We Think, Therefore We Are Page 6

  How many desirous intelligences, he wondered, before the rot and the rust completed their work, could say as much?

  Salvage Rites

  Eric Brown

  The starship emerged from voidspace one parsec beyond Altair.

  Ella found it during the graveyard shift. She was jacked into the sensors of the salvage tug and buzzed me a second after locating the drifting hulk. I jerked awake in my sling, ripped from dreams I’d rather not talk about.

  “Something’s come up,” Ella said, and cut the link.

  I stumbled from my berth, found the ladder to the observation nacelle, and climbed. My heart was pounding, and not only from the exertion. The thought of being alone with Ella had that effect on me.

  I entered the nacelle feet first, stopped dead, and stared through the blister.

  She had found the monastery starship . . .

  All starships are beautiful. They are colossal and totally silent, and they drift. But the St. Benedictus was something special. She was twenty-five kilometers long from her nose cone to the flaring bells of her ion boosters. Her carapace was excoriated from five centuries in voidspace. Stained-glass viewscreens lined the length of the starboard flank.

  Ella slid me a casual glance. “This what you been looking for half your life, Ed?”

  “More than half,” I murmured. “Call it thirty years.” Shaking, I collapsed into a sling and stared out at the wallowing starship. All of us have dreams, but most of them remain just that—fantasies that can never be realized. Here, before me, was my dream made real, the culmination of so much longing, so much hopeless yearning, that part of me disbelieved the search was at an end.

  Though, perhaps, it was only just beginning.

  “Oh, Christ,” I said, near to tears.

  She just looked at me. “You humans amaze me,” she said at last.

  I looked across at Ella, slouched in her sling. She wore ripped shorts and something strapped around her chest to cover her nonexistent breasts. She was slick with sweat, and her slim limbs highlighted the glare from the nearby sun.

  I’d fallen in love before but never with a nonhuman entity.

  “Why’s that?” I asked.

  Staring out at the monastery, she smiled to herself. “I know what obsession is,” she said. “I know what piety is. I just can’t feel them.”

  “I don’t know if that’s your loss or not.” I smiled at her, smitten by her beauty. Her template was Venezuelan Indian, her somaform that of a nineteen-year-old of indeterminate gender. After working off her ten-year indenture to her manufacturers, she’d chosen female for herself, undergoing elective somasurgery and chromosomal implants.

  I’d found her in a bar on a backwater world of Sinclair’s Landfall, Procyon, all her cash spent and without the funds to upgrade. Sitting alone, she’d seemed small and childlike and utterly vulnerable. I’d hired her on the spot, bought her a pilot addendum, and introduced her to my tug, A Long Way From Home.

  I think I looked upon her, then, as my salvage project.

  “I monitored for signs of life,” she said. “Nothing.”

  “Try hailing them, all frequencies.”

  “Already done that. No response.”

  Something felt very cold within me. “Can’t all be dead . . .” I whispered.

  Ella was watching me.

  “It isn’t the salvage rights,” I began.

  “I know.” She smiled. “I’ve seen you praying nights, after your shift.”

  I shrugged. “So . . . maybe they did find God.”

  She tipped her head to one side, then transferred her sceptical gaze from me to the becalmed behemoth.

  I gave Ella the history lesson that was missing from her memory cache.

  The St. Benedictus was launched with the blessing of the Vatican five hundred years ago when Earth received the coded tachyon vectors out of a star in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud. The decoded message spoke of Godlike beings who’d seeded the galaxy with life, but the Catholic Church was sceptical and decided to send its own investigative party. Sublightspeed, the St. Benedictus headed off to the Cloud with a thousand monks in cold sleep—a state they called suspended prayer—and calculated they’d take around two hundred and fifty Earth years to reach their destination.

  “And now they’re back,” Ella said. “But how did you calculate where they’d emerge, Ed?”

  I shrugged. “Simple. They launched from Altair III. Made sense they’d emerge around here at some point.”

  “And you’ve been scouring the vicinity for thirty years?” she said, in a tone halfway between wonder and ridicule.

  I nodded and stared out at the drifting colossus, a sensation like epiphany welling in my diaphragm.

  “Something I don’t get, Ed. What makes you, a good Catholic boy, think these frozen monks’ve found God? The Vatican was sceptical, right?”

  “The Pope back then was fallible, Ella. Look at her turnabout on the issue of AI sentience.”

  She tapped her head. “I wasn’t programmed with such historical trivia.” She smiled at me, as if to sweeten her acerbity. “So you been dreaming that they’ve found all the answers? Even found God?”

  Unbidden, tears filled my eyes. “Ella, I haven’t told anyone this for fifty years.”

  She looked at me, her expression blank. “What?”

  “Back when I was a boy, just fourteen, my kid sister and me . . . we lived near the sea, a place called Sydney, Earth. We spent a lot of time just messing around, exploring the rock pools.”

  She tipped her head to one side. “And?

  “And one day, a storm blew up . . . Maria was standing on the edge of the headland, taunting the waves. . . . She always was a tomboy.”

  “She died, right? The sea got her?”

  I nodded. “A wave swept up and took her away.” Ella said nothing, just tipped her head to the other side and stared at me.

  “I watched as she was swept away. There wasn’t a thing I could have done. I raised the alarm, then went straight to Church and prayed that she’d be rescued . . . and the next day, when they found her body, I went right back and prayed for the salvation of her mortal soul.” I shrugged. “Guess I’ve been praying, on and off, ever since.”

  Ella just looked at me with those massive brown, nonhuman eyes. Did I read pity there, or were they merely empty?

  I sat in the copilot’s sling on the flight-deck while Ella nuzzled us up close to the flank of the monastery ship.

  Karrie, our engineer, stood before the viewscreen, her mouth open as she stared out at the great cliff face of the starship. She turned to me and touched my hand, her eyes diffident. We were close—I’d worked with Karrie almost ten years, so of course we were close—but never that close.

  It was not the ideal situation, the three of us cooped up in the confines of A Long Way From Home. I’d thought of firing Ella two weeks after hiring her, when I began to realize what I felt for her. But by then it was too late.

  “That’s about as near as I dare go,” Ella said.

  “Near enough,” I said.

  Karrie swept graying tresses from her face and glanced at me, worried. “We need to talk it through,” she said. “Let’s not rush into this.”

  Ella said, “Ed’s made up his mind, Karrie, as soon as he saw that thing out there.”

  Karrie shot Ella a venomous glare.

  “Hey,” I said. “I know what I’m doing. Don’t worry. I might have waited years for this day, but that doesn’t mean I’m rushing into anything. I’ve had plenty of time to plan this, get it right.”

  Karrie tried a smile. “Just wondering how we’ll manage the business if you don’t come back, Ed.”

  “I’ll be back. I’ll suit up and take the bell across. I’ll be in there an hour, in com contact all the time. After an hour, I’m outta there. Then we’ll talk over what I found and take it from there.” I looked from Karrie to Ella. “That sound sensible?”

  Ella stared at me, calculating.

 
Karrie still looked worried. “Take care, Ed, okay?”

  I slipped from my sling and made for the bay.

  Karrie readied the bell, and I was suiting up when Ella’s soft drawl sounded through my earpiece. “Ed, I’m getting something from the monastery ship.”

  “I’ll be right up.”

  I left Karrie to finish off preparations and, heart pounding, climbed to the flight-deck. Ella sat in her sling, her skull jacked into a comline.

  Her eyes were turned up to show their whites, eerily, and for second I was worried. Then she jerked, reached up and yanked the comjack from her occipital augment. Her eyes were glazed when she turned to me.

  “What?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “Coded. Gigabytes of the stuff. Didn’t make the slightest sense. Look, I need a couple of hours to work on what I cached.”

  “So there’s someone alive in there?”

  “Or the ship’s AIs are running the show. I’ll be able to tell you that in an hour or two.”

  I stared across at the ship, excitement pulling at my innards.

  “Ed, I’d hold off going over there till I make sense of what they sent.”

  “I can’t do that, Ella. I’ll be in com contact. Fill me in as soon as you’ve worked it out, okay?”

  She reached out a small hand, touched my arm. The gesture could have been interpreted as caring, but I knew better.

  “Ed, Karrie was right, you know? We shouldn’t rush into this. It’d make sense to wait till we have as much knowledge as possible.”

  “So why didn’t you back Karrie up earlier?” I asked.

  “We didn’t have the communiqué from the ship back then,” she said. “And anyway, my agreeing with Karrie wouldn’t make her hate me any less.”

  I looked at her hand, then touched her slim wrist with my fat, blunted fingers. “It’d be nice to think you cared.”

  “I care that you might be getting yourself into danger, Ed.”

  “Yeah. Who’d employ you, then?”

  “That’s cruel.”

  “It’s true.”

  She stared at me and said, “I can empathize with you enough to realize when you’re putting yourself in danger because of something irrational.”

  “Don’t you ever feel anything other than the rational?” I asked her. “Christ, how sterile your existence must be!”

  She shook her head. “Do you think I relish this emptiness, Ed? Don’t you think I’d love to feel . . .” she gestured toward the monastery ship, “feel what you’re feeling now? I can appreciate the philosophy of religion, understand its origins, but all I feel is its emptiness.”

  “I’m sorry, Ella.”

  “I’d love to experience rapture, to have faith, the knowledge that there is more to existence that the sheer mechanistic rote of birth and death, more than the existential certitude of entropy. . . . But I’m not human, and never will be.”

  I chose to read self-pity into her words. I looked upon her, slight and apparently female and pathetic, and something moved me to stroke her arm and say, “Ella, ever since I first saw you, back in the bar on Sinclair’s Landfall, something in here—” I thumped my chest “—went haywire. It’s been growing ever since. I know, I’m old enough to know better. I don’t want to call it love, but, Jesus, what else can I call it?”

  “Ed.” She tried to pull away.

  “And the hell of it is, you can’t feel a thing.”

  I stared at her. She returned my gaze. “When we get back, if you like, we can do sex.”

  I laughed at that. “You can’t even call it making love, Ella.”

  “I have the physical urges that correlate to sexual arousal,” she began.

  “And you’d do it with anyone or anything that came along. Well, listen, with me . . . call me old fashioned if you like, but when I ‘do sex,’ I like it to mean something.”

  She looked away; I’d like to think that my outburst had in some way affected her, but the fact was that her console was flashing: Another communiqué was incoming. She jacked herself into the comline and showed me the whites of her eyes, and I fled the flight deck and joined Karrie in the bay.

  I finished suiting up and inserted myself into the bell. Minutes later I was drifting through space, navigating my way from the tug and across to the curved flank of the starship. I eased the bell between two stained-glass viewscreens, and it latched onto the deuterium panels like a limpet.

  I activated the device I called the can opener, and ten minutes later the console signaled I was through. I initialed entry procedure from my wrist control panel and wriggled feet first through the lock.

  “Ed?” Karrie’s voice was tinny in my helmet. I activated my wrist screen and stared at her.

  “I’m okay. I’m inside.”

  The perfect circle of metal from the ship’s flank lay at my feet, its pitted surface contrasting with the stone-slabbed floor of a lateral corridor. A remote sensor detected my presence and obligingly activated the lighting.

  “What’s it like, Ed?”

  I stared around me and whistled. “Like . . . you ever been to Earth, Karrie? You ever seen a monastery?” I panned my wrist screen around to give Karrie a virtual tour.

  “Me, I’m a fully paid-up atheist, Ed.”

  I wasn’t in a starship but in the cloisters of a monastery. The curved walls were adorned with religious imagery: crucifixes, icons, effigies of saints. And the illumination wasn’t your usual starship strip-halogens but simulated candles in wax-encrusted sconces.

  I swore I could smell incense, but that was my brain playing tricks. My suit was sealed.

  I’d pored over the schematics of the St. Benedictus for hours during my off-shifts, preparing myself for this moment. I turned right and headed off down the lateral, toward the cryogenic chamber where I hope to find the sleeping monks. If, that was, they were still alive. I recalled Ella telling me she’d monitored for life, without success, and I wondered what I’d find.

  I walked a kilometer. The ship was programmed for Earth-norm gravity, perhaps a little lighter, which made the hike easier. My movements alerted the sensors, so I progressed the length of the lateral in a constantly moving bubble of illumination. It gave me the eerie feeling of being observed.

  “Ed?” Karrie said, all concern.

  I glanced at her headpiece on my screen. “I’m fine. Making my way to the cold sleep chamber.”

  “Keep talking. I’m uneasy when you’re silent.”

  I laughed. “There’s nothing to be concerned about, Karrie.”

  “You don’t know that. The ship’s been away five hundred years. The monks might’ve . . .”

  “What?” I said. A part of me was touched at her concern; another part felt guilty at wishing the concern were coming from Ella.

  “I don’t know. What might they have seen, Ed? What if what they found sent them mad?”

  “You been watching too many holo-vees,” I laughed.

  “Just be careful, okay?”

  I came to a junction watched over by an effigy of the Madonna. I turned right. Ahead was darkness, banished as I walked.

  “Where’s Ella?” I asked.

  “Right here on the flight-deck. She’s . . . not with us. Jacked in. Calculating something—like machines do.”

  “Working out what the monastery sent us, Karrie.”

  “She gives me the creeps, eyes turned up like that and spasming.”

  “Spasming?” I couldn’t keep the concern from my voice.

  “Yeah,” Karrie said. “Jitterbugging like she’s taking a thousand volts.” She turned her wrist screen to show me Ella, writhing in her sling.

  “Routine procedure,” I said, more to reassure myself.

  A beat, then Karrie said, “What do you see now, Ed?”

  I looked around me. “Corridor, a long corridor. I should be coming to the chamber soon.”

  A minute later Karrie said, “You’ve . . . you’ve been gone twenty minutes, Ed. You gave yourself an hour, right? T
hen you’re outta there.”

  “Right, boss,” I said.

  I stopped walking. Up ahead I made out an arched entrance. “I’m there,” I said. “The cryo chamber.”

  I approached the entrance and slowed. I remember entering a cathedral the last time I was on Earth. St Paul’s, London, I think it was. Now I experienced the same charge, increased a hundredfold.

  I crossed the threshold, and a faux chandelier came on, filling the circular chamber with light.

  The cryopods were catafalques . . . except, these tombs were empty.

  “Ed?”

  I crossed to the nearest bank of pods. The crystal lids were lifted, revealing vacant containers with masses of redundant leads and subcutaneous needles.

  “Ed, for chrissake!”

  I panned my wrist screen to shut her up. “It’s okay. I’m in the cryo chamber, but it’s empty.”

  “Where are they?” Karrie asked.

  “If they’re alive, then . . .”

  “What?”

  “Think about it. What would you do at journey’s end, but give thanks? They’re in the chapel, Karrie. Stands to reason.” If they’re still alive, I reminded myself.

  After a short silence, she said, “You’ve been gone thirty minutes, Ed. You’d better be thinking about making your way back pretty soon.”

  “Will do,” I lied.

  I quit the cryogenic chamber and headed into the heart of the ship.

  I heard the chant of plainsong well before I reached the chapel.

  A thousand voices sang, supernal; the sound crescendoed, filling my chest with a nameless emotion. I felt like weeping. I thought about Maria, drowning all those years ago. I thought of Ella, who would never experience anything like this.

  “Ed? What’s that?” Karrie asked.

  “Kyrie eleison.” I told her.

  “It’s . . .” she began.

  “Beautiful,” I finished for her.

  I closed my eyes, and I was young again, and Maria was by my side; we entered the church, and she knelt and prayed, and later I asked her and she told me that she had prayed for my eternal happiness. I was eight, and sentiments like that meant all the world to me, then.