Brian Stableford - Hooded Swan 06 by Swan Song

Author:Swan Song
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-08T22:50:39+00:00

It is a sad truth that many of us are not really at home in the roles which destiny carves out for us. Even the lowliest of liner-jockeys must feel some sort of pang when he lets his ship be taken out of his own hands. It’s like a mother being forced to hand her new-born baby back to a robot nurse for safekeeping. It may be the best thing for all concerned but it’s a painful moment. Handing a ship over to a computer is worse, because even a robot nurse has hands. A ship’s automatic pilot has only a spool of magnetic tape and a clutch of wires—a series of printed circuits inside a tube is its brain and a pattern of electric pulses meandering around cupro-carbon cytoarchitecture is its action and intelligence. It’s not the machine you resent—the machine is an organ of the ship that you love—but the fact that the machine is run by an absent, often anonymous head represented by a set of rules. There’s no margin for feeling or reaction or sensitivity in a computerised flight-plan.

Nevertheless, as soon as Sam was happy in his harness, I had to bow out and let the automatics take over.

I aligned her along the axis of the lens, dropped her into the prescribed groove, synchronised the timing on the activator, and let her go.

It was probably worse for me than it would have been for anyone else. The Hooded Swan was more me than any other ship was anyone else. In addition, I knew what it was like to be a passenger in my own body. I’d had to step aside and let an alien take control of everything that was me. I had a comparison to draw. I had the feeling to relate. When Titus Charlot’s ghost, personified by a computer program, took over the flight of the Swan I felt as though he were cheating the very nature of existence. He seemed far more alien than the wind, at that moment. But it was only a feeling—another waking dream—and it passed.

I sagged in the cradle, exempting myself even from the tension.

My hands were still holding the controls, but the levers eased between my fingers without any pressure from my muscles. I was still participating in that I was still empathising with the ship, but I felt totally weak and impotent. At any second, as fast as I could react, I could take the volition of the ship back into myself. With a single dramatic action I could override the program and do whatever I had to do. But if we were going to go through the gateway instead of just into the nebula and out again I had to trust Charlot’s flight-plan. I didn’t know how sensitive the gateway might be, but I still remembered one of the most important discoveries of my childhood—the moment that I found circles punched out of sheet alloy in Herault’s workshop wouldn’t operate slot machines. They just went in and came right out again.

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