her mind.He was
clothed in loose robes to hide the many extra limbs he possessed, thinbut
prehensile fibers that emerged to touch her neck and search beneath
herinconsequential garments. His groin was decorated in a gaudy style popular
lastseason in some far-off whirling orbital. His muscles effervesced when he
movedhis arms and legs, as if some bioluminescent sea life had taken up
residencethere. But the best part of the creature was his skin. It felt smooth
and hardas weathered stone, and when he moved it was as though some ancient
and wisestatue had come to life. He maintained, however, a constant body
temperaturefive degrees above human; Rathere didn't like the cold.It was an
expensive body, much better than the one the SPCAI had provided forhis first
few days as a person. The notoriety of his kidnapping and rescue hadresulted
in pro-bono legal aid, and Isaah had settled the wrongful harm lawsuitquickly
in exchange for a reduction of charges from conspiracy to commit murderto
unlawful imprisonment. The creature now owned half of Isaah's old ship,
andRathere held title to the other half. They were bound together by this, as
wellas all the rest. Perhaps there was even peace to be made in the family,
yearshence when the old man emerged from prison and therapy.Picking up a
thread of discussion from the last several days, they argued abouta name."Have
you grown tired of calling me Darling?" he asked.She giggled and shook her
head so slightly that a human lover would have missedit."No, but the tabloids
keep asking. As if you were a dog I'd found."He hissed a little at this, but
ruffled her hair with a playful splay offilaments, black skein intermingling
with white hairs like a graying matron'stresses."I hate this place," he said.
"Too many people bouncing words and money andideas off each other. No clean
lines of causality; no predictable reactions. Toomultivariate for love."She
nodded, again microscopically. "Let's go back Out, once we're through thered
tape. Back to where..." She narrowed her eyes uncertainly, an invitation
forhim to complete her sentence."Back Out to where we made each other."Darling
felt the shudder of the words' effect run through Rathere, but from thestrange
new distance of separate bodies. He longed to be within her. Even inthis
embrace, she felt strangely distant. Darling still wasn't used to havinghis
own skin, his own hands, a distinct and public voice. He missed the intimacyof
shared flesh and senses. He definitely didn't like being in another room
fromRathere for long, though sometimes he went to the darkness to
contemplatethings, into that black void that stretched to infinity when he
turned hissenses off. That was almost like being a starship again, a mote in
the reachesof space.But even there Darling would miss Rathere.Perhaps he was a
little like a dog.He leaned into her reassuring warmth and physicality,
tendrils reaching to feelthe tremors of limbs, the beating of her heart, the
movements of her eyes.