Orson Card - Children of the Mind

Then he shook his head, let go of her hand, and left the room. I will not listen to the voice of despair, he told himself. Would I tame this great being and make her so much my slave that every moment of her life belongs to me? Would I focus her eyes so they can see nothing but my face? I must rejoice that I am part of her, instead of resenting that I'm not more of her.

He returned to his place and got back to work. But a few moments later he got up again and went back to her. He was useless until she came back. Until he knew the outcome, he could think of nothing else.

Jane was not precisely adrift. She had her unbroken connection to the three ansibles of Lusitania, and she found them easily. And just as easily found the new connections to ansibles on a half dozen worlds. From there, she quickly found her way through the thicket of interrupts and cutouts that protected her back door into the system from discovery by Congress's snoop programs. All was as she and her friends had planned.

It was small, cramped, as she had known it would be. But she had almost never used the full capacity of the system -- except when she was controlling starships. Then she needed every scrap of fast memory to hold the complete image of the ship she was transporting. Obviously there wasn't enough capacity on these mere thousands of machines. Yet it was such a relief, nonetheless, to tap back into the programs that she had so long used to do so much of her thought for her, servants she made use of like the Hive Queen's workers -- just one more way that I am like her, Jane realized. She got them running, then explored the memories that for these long days had been so painfully missing. Once again she was in possession of a mental system that allowed her to maintain dozens of levels of attention to simultaneously running processes.

And yet it was still all wrong. She had been in her human body only a day, and yet already the electronic self that once had felt so copious was far too small. It wasn't just because there were so few computers where once there had been so many. Rather it was small by nature. The ambiguity of flesh made for a vastness of possibility that simply could not exist in a binary world. She had been alive, and so she knew now that her electronic dwellingplace gave her only a fraction of a life. However much she had accomplished during her millennia of life in the machine, it brought no satisfaction compared to even a few minutes in that body of flesh and blood.

If she had thought she might ever leave the Val-body, she knew now that she never could. That was the root of her, now and forever. Indeed, she would have to force herself to spread out into these computer systems when she needed them. By inclination, she would not readily go into them.

But there was no reason to speak to anyone of her disappointment. Not yet. She would tell Miro when she got back to him. He would listen and talk to no one else. Indeed, he would probably be relieved. No doubt he was worried that she would be tempted to remain in the computers and not go back into the body that she could still feel, strong and insistent on her attention, even in the slackness of such a deep sleep. But he had no reason to fear. Hadn't he spent many long months in a body that was so limited he could hardly bear to live in it? She would as soon go back to being just a computer-dweller as he would go back to the brain-damaged body that had so tortured him.

Yet it is myself, part of myself. That's what these friends had given to her, and she would not tell them how painful it was to fit into this small sort of life again. She brought up her old familiar Jane-face above a terminal in each world, and smiled at them, and spoke:

"Thank you, my friends. I will never forget your love and loyalty to me. It will take a while for me to find out how much is open to me, and how much is closed. I'll tell you what I know when I know it. But be assured that whether or not I can achieve anything comparable to what I did before, I owe this restoration of myself to you, to all of you. I was already your friend forever; I am forever in your debt."

They answered; she heard all the answers, conversed with them using only small parts of her attention.

The rest of her explored. She found the hidden interfaces with the main computer systems that the Starways Congress's programmers had designed. It was easy enough to raid them for whatever information she wanted -- indeed, within moments she had found her way into the most secret files of the Starways Congress and found out every technical specification and every protocol of the new nets. But all her probing was done at second-hand, as if she were dipping into a cookie jar in the darkness, unable to see what she could touch. She could send out little finder programs that brought back to her whatever she wanted; they were guided by fuzzy protocols that let them even be somewhat serendipitous, dragging back tangential information that had somehow tickled them into bringing it aboard. She certainly had the power to sabotage, if she had wanted to punish them. She could have crashed everything, destroyed all the data. But none of that, neither finding secrets nor wreaking vengeance, had anything to do with what she needed now. The information most vital to her had been saved by her friends. What she needed was capacity, and it wasn't there. The new networks were stepped back and delayed far enough from the immediacy of the ansibles that she couldn't use them for her thought. She tried to find ways to offload and reload data quickly enough that she could use it to push a starship Out and In again, but it simply wasn't fast enough. Only bits and pieces of each starship would go Out, and almost nothing would make it come back Inside.

I have all my knowledge. I just haven't got the space.

Through all of this, however, her aiúa was making its circuit. Many times a second it passed through the Val-body strapped to a bed in the starship. Many times a second it touched the ansibles and computers of its restored, if truncated, network. And many times a second it wandered the lacy links among the mothertrees.

A thousand, ten thousand times her aiúa made these circuits before she finally realized that the mothertrees were also a storage place. They had so few thoughts of their own, but the structures were there that could hold memories, and there were no delays built in. She could think, could hold the thought, could retrieve it instantly. And the mothertrees were fractally deep; she could store memory mapped in layers, thoughts within thoughts, farther and farther into the structures and patterns of the living cells, without ever interfering with the dim sweet thoughts of the trees themselves. It was a far better storage system than the computer nets had ever been; it was inherently larger than any binary device. Though there were far fewer mothertrees than there were computers, even in her new shrunken net, the depth and richness of the memory array meant that there was far more room for data that could be recalled far more rapidly. Except for retrieving basic data, her own memories of past starflights, Jane would not need to use the computers at all. The pathway to the stars now lay along an avenue of trees.

Alone in a starship on the surface of Lusitania, a worker of the Hive Queen waited. Jane found her easily, found and remembered the shape of the starship. Though she had "forgotten" how to do starflight for a day or so, the memory was back again and she did it easily, pushing the starship Out, then bringing it back In an instant later, only many kilometers away, in a clearing before the entrance to the Hive Queen's nest. The worker arose from its terminal, opened the door, and came outside. Of course there was no celebration. The Hive Queen merely looked through the worker's eyes to verify that the flight had been successful, then explored the worker's body and the starship itself to make sure that nothing had been lost or damaged in the flight.