Free Beyond the Rift by Peter Watts Page A

tried: there’s no record of Dix anywhere on the crew manifest until his mid-teens, when he just showed up one day and nobody asked about it because nobody ever ...
    “Look what you’ve made of him. He’s great at conditional If/Thens. Can’t be beat on number-crunching and Do loops. But he can’t think . Can’t make the simplest intuitive jumps. You’re like one of those—” I remember an earthly myth, from the days when reading did not seem like such an obscene waste of lifespan—“one of those wolves, trying to raise a human child. You can teach him how to move around on hands and knees, you can teach him about pack dynamics, but you can’t teach him how to walk on his hind legs or talk or be human because you’re too fucking stupid , Chimp, and you finally realized it. And that’s why you threw him at me. You think I can fix him for you.”
    I take a breath, and a gambit.
    “But he’s nothing to me. You understand? He’s worse than nothing, he’s a liability. He’s a spy, he’s a spastic waste of O 2 . Give me one reason why I shouldn’t just lock him out there until he cooks.”
    “You’re his mother,” the chimp says, because the chimp has read all about kin selection and is too stupid for nuance.
    “You’re an idiot.”
    “You love him.”
    “No.” An icy lump forms in my chest. My mouth makes words; they come out measured and inflectionless. “I can’t love anyone, you brain-dead machine. That’s why I’m out here. Do you really think they’d gamble your precious never-ending mission on little glass dolls that needed to bond.”
    “You love him.”
    “I can kill him any time I want. And that’s exactly what I’ll do if you don’t move the gate.”
    “I’d stop you,” the chimp says mildly.
    “That’s easy enough. Just move the gate and we both get what we want. Or you can dig in your heels and try to reconcile your need for a mother’s touch with my sworn intention of breaking the little fucker’s neck. We’ve got a long trip ahead of us, Chimp. And you might find I’m not quite as easy to cut out of the equation as Kai and Connie.”
    “You cannot end the mission,” it says, almost gently. “You tried that already.”
    “This isn’t about ending the mission. This is only about slowing it down a little. Your optimal scenario’s off the table. The only way that gate’s going to get finished now is by saving the Island, or killing your prototype. Your call.”
    The cost-benefit’s pretty simple. The chimp could solve it in an instant. But still it says nothing. The silence stretches. It’s looking for some other option, I bet. It’s trying to find a workaround. It’s questioning the very premises of the scenario, trying to decide if I mean what I’m saying, if all its book-learning about mother love could really be so far off-base. Maybe it’s plumbing historical intrafamilial murder rates, looking for a loophole. And there may be one, for all I know. But the chimp isn’t me, it’s a simpler system trying to figure out a smarter one, and that gives me the edge.
    “You would owe me,” it says at last.
    I almost burst out laughing. “What ? ”
    “Or I will tell Dixon that you threatened to kill him.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “You don’t want him to know.”
    “I don’t care whether he knows or not. What, you think he’ll try and kill me back? You think I’ll lose his love ?” I linger on the last word, stretch it out to show how ludicrous it is.
    “You’ll lose his trust. You need to trust each other out here.”
    “Oh, right. Trust . The very fucking foundation of this mission.”
    The chimp says nothing.
    “For the sake of argument,” I say after a while, “suppose I go along with it. What would I owe you, exactly?”
    “A favor,” the chimp replies. “To be repaid in future.”
    My son floats innocently against the stars, his life in balance.
    We sleep. The chimp makes grudging corrections to a myriad small trajectories. I set the alarm to