"Let's see... we've checked out several more sugar-rock claims."

"How much?"

"A few dozen more tons."

"Every little bit helps."

"Well, yes. But bringing them in is posing a challenge. Most are old mining claims off the treeways. We don't have much in the way of portable disa.s.sembly technology, and we only have a handful of tugs to bring them in with. We may not see much benefit from these claims in the end."

"Keep working on it. By the way, I appreciate your taking on the ice harvesting effort. Sean's up to his eyeb.a.l.l.s trying to get the warehouse bug distribution and energy systems back into repair."

"I don't mind. With Pearce providing security, my own people's a.s.sembly and distribution efforts are proceeding smoothly. Thus far."

"Very good. Thanks."

He lofted himself to the door. As he started to propel himself through the doorway, Jane said, "Aaron, wait!" She was thinking about her Voice.

He stopped himself at the doorjamb.

She wanted to ask him, Do you believe in G.o.d? I mean, really? Do you believe in G.o.d? I mean, really? Even after hearing the Voice, which felt realer than Even after hearing the Voice, which felt realer than she she did, she couldn't say she did. did, she couldn't say she did.

She knew Aaron was Christian-he always requested the requisite holidays off. That could be more for his family's sake than his faith. But she suspected that he was a believer. She had seen him in the break room, once, with his hands clasped, eyes closed, lips moving silently.

She thought better of it. "Never mind. Send Sean in, would you?"

"By all means. " He hesitated, and smiled. "I've been meaning to say, once this crisis is behind us, it's our turn to have you and Xuan over for dinner."

Jane returned his smile. She had always liked Aaron. No one worked harder, smarter, or with more integrity and dedication than he did. "Sounds great."

As a courtesy to Sean, who hadn't fully adapted to microgee, Jane lofted herself to her desk. He groped his way over and pulled himself into in the saddle opposite her workstation. She settled onto her own saddle, slipped her feet into the stirrups underneath the desk, and grabbed hold with her toes.

"What's the status of the Jove expedition?" she asked. They had just launched an emergency mission to Jupiter to mine ice from its moons.

"I have some buddies stationed on Europa, at the military base there. The North American Conference has now pledged their support, and the base has been authorized to give us clearance to land and mine a few thousand metric tons. I'm waiting for them to get the security checks finished, but my contacts are facilitating matters. They don't foresee any serious difficulties.

"It'll be almost eight weeks before I can get you a shipment, though," he said. "That hasn't changed. And it won't be enough to meet our needs for long. The nearest ice-laden rock coming Down after Ogilvie & Sons's is nearly four months away, even at maximum acceleration."

"Let's not worry about that now. You just get as much ice here as you can, as quickly as you can. Even if it doesn't get here in time to meet our needs, I can use it as a bargaining tool."

"All right."

"And the root cause a.n.a.lysis?"

"I'll have something by your meeting with Benavidez tomorrow."

"Good. Oh, expect a call from Val Pearce-I volunteered you and your HazMat team as deputies. We're beefing up security."

"All right," he said. His hand touched his side. She noticed the handle of a weapon under his jacket.

"You're armed?" she asked in surprise. He pulled out a military revolver, and looked at her. There was a law against carrying weapons inside Zekeston.

"It seemed the thing to do," he said. Jane hesitated, then waved him out. If anyone was going to carry an illegal firearm, she'd prefer it to be Sean.

Next came Tania. To Jane's surprise, she brought a young man with her whom Jane pegged immediately as a Downsider, in some indefinable way, though his movements were Upsider-sure. Slung over his shoulder was a large case on a woven strap. Tania had not informed her she was bringing someone else to the meeting. Typical Tania behavior.

"Whom do I have the pleasure...?" Jane asked, lifting her eyebrows pointedly. Tania waved a hand at her a.s.sociate. "Gabriel Thondu wa Macharia. He's a consultant I brought in to help us with our problem."

Jane guessed the young man must be from the moon; perhaps because his skin and eyes were very dark and his dress was high-quality wear, in a style she dubbed Earths.p.a.ce-casual. A plurality of Lunarians were of East African descent, and many were engineers or scientists. Most were quite well off, and the younger they were the more adventurous they were. Upsiders interested in traveling the solar system, helping solve technology problems to fund their travels, while satisfying their own wanderl.u.s.t.

She said to Tania, "So, this young man is here to solve our problem for us...?" The rest of her sentence-otherwise you are in deep trouble-hung unsaid between them.

Tania laughed. "Relax; I know what I'm up to. He's a Tonal_Z troubadour. One of the best."

A what? Jane suppressed a confused scowl, and brushed hands with the young man. Jane suppressed a confused scowl, and brushed hands with the young man.

"Looks like we've got us a feral sapient," Tania said.

Jane inhaled sharply. "Are you serious?"

"We've just confirmed," Tania told her. Jane glanced at the troubadour, who nodded.

Engineered artificial sapients had been around for nearly a century. Their production was tightly regulated. Feral sapients-those that emerged naturally within large computer systems-were vanishingly rare. Jane knew of only six over the past two hundred years. Only two had survived emergence: BigLox and FootSojer. All six had killed large numbers of humans.

The "sapients" used in their computer systems were not truly self-aware. Even designed sapients that got too smart became dangerous. But naturally occurring ones were far worse. If the lock failures were due to the emergence of a feral sapient, they had to extract it from their systems before it could do further harm.

"Five of the other six ferals have also emerged during a crisis," the young man said, with a Downsider accent strong enough that Jane had to strain to understand him. "I have been trying to establish communications with it. We made contact. Just moments ago."

"Here." Tania's fingers flew across an invisible thicket of commands. "I'm logging us in." Jane's visual connection went live. "Go ahead, Thondu."

The young man opened the case, pulled out a collapsible harp, and a.s.sembled it. It stood about half the size of a symphony harp, with a crisscrossed, double set of strings. He secured himself to the wall with Velcro, and slipped his feet into the straps on a set of pedals at its base.

"Excuse us a moment, will you?" Jane said over her shoulder to Mr. Macharia, and pulled Tania aside.

"What is all this business?" she said in a low tone. "What is a Tonal_Z troubadour? Have you lost your mind mind?"

"No offense, Boss," Tania countered, "but have you been living in a cave?"

Jane cast a look askance at her. "As a matter of fact, yes. I don't make it a point to track minor geek subcultures back on Earth. Tania, is all this really necessary?"

"Yes!" Tania sighed. "Tonal_Z isn't minor. It's been around for at least a couple of decades now. It's better known in Earths.p.a.ce, I grant you. It's a music-based language developed for communication with sapients. It solves most of the natural-language problems that we've been struggling with over the years. It's a huge deal. To make the best use of the most modern sapients demands high efficiency and rapid communications. Artificial sapients take to it like otters to water. Without Thondu, our ability to communicate with the feral would be greatly hampered. Trust me on this."

"OK, fine, but what's with the troubadour business?" She eyed the young man now tuning his harp.

Tania ran her fingers through her hair-Jane could tell she was having to suppress her own irritation. "It's part of the gig. They're computer programmers, fluent in Tonal_Z. A whole subculture has cropped up back on Earth. They're actually quite cool. They're hacker-musician-poets. They can fix just about any software problem you can think of."

Now that Tania mentioned it, Jane remembered a Downsider show she had caught an episode of, that included a troubadour.

"You have no idea how lucky we are," Tania said, "that Thondu happened to be traveling through. His ship was grounded by the crisis."

"All right, all right." Jane threw her hands up in acquiescence. "Let's get on with this."

They returned to Thondu, who gave Tania a querying look. She nodded. He played. His word-music dripped off the strings-plaintive, mellow, and exotic. Tania's interface provided a multimodal translation.

Info: I = MeatManHarper, sang his harp. sang his harp.

"Who is 'MeatManHarper'?" Jane whispered. "And what's with the pseudo-baby tech talk?"

Tania gestured at the troubadour with her chin. "MeatManHarper is Thondu's Tonal_Z nom de chanson nom de chanson. Tonal_Z is a creole. Very simple and regular grammatically. Simple verb structures make it easier to avoid confusion when you are talking to artificial ent.i.ties. We have so few things in common with sapients," she said. "Simplicity is crucial to avoid misunderstandings."

The young troubadour continued to play.

Info: I = at-place this, at-time this.

Query: [algorithms], you = at-place what, at-time this? That's all.

He repeated this whole sequence twice. As he stilled his strings, the interface lit up and sang on its own. Though Jane had been expecting it, it made her jump. Its wordsong spun out breathtakingly fast. She was surprised that the young man could keep up, but from his expression it was clear he understood. Her interface translated: Info: I = BitManSinger. I = at-place this, at-time this. Command: MeatManHarper, sing-talk more at-time this! That's all.

The young troubadour looked shocked. "It's named itself!" he gasped.

Tania looked thoughtful. "BitManSinger. It's named itself in juxtaposition to your name. Obviously, it has no gender ident.i.ty; it's borrowing your syntax." She turned to Jane. "If that means what I think it does, it's just reached a major milestone-it's figured out that there is a whole other world out here, not made up of data bits and mols. It also seems to have a taste for poetry," Tania said, while the young troubadour launched into a Tonal_Z poem-song.

"My G.o.d, this is incredible!" Jane burst out. "Come here, Tania. You, Mr., uh-"

"Call me Thondu," he sang in a gorgeous tenor, harmonizing with the tones he was playing. Jane's breath caught; how might the feral react to this intrusion of English into the song-poem? The tones of Thondu's harp were Tonal_Z words, though, as far as the feral would be concerned, so perhaps it would consider the English words to be background noise. "All right. Thondu, keep playing, will you?"

Jane ushered Tania into a small conference room next to her office. "Fill me in."

"We've got waveware tracers embedded all over the place," Tania whispered. "This is a smart one-it's rooted out several of them and has developed some sophisticated masking behaviors. It's been diverting more and more of the cl.u.s.ter's computing resources as it develops. But we've made progress tracking its activities. We should have it well enough mapped to attempt an extraction by tonight or early tomorrow morning."

Jane asked, "Why can't we just wipe it out? Like, now now."

Tania looked horrified. "Wipe out the first artificial intellect to have emerged naturally in over twenty peta-turings? You can't be serious!"

"Tania, my only priority is the protection of the people of this cl.u.s.ter. I'd kill any human human who threatened Phocaean lives, never mind a semi-sentient artificial construct!" who threatened Phocaean lives, never mind a semi-sentient artificial construct!"

Tania grew quiet. She did not look happy. But finally she nodded. "Yes. We could wipe it out, if we had to. But it's deeply embedded in our systems. In a very real sense, it is is our systems. Without laying the proper groundwork, we'll take out critical life-support functions. Or if we miscalculate its ident.i.ty boundaries or level of awareness, it could lash out in unpredictable ways and do irreparable harm. We have to study its responses and map it, no matter what course we take. It's a risk, but I truly believe that trapping it live and whole is our safest alternative." our systems. Without laying the proper groundwork, we'll take out critical life-support functions. Or if we miscalculate its ident.i.ty boundaries or level of awareness, it could lash out in unpredictable ways and do irreparable harm. We have to study its responses and map it, no matter what course we take. It's a risk, but I truly believe that trapping it live and whole is our safest alternative."

Jane eyed Tania, trying to gauge how biased this a.s.sessment might be by her desire to capture the sapient program. "How aware is it?"

"We don't know for sure yet. We have have identified its nucleus. This one seems to have a modified star-structure as its ego pattern. Typically, star-structures have high linguistic and a.n.a.lytical capabilities but low subjunctive intelligence. Therefore, their awareness isn't well-generalized." identified its nucleus. This one seems to have a modified star-structure as its ego pattern. Typically, star-structures have high linguistic and a.n.a.lytical capabilities but low subjunctive intelligence. Therefore, their awareness isn't well-generalized."

"Um, could you translate that into English? Is it as smart as a human? A monkey? A dog? A parrot?"

Tania frowned. "Comparisons with organic life are always misleading. It's a lot smarter than we are in some ways. It has volition. It has curiosity and... I guess what you could call the equivalent of a survival instinct. But it's probably a good deal less self-aware than we are. Roughly comparable to a lesser ape or a greater bird, if it's like most star-structure sapients; it doesn't grasp that there are self-aware ent.i.ties other than itself. It views us merely as autonomous processing modules and data structures, most likely, whose source code it hasn't learned how to access yet."

"How worried should we be about its ability to understand our communications?"

"Not much. Even if it could tap into our secured lines and process all of them at once, and if it could somehow derive its own natural-language processor-essentially impossible-or pirate a prototype when all the important research is being done a hundred fifty million miles away-also impossible-it simply doesn't have anywhere near enough contextual data to comprehend in real time all the ambiguities inherent in human language."

Jane frowned. "How can you be so sure?"

"Look, even sapients who have been around for a hundred years or more and have built-in, highly sophisticated learning capabilities have difficulty understanding human language on the fly. Too many inherent complexities exist. They bog down in all the combinations of potential meaning. They are logic processors at their core, and we are pattern recognizers. We think differently."

"I need something more tangible."

"We can run a couple of tests on its comprehension if you want us to. It may be self-aware, but it still has plenty of subsidiary processes that are not under its conscious control. We have a direct line into its psyche." And she grinned. Jeez, Tania, Jeez, Tania, Jane thought, Jane thought, the things you get off on. the things you get off on.

"Does it realize yet that it's dependent on us?"

"You mean, has it figured out that we can pull the plug?" This was the most dangerous point in dealing with an artificial sapient: when it realized it was vulnerable to the will of humans. "No, not yet. It's still very young."

"Has it figured out how to replicate itself?" Another danger point.

Tania shook her head. "No. Because it's not engineered, its ident.i.ty structures are diffuse and inefficient. It's cramped for s.p.a.ce, and we've ever so gradually begun limiting its access to peripheral areas. So its ability to extend itself is growing more constrained. Still, some of the things it has tried are suggestive."

"What is the risk that it could escape our systems?"

"Excellent question. A single trunk exits the city and the main control is in the Hub. We have restricted transmissions to brief, masked bursts on a random timetable. We are tracking every bit. We don't think the feral knows about it yet."

"Hmmm. Upside-Down can't be too happy about that." She was surprised that John Sinton, the local Upside-Down executive, had not been beating down her door.

"We have been getting a lot of calls from them," Tania admitted. "They've got good storage capacity, but they're close to maxing out. Things will get nasty quick if we don't get this feral out of our system soon. And we can't shut down communication with the outside world altogether, even if we blow Upside-Down off. Half our resource management operations are on the surface. It would cripple Sean's recovery efforts. We just need to trap it before it figures out how to escape."

"How long have other sapients taken to make such a conceptual leap?" Jane asked.

"Some figure it out within a few days of their emergence; others, never. This one is making strides in that direction, but I estimate that we have at least a day or two before it makes any such attempt."

"Can you challenge or distract it in some way?"

"Actually, that's exactly the wrong approach. Like humans, it learns best by being challenged. We've already challenged it by alerting it to our existence. The fact that it has just started calling itself 'BitManSinger' in juxtaposition to Thondu's 'MeatManHarper' means it has figured out that there's a world separate from its digital matrix. Which is a necessary precursor to begin attempting to manipulate things in our world. Before you ask, it was a calculated risk, and we are learning a huge number of things from this contact, so yes, it was worth it. But going forward, we need for it to feel as cozy and safe as possible."

"How aggressive are star-structure sapients?"

Tania's gaze flickered. "That depends."

"Tania, don't hold out on me."

"OK." Tania sighed. "This is the first star to have evolved naturally. There have been some instances of aggressive behavior among the engineered ones, but the cases I've found in the literature suggest that their aggression has been primarily defensive in origin."

"Um, that sounds contradictory, Tania."

Tania shrugged. "The best defense is a good offense. And we've caught this one very early in its development." Excited, she grabbed Jane's arm. "Can you imagine? We have a new order of feral artificial sapient! This is huge! This thing is the mother of all feral sapients. The research possibilities are phenomenal."

Trust Tania to be thrilled about one of the biggest threats the cl.u.s.ter had ever faced. "Keep your eye on the ball. The cl.u.s.ter's safety comes first."

"Of course it does." Tania looked offended.

"All right. Catching this critter becomes our top priority. You have access to whatever resources you need. I want you to proceed with mapping and extraction, but be prepared to pull the plug if things spin wry."