The first title that came to mind, reflexively, was Bad Karma, but I didn’t say so. Way back when, I had always told my critics — and, for that matter, myself — that the fight tapes I made were a public service, because they allowed people with a taste for violence to indulge it harmlessly. There was a grain of truth in the argument, but not enough. If Christine Caine had wanted to commit virtual murders she could have done so, even in the twenty-second century. Maybe the quality of the illusion wouldn’t have lived up to the standards of the world in which we now found ourselves, but that wasn’t the factor that had displaced her murderous passion into the meatware arena. Murder is only murder if you kill real people. Life is only life if you actually live it. Maybe there were some among the Earthbound who really did spend most of their lives in VE nowadays — but I was willing to bet that they were far outnumbered by people who regarded VE as workspace and social space, and only ventured into fantasylands for the sake of occasional relaxation.

Christine Caine, I suppoed, must have seen multiple versions of all her favorite fantasies while she was a child, but it wasn’t just the warnings her mothers had given her that had brought her back to stern reality. Perhaps that was a pity; if she’d become an addict, she’d probably have been harmless.

The umbilical had been attached to Peppercorn Seven’s blister now, although there had been no obvious hatchway on the pitted surface. The tube didn’t seem to be wide enough to accommodate a full-sized human body without bulging, and it was possible to see the vague outline of the first person out of the capsule. The movement of the bolus along the umbilical was smooth, presumably controlled by peristalsis rather than by any undignified wriggling on the part of the passenger.

We counted the four passengers into the body of Excelsior one by one, but once the umbilical had been sealed it was by no means an exciting business.

“The other ship is much bigger, apparently.” I told my companion, slipping back into mentor mode just for a moment. “ Child of Fortuneisn’t just a nest of cocoons — it actually has empty spaces inside, and an ecosphere of sorts.”

I needn’t have bothered; Christine had researched the topic and obviously knew more about Child of Fortunethan I did. She confirmed that the spacecraft built in the outer system were very much more complicated, almost qualifying as microworlds in their own right. “It has an AI brain as big as Excelsior’s,” she concluded. “ Reallybig, and reallysmart — a supersilver. But machines still don’t have the vote.”

The last addendum was phrased as a jokey offhand comment, but I guessed that she’d actually researched that too.

The consensus in our time had been that AIs could never become conscious because there were fundamental limitations in inorganic neural networks — fundamentalmeaning right down at the atomic and subatomic levels. No matter how rapid they were as calculators, nor how capacious they became as datastores, nor how how clever they became at animating human-seeming sims, they would always be automata, according to the best human brains around. Consciousness, according to the dominant view, was something that could only emerge in organic systems, and was precarious even there. What I’d found out about the history of emortality suggested that the same opinion was still dominant — although my reflexive tendency to treat any popular opinion with derision reminded me that there were ideological reasons why “the best human brains” might want to believe that they could never be equaled or surpassed.

“The modern opinion seems to be that it’s far easier for organic brains to become robotized — reduced to mere automata — than it is for automata to acquire the creative, conflicted, and multilayered messiness that’s the fount of consciousness,” I said to Christine.

“Unless and until the people of the glorious thirty-third century actually find a reliable way of detecting and measuring consciousness, it’ll probably remain a matter of opinion,” she retorted. “The ships they use in the outer system have to take much longer trips and they have to be much more versatile, so they have to be a lot smarter too. Thatthing just sits around in an orbital parking lot waiting for people to shuttle up out of the gravity well. It’s a glorified cab that hops back and forth between Earth, Luna, and their neighboring microworlds. The ships they use outside the belt have to be capable of operating on the surfaces of icebound satellites and in the outer atmospheres of gas giants. They have to be extremely smart — and it isn’t just outer system equipment that has to be smart. The people busy terraforming Venus and mining Mercury have much smarter AIs at their disposal than the people on Earth. Outer System AIs could have played a much larger part in the Gaean Restoration, if the Earthbound hadn’t refused them the chance. The Earthbound are afraid of them.”

Are they?I wondered. Or is it just that they won’t pay the asking price for equipment designed and manufactured in the outer system. I knew that there was an AI “metropolis” on Ganymede, where the outer system ships and interstellar probes were mostly built, but I hadn’t carried my research beyond the merest matters of fact. I made a mental note to make a more careful investigation of the balance of trade between the Hardinist Cabal and the Confederation.

There was nothing more to watch, and we didn’t know how long we’d have to wait for our introduction to the ambassadors from Earth, so we turned away from the window.

“Have you looked at Venus?” Christine asked me.

“No,” I said, “but I’ve seen picture-postcard views of Titan and Ganymede. Just like old science fiction tapes. Curiously nostalgic, in a way. I used to know someone who worked on that kind of imagery, until he sold out to PicoCon.”

“Damon Hart,” she guessed. It was the first indication I’d had that she’d been researching me, and that she’d seen the tape of my first conversation with Davida. It was oddly disturbing, although I was aware of the absurdity of thinking that my privacy had been invaded.

“Yes,” I conceded, dully. “Damon Hart.”

“Conrad Helier’s heir. Eveline Hywood’s too. Quite a start in life.”

I knew that Christine had been put away before Hywood hit the headlines as the supposed inventor of para-DNA, and long before para-DNA was anything but a few black blobs carelessly discarded in the Pacific in the unfulfilled hope that it might be misidentified as a natural product. She’d been digging — and now she was fishing. Somehow, it didn’t seem as understandable that she should be interested in me as it was that I should be interested in her. She was the crazy one.

“Yeah,” I said. “It was a real privilege to have known him, I think. I can’t quite shake the suspicion that he had something to do with my being put away, though — and if he didn’t, he doesn’t seem to have lifted a finger to get me out, even though he was firmly established in the Inner Circle long before he died. I still can’t remember…but I have this gut feeling.””

She’d probably have continued probing if we hadn’t been interrupted, but we were. Mortimer Gray and Michael Lowenthal were obviously keen to get on; they couldn’t have lingered more than a couple of minutes exchanging pleasantries with the sisterhood’s welcoming committee before hopping back into yet another glorified white corpuscle and speeding through Excelsior’s bloodstream to us.

Sixteen

The Men from Earth

Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray were so keen to see us, in fact, that they were practically elbowing one another out of the way as they approached. They both headed directly for me, but that might have been because Christine, gripped by a sudden fit of modesty, had dropped back to a position almost directly behind me.