“Fourteen years, and it comes to this.” Captain Tacoma Washington sat in front of the Santa Maria’s navigation console. The torchship’s bridge was empty; it was early in the morning as the crew reckoned time. And since he’d disabled the computer’s audio channels, there was no reply from the AI that lived somewhere behind the console. But her image still watched him from one of the displays, light-skinned and dark-haired, Mother Mary as Colombus might have had her carved into the prow of his flagship. But the old Captain’s figurehead couldn’t talk, couldn’t tell him he was wrong, couldn’t flat out disobey him and refuse to cut the waves.

Well. In the end, Maria had only made the task more difficult, not impossible. He had calculated the parameters himself, and now he knew the Angle and the Time that she had refused to tell him. He knew just how to turn the massive ship, and when to light its fusion engine and play it like a blowtorch over the vessel that threatened to overtake them.

Tacoma Washington had been born in a Confive habitat shortly after Earth’s ecosystem collapse, and in an unusually romantic lapse his parents had named him after their old hometown. As he grew up, he felt a peculiar responsibility towards his namesake, as if he somehow embodied all the souls that had been lost when that city had died. So when the opportunity arose for him to lead an expedition in search of new worlds for Man, he did not hesitate, though the price was steep. He had, he thought, a Destiny, and he would do whatever was necessary to see it through.

He transferred the parameters he’d calculated to the guidance system. Maria’s eyes widened, but there was nothing she could do about it; her audio channels weren’t the only thing that Tacoma had disabled. The displays around him shifted as the guidance system began a six-hour countdown.

“Fourteen years,” he said again, shaking his head. And seventy-four to go before they reached Alpha Centauri, coasting at five percent of light-speed. That was the frightening thing, the useless stretch of time that would waste their lives and make their sacrifice pointless if the ship behind them were allowed to slip by.

“We always knew it was a possibility,” came a voice from the entrance to the bridge. Anchored there by one hand was the ship’s cyberneticist. Jeremy Clay’s microcomputer implant formed a dark jewel in the middle of his forehead, the caste mark of a torchship officer.

“Hello, Jerry,” Tacoma said softly, wondering how long the man had been there.

Clay pulled himself through the doorway; the bridge was at the hub of the torchship’s wheel-and-axle geometry, and weightlessness reigned there. “We knew that someone back home might develop a better propulsion system.”

“Yes, but we didn’t expect them to come chasing up our tailpipe.” Colombus might have believed that the stars were fixed in the sky, but Tacoma knew better. The whole universe was in motion, and no two interstellar journeys would ever take quite the same path. If their opponent had simply headed for Alpha Centauri by the shortest route, it wouldn’t have come anywhere near them.

“Nonetheless, we agreed that if it happened, we’d let them pass.”

“We agreed,” Tacoma said, eyes steady on Clay’s, “that our mission is to propagate humanity, not win a race to Alpha Centauri. We assumed that our competitors would be human. But that ship isn’t carrying human colonists. It’s a robot.”

“A sentient, self-replicating robot,” Clay amended.

“Well that’s the problem, isn’t it? A simple probe wouldn’t matter, but that thing could populate an entire stellar system. You’re the one who told me the numbers: if it reproduces once per year, there will be more than a million of them waiting for us when we get there.”

“So you’re going to destroy it.”

“I’ve already loaded the program.”

“And what does Maria think about that?”

“Don’t bother asking,” Tacoma said laconically. “I shut off her mouth.”

“I suppose you wouldn’t hesitate to kill her too.”

Tacoma blinked, the only sign of the conflict that was brewing within him. “You can’t kill what’s not alive, Jerry.”

Maria thrust out her middle finger in a gesture of contempt, then cut the signal to the display. A muscle jumped in Tacoma’s jaw. Once he had thought of her as human. Once they had been friends, but he couldn’t allow himself that luxury any longer. He rubbed his temples, trying to smooth out the knot of pain gathering there. He was careful not to touch the smooth stone of his implant. It had been inactive for many years, and he had no inclination to turn it on now. It was bad enough that he had allowed it to become part of his body; he didn’t need it intruding into his mind as well.

“Jerry,” he started, then stopped when he heard the strident ring in his voice. Make an attempt at reconciliation, he told himself. What’ll it cost? Nothing but time, and there was plenty of that.

“Look,” he started again. “It’s not like I want to destroy the thing.”

Clay measured him with his gaze. “That’s not at all obvious, Captain. No disrespect intended, but there is some history here, isn’t there? Between you and it?”

“That,” Captain Tacoma Washington said faintly, remembering with painful clarity the day the news from Sol had finally caught up with them, “has nothing to do with this.”

#

Back in his cabin, in the comforting grasp of gravity, he slotted a memory card into his workstation. The picture album opened to where he’d left it, a family portrait taken when Jason was barely a year old. The boy sat in his father’s lap, hands knotted together in excitement and a delighted expression on his face as he watched the holographer’s antics. Amy stood behind them, looking straight into the camera with her dark brown eyes. Tacoma examined his own image critically, noticing as he always did that his gaze was off by a few degrees, looking at something else. As always, the person in the hologram didn’t seem particularly like him, any more than the image in a mirror did. He wondered distantly if other people reacted the same way when confronted with their likeness.

He closed the album and pulled its card from the reader. Yes, the price was steep: both his wife and his son, gone forever as surely as if they were dead. And that thought opened an old wound, because no matter how distant Amy was in space and time, she was still alive. And she had made her own choice. She could have come with him. But she didn’t want to, and Tacoma couldn’t handle Jason by himself.

And so. His fingers moved along the spines of the memory cards that filled the shelf above his desk, looking for the worn label that his mind didn’t want to find, but that he couldn’t avoid any more than he could have prevented the events recorded within it.

Maybe if he had stayed, Jason would still be alive. But he had a Destiny, so he had left and they had stayed behind. And as he had whittled away the lonely years in his cabin, shaping his life into the long and sharp Purpose he had perceived for it, Jason had grown up. Like his father, he had learned the arts of Astrogation, of Engines and Weapons. And he had done well for himself, until he took a contract with Pallas Athena.

Tacoma turned the memory card over in his fingers, an oblong rectangle of ebony plastic. Its label simply said 2079, the year the newscast had been sent. He’d asked Athena for more information, but by the time his request had been received, she’d gotten into a war with Confive, and was not particularly interested in helping him. He was, after all, on the other side. So the newscast was all he had left of his son. He slotted the card into the reader. Darkness unfolded to envelope him, the nearly empty, sun-shot darkness of interplanetary space.

“What’s so special about asteroid 1990SB?” Flash Hopkins of Skywise NewsNet — better known as SKYNN due to the minimal wardrobe of its anchors — posed the leading question. Tacoma had heard the line so many times it barely registered.

The newscaster floated beside a nondescript chunk of rock in the outer belt. Her long curly hair framed yellowish eyes and a delicate straight nose, a face more Caucasian than not, though her skin was as dark as Tacoma’s. She claimed to be a direct descendant of Lightning Hopkins, but he believed she had bought her color and more than likely her figure as well. He knew himself well enough to realize that his lack of sexual appetite for the better part of seven years was due to the juxtaposition of her image with his son’s death, and he resented the loss. He struck back the only way he could by labeling her a fake. He only wished he could also call her a liar.

“…no dome,” she continued her spiel. “Its sole inhabitant is a man obsessed with artificial life, self-replicating machinery. Andrew Newport broke contract with Pallas Industrial Complex several years ago and escaped from a nanotech research facility to continue his work out here, free of corporate constraints.”

The view shifted and came to rest with the hull of a warship in the foreground. “Today Pallas Athena moved against Newport, claiming that she held contractual rights to his work. Another shift, to a three-dimensional plot that rendered the arrival of the Athenian battle group in familiar symbols of velocity and acceleration, ship type and mass. Jason’s Longshot was already highlighted in preparation for what would come.

“As the battle group closed with 1990SB, Newport launched a prototype of his work, a self-replicating robotic ramjet. A fighter piloted by Jason Washington was in a position to intercept it, but was destroyed in the attempt.”

There. That was it, pure and simple: destroyed in the attempt. But still the tactical plot moved in slow counterpoint to her words, the Longshot breaking from its station at the periphery of the battle group and arrowing after the escaping spacecraft. A conical ramfield opened ahead of the vessel, an electromagnetic scoop that funnelled protons from the solar wind into the core of the spacecraft where they were fused into a stream of light, a rushing roar of heat and power.

In the tactical plot, the spacecraft began to accelerate away from the Longshot. That should have been the end of the matter; the Longshot was not yet in missile range, and now never would be. But for some perverse reason known only to itself, the spacecraft turned until its star-hot exhaust came to rest squarely on the Longshot, which slowly, by degrees, became an inanimate object. Then the spacecraft turned again, still accelerating, but now on a heading that would take it out of the solar system.

“In a related item,” Flash droned on in the background, “Newport’s spacecraft may have grave consequences for an interstellar expedition launched seven years ago. The superior performance of its ramjet engine will allow it to reach Alpha Centauri thirty-seven years ahead of the Confive starship…”

It was as if, Tacoma thought, Newport had carefully considered how he could most hurt him. First Jason, and then the very mission for which Tacoma had left his family in the first place. Well, what goes around comes around, and he was going to personally see to it that the ramjet’s end came around pretty damn quick. Maybe then he could get back to living his life. He rose from his desk, reaching for the workstation’s switch.

“…and that’s the Naked Truth,” Flash wrapped up the newscast with SKYNN’s traditional closing line just before he extinguished her.

#

He wore his dress uniform to the bridge, feeling a need for formality. The events recorded in the Santa Maria’s log would be duly relayed back to the solar system and scrutinized for years to come. This was, after all, humanity’s first interstellar battle. His staff seemed to have come to the same conclusion, as they were also clad in the maroon uniform of the expedition instead of the usual motley collection of shorts and sweatshirts.

He nodded easily to them as he worked his way around the cluster of consoles to his own position. The consoles faced inwards, and at the center of the hexagon they formed was the main holographic display, a stage for the drama they had come together to enact. As he strapped himself into his seat, the communications officer caught his attention.

“We’ve received a transmission from Pallas Industrial Complex, sir.”

Tacoma glanced up, brows drawn together. “What does it say?”

The communications officer glanced over to Clay. The cyberneticist cleared his throat. “It was addressed to you, sir,” he said. “But judging by the size and structure of the file, I’d guess it’s some kind of semi-intelligent construct.”

Tacoma nodded slowly. “All right. Put it on the main display.”

The AI was clad in period costume, crested helmet, bronze armor and leather kilt. Pallas floated above her like a pitted moon and cast an ethereal light on her features. If she were a real woman, Tacoma would have thought her beautiful, in an icy sort of way.

“Captain Washington,” she said with a faint smile.

“Hello, Athena.”

“It’s a pleasure to see you again.” Her gaze swept over the rest of the bridge. “Though I’d prefer a private setting.”

“We don’t have the facilities, I’m afraid,” he lied. He wished Athena had just sent a plain message instead of this puppet, which he wasn’t inclined to indulge any further than necessary.

“Very well,” she shrugged. “I’d like to apologize for not replying to your requests for information on the fate of your son, but it has been a busy time for me.”

“War is seldom tranquil,” Tacoma said, an edge to his voice. He well-remembered newscasts of Athena’s ramjets maneuvering against Confive’s torchships. There had been inevitable comparisons with warfare of the previous century, and in his memory grainy film clips of Pearl Harbor formed a two-dimensional backdrop for the holos. As wave after wave of Japanese aircraft pounded the American fleet in the background, so Confive’s fleet had been decimated by Athena’s ramjets.

“My war with Confive is long over, Captain,” Athena replied. “My energies have lately been absorbed by another pursuit, one very much concerned with the spacecraft that is about to overtake you. Releasing the information you requested could have compromised my efforts. However, a turning point has been reached that allows me to end my silence on the matter.”

She studied him for a moment before continuing. He waited stoney-faced, uncomfortably aware of the presence of his staff.

“I am about to launch my own ramjet expedition for Alpha Centauri. It will, I’m afraid, overtake you. However, it will not overtake Newport’s ramjet.” She looked down thoughtfully, choosing her next words with care. “I cannot overemphasize the risk that Newport’s ramjet poses to both of our expeditions. Its progeny could overrun the Centauri system before either of us arrive. It would be best for all concerned if it were never given the chance to reproduce.”

“Might I assume,” Tacoma said, “that the ships in your expedition are also self-replicating robots?”

“That is in fact the case,” Athena admitted. “And all the more reason for you to listen to me. If you don’t destroy Newport’s ramjet, you may arrive in the midst of a war between the descendants of my expedition and his, a war in which you have little to gain and much to lose. I can’t predict the reaction of my descendants to your arrival, but I doubt they’d be overly concerned about your safety if they were fighting for their own survival. On the other hand, if you were to destroy Newport’s ramjet, I can guarantee you a place in the empire they will build.”

Tacoma nodded, absorbing the implied threat. He had the unpleasant sensation of walls closing in on him.

“I don’t expect a reply now,” Athena said, “and considering the limitations of my current incarnation, it would be meaningless anyway. Your actions will tell the tale. But as a gesture of my goodwill, I’m willing to extract the log of the Longshot from my memory. If you will release the storage space…”

Tacoma gave the nod to Clay, and Athena closed her eyes for a moment.

“Please consider my request carefully, Captain Washington,” she said when she was through. “Good luck, and I hope we meet again in favorable circumstances.”

Her image faded from the display, leaving the emptiness of interstellar space in its place, broken only by the markers that showed the Santa Maria’s position and that of the approaching ramjet. Two hours remained before the Santa Maria’s fusion torch came on line. Two hours to decide the fate of an unborn empire. Tacoma smiled grimly at the thought.

It was clearly in their best interests to follow his original plan, better to deal with a known evil than an unknown one, better to arrive to a system at peace than one at war. But the truth of the matter was that he didn’t want a place in Athena’s empire. More than anything else, he wanted a new world untouched by the hand of man or his creations. But it didn’t look like he was going to get it. It would be a hollow victory when he destroyed Newport’s ramjet, barely worth the effort.

“Sir…” Clay began hesitantly, snapping Tacoma out of his revery.

“Give me access to the Longshot’s log,” he said, the words like iron in his mouth. He turned to the chief engineer. “I want an estimate of the probability of our torch destroying the ramjet — and a rundown of its offensive capabilities — within the next hour.”

“Sir,” Clay interjected, “there’s one thing you should know…”

“What is it, Mister Clay,” Tacoma said with thinly veiled impatience.

“The pilot of the Longshot” — your son, he did not say — “appears to have been fitted with a cybernetic implant.”

Tacoma blinked, wondering if Clay were simply trying to annoy him, to make a point in favor of the implants, or if there were some meaning hidden in this statement that he was supposed to grasp. The rest of the staff studiously ignored the exchange, heads bent to their tasks.

“The log is in sensorium format,” Clay continued, gazing into some interior space. His eyes refocused on Tacoma’s. “Sensoriums are taken straight from their originator’s nervous systems. They aren’t compatible with the main display devices here on the bridge. I can try to translate the audio-visual portion for you, but I can’t vouch for the accuracy of the result. And it’ll take some time.”

Tacoma suspected that there would be no more desirable choices in this game, only necessary ones. “That won’t be necessary,” he said, surrendering to the inevitable as gracefully as he could.

He touched the middle finger of his left hand to the smoothly rounded surface of his implant so the device could read his fingerprint. The transceiver behind the implant’s purplish lens began to receive and interpret the hidden signals that filled the bridge. Chevrons of rank and position superimposed themselves over the dark jewels of his staff’s implants. Mark of the beast, he thought bleakly. And it was in him too, like it or not.

He located the icon that represented the torchship’s main computer and blinked twice in succession to open a window on the computer’s file system. It only took a moment to locate the Longshot’s log; it was represented by a crisply detailed hologram of Jason in the window. He blinked at the icon to open it. Unexpectedly, the image turned and locked its gaze on his own, its eyes empty black portals to another world.

#

The cockpit of the Longshot was a cramped affair, little more than a pair of contour seats separated by a hatch that led down to the torchship’s living quarters. The second seat was empty, as usual. Some pilots went so far as to strip it out entirely, but Jason had left it in. Sometimes the pilot of a damaged fighter survived long enough to be picked up, and then the spare seat served a purpose.

There were no windows; windows could be broken, could admit dangerous radiation, were in short unnecessary liabilities for a fighting craft. A backup holographic display showed the essentials of his situation, group disposition and ship status, but the real action was in his head. His NeuraLogic implant turned him into a cybernetic organism in the truest sense, a finely-tuned balance of man and machine, with no clear line where one stopped and the other began. In fact it seemed to him that he was not in a spacecraft at all, but was a spacecraft, a metallic bird of prey.

Signals from the Longshot’s sensors were mixed and enhanced by the torchship’s computer to give him a peculiar wrap-around vision; he could literally see what was behind his head, as if he were a singular point of perception gliding silently through the night. The sun was down, because it was the nearest gravitational sink of any significance. The plane of the ecliptic formed a translucent green disk off to his right. Behind him, a tunnel of square frames shrank to a series of dots, a graceful arc that began at Pallas in mid-belt.

Ahead, the future was considerably closer at hand. Asteroid 1990SB was less than a light-second away and closing fast. The marker frames swept by him like mileposts, ticking off the time of his passage. The battle group had separated into two squadrons, the larger of which was already decelerating to match velocities and rendezvous with the asteroid. The smaller squadron, which included the Longshot, wouldn’t begin to decelerate until it had passed the rock. Its purpose was to soften the place up with a few well-placed missiles, and catch any flak the owner might be able to put out. Which suited Jason just fine; the lead elements of a battle group always got good news coverage, and he needed the advertising. Business had been slow lately.

He zoomed in on the asteroid until he could make out some detail. Athena had provided a detailed model of the target, so he knew what he was looking for: the muzzle of a large mass driver that had been disguised as deep crater. He summoned the model from memory and superimposed it on the image of the asteroid. It was the work of a moment to rotate the model until its contours matched those of the rock.

“Good workmanship,” he muttered to himself; the mass driver’s muzzle really did look like a crater, at least from this range. He marked the crater for a small five-kiloton nuke. He didn’t want to fry the base, just seal it up. Then he mixed the Longshot’s electrostatic sensors into visuals to look for power lines buried under the surface. A delicate skein of field lines surrounded the rock, pulsing larger as he watched.

He unlimbered the Longshot’s laser and fired an alert burst off to the squadron leader. A moment later a communications window opened beside the leader’s torchship.

“What’s up, Longshot?” Prostheses gleamed dully where the man’s eyes should have been, the price of an earlier contract that had gone sour.

“I’ve got a signature that indicates a mass driver launch.”.

“Are you in missile range?”

“Oh, I can hit the muzzle,” Jason said, studying the field lines. “But I don’t think the missile will get there in time.”

“Open fire,” the squadron leader said calmly. The Longshot shuddered as the nuke left its pod. Its gas-core fission motor scratched a purple after-image across Jason’s retinas.

At the pole of the asteroid farthest from the mass driver’s muzzle, the field lines began to collapse. Jason shook his head. The launch was under way; the capacitors buried deep within the asteroid were discharging their energy into the mass driver’s electromagnets. He reoriented the Longshot and brought its torch on line. Weight settled over him as the fighter began to accelerate.

“Longshot, what the hell are you doing?”

Jason kept his eyes on the rock as the field collapse rippled up towards the muzzle. A moment more…

A silvery object flashed from the maw of the false crater. In a moment, Jason had acquired the object on his radar, and verified that his velocity vector was swinging around to match. “On intercept,” he said. He raised his eyes to meet the squadron leader’s scowl. “Sir.”

“Proceed,” the man said after a moment. “If it looks like it’s going to get away — or get in the way, for the matter — destroy it. Otherwise, I want it back in one piece, near as possible.”

The com window closed as the link was terminated from the other end. Jason allowed himself a smile. He was right on cue today, no doubt. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a flare of light as his missile sealed the mass driver’s muzzle. Well, he amended the thought, almost on cue. He swung the laser around and tapped lightly on the spacecraft.

“Knock knock…” No answer. He stepped up the laser’s intensity and tapped again. At this range, it wouldn’t do any significant damage, but it might get their attention. “Hello in there, anybody home?”

A com window opened on the image of a young woman, and behind her some kind of a park or forest. Definitely fake, you can’t put a forest in a forty-meter ship, but at least she had the courtesy to let him know it right up front. “This is Ariel Newport,” she said. “What do you want?”

“This is Jason Washington, commander of the Longshot, in the service of Pallas Industrial Complex,” he droned out the longest greeting he could think up, meanwhile watching the com link monitor. No security that he could detect. He paged through his catalog of viruses and worms and picked a likely candidate, impressing it on his carrier.

“I’ve been directed to recover your ship if possible,” he continued, “and destroy it if not. I believe it is in your best interests to surrender now, turn control of your vessel over to me, cease and desist, etcetera.” A beep from the console told him that the worm was in. “Comprendez?”

“I’m afraid that’s entirely impossible,” she said. “Furthermore, I think it’s in your —”

A line of static zagged through the com window as the worm took control of her communications system.

“— in your —” The window broke clean in two, the upper half containing her image, the lower a status report from the worm.

“Damn it,” she cried, “what are you —” And her image blanked out as she isolated herself from the com system.

Jason whistled tunelessly as he loaded another program into the com link, his own simulacrum this time. “If you want the job done right,” he commented to her empty window, “you’ve got to do it yourself.”

As if in reply, Ariel launched a missile. Oddly, it fled ahead of her coasting vessel, away from both it and the Longshot. Jason shook his head, thinking she must be badly rattled.

The missile detonated ten kilometers ahead of the spacecraft. Its shaped nuclear charge created a jet of plasma that lanced back through the hollow core of the vessel. Jason frowned at the image, trying to make sense of it. An intense electromagnetic field opened up ahead of the spacecraft, opened like wings of light that strained against the tenuous solar wind.

He glanced at the link monitor. His simulacrum was almost in.

Starlight swirled in the throat of the vessel, the first sparkles of fusion snapping static across the radio bands. The ramfield strengthened, and the inrushing plasma ignited in a full-spectrum roar of heat and power. The ramjet’s exhaust swept towards him like fire across the sky. The last thing he saw was his own simulacrum looking at him through the upper window of the com link. He wondered, as the killing fever rose to still his thoughts, if there was a hint of sadness on its face.

#

The sensorium withdrew slowly from Tacoma’s mind like a falling tide that leaves the beach naked to the hot sun. By degrees he became aware of his surroundings, and glanced mechanically at a clock. Half an hour until intercept. They would light the Santa Maria’s torch soon.

“All right,” he said. “All right. What’s our status?”

His communications officer spoke first. “We received a transmission from the ramjet, while you were reviewing the log. It’s straight audio/visual, nothing complicated.”

“Put it on.”

“It was addressed to you specifically,” the officer cautioned.

Tacoma nodded, feeling as if a wind had blown through him and swept out all his secrets. There was nothing left to hide. “That’s fine.”

Once again an image formed in the central display. With the shock of unexpected recognition, Tacoma realized it was Jason. His heart sank. Was there nothing simple in this life? Couldn’t his friends be on one side and his enemies on the other, and not all mixed up so he couldn’t even tell them apart?

“Father,” the image spoke, “forgive me for not sending a message earlier. Our laser was damaged when we escaped from the Sol system, and we couldn’t reach you until now. That’s why we intercepted you instead of heading straight for Alpha Centauri; I didn’t want you to spend the next seventy-odd years worrying about us.”

Tacoma’s eyes narrowed. The explanation was barely plausible. If the ramjet had headed straight for Alpha Centauri, its closest approach to the Santa Maria would have been thirty-five astronomical units, too far to send a message with a damaged laser.

“We also received Athena’s transmission,” Jason continued, “and while it’s true there was a battle, she lied about which side I was on. Andrew Newport was my friend; I helped him build this ship. Athena wants you to destroy us because we’re competitors. We’ll be dug in by the time she reaches Alpha Centauri, and she’ll never get her empire off the ground with us there.

“She says we have self-replicating machinery, but in fact, the only thing we have is people, just like you. She developed self-replicating machines herself, and then set us up to take the heat. It’s always better to be second.” His grin was heart-achingly familiar, and Tacoma felt the first painful stab of hope that somehow this might be real.

The first phase of the program that Tacoma had loaded that morning kicked in, awakening the ship’s fusion engine from its long slumber. Cryogenic deuterium flowed through preheater lines, state changing from liquid to gaseous to plasma on the way to the fusion chamber. Tacoma keyed a hold into the count-down. The ramjet was ninety light-seconds out; there was still time to think this through.

“Comments?” he asked his staff, his throat unpleasantly dry.

The chief engineer spoke first. “There’s no way that ship could be manned, Captain. Its ramfield generator would scramble any chordate’s nervous system. And for that matter, they’d have a hard time coping with the radiation from the engine itself; it’s pretty damn hot.”

Clay cleared his throat. “I took the liberty of reviewing the Longshot’s log too. That message could’ve been produced by the simulacrum that Jason uploaded. If it failed to gain control of the ship’s computer system, it could have been subverted.”

“Open a link to the ramjet,” Tacoma told the communications officer. “This is Captain Washington of the Santa Maria.” Not your father, the captain of an enemy vessel. Remember that, Jason. “We have reason to doubt your statements. Our analysis indicates that your vessel is incapable of supporting human life. We suspect that you are a simulacrum, and that Athena’s account is closer to the truth than yours.”

It took three long minutes for the message to reach its destination and the reply to return. At last Jason’s image came to life again. “You’re right that the ramjet doesn’t have a viable life-support system. We’re all in suspended animation, packed into cargo bays like sardines. It feels like I’m alive, but in fact ‘I’ am just a simulacrum, put here to mind the shop until the real thing wakes. I sometimes wonder what that will be like; we don’t know how to reintegrate a simulacrum with its source.”

He fell silent for a moment, eyes downcast as he thought about it. “Well. I’m sure there will still be work for me to do. So. Following this message I’ll send the schematics of the ramjet, and technical data on suspended animation too. It’s pretty simple; you may be able to use it onboard the Santa Maria. What else can I do to convince you?”

Tacoma rubbed his temples as the data transfer flickered through the display. One of them — Jason or Athena — was lying. Or both of them, for that matter. And he was running out of time. He spoke without looking up. “Life support, check out the suspended animation data, tell me if it’s reasonable. Engineering, verify the schematics. Cybernetics…” He looked up at Clay. “Tell me how close a simulacrum can be to the original.”

The cyberneticist shrugged. “It depends on how long it was incubated. The basic technique is to lock a neural net onto a host nervous system. Over time it acquires virtually all of the host’s characteristics. From what I’ve seen, I’d guess Jason was fitted with an implant early on. Adolescence, more than likely. So his simulacrum may have been very good by the time he, uh…”

“Died,” Tacoma finished the sentence for him. “If you can call it that.”

“Yes.”

The life-support officer caught his eye. “The suspended animation data looks good to me, sir. We won’t know until we try it, of course. But it’s theoretically sound, if a little radical.” He shook his head. “Vitrification. I’d have never thought of that.”

Tacoma turned to the chief engineer. She raised her hands in a gesture of bafflement. “I don’t know. It could be a pack of lies, but if so, they’re consistent lies. I still think the radiation would be a problem, though, suspended animation or not.”

“They have cellular repair mechanisms,” the life-support officer responded. “They’re an integral part of the vitrification process that —”

Tacoma held up a hand to silence him. “That’s enough,” he said. And then more gently, “Thank you both.”

He glanced down at his console. The fusion engine was hot and ready; the guidance system was tracking the oncoming ramjet. All he had to do was touch a key to open up the engine’s magnetic nozzle and release a relativistic jet of plasma, a lance of fire. He had no doubt what the result would be: an expanding cloud of ions, bright with carbon and silicon, glowing and then fading in the night where a ship had once been.

But he couldn’t do it. Regardless of whether or not Jason’s simulacrum was telling the truth, the only thing that was left of his son was onboard the ramjet, somewhere in the gray land between man and machine, life and death. He really didn’t have to analyze it any further than that to know what he had to do. He aborted the program.

When he looked up from his console, he found Clay watching him.

“So you believe that Jason is in suspended animation.”

Tacoma pieced together his thoughts, trying to create a chain of logic that would explain his actions. “You remember the Turing test?”

Clay nodded. “Put a computer in one room and a man in the other, and let them talk to each other. If the man can’t determine that he’s not conversing with another person, then the computer has passed the Turing test.”

“And if it passes,” Tacoma said, “the computer is said to be sentient. But if the computer doesn’t know that it’s a computer, how can you say that it’s conscious or even self-aware? If Jason’s simulacrum had passed the Turing test — if it had believed itself to be a flesh-and-blood person — I might have destroyed the ramjet. But it knows it’s a simulacrum, so I can only conclude that it is as aware intelligent as I am. And it doesn’t really matter whether or not I believe that Jason or anyone else on the ramjet is in suspended animation. Maybe the simulacrum is lying in order to preserve itself, or maybe it’s telling the truth and ‘Jason’ really is onboard. Either way, it’s not my place to destroy it.”

Clay nodded slowly. “So what about Maria?”

Tacoma turned to the display that the AI habitually occupied. She was still there, watching him through narrowed eyes. There was more than one kind of exploration to be made on this journey. There were worlds without, but equally important were the worlds within. And what did it matter who had made them?

He cleared the locks he’d placed on her output channels. “I was wrong Maria. I’m sorry.”

She considered it long enough to make him wonder if the damage he’d done was irrevocable. Some things you can’t just take back, after all. But at last she sighed, and shook her head. “All right. Apology accepted. I’m still mad, but I’ll get over it.”

He relaxed slightly. “Good.” He took a breath, and then he took the plunge. If you’re going to do it at all, you might as well do it all the way. “Dinner tonight, in my cabin? It’s been a long time.”

She looked startled, and then a smile broke through her clouded face. “Yes,” she said, “that would be a pleasure.”

#

“You’re sure this will work?” Tacoma asked, examining the oblong capsule he held between his fingers. Such a small thing, for what it promised.

“You’re the last one,” Maria said. “It worked for everyone else. What, do you think you’re different somehow?”

He shook his head and smiled. “No, I suppose not.” He swallowed the capsule.

“Now lay down,” Maria said. And when he had, “Not different, Tacoma, but special.” She leaned down and kissed his forehead. “I’ll be here when you wake.”

It didn’t take long. The mechanisms in the capsule were the size of bacteria, and possessed the same replicative abilities. They rose like a tide through his body, entering cells and cross-linking the molecules they found there, blocking the natural machinery of metabolism. Yet as his cellular fires were extinguished by the advancing tide, Tacoma’s consciousness seemed to be buoyed upwards, until at last he stood whole and amazed outside his own body.

Maria was watching him gravely.

“The implant,” he said.

She nodded. “Yes. I had it incubate a simulacrum, over the last few years. I didn’t want to be alone. Are you mad at me?”

“I am… still myself.” He looked down at his hardening body. Trailing the first wave of cellular mechanics, a second was hard at work replacing water with a glycol packing that would vitrify into a material as durable as glass. “I won’t be able to go back, will I?”

“No, I’m afraid not.”

Sometimes life was so terribly one-way. He shook his head, surprised at the tears in his eyes. “Well. Tell me, are there places to explore here?”

She took his hand, her flesh solid and warm. “There are places and times beyond imagining.”

#

The Santa Maria decelerated into the Centauri system at a tenth of a gee, fusion torch blazing ahead like a brilliant headlight. For those who awaited its arrival, there was no mistaking the sign. They made ready the many houses they had built, and lit the welcoming hearth fires.

Deep within Tacoma Washington’s body, somewhere in the gray land between organism and machine, cellular mechanics rekindled the fires of his metabolism. Slowly, by degrees, he woke from his long dreamless sleep.

“There’s something you should see,” Maria said softly from beside his bed. Someone else stood behind her, but Tacoma couldn’t quite bring him into focus. He started to rub his eyes and winced as pain flared in his joints.

“I think I’ve gotten old,” he said. The ghost image had disappeared.

“There’s probably some residue left from the vitrification. Your mechanics will finish sweeping it out in a day or two. Stay where you are, and I’ll shift us.” The room dissolved around them as she linked the ship’s sensors to his implant, leaving them drifting together on the outskirts of the Centauri system.

“Any opposition yet?” he asked.

Maria shook her head minutely. “Nobody else passed us. I guess Athena didn’t like the odds, after we let Newport’s ramjet go by. According to the newscasts, she launched for Tau Ceti instead. Virgin territory.”

“At least we won’t be caught in the cross fire. What about Newport?”

“Take a look at the asteroid belt,” she said.

All he could see at the present magnification was a tracery of faint, gauzy lines. “What is it, a ring system? Like Saturn, but heliocentric?”

She tapped a zoom control on one of the virtual consoles arrayed around them. The indeterminate gauze resolved into wide-looping chains of tiny cylindrical beads. The chains resembled nothing more than strands of blue-green algae, primitive colonies of one of the earliest forms of life. Tacoma brought up a scale indicator and frowned. On average the beads were six kilometers long, two in diameter.

“Those aren’t natural,” he said flatly.

“No, they’re not.” Maria’s eyes were steady on his.

“Newport’s ramjet,” he said tentatively, and then stopped. The thought was too big.

“Built them,” she finished it for him. “Is building them now. Instead of replicating itself exactly, the ramjet changed its design, mutated itself. To build habitats.”

“But why?”

“For us. For you. There aren’t any habitable planets in the system, Tacoma. We’ve got the equivalents of Venus and Mars, but nothing in between.”

Tacoma’s heart sank. The telescopic data hadn’t been conclusive, but it had looked promising. But they weren’t fools; they had brought all the gear they would need to mine an asteroid belt and resupply the torchship. Even build a habitat, eventually, for their children.

“We could have made our own way,” he said, gazing at the immense, intricate chains.

“Yes,” Maria replied simply.

He sighed. “It never works out quite the way you think it will, does it?” He shook his head. “There must be thousands of them.”

“Millions,” she said. “More than you could explore in a hundred lifetimes.”

And what did it matter who had made them? He turned to the myriad small tasks required to wake the crew and bring their long journey to an end. They were coming home.

– Copyright © 1992 Doug Franklin