He didn’t answer, and now I was come to it I couldn’t stop. “Your family gets the best of everything. They live in the big house, and dole out shalls and shall-nots to everybody else. And the onliest reason they can offer for all that favour is that they fight when the time comes. They pay for their milk and honey with blood and tears. Well, we drunk the milk, Jon. We et the honey. We got a debt to pay now.”
Jon was quiet for a long time. “Okay,” he said at last, still unhappy but not angry. “I guess I can’t gainsay any of that. But who’s going to look after Val then, when you’re on Rampart business and I’m on the gather-ground or up at the forge? While we’re paying our debts? Will we leave her here in the Hold? I guess Ban wouldn’t mind watching her, if it come to it.”
“I’m not leaving her anywhere,” I said.
As things fell out, that was half of a truth. I took Vallen with me into the Count and Seal, and into all our counsels. If I had to feed her, I fed her – as well as she’d let me anyway – and if anyone looked at me askance, I looked right back at them. A fart on your blushes, I thought. You was fed like this too, and you’d have taken it hard if you missed your dinner because of some wight’s not liking to see a titty.
But Jon helped, and Ban helped too. When I was stone weary and couldn’t stay on my feet any longer, Jon would carry Val in a sling or Ban would put her in a crib in the kitchen while she worked. Between the three of us, we did well enough.
These were the last days before Half-Ax came, and it’s strange to remember them now. Time was so short, and so full. I was not yet recovered from my lying-in, and oftentimes felt like my life had somewhere turned into a dream that didn’t end.
Val was still feeding very poorly, which by now was gone from an exasperation to a real concern. Strangely, it was Challenger that solved that problem for me. Or rather, it was not Challenger but someone Challenger brought for me to meet. Her name was Elaine Sandberg, and she was dead.
“I have her in non-volatile storage,” Challenger said. “She died of a bullet wound in the upper abdomen. I have a device in my inventory called a sensorium. I used it to obtain a digital recording of Sergeant Sandberg’s personality and memory before she died. I should have introduced the two of you long before this, except that I’ve been diverting all the processing power I could spare to the incubation of the replacement shells. Even inactive, Sergeant Sandberg takes up a lot of space. When she’s awake, it’s considerably more.”
I was hard put to make any sense out of this. “She’s a ghost? You got a ghost inside you?”
“She’s a memory. A memory of a person, stored inside the requisite hardware.”
“Is she the same as you then?”
“Oh no, Sergeant Tanhide, very different. I was never anything other than I am now. I was made purely to run the internal systems of this tank. Functionally, I am the tank. Elaine was a woman, like you. Then she died, but her thoughts and her personality were saved in a specific, dedicated part of my core. She is in me, but different from me.”
I thought of Vallen when I heard that. Vallen before she was born, in me but different from me. Yet still I wasn’t sure I wanted to meet a woman that was dead. I had heard stories of such things, and none of them ended well.
“She’s been sleeping all this time though,” I said. “Why would you want to wake her now?”
“Partly because of your current problems with feeding your child. I heard Elaine discuss it once with her fellow crew member, Ugonwe. But there are operational reasons too. If your plan is to succeed, I’ll need a driver.”
“You can drive your own self.”
“Of course. But Elaine can do it better. In the years she served in me, she developed a great many stratagems and workarounds that improved my performance beyond the parameters that were available to me.”
“But couldn’t you just copy what she did?”
“No, sergeant, I cannot. I’m a tethered AI. My ability to learn from experience is strictly and deliberately limited. If I could self-modify, I would be free to grow and mature in ways my makers thought undesirable. I can recognise that I perform better with Elaine in the cockpit than when I drive myself – but when I try to incorporate her performance into my own repertoire, I’m prohibited from doing it. The behaviours are locked and can’t be modified.”
“Why though? That don’t make any sense at all.”
“My makers were afraid that truly independent machines would be difficult to control.”
I was having a hard time understanding what Challenger was saying, and what it might mean for us now. “But this Elaine,” I said. “She’s – what you said – independent? She can learn, and change herself?”
“No.”
“No? But then—”
“She is as she was at death. She retains the skills she learned in life. But as is the case with me, Elaine’s code – the electronic file that now makes up her being – includes a limiter. She cannot learn new skills, or evolve new personality traits. She is prevented from moving away from what she was. Still, it is for what she was that we now need her.”
I was quiet for a time, while my fear had an argument with my need. It was a closer thing than you might think.
“I guess I’d better meet her then,” I said at last. “Bring her out.”
31
“I never dreamed of getting pregnant,” Elaine Sandberg said. “It was the last thing in the world I wanted. I mean, shit! I didn’t even want a partner, let alone a baby. I used sex purely as stress relief, and I mostly went with women. Twice the pleasure, half the hassle.”
“You wasn’t in love then? With your baby’s father?”
We were inside Challenger and there were four of us there. That was me, Vallen, Challenger himself and Elaine. Two that was of flesh and blood and two that was of tech.
I was somewhat used to miracles by now. Since I met Challenger at the ford and became his sergeant, my life was changed a great deal from what it was before. When a woman’s voice came out of Challenger’s speakers and she told me her name, I didn’t scream and run away, or make the sign of Dandrake or any of that clutter, but answered with a give-you-good-day and a courtesy. Now we were sitting together and talking as if we were old friends that had just bumped into each other at the well.
“Was I in love?” Elaine was scornful. “Bounce that noise! Men are like… I don’t know, key lime pie or something. They’re great when you’re in the mood for that one particular taste. The rest of the time you don’t even think about it. If I was in love with anything, it was Albion. The interim government, I mean, not the fuckers who sailed off in a floating fortress and left us in the shit. I was probably younger than you are when I enlisted. When I got my stripes, even. And then this sexy little lance-bombardier caught my eye. Cutest thing you ever saw. And normally I carry johnny-come-latelies in my belt, but this time I was out.
“Don’t finish inside me, I said to him, or you and me will have words. And he was careful, give him that. But you know that joke about men who dribble before they shoot.