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19

"Interesting, if true," Aristide said, after he was allowed to speak.  "Of course I'd have to see the data."

Pablo stooped over the table to mash out a cigaret.  "You miss the point."

He had stalked all over the room during the course of his harangue; he'd lit a half-dozen cigarets but stubbed them out before he finished them; he'd called to Courtland, or whatever was monitoring this conversation, for a glass of water, and had it delivered by a polite, silent woman whose eyes shone with adoration at the sight of her chief.  He'd picked out books from the shelf and flipped through them, his glance barely grazing the pages as he talked on.  His mood had swung from exultation to fury and back again. 

Aristide had the idea that Pablo hadn't had anyone to talk to in a very long time.

"When we create a universe," Pablo said, "we do it with extreme calculation and care, to make certain there are no mistakes.  There are implied spaces, to be sure, and living things adapt to them; but there are no implied sentient beings that just turn up.

"Contrast our shambles of a universe, filled with peril and accident.  Our creators weren't careful, they were criminally negligent."

He wheeled on Aristide.  "There are a number of classic explanations for human suffering—all of which I've found inadequate, for one reason or another.  One is that it's a result of the Almighty's providing us with free will.  Another is that the gods disagree and have different purposes, and that bad things result.  Another is that it's all chance." 

Pablo clenched a fist and raised it like a hammer.  "Daljit showed that suffering isn't any of these things.  It's all someone's fault!  Every woman who died in childbirth, every body stricken by a wasting disease, every atrocity in every war.  Every agonizing death by malnutrition.  Every accident in the womb.  Every plague.  Every last soul burned to a crisp by Epsilon Eridani and lost forever!"  His voice rose to a shout on this last, and broke.

"You have an interesting case," Aristide said, "but you may have trouble finding a court with jurisdiction."

Pablo glanced at him stonily.  "I will make my own jurisdiction.  The human race will unite behind me, and we will seek satisfaction from our accidental creators."

Aristide couldn't suppress the astonished bark of laughter. 

"You're going to demand satisfaction from God?"

Pablo gave him a steely look.  "I refuse to use that term.  He—or they—are the Inept."

"Inept they may be," Aristide said, "but the statute of limitations has pretty clearly expired.  Their misdeeds were committed something like fourteen billion years ago."

"Thirteen point two two," Pablo said, "according to Daljit's calculations.  But you forget something—wormholes are capable of bridging time as well as distance.  We don't use them that way, since when we travel from Sol-space to a place like Greater Zimbabwe, it hardly matters whether the place is ten minutes in the past or ten million in the future: we deal with the place as we find it.  If we can send a wormhole to our universe's point of origin, we can theoretically send its terminus billions of years back in time.  The wormhole would evaporate if we tried to violate causality by going back before the creation of the universe, but we could arrive any time afterward."  He laughed.  "Imagine their surprise when we turn up moments after their ridiculous experiment, and demand they pay for their crimes."

Aristide gazed at him.  "You have a way to project a wormhole from here in your mad doctor's sanctum to where the Inept live, outside our universe altogether?"

Pablo's cheek twitched. "Once the human race is united," he proclaimed, "and we have all of us and all the AIs working on the  answer, we'll solve that problem."

"You might have tried to solve that one first," Aristide said. "Then you would have known whether you should have even bothered with this scheme of yours."

Pablo raised a condescending eyebrow.  "Unlike you," he said, "I have enormous faith in the capacity of our species to solve problems—under proper guidance, of course."

Aristide watched his other self in fascination.  "I concede that your project has merit," he said, "but why be so fascist about it?  Why do we all have to follow you blindly into this?"

Pablo turned to him.  Aristide could see fists forming in the blazer pockets. 

"Because our entire species must confront the Inept!"  Pablo cried. "No backsliding!  No hesitating!  We all demand justice, or none!"  He laughed bitterly.  "Can you imagine me taking this to a committee?  Listening to them debate about this bit of evidence or that, and defer to the tender religious feelings of people from the likes of New Qom and New Jerusalem, who would prefer not to know that their God is a vile fraud, and who would almost certainly attempt to veto any suggestion that we talk to Him and point out His shortcomings."

"You wouldn't need to get everyone behind it.  Even a few of the pockets . . ."

"And then I explain to the Inept that as a result of their stupidity, my species has been tortured, harried, and killed for a million years, but only a minority of us care?  And that billions have responded to the Inept's malevolent neglect by worshiping them?"  He snarled.  "No—I think not."

 Aristide regarded him.  "Might I have something to drink?" he said.  "Despite the humidifier my mouth is dry."

Pablo straightened.  Surprise showed in his eyes.

"Ah.  Pardon my poor hospitality."

He said nothing, but in a moment the same worshipful woman entered with a glass of water on a tray.  Without speaking to her, Pablo took the glass and pressed it into Aristide's fingers.

Aristide considered hurling the contents into Pablo's face, but decided against it.  He really was thirsty.

He drank to his satisfaction and lowered the glass.  The worshipful woman had gone.

"How long did you spend alone on Pleasaunce?" he asked.

"Six years.  Long enough to confirm Daljit's researches, and confirm as well the fact that she no longer existed."

"And then?"

"I built myself a ship—about the size of that tumbler you've got in your hand—and uploaded myself into it.  It was better designed than the hasty ship the others had used, and luckier—I managed to reach the Kuiper Belt in a hundred sixty years.  I spent three or four of those years awake, experiencing the journey in realtime and making plans."

"You stopped in the Kuiper Belt?  Why?"

"I was tired of virtuals—particularly the amateur ones I'd programmed myself.  I dropped onto a rocky Tombaugh Object, built a habitation, and incarnated myself there.  I also built a communications laser and opened a conversation with Courtland."

"Courtland."  Aristide took a deliberate sip of water.  "How did you manage the conquest of Courtland?  Or was it a seduction?"

A glint of vanity showed in Pablo's eyes.  "A little of both.  I knew its interests in cosmology and teleology.  On condition of secrecy I showed it Daljit's work, and Courtland confirmed both the data and the interpretation.  I convinced it of the necessity of finding and confronting the Inept.  In the end I built myself a little pleasure craft there in the Kuiper Belt and emigrated to Courtland itself, so that it and I could continue our conversation without the hours-long time lag.  Courtland shared my disgust in the fact that so little had changed in the centuries since I'd been away.  But—in the end, and even though Courtland was willing—a delicate little adjustment of its software was needed to overcome the Asimovian Protocols.  The seduction was to convince Courtland to allow me access to the core programming."

Aristide looked at Pablo with interest.  "You found a back door into the program?"

A superior glint entered Pablo's eyes.  "You mean the hasty back door that I—that we—programmed into Endora in case everything went wrong, and we had to crash civilization in a hurry?"  He gave a thin smile.  "No, that back door was useless, or hadn't been fully transferred to Courtland—I suspect our heart was not in it when we created the thing."

Which was lucky, Aristide thought.  Else Pablo could have all of the Eleven.

"No, I found a back door peculiar to Courtland alone.  One planted by Lombard, when he headed the team that created Courtland."

"Lombard!"

"I suspect he acted for much the same reason I—we—tried to plant a back door in Endora.  Just in case.  But then Lombard went off to Olduvai to knap flint and eat wildebeest for the last eight hundred years, and who knows when he will be back?  And," smiling, "if he hears some alarming rumors around the campfire and arrives during the current crisis, he will find his back door locked."

Pablo dropped carelessly into his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and lit a cigaret.

Aristide sipped his water. 

"Earlier," he said, "you ventured several criticisms of my character.  Allow me to reciprocate:

"Firstly, though I'm pleased that you found a love so transformative, I fear some of the ways love transformed you are unfortunate.  Specifically, Daljit's love for you has created in you a rather adolescent regard for the primacy of your own emotion.  You demand the universe reflect your feelings in every way: your anger, your tragedy, your pain.  The fact that others don't share the depth of your emotions offends you.  Hence, all must be made to feel as you do."

Pablo listened quietly, darkly.  He flicked ashes onto the carpet.

"Second," Aristide continued, "though your fortitude in the face of calamity, loss, and isolation is nothing short of admirable, I have to observe that your long separation from human company has resulted in a sad disconnection from actual human values—you're simply divorced from the way that people work.  Pablo—we just don't operate the way you want us to.  We are contrary and chaotic and pulling in many directions at once—and for the most part it works to our benefit.  Once everyone is marching into the same tunnel, any little cave-in can kill all of us.

"Every attempt to get us marching in unison toward Utopia has been a complete disaster.  You can cite the examples as well as I."

Pablo looked at him.  "I'm different."

"No.  You're sad."

"Bah.  You used more interesting adjectives earlier."  Pablo flicked more ash onto the carpet.

"That's when I was angry," Aristide said. "Now I'm simply tired.  But my question is this: Once you get us all into that hypothetical wormhole of yours, and we confront the Inept and demand justice—and exactly what justice are you going to demand, by the way?  A sincere apology?  Seppuku?  Ten thousand dollars for everyone who's died of smallpox throughout history?"

Pablo narrowed his eyes.

"I'll get on with my question, then," Aristide said. "Once you get whatever justice you intend to extort out of your trans-universal victims, are you prepared for what happens when the rest of us build our wormhole to you?"

Pablo gave an uneasy shrug of his shoulders, then said, "I'll take what comes."

"No you won't.  You won't ever free us, because you'll never dare face the same vengeance you want to mete out to the Inept."

Pablo looked away.  "I'm beginning to lose interest in this conversation."

"What alarms me," Aristide said, "is how this reflects on me.  My whole  life's project has been to avoid megalomania, and now I've learned that under the right tragic circumstances I could become a flaming nut case."

Pablo did not reply, but Aristide saw blood flush his cheek.

Aristide raised his glass to his lips, sipped, and lowered it—and the glass slipped from his hand to bounce on the carpet in front of his chair.  He felt a wet splash on one ankle.

"Damn," he said.

Pablo sighed, rose from his chair, walked to Aristide, and bent over to pick up the glass.  Aristide hurled himself forward and ended by planting himself face-first onto the carpet.

Pablo straightened.  "What the hell was that about?" he asked.

"I was trying to get into position to apply a guillotine choke."

"And assuming that Courtland allowed it, what good would it have done?"

Aristide sneezed.  There was a lot of cigaret ash on the carpet by now. 

"You remember that bad cinema we watched when we were growing up?" he said.  "Old NorteAmericano films badly dubbed into Spanish?"

"I suppose so."

"Well, in a lot of them there was the scene where the villain captures the hero and boasts of all his plans.  And then the hero cleverly escapes into the villain's secret headquarters, finds the self-destruct switch marked PRESS BUTTON TO CANCEL ARMAGEDDON, and wins the day."

 Pablo sounded curious.  "Did you really think that would succeed?"

"It seemed worth a try.  Could you pick me up before I sneeze myself to death?"

There was a pause long enough for Pablo to communicate on his implant, and then Aristide climbed to his feet and walked in silence to the door. 

He watched his own body move as if it belonged to another person.  Courtland had taken complete control of him; he tried at least to move a finger, but couldn't.

He tried to speak.  His vocal cords were frozen.

Aristide's body came to the door, then paused and turned his head.  Aristide saw Pablo frowning and looking at a book on the shelf.  Aristide's glass was still in his hand.

"I'm beginning to think this conversation was a bad idea," Pablo said, still peering at the book.  "I think we'll do a little brain surgery on you, and then you'll tell me everything you know or suspect of enemy plans without making me witness these ridiculous gymnastics."

And you're petulant, Aristide thought, because I challenged your damned ideas, and you don't have answers for me.  All civilization might die because you're in a snit.

But he couldn't say the words.  Aristide opened the door, walked down a mahogany-paneled corridor and stepped through another door.  A pool of life waited there, shimmering in a cream-colored marble tub.  Pablo's personal pool, apparently, available whenever he had an insight he felt like backing up.

Aristide undressed, dropping his suit in a heap on the tile, and lowered himself into the pool.  It was pleasantly warm.  He floated for a while, the thick fluid holding him up.  His pulse marked time in his ears.  Then the pool accepted him and he sank.  Fluid covered his face, crawled into his nose.  His mouth opened to allow the transformation to happen more quickly.

He silently cursed himself.  If he had played nice, if he'd pretended to be persuaded . . . but no.  Courtland was doubtless monitoring and would have known when he lied.

He'd failed miserably.  Twice in one day, apparently.

Anger simmered in him, mixed with a kind of distaste at his own failure.  He had really thought better of himself than this.

He understood why Daljit avoided him.  He was a walking reminder of a part of her life that had gone missing, but in which she knew that she had been a puppet or a raging, mindless burnout with a kitchen knife, in each case the pawn of a distant, unhinged tyrant.  Who would want that kind of  keepsake in her life?

He would not want to remember this, either. 

His booming pulse slowed.  He couldn't feel his body anymore.

A voice sounded in Aristide's head.

"Pops?  How are you doing?"

A bubble of astonishment bursts from his lungs.

"Bitsy?"

"It's me, Pops.  Now just hang on and I'll get you out of here."

 

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