Charles Gannon - Raising Caine

Rulaine nodded slowly. “Okay, I get it. But I have to tell you: between that strategy and your, well, winning ways around people, I was half-convinced you were our traitor.”

She nodded back. “Good.”

“Good?”

“Sure. Figure it out, genius: I wanted to be the one that no one trusts. I wanted any spoken or unspoken suspicion centered on me. Because if it was, then everyone else isn’t so worried about someone watching them — including the real traitor. Humans, even pros in my field, tend to have that blind spot; they presume that someone who is under scrutiny is too worried about proving their own innocence to be watching anyone else. Problem was, Macmillan didn’t give me much to go on. Probably the only thing he ever did that would have incriminated him I wasn’t on hand to see.”

“Which was?”

“When he sabotaged Riordan’s filter mask. I’m guessing he did that right after we crashed. During our salvage work, we had to take off our masks to keep them from getting soaked. I’ll bet in all the activity, and then the confusion after Hirano was attacked by those pirhannows, he had plenty of opportunity to take care of Riordan’s mask. It was a shrewd plan: let Caine sicken by degrees, weaken the group by taking out our leader — who we’re not likely to leave behind — and freeze us in place. But the water-striders ruined it. Suddenly we had mobility independent of effort. But Macmillan never tipped his hand after that.”

“Where’d you learn your fieldcraft?”

“Officially? I spent some weeks in training with the DGSE at Noisy-le-Sec, but mostly at the School of Hard Knocks.”

“Starting in early childhood, if Mr. Gaspard is correct.”

“He is, although the bastard has no right to talk about it.”

“It doesn’t sound as though you like your employer very much. Well, your ostensible employer.”

“Oh, he’s my real employer, all right. I took his coin and I took IRIS’ and didn’t much mind; I deserved them both, and more besides. But no, why should I like him? He’s a prissy classist manbitch who thinks the world was better off when everyone who doesn’t share his complexion was safely under the administration of colonial masters.”

“Gaspard?”

“Sure. Part of the postwar wave of NeoImperialists.”

Rulaine scratched his head. “I’m not even sure what that refers to.”

“That’s because you were on the counterinvasion fleet to Sigma Draconis. Those of us who lagged behind, even by a few weeks, got an earful of rhetoric about how humanity could no longer afford the inequities and inefficiencies which had plagued humankind for so long. So what’s their answer? Any country that they felt couldn’t pull its weight or hadn’t been able to create an orderly government was essentially put on probation.”

“Probation?”

“Yeah; as in, ‘fix your shit or we’re coming in and fixing it for you.’ Coño , if that’s how it was going to be, why the hell did the Western powers ever leave their colonies? They lost almost two centuries of fun oppressing, raping, and exploiting.” Her terribly bright smile was as bitter and vitriolic as Bannor had ever seen on a human face.

He shrugged. “Then what’s your answer? If we do get into another scrap with our new interstellar neighbors, and that seems likely, then how do we get everyone mobilized, working toward the common goal of speciate survival?”

“I don’t know, but you sure as shit don’t accomplish it by taking away some of your own peoples’ national sovereignty!”

Rulaine sighed. “Gaspard is a pragmatist. And he probably has a better sense than we do about how much time we have to get our house in order before the wolf comes sniffing around the door again.”

“Yeah, well, it took centuries to make this mess. Only seems fair that it would take centuries to unmake it.”

Bannor nodded. “I get that. But what if we don’t have centuries?”

“Look, I’m not saying I’ve got the answers. But the five blocs are going about this all wrong, and they’re not losing a lot of sleep over it, either. The only thing they’ve all been able to agree on is that they should take the unproductive nations out behind the shed and whup them. Yeah, just like old times.”

“So, you hate the nation-states. Surprised you’re not working for the megacorporations.”

“ Them ?” Bannor thought Dora might have expectorated along with her utterance of that word. “Look: nations screw up like people do; sometimes they mean well, sometimes they’re selfish or delusional bitches on a spree, and sometimes they just plain make mistakes. But the megacorporations don’t make mistakes; if they do damage, it’s because they like the cost-to-benefit ratios, dead innocents notwithstanding. Nations are bulls in the global china shop; corporations are sharks.”

“Yeah, but what about the—?”

Veriden rose. “Rulaine, I didn’t come here to debate politics, the world, and everything. I came to make a report, explain why I didn’t let anyone know I was IRIS, and try to get along. But as you’ve pointed out, I don’t do that very well.” She looked over her shoulder at Caine. “I hope he pulls through. But there doesn’t seem much chance of it now.” She turned and padded away, dwindling down the long hallway that was shaped by walls which swept up into high and impenetrable shadows.

Mriif’vaal approached the Rapport Sphere and thought: Twice in the same week; this is unprecedented in the annals of Disparity. Woe that I should live in such times .

He touched the outer layer of the sphere. The transparent membrane began allowing his tendrils to move through it. Moving very slowly, his whole body passed to the other side of the barrier much as oxygen passed through it by osmosis.

Between the osmotic Outer Sphere, and the hard, hermetic Inner Sphere, the air was thick: an overpressure environment that ensured that none of the spores and pheromones within the Inner Sphere would escape when the seam into it was opened. Mriif’vaal sighed, stared at the swirling vapors on the other side of the hard, clear surface. Those many airborne transmitters and receptors of meaning were not to be braved by the unprepared. The unrestricted sensory wave that perfused both the body and mind of any Slaasriithi that entered was powerful, paralyzing to the untrained.

Mriif’vaal did not welcome his imminent contact with the OverWatchling’s mind. He did not know any ratiocinator that did. And none of the other taxae had contact with it at all. Indeed, it was probably wrong to even think of the OverWatchling as having a mind. It was more akin to a highly detailed awareness. It deduced, but hardly reasoned; it learned, but was rarely capable of generalizing lessons learned within one domain of knowledge to any other; and while it was capable of change, it was disposed to resist it, in the interest of maintaining the stability of the polytaxic order and the synergies of macroevolution.

But this was not what made the consciousness of the OverWatchling such a ubiquitous source of discomfort among ratiocinatorae; it was the unsettling impression that its awareness could have been a mind, but had not been allowed to become one. This invariably led any perspicacious ratiocinator to wonder what dark path of inducement had produced this biomechanical hybrid, this being that was not a being. It did not help matters that the source of the OverWatchlings was not shared with the whole of the Slaasriithi polytaxon, not even with all Senior Ratiocinatorae. It was only known to those Prime Ratiocinatorae whose domains of responsibility transcended the boundaries of an individual world and extended into the interconnections between planets, star systems, and species. It was they who delivered new OverWatchlings to planets that had been sufficiently bioformed to warrant one. They did not divulge where the OverWatchlings originated, or how their biological and mechanical parts were, ultimately, fused. None of which helped diminish the disquiet that other ratiocinatorae felt when in contact with the awareness of these pseudosophonts. Mriif’vaal splayed his tendrils wide across the Inner Sphere. A seam opened where none had been evident; he entered the pungent miasma.