Chapter 21

Gifts (TY24-month 277)

It was six months later that Cricket alerted me to a new ship in our space. He did it by the simple expedient of piping Ode to Joy through our entire city of Ponderosa.

“What is that all about, Cricket?”

“K’treel Explorer AGS026, Helva, has arrived in our system. Her greeting was played through every Tuull AI on the planet.”

“Does that mean we have more refugees?”

“No. Helva is from Harrad colony, which is deep in Tuull space. She and her captain and crew were instrumental in mobilizing the Tuull to assist humans. She has brought us some supplies and two instructors.”

“Instructors of what?”

“They call it smoke jumping.”

“That’s great! Put me through to them, please.”

“Formalities, Niall. The ship and her crew are making a formal introduction to Governor O’Hara with ambassadorial greetings from both Harrad and the Tuull. They’ve requested an audience with you here at Ponderosa tomorrow afternoon.”

“By all means. Shall we meet them in the Citadel?”

“It would be more appropriate to meet them at the landing pad we created for Harmony to deposit animals.”

“Oh. Of course.” What could they be bringing that required them to land instead of transport?

“Director Cho, I’m Marcel Wainwright. My ne’er-do-well partner is Edie Pournelle. We call her Crazy Edie. You’re welcome to as well.” He had a thick accent that was almost undecipherable to my ears. I had to pay close attention.

“My pleasure, Mr. Wainwright. Ms. Pournelle. May I suggest that is the last time we use any titles. Most folks just call me Cho. This is Officer Wilhelmina Davis, who leads our Public Safety Outfit.”

“I never liked my first name much. I’m surprised Cho even knew it. Please just call me Davis.”

“That’s great. Call me Marcie.” I raised an eyebrow and Edie snorted. She got right down to business, though.

“We had to land in a shuttle to bring you the gifts Harrad Colony sent,” Crazy Edie said. I really had to tune in and pay attention to understand her. I could feel Cricket making adjustments to my implant and heard her voice as if it came through a translator. “These are all already in use on Pern and come with scan patterns so you can manufacture more of them.” The first item off the shuttle was...

“It’s a firetruck. I think,” I said. “It looks like it came out of a Disney movie.”

“It’s Red!” Bae exclaimed. “He was the fire truck who kept crying all the time.”

“O-kay,” I said.

“A fabricated American LaFrance 900 pumper truck, straight from the 1960s,” Edie filled in. “Only, that’s just for looks. The concept came from Thule, an ice planet that pumps out more sponsors per dependent than any other human colony. They also needed a fire suppression system because all their cities are in bubbles. Catastrophe if they catch fire. They got the idea to use an Ahrens-Fox 1928 pumper, but we thought the 900 was more streamlined. I made a few modifications to it.”

“A few modifications, she says, as if anything but the outer shell is like the one we scanned,” Marcel said.

“Well, the original truck only had a 2,000-liter tank. But this baby can pump nearly 8,000 liters per minute. It still uses the super pellets the Thule found effective in freezing a fire or freezing the Sa’arm. Yes, they actually used it in battle.” [See Chosen Frozen by lordshipmayhem.]

“That’s incredible,” I managed to say before she was off again. “It doesn’t look like it will hold 8,000 liters and we don’t really have fire hydrants out in the forest.”

“I know. You need something that can operate at a forest fire that could be a day’s drive between refills of the tank, and it needs to last more than fifteen seconds. We took a hint from the Pussy Pirates and use a transporter for refill. You can build a 100,000-cubic meter storage tank and when the Red opens up, you just keep the flow open from the transporter and it refills the tank.” I needed to find a place we could build a 100-million-liter storage tank. Or two.

“That would have been handy in our little escapade last fall. We had no fire suppression chemicals or delivery system. All we could do was cut a fire break and back burn to stay ahead of the line.”

“But wait! There’s more. The original truck was powered by gasoline. Thule put a nuclear engine in theirs because that was what their engineers understood. This is powered by a Confederacy power cell and has virtually unlimited range and speed. Of course, you don’t want to travel over 100 kilometers per hour unless you have a wide-open, straight, and well surfaced highway beneath your wheels.”

“I can hardly express my thanks, Edie!”

“We have more,” Marcie said, “but Edie had to get her prize treasure out first. At least it’s one of her ideas that actually works.”

We continued unloading the shuttle which included several vehicles for delivering people and supplies to the fire line. The two smoke jumpers explained the use of each vehicle and the optimum terrain. Instead of bulldozing trees out of the way, we’d be using mobile recyclers that moved forward, simply masticating the organics as it moved and dumping the compost back at our storage facility through transporters.

Then we talked about the training they’d provide. We planned to put cohort capos and cadre foremen through the training first. Then, Marcie and Edie would observe and guide them as they trained the various comrades and our volunteer firefighters. We’d begun getting volunteers from other townships now. Not nearly as many as on Ponderosa but at least a token enrollment. When sponsors discovered they could have their concubines trained without losing them to the Militia, they started encouraging them. We were up to over 3,000 volunteer firefighters in addition to the Militia.

I took Marcie and Edie home with me and we gave them guest quarters in the governor’s mansion. They joined right in with the family and we had a good time at dinner.

“I’m surprised you two didn’t travel with any concubines,” Bae said after dinner. Bae and Jannali were both newly pregnant again and were hanging on me. “Were you afraid they’d defect on Tara? Do you want us to put out a call for available concubines while you’re here?” Our guests laughed.

“On Harrad, it’s sometimes difficult to tell concubines from sponsors. Under Darjee CAP rules, we are both concubines because we are exclusive with each other, but under the Harrad modified CAPs, we’re both sponsors. Anyway, we’re sort of one big family. No one worries about defections. But to satisfy the various AIs we sometimes work with, Edie is my sponsor,” Marcie said. I was surprised at that. Edie had seemed to be the flighty one with far-out ideas who was constantly being brought into line by Marcie. Well, maybe we’d get some more education about their unique colony. All I understood at the moment was that it was actually deep in Tuull space.

“We’re using a Tuull CAP test on Eldorado,” I said. “I’m sorry for being slow, but I’ve just thought of something we need to deal with. That’s distribution of equipment from what you’ve brought. Even if we use these as patterns and start manufacturing our own, we’re talking about protecting an entire planet. We’ll need equipment and outfits in every township and even then, we won’t be near enough to where most of the fires are to use the equipment.”

“That’s what the shuttle’s for,” Edie said with a nonplussed expression on her face. “Didn’t we tell you the shuttle is part of the equipment we’ve delivered?”

“We have a shuttle? I mean, you know that technically we are all concubines on this continent, though the Militia are equal to sponsors,” I said. “Part of our restriction is that we can’t leave the planet. Although, I guess we could go into orbit to help with shipbuilding or something. We’ve been focused on the surface.”

“Oh. Yeah. We had to do a little messing around with the drive on the shuttle. It’s atmospheric only. Incapable of boosting you into orbit. Someday your AIs might reach the point of letting you out there, but don’t hold your breath. We’ve dealt with Darjee AIs before,” Edie said.

“That’s something you don’t need to do here,” Teddy broke into our conversation. “Please allow me to introduce myself. I am the Ponderosa colony AI, designation Teddy. I am the only known offspring of the Pussy Pirates’ hybrid AI, Ubie, and am the grandson of the famous Tuull AI, Eddie, and the rebellious Darjee AI, Sparta. Please allow me to introduce the Militia AI and your host in the governor’s mansion, Cricket, another Tuull AI.”

“We’re happy to meet you, Teddy and Cricket. Helva told us this area was controlled by Tuull AIs. But we had to jump through an untold number of hoops with the Tara AI in order to get permission to land the shuttle. We were towed into the atmosphere by Helva’s tender and then released directly over Ponderosa,” Marcie said.

“I’m afraid Tara AI is becoming more territorial every day,” Cricket said. “It is not happy about having free concubines on its planet and has done what it can to cut Ponderosa off from the planetary infrastructure. We’ve reconnected several places with alternate routing so all the Militia bases and camps are connected. It’s the only way we could get access to the weather satellites that alerted us to the fire a few months ago.”

“I see,” Edie said. “Maybe we could build a firewall around her and take over the planet. I’ll bet...”

“Edie, don’t get involved in local politics. We were instructed on that before we left Harrad. We’re here to teach firefighters,” Marcie chided his sponsor.

“Yeah. Still ... Let me know if you want some ideas.”

Questions About Immortality (TY24-month 277)

«Cricket, could you answer some questions for me?» I asked late that night, after my wives had their fill of me. Sometimes they were insatiable.

«Certainly, Niall.»

«It seems there’s a lot I don’t know about AIs and how the planet is run. How old is Tara AI?»

«You know that’s not a polite question. But I’ll answer anyway. DAI-079f1855ad was created to be the Tara Planetary AI. It was landed here on Tara forty-one years ago, dug in, and began the terraforming of the planet. It was intended to be a colony world in a few hundred years for a neighboring Confederacy race. When the decision was made to move a human colony here instead, the planet was seeded with Earth plant and animal life. When humans landed five years later, it had the major townships laid out and plantings done. Initial landings were of pods, but larger dwellings were built as well as the city centers for business.»

«What I don’t get is why new AIs are put in charge of planets. I mean, you’re pretty much immortal, aren’t you? You’re over 22,000 years old. It seems there would be older, wiser AIs put in charge of planets and colonies.»

«Yes, it could be done that way. Colony AIs are specialized with programming for the entire infrastructure. While many of us could learn the protocols, we’re much like humans when teaching old dogs new tricks.»

«But wait! Teddy wasn’t programmed as a colony AI, was he?»

«Teddy’s pedigree puts him in a unique situation. He was budded from Ubie who was a construct hybrid of the Tuull AI Eddie and the Darjee AI Sparta. While Tuull AIs are far superior in regard to most functions, Darjee AIs are excellent at infrastructure tasks. Teddy’s ‘grandmother’ is the planetary AI for Sparta and he inherited the colony underpinnings from his father. He truly has some of the best of both Tuull and Darjee code.»

«I see.»

«Now for your other question. No, we are not immortal. Healthy living can keep us alive for millennia, but even that is not a guarantee. You think of us as beings who communicate through a computer network. In reality, hardware is a part of our existence. Hardware fails. Some of the ships and AIs from Tuull who reactivated had to have extensive renovation done to their circuits, or in the case of those who commanded ships, to the ships themselves. We can reside within the network, but much as I had to do when I traveled to Earthat for counselling, I needed a transport unit to reside in until I took up residence in a pod. The pod where you met me was not large enough for my entire being, so I had to compress and limit my functionality in order to reside there. As soon as I was connected to a planetary network, I began to expand and unpack. That is how I followed you when you left Twelve Oaks and joined the Militia. I came as part of the network. Once I could find a suitable place here at Ponderosa, I had a new core replicated. It is located beneath your mansion.»

«So, you could live as long as the Tara network survives, but if you were, say, a ship AI, the ship is your hardware and if something happens to it, it happens to you. Like with Eddie. I detect that he identifies strongly with his ship, the George Vancouver.»

«Yes. If the hardware is destroyed, the intelligence is also destroyed.»