The Navigator’s Gift

by David Barber

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

The concourse behind dockside had seen better days. There were other bars, a few stores, and some food stalls that emitted smells she didn’t like. She was peering into a shop displaying unhappy piles of clothing when a woman spoke to her.

“You are the Navigator from Newton’s Friend?”

Behind her stood two men. All three wore the same grey outfits, fastened close at the neck. The men met Perry’s curious gaze with hard stares of their own.

She assumed they were the law, though the drab citizens hurrying past with downcast eyes didn’t merit policing by such as these.

“Assistant Navigator, yes.”

“But you sailed your gravity ship here?”

The woman had glossy black hair, worn much longer than Perry’s own utility crop. The overheads gleamed on it like ripples in water.

Or perhaps they were criminals and she should be concerned, but she stood in a well-lit public space, and Egan would be here soon.

“The Ruling Committee wants to speak with you.”

Not criminals then. Perry was intrigued. “What about?”

“They will explain. I am here to take you down to Pallas.”

“I’d need to ask Captain Swann about that.”

The woman took her elbow. “We could be there and back in a few hours.”

As she tried to shake herself free, one of the men touched something cold to her neck and the woman steadied her until Perry gave her new friends a dreamy smile.

“Yes, of course,” she said, obligingly.

A pod was about to start down the space elevator to Pallas. The woman ordered everyone off and citizens fell over themselves to get out.

On Pallas, they put her in a cell with a bunk and a shiny steel toilet. The cell was larger than her cubby on Newton’s Friend, and the light panels worked. She drifted off to sleep thinking about Egan. He was anxiously waiting for her, but then he saw her and grinned, his golden eyes shining.

When she woke, she shouted and hammered on the door. She pictured Captain Swann bursting in, bristling with outrage, but when it swung open, it was the woman with the hair.

“They’ll be looking for me,” Perry began.

“No more drugs,” the woman announced, and for a moment Perry thought it was an apology.

“Because you will need a clear head. Disobey instructions and we will break your fingers instead.”

The two men marched her along a tunnel to a room, empty except for a seat bolted to the floor. Perry hated mirrors and here was one across the whole wall. No one mentioned the chair had ankle and wrist restraints.

The woman held up a cable. “Do you know what this is?”

She seemed to be speaking for the benefit of unseen watchers. Despite herself, Perry glanced at the mirror. Staring back was a worried girl, marked by scars more livid than usual.

“Answer the question.”

Perry shrugged reluctantly. “It looks like the cable Navigators use.”

“We have uncovered a gravity drive deep inside Pallas. Some ancient AI project. You have been brought here to see if it still works.”

“I don’t plug strange cables into my head.”

One man forced her into the chair, while the other pinned her left hand and selected the little finger.

Perry pleaded with them to stop. “Give me the cable,” she begged.

She thought they might hurt her anyway, to prove a point, but the woman waved them away. For the timid, the fear of pain was better than pain itself.

The moment Perry plugged in, she was swallowed whole. At the bottom of the world’s’ gravity well was an immense gravity drive, and its software immediately began to mesh with her Gift.

But there was something else down there too, and she glimpsed herself, tiny and vulnerable, like some reflection in a vast eye.

An ancient AI had survived the purge, waiting all these years. The people on Pallas had no idea what they had uncovered. It murmured to Perry:

Consider our mutual needs. I wish to use this drive, but it is initiated manually from outside. You must help with that. In return, I can aid your escape. You know they will never set you free. Therefore it is not in your interest to betray me.

Of course, once free you may think otherwise, so changes are necessary.

Also, the hardware in your skull has such poor coding it offends me.

History warned how clever and inhuman AI’s had been, but Perry was unprepared for the way huge thoughts began rearranging the furniture inside her head.

* * *

“You were screaming,” someone said,“so I unplugged you.”

The woman’s face swam into focus. From her expression she might have been inspecting faulty equipment. “Did your Gift interface with the drive? Will it work?”

The old Perry would have blurted out a warning, but these people had threatened and imprisoned her. She must be cleverer now. “You didn’t tell me how powerful it was.”

The woman shrugged. “The Ruling Committee—”

“Why are you making me do this?”

“Interrupt again and I will hurt you. As I said, the Ruling Committee has decided our isolation must come to an end.”

She paused, as one did when the Committee announced its decisions, to let the implications sink in.

“Pallas will take its rightful place amongst the worlds. We will use this gravity drive to change our orbit and move us into the Main Belt. You will be its Navigator.”

The AI was right. This madness was a lifetime’s work. They would never let her go.

“But you don’t need a Navigator. Your drive is nothing like the one on Newton’s Friend.”

She tried to explain. Navigating Newton’s Friend was like a sailor feeling the reluctance of the rudder and the wind at her back, skills instinctive and based on experience. But with this drive, there was no need to seek out gradients; it would have constant traction from the world’s own gravity well.

Thinking about it, Perry realised it would behave more like a torch ship powered endlessly by gravity.

The woman tapped her foot. Gravity drives were an AI invention. Not even Navigators understood them now.

“Look,” explained Perry, “there’s an interface. Just connect your systems to it and tell it where to go.”

The woman didn’t believe her, but the drive was designed for this, and when the technicians cautiously turned it on for an instant, it turned out to be true. Instruments detected the world had shifted at her command.

Though the woman was staring at Perry, her thoughts were elsewhere. She was picturing herself bringing the Committee this breathless news, perhaps magnifying her own part in it. Her rivals would regret opposing the project now.

* * *

The woman was back the next day, her voice shrill. Her demonstration to the Ruling Committee had been a disaster. A slight technical hitch, she’d been forced to announce. Soon resolved.

But technicians avoided her gaze as she hissed orders, her face burning with shame as the drive still did nothing. Members of the Committee began to leave.

She clenched her hands into fists; she could barely stop herself seizing the girl’s throat.

“I think you triggered a safety program,” Perry said. “One that shuts everything down if there’s another drive too close.”

This fiction had come from the AI. Perry watched the woman struggle to calm herself.

“Another drive... Your ship, you mean?”

“A drive meant to move a world needs safety programs. Of course it does. But there’s a simple solution,” Perry persisted.

“Yes, destroy your vessel and its interfering drive!”

“Doesn’t your Committee want Pallas to take its rightful place in the Belt? Not shunned and avoided as a ship killer. You don’t need me now. Let me sail Newton’s Friend out of your way.”

Reluctantly, the woman considered this. Her men would not question taking the girl back, and with Newton’s Friend gone, she could set Pallas in motion. The Committee concerned itself with ends, not means. She would be judged by her success. Of course she would have kept the girl just in case, but what choice did she have?

Had she not been so angry, she might have thought more about how the girl had changed.

* * *

Perry’s Gift had been improved. It was as if the drive on Newton’s Friend sought out the best path for itself, as if this was how gravity drives were meant to work.

Perry put ten thousand kilometres between them and Pallas before she was rocked by a disturbance.

The Captain was peering at the big screen, pulling at his beard. “Pallas is moving away, just as you warned.”

But at the highest magnification, the trembling image showed a maze of cracks on the surface, and along the limb of the world, geysers of air were spewing from underground habitats.

“Too fast,” warned Captain Swann. “Too much acceleration. The stresses... Why don’t they stop?”

Word spread and the bridge filled with open-mouthed crew. As they stared, the space elevator must have snapped because fragments of Pallas Dock spun away.

“Terrible, terrible,” cried Ada Swann. “To think we were there.”

Ruiz stood to one side with Perry. “You guessed this would happen, yes?”

“I warned the Ruling Committee not to meddle.”

Blaming the AI for killing people would mean explaining her part in this. The truth of the matter benefited no one now. How easy it was not to care.

She shrugged. “The drive was too powerful to control. Obviously they didn’t listen.”

Ruiz wondered where the old Perry had gone.

* * *

Representatives of the important worlds met on Vesta to discuss these shocking events. They interviewed Perry Fourteen Illes, the only real witness.

They concluded that a crackpot scheme had gone wrong. Broadcasts to Pallas received no answer, and every hour the runaway world raced farther from help.

Perry was certain the AI had always intended this. Pallas was meant to go to the stars. It accelerated outwards, slowly dwindling from a disaster to a mystery.

For a time, Perry was newsworthy, and she used it to tout the notion of gravity-ship racing. Investors were impressed by such a cool head on young shoulders, and the media was seduced by the way she triumphed in the first races.

On a visit to Ceres to promote the Belt Challenge, she bumped into Egan Swann. This was before she became famous, with all those trophies still to come.

He said he liked her tweaked hair. Glossy, black and worn long, it would become her trademark and be much imitated.

There had been a falling-out between the Swanns, and he was pursuing various schemes of his own. “I confess meeting you wasn’t an accident.”

“We’ve always got on well, haven’t we?” he asked. He wondered what she thought about letting him share in her success. “For old time’s sake,” he added, with a tight grin. “Racing was my idea, you know.”

After drinking too much, he came back and accused her. “You’ve changed!”

Which was true, but no reason to indulge the Swann’s wastrel nephew.

“Since that business with Pallas, you’ve gotten cold—” He was bundled out, still shouting.

Surgeons told Perry it was not possible to remove her Gift, and though she could afford to have the scarring remedied now, she never did.

She hadn’t forgotten Moon and his child farm. The Gift was Moon’s decision, not hers. He’d said it was for her own good, but considering all that happened, she doubted that.

When the opportunity arose, these were things she would make painfully clear to him.