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Chapter Sixteen

JEFF never did find out what Lilah told her mother about their adventure with Simon Macafee. Connie Cheever was waiting for the Galileo as it docked at Confluence Center, and her grim expression had her daughter flinching in advance. Lilah was expecting the worst, though she didn't know for what. As for Simon Macafee, he gave the situation one look and retreated without a word into the lock. Connie took just enough notice of her daughter and Billy Jexter to wave them away to the Confluence Center interior. As soon as they were gone she spoke to Jeff.

"The Dreadnought is here. It took a faster and riskier path than I expected through the Cloud's spaceways, and we picked up its approach just half an hour ago. The ship is docking now. In a few minutes I have to go for a first meeting with their commander, but I had to talk to you first. Do you know a Space Navy ensign called Myron Lazenby?"

"He's my cousin!"

"I thought so. I've never heard you say the name, but Hooglich recognized it. He told me a number of things about you and Myron. What about Mohammad Duval, have you heard of him?"

"Never."

"Hooglich and Russo say he's bad news. A stooge for Giles Lazenby, according to them."

"Giles Lazenby is my uncle." Just saying the name gave Jeff's insides a lurch. "He's Myron's father."

"I know."

"Why are you asking about them?"

"Because Myron Lazenby and Mohammad Duval are listed on the manifest as crew of the Dreadnought. Mohammad Duval is the captain, Myron Lazenby is a new recruit on his first assignment. In a few minutes they will be inside Confluence Center. Confluence starts tonight—I moved up the schedule, but I never dreamed the Dreadnought might get here before we started. Here's my question. Do you want to be the person responsible for showing Myron around Confluence Center and taking him to Confluence? I realize that you hardly know your way around, but he is your cousin. It would be natural for you to be in charge of him, especially when the Confluence games begin. On the other hand, I can see reasons why you might not want to do it."

"I'd rather not." Jeff spoke instinctively and at once, without analyzing his feelings.

Connie Cheever stared at him. "Right. I can understand that. I'll make other arrangements. Now I have to get to my meeting with Captain Duval."

She turned and left, before Jeff had a chance to explain.

But would he have explained, even if she had given him a chance? The truth was not very flattering. He couldn't see himself reciting to Connie Cheever the whole multiyear history of interactions with his cousin, Myron outperforming Jeff in every way and at every step. And Confluence, according to Billy, involved large numbers of games, just the sort of environment where Myron would shine and Jeff would sink. If he were in charge of Myron, the dreary pattern of losses would be repeated over and over.

All that, and more, had been wrapped up in his terse "I'd rather not" to Connie Cheever. She said she understood, but she didn't. Jeff was still standing, filled with feelings of his own inadequacy, when Simon Macafee emerged from the dock.

"Not pleased?" said Simon.

It took a moment to realize that Simon was referring not to Jeff's own mood, but to Connie Cheever's reaction to where they had been and what they had done.

"She's not pleased, but it had nothing to do with us and the trip inside the sounder. We didn't have a chance to say a word about that. The Space Navy ship is here. It arrived early."

"Ah." Macafee's eyes, usually remote and abstracted, came into sharp focus on Jeff. "Are they making threats?"

"No. They only just got here."

"Give them time."

"You think they came to cause trouble?" Jeff followed Macafee, who was moving away past the bare exterior docks of Confluence Center.

"Why else?" Macafee paused, and the strange eyes turned again on Jeff. "The other question is, Why? I don't mean I can't think of a reason why the Space Navy might cause trouble, I just don't know which reason to choose. Sol-side misunderstands the Cloud in so many ways."

"I know." Jeff thought back to his own fears, before he left Earth. "Did you know that on Earth they call the Cloud Cyborg Territory? Before I got here, I imagined that you were all cyborgs."

"Why would we be?"

"No one told me that. I thought the Cloud was producing some sort of superwarrior. I saw you as a kind of horrible mixture, human and machine."

"You weren't alone. I've heard that idea before. It's the way the Sol-side government likes to paint us. Come on." They had reached an unlit shaft. Macafee took two paces forward and dropped out of sight.

Jeff stood for a few seconds on the edge, peering down into darkness. It could be a fatal drop. Finally he repeated to himself, "Jefferson Kopal is a coward. He knows it, and if he doesn't do something about it soon, so will everyone else," and stepped out into space. There was a terrifying and stomach-turning interval of free fall, in which he sensed the sides of the shaft flying past him at increasing speed. Then at last he was slowing, for no reason. A few more seconds, and he was deposited in a feather-soft landing on a floor of white tiles.

"Slanting opinion a certain way by choice of words has a special name," Macafee went on, as though nothing had happened since his last remark to Jeff. "It's called propaganda. The word started out with a religious meaning, but now it's used differently. Propaganda means speeches and handouts and publicity designed to give one group a distorted idea of another. If you are going to fight somebody, or invade them, or even exterminate them, it helps a lot if your soldiers believe the other group is made up of monsters, or creatures less than human. Back Sol-side you had propaganda about the Cloud, and a big part of it was talk of cyborgs."

They had reached a chamber with a dozen exits, some of them leading to corridors, others to stairways. Macafee walked to a bench at the side of the room and sat down. He gestured to Jeff to join him.

"If Lilah and Billy are heading straight for Level One, they'll come through here. You and I took a shortcut with a little help from an Anadem field. While we're waiting, I want to walk you through a mental exercise and set your mind at rest. Let's agree that a cyborg is some mixture of a human and a machine. And let's ask how much machine, and how much human, you would want in a perfect soldier. We'll start first with pure human and pure machine, then look at mixtures. Can you list the properties or abilities that you think would be important for a soldier operating in space?"

Ten minutes ago, Jeff had been telling himself how much he hated games. He meant it, but there was one kind of game that he didn't hate at all: He loved any challenge that depended not on strength or physical coordination, but on thought alone. Apparently Simon Macafee was the same.

So. Properties and abilities useful for space warriors. The first candidate that came to mind was one that Jeff had experienced for himself, recently and painfully.

"You need an ability to withstand high accelerations."

"That's a fine start. What would you say humans can tolerate?"

"I'm not sure. Maybe ten or twelve Gs, but that's only for a short burst. Five Gs?"

"Fair enough. But you couldn't take that for long, either, a few days of it would kill you. A machine can easily be built to operate for as long as you want at a hundred Gs—a thousand Gs, too, if you ever needed it. Score one for machines. What else?"

"Perception. The ability to observe your surroundings."

"That's good. Do you know the human limits?"

"We see from violet light to red light."

"That's roughly from 0.4 to 0.7 micrometers' wavelength. Not very much, less than a factor of two in range. I can build a machine that 'sees' everything from hard X rays to long radio waves, a billion times as big a range as we have, and in at least as much detail as we see. Machines win again. What else?"

"Life support." Jeff could see where Simon Macafee was heading, but he didn't mind. This was the sort of talk he loved and almost never got—a discussion like this with Myron or anyone else at Kopal Manor was unthinkable.

Macafee nodded. "Another good one. Let's consider it in pieces. A human can survive long-term in a pressure range from about one-third of an Earth atmosphere to a couple of atmospheres—provided we have the right gases, which in practice means oxygen plus something inert. A machine can operate in anything from hard vacuum to a thousand atmospheres or more, and it can tolerate any gas mix that doesn't dissolve it. We need food and water, too. A machine needs a power source, that's all. We have a fixed operating rate. Even when we are asleep, we use almost as much energy as when we are awake. We can't power down, or switch ourselves off for a few months. A machine can do both of those. We feel pain, and sometimes that hinders our ability to function. Try thinking clearly with a broken arm. A machine has self-preservation sensors, but damage does not interfere with its logic functions.

"We also come in standard sizes. There are adult humans who mass as little as fifteen kilos, or as much as five hundred, but I don't think either limit would be my choice for a warrior. A machine can be as small or as large as you choose, depending on needs. Think of the nannies, too small to see but still regular machines. A human is also made of fixed materials—not very strong ones. A machine can be made of anything, steel or carbon filaments or condensed matter."

Lilah and Billy had entered the room and stood listening. Simon Macafee went on talking as though he did not see them. Jeff suspected that he didn't. Macafee was enjoying himself—and so was Jeff.

"You might think you can do better by combining human and machine into a cyborg," Simon went on. "You can't. You introduce other problems. I could give you an artificial arm, able to lift tons. But the rest of your body is still flesh and bone. Try to exert all the force your arm can produce, and you'll tear yourself apart. The same problem arises if I speed up your reaction times. You'll rip your muscles if you try to move too fast. However you look at it, a cyborg makes no sense—except for the special form of cyborg where the nannies enter a human to repair it."

"You're leaving something out." Simon Macafee might be a legend in the Cloud, but Jeff was not self-conscious when he had something to say. "What about self-repair? We can do that. The Logans can't."

"True. But only because it's not the economical way to do things. Why carry a whole repair factory around with you, when you can leave it in one central place and go there only when you happen to need it? Humans are more like snails than we like to think. They carry their house around on their backs. We carry around every useless thing that four billion years of evolution has dumped onto us, hair and nails and teeth. How long since you had to use your claws and fangs to defend yourself? I know of only one area where we are superior to machines: We are still more flexible in what we can do, and more adaptable—but the Logans come closer to us every year."

"I don't think that's the only thing humans do more effectively than machines," said Jeff, and then at once wished he had kept his mouth shut.

"You don't?" Simon Macafee sniffed skeptically. "Can you name another?"

"Well, we are better"—Jeff wasn't sure how to phrase this—"we are more efficient at replication. Machines are not self-replicating."

"What's replication?" Billy asked. "Does that mean breathing?"

"You're thinking of respiration," Macafee said. "Replication means making copies."

"Huh? You mean like making copies of things with a copying machine?"

"No, Billy. I mean like breeding"

"Which means having children," Lilah added. She gave Jeff an unreadable sideways glance of bright blue eyes. "Rely on an Earthling to come up with that as his prize example."

"And it's not true," Macafee said. "First of all, many animals reproduce far more easily than humans. Second, the nannies replicate themselves until their job is done. And if you're thinking of speed of replication, a nanny or a bacterium can produce a working copy of itself in twenty minutes. Last time I studied the subject, a human took at least nine months to make. And when you're all done, a baby can't look after itself for many years." He stood up. "I'll be interested in another example if you can think of one. But I'll be amazed if you can find any case where a cyborg human/machine combination is better than a machine, in a combat situation. It's just Sol propaganda."

Macafee nodded at the others, signaling that the discussion was over. He wandered off toward one of the exits.

Billy said to Lilah, "What did you mean when you said, rely on an Earthling to come up with that as his example? What do people from Earth do that's different from us?"

"We-e-ell . . . ."

Jeff went after Simon Macafee. He didn't mind Billy putting Lilah on the spot, but he wasn't sure he'd like her answer.

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