Ironheart Read online

  The soup course was done. The quaint robo-butler reappeared from its camouflaged niche, cleared their dishes, and set out the entrée. It appeared to be some sort of meat and some sort of vegetable. Willa began to eat, without asking any questions other than which cutlery to use. She hailed from a relatively cosmopolitan system, and had been exposed to enough recipes that nothing much struck her as exotic. And nothing dangerous would come out of a properly functioning protein matrix calibrated for humans.

  Willa slowly chewed her food, as she weighed whether or not to broach the next subject. But the question seemed so blaringly obvious, that she couldn’t see any point in pretending it wasn’t on her mind. So she said, “Anya. May I ask why you came out here? To XB-79853-D7-4?”

  “After the death of my companion, I sought desolation and loneliness.”

  Willa hesitated. “But wasn’t your companion your intuiter? I assumed she ... I assumed you lost her after your arrival here.”

  “I’ll tell you something you’ll think extraordinary,” said Anya, and leaned toward Willa across the table. “I didn’t have an intuiter.”

  “You mean you’re the intuiter?” She hadn’t struck Willa as the type, and moreover it was mildly dangerous to have the intuiter be the only crew-member. When someone took off the intuition bowl and came out of the hyperface, they were in no condition to deal with any problems that might suddenly present themselves. Of course, it would probably be nothing the AI couldn’t handle, but still.

  But Anya said, “No. I am no intuiter. Ironheart has no need of one.”

  Willa made a dubious face, not wanting to be quite so rude as to openly doubt Anya, but not seeing any other choice. “With all due respect, Anya, there must have been an intuiter here. I mean, Ironheart wasn’t built in the vicinity, was it? There aren’t adequate facilities nearby, and never were. So somebody must have flown the ship out here.”

  Anya was nodding, like she’d heard all this before. She said, “This will be difficult for you to believe, but long ago I found a way to do without an intuiter, as you know it. Thus, I have long been able to live as the sole occupant of Ironheart, if I choose. Though it does grow lonely, traveling that way.”

  Willa squirmed. “Well. I don’t mean to be rude. But, yeah, that’s pretty hard to believe. People have been trying for thousands and thousands of years to figure out why the symbol logic of the human brain, and the other five pilot species, interacts so much better with the hyperscape than the symbol logic of AI’s, or of the other sixty-three sentient non-pilot species. It’s, like, one of the biggest philosophical, metaphysical problems of all time. Kind of every religion I’ve ever heard of talks about it. Really smart people have been trying to figure it out for all of Galactic history. And if you had a pure-cyber intuiter that would mean that you’d solved the riddle, right? You or whoever made the thing.”

  “And you wonder how it could be that I have found the answer when all those others have failed.”

  “Pretty much. Sorry.”

  “Do not apologize. The answer is simple. I once, very long ago, had the great good fortune to know an extremely intelligent member of a now-extinct species, who managed to solve the problem, and gave the solution only to me, shortly before he died. Shortly before the destruction of his planet, in fact. And now you have had the luck to randomly stumble upon me.”

  Willa stared at Anya, then laughed uneasily. “It’s just too fantastic!”

  Anya took a sip of her wine. “I am not offended by your incredulity.”

  “I mean, if you really have this device, then ... like, could I see it? Because it would be the most amazing thing I ever saw.”

  “I disabled it.”

  “You disabled it? You had a thing like that, and you intentionally disabled it?”

  “Yes. I disabled it, then shut down what systems still worked, then depressurized the ship. And went to sleep.”

  “But why?”

  “Oh, Willa. I was very sad.”

  Willa blinked. What to say to that?

  Anya’s eyes were on her plate. She wasn’t really eating at the moment, only moving food about with her fork. “As I have told you, there was someone else with me shortly before I arrived at this system.”

  For a moment she said nothing more. Willa remained silent too, keeping her eyes upon Anya.

  Finally the strange woman resumed speaking. She said, “A woman who had traveled with me a long, long time. When she died, I wandered. Then I came here, and destroyed a component of the device I use for intuiting. I powered down the ship and went to sleep.”

  At last she gathered some food onto that fork, and raised her eyes to meet Willa’s as she brought the morsel to her mouth. Willa met her gaze—compassionately, but withholding a part of herself. There were multiple things she felt to be true, and not all of them jibed together. The first was that, impossible though it might be, Anya truly believed that she had a means to hyperjump without need of an organic sentient intuiter; i.e., a pure-cyber intuiter. But the second thing was that this sad abridged tale she’d just recounted was true, too, at least in part: she’d had at least one crewmember aboard, around the time she’d come to XB-79853-D7-4. Presumably that had been her intuiter, and her death had been the reason Anya had been stranded out here. The trauma must have addled Anya’s sense of the timeline, so that she believed the death had occurred before her arrival in the system—the grief must have triggered such quasi-suicidal despair that she misremembered herself as having chosen to put herself to sleep of her own volition, instead of from necessity. Who knew what strange effects grief and isolation might have on a lone traveler stranded at the very edge of the galaxy? For the moment Willa was concerned only with what Anya believed to be true, not with what objectively was.

  The third thing was that Anya did not plan to harm her. Willa had no doubts about that. She herself, and not merely the package of skills she represented, had some intrinsic value to Anya—the woman practically radiated that truth. Willa didn’t know if she would ever be able to actually use the fact to influence Anya, but she was certain she’d need not fear harm as long as she was aboard Ironheart.

  With a sweet smile and a slight tilt of the head, she said, “Well, I’m very sorry, and I hope I haven’t offended you. But much as I’d like to believe you, I can’t.” Hurriedly, she added, “I do believe that you believe it.”

  “Don’t let it trouble you. I hope to have a chance to demonstrate it to you soon.”

  “I can tell you that if you really do have a machine that can pilot through hyperspace without a sentient pilot attached, every sentient in the galaxy will flip out the moment you upload it to the Registry.”

  But Anya said, “I have been considering showing it to Fehd. I know he has an interest in my gewgaws.”

  Plainly, Anya was a bit off. Even more fanciful than the notion that she might have such a revolutionary machine was the idea of just showing it to Fehd instead of uploading its specs to the Registry. Probably she had been stranded out here alone for a long long time after her intuiter had died, before she’d put herself into suspended animation. She’d started telling herself tall tales as a way of staving off insanity, and had wound up believing them just enough to go a little crazy.

  Anya said, “Tell me of yourself.”

  “What would you like to know?”

  “Tell me of the place you fill on the Canary. Are you happy there? Would you ever consider leaving?”

  Uh-oh. “I would consider it, sure. I mean, Burran and I do have a contract with Fehd, and it’s pretty specific about what conditions we’re allowed to leave under.”

  Anya ignored all mention of the contract and focused on Burran. “Your lover. He would be among your conditions for taking a new post? That he should accompany you?” She sounded less than thrilled.

  “First of all, I ought to point out that we’re really not looking for a new ship.” Poor Anya. For all her natural and legitimate dignity, there was something very sad about how she couldn
’t see what an unattractive prospect her crippled, ancient, musty, oddly labyrinthine ship would be for employment. It only made Willa all the more tender. “But if we were, then, yeah, Burran and I would stick together. It would be awful for me to leave him, after all he’s done for me. Anyway, I love him.”

  Anya studied her as she spoke. Dabbing her mouth with a napkin, she said, “Your crewmate Madaku thinks that your lover is a brute, and unworthy of you.”

  Willa’s nerves flashed hot as thruster-tubes. “He said that to you?”

  “Oh, no. He may never have said it to anybody. As one ages, one has less need to hear certain things said aloud.”

  “Oh. Okay. Well.” Willa herself knew perfectly well that was what Madaku thought. Hearing it finally said openly was nonetheless unpleasant, though, and made it something more difficult for her to politely fail to notice.

  It felt like Anya was looking more and more deeply into her, with no effort at all. As Willa met her calm, penetrating, unreadable gaze, she grew uncertain. For a crazy moment, Willa wondered if she was going crazy, because suddenly everything Anya had said seemed perfectly plausible. Why couldn’t she have some sort of miraculous pure-cyber intuiter stashed away on board? She could have anything. “What’s in all these crates that are stacked all over? And in all these small rooms? This ship is like a maze.”

  “Trinkets,” said Anya. “Tell me what Burran has done for you. I don’t mean to challenge you, I simply am curious.”

  If Burran had been in Willa’s place, subjected to this sort of interview, he would have turned it around on Anya, would have wanted to know what her interest was in the crew’s private lives and would have refused to divulge much information. Madaku and Fehd probably wouldn’t have been so suspicious, but they would have found Anya’s intensity gauche, and would have given only trivial answers. What Willa saw was a lonely woman of great independence and noble character, attempting to soothe her loneliness without suffering the indignity of admitting that was what she was doing. So she was happy to answer.

  It was a big question, though. “He’s done a lot for me,” she said. “For one thing, he’s the reason we’re here, with the Canary. When Fehd put out the call for a new intuiter, Burran didn’t try to talk me out of accepting or discourage me at all. Of course, technically it was a promotion for him, too, since Fehd agreed to bring him on as sole security officer. But obviously he was happier before.”

  “Where was that?”

  “He was in charge of security in the Davenport System.”

  “Hm. Tell me, friend Willa. This new galaxy seems so very safe. Why then is there need of a security specialist, such as Burran?”

  “Oh, well, you know. On a lot of ships like the Canary, it’s almost just a formality to have one.”

  “Your Burran seems not to think it a mere formality.”

  “No, that’s true, he doesn’t.” Willa made only a half-hearted attempt to muffle the pride in her voice. “Fehd got really lucky, actually. He was on the look-out for an intuiter and a security specialist, both, and he didn’t want to spend too much. You’ve probably noticed how much Fehd likes a bargain. Anyway, the shares he was offering were more than enough for me—I’d never been a lone intuiter before. But it never would have been enough to afford Burran, if Burran hadn’t been gung-ho enough on me taking this opportunity that he was willing to settle for a quarter the pay he had been getting.”

  “Curious. Is it not customary for an intuiter to get a larger share of mining profits, than the security specialist? It strikes me that the intuiter must be the most vital member of the crew.”

  “Yeah, all other things being equal. But, like I said, this is my first job as a solo intuiter. Before this I only ever worked in the short-range intuiters’ bank in the Davenport System. Whereas Burran is one of the few security specialists with any experience worth a darn. He had to deal with real, actual violence sometimes. As Security head he was working on the surface of Davenport, in the reservation of the Shaggy Thwaps.”

  Naturally, Willa then had to explain to Anya the Shaggy Thwaps, a tribal species of humanoids native to Davenport. Their linguistic capacity was functional enough, albeit a bit lacking in abstracts, and they had a high enough intelligence to rate as sentients; but they weren’t smart enough that they would ever independently develop any real technology, much less spaceflight. That was why they’d been spared by the Galactic Hygienes, despite their violent tendencies.

  For thousands of years they’d been more or less left alone, at least once the Hygienes had started wiping out species that couldn’t keep their hands off of others. But Davenport was a major source of unadium, one of the few useful metals that were rare on a galactic scale and difficult to synthesize. So population centers had been set up to facilitate the unadium exploitation; because of unadium’s volatility and the ethico-judicial necessity of withdrawing massive amounts without disturbing the Thwaps’ environment, it was a vastly bigger undertaking than the Canary’s current strip-and-grab operation.

  Meanwhile, Registry Guidelines quite strongly discouraged exposing low-intelligence sentients like the Shaggy Thwaps to the kind of standard-tech societies that could only confuse their own tribal organization, and in which the only role open to them would have been slaves (slaves serving some irrational end, for example sexual or religious, since for any straightforward, utilitarian purpose a robot could serve as well as a sentient). Therefore, since most of the planet was given over to unadium exploitation, the fifty thousand or so Thwaps had been moved onto a series of reservations. Burran had been part of the team that policed the Thwaps, interacting with them on the ground, insuring that the mining population made no unauthorized incursions into the reservations, and also controlling their internal outbreaks of violence and making sure that no Thwap gained access to a Registry monitor. Burran’s homeworld was even more patriarchal and hierarchical than those of the rest of the Canary’s crew, making him particularly suited to such work.

  “It was a great place for him,” finished Willa. “But when I got the chance to be a real pilot ... well, that was my dream. You know?”

  “And Burran did not stand in your way. The truth is I’m not surprised, regardless of what opinion Madaku may have of him.”

  “Not only did he not stand in my way, he was the one who showed me the call. And I’d always thought that if the time ever came to join a small ship, that he would at least mope a little. But he didn’t even do that. He was just happy for me. Even if the Canary is starting to drive him a little nuts.”

  “He has a gentle heart, you would say.”

  “Oh, yeah. Everybody has this certain idea of him. But if you could see him when he’s with me ... he’s different.”

  “How, exactly? What does he do when you’re alone?”

  Willa ducked her head, and blushed. With a shy little laugh, she said, “That, I don’t think he’d want me to tell.”

  They ate in silence a while. Then Anya said, “Tell me, friend Willa. What is it like, in the hyperface? I am always curious, for it is one of the few places I have not been and cannot go.”

  Willa gave a little start. Normally that would be considered an impolite question, given what a sensitive state the hyperface was for any intuiter, and given the fact that voluminous explanatory tracts were available by the millions for anyone who felt like downloading them from the Registry. But of course, Anya was too exotic to know even that rule of etiquette.

  Not that Willa minded—in truth, it was fun to be challenged to articulate the experience. She gazed into space, eyes unfocussing, trying to dredge up the words that might paint the impossible picture.

  “It’s a kind of a blue-gray space,” she began, slowly. “For me, anyway. Even though there’s no light—all I mean is, it feels blue-gray. A landscape of spheres and lines of connective force, stretching out to infinity, or as near infinity as makes no difference. Those spheres are gravity points, of course. You dart through them and between the lines, in your body that
you can sense but can’t feel or see. That body is the ship, or its astral proxy, or whatever you want to call it. You dart and ricochet through the gravity balls. All that part’s fun—well, not exactly ‘fun,’ once you get that deep you’re past the personality, or anything superficial enough to feel ‘fun,’ but ‘fun’ is the closest word I’ve got.... Anyway, the tricky bit is stopping near one of those gravity sources, but not so near you enter realspace in coexistence with it. And if you enter realspace away from any gravity sources, that probably means you’re outside the galaxy, and good luck ever finding your way back. And of course they’re going by too fast for you to ever really see them—you have to intuit from the patterns you’re seeing where the upcoming gravity point will be, the one you’re coming up on. And because you’re going so much faster than light you’ve got to start braking before you actually reach it.”

  She stopped talking, and smiled at Anya. “Sorry, I know this isn’t making sense!”

  Anya smiled back at her. “So few things ever do,” she said.

  Willa nodded, and continued. Her eyes glazed again as she gazed back into that weird distance and said, “And once you go down that deep, you realize that the balls and the lines of force are familiar. ‘You’ don’t realize it, exactly—there is no ‘you’ that deep in the substrata of the mind, that far below the level of the personality—by then you’re way down deep in the fundamental symbol logic of the brain itself. Once you’re there, it’s a heck of a dance to maintain any sort of intention, much less the tight control a pilot needs, when you’re down where there isn’t even a ‘you’ that can want things. I can’t begin to explain how you do it, I can never even quite remember how I managed.... And at that deep level, the mind’s symbol logic’s self-representation lines up with and manifests itself in the same fashion as the hyperface does the substructure of the physical universe itself. The deep structure of the physical universe is analogous to that of the human mind. And that’s it: the amazing thing; the one mystery that never, ever stops being new.”