Part 16 (1/2)

”Yes? Yes?” The bird hopped about excitedly on her shoulder, then jumped to the nearest branch and began prancing in front of her. ”Good! Good! Ed happy! Ra. But she had no idea how, in practice, she could obtain a nodule containing Ed.

She gazed at the parrot. With head bent and neck feathers askew, he looked about as dejected as a parrot could look. Her heart sank for him, and for herself. She'd certainly miss him. ”Maybe there's a way,” she murmured. ”Maybe. I'm not sure. I'm not even sure when or if I'll be flying again. But if there's a way ...if there's a way ...”

Ed's head came up a fraction of an inch.

She sighed. ”I'll see what I can do, okay? That's the best I can offer. Will you accept that?”

Ed hopped back onto her shoulder and pecked affectionately at her hair. ”Ed happy. Happy as can be,”

he said - not quite with the same joy as before, but with hope, at least, in his voice.

”Good.” She stroked the side of his head with a finger. ”And now, old friend, I think perhaps I should see if I can find my other friend, Ar. Be here when I come back?”

”R-r-right here! Right here! B-bye!” With a flash of color, Ed launched himself up into the thick tree cover.

Jael waved, and then the rainforest dissolved around her.

She didn't have to look far to find Ar. He was sitting at a nearby station, playing with a screen-display game that flickered s.h.i.+fting colors onto his face. He looked up, crinkle-mouthed, as she approached.

”Jael,” he said.

”Am I interrupting you?”

He pa.s.sed a hand over the display screen and it went dark. ”I was just waiting for you. I thought you were probably - well, that maybe you'd rather not be interrupted.” His luminous eyes met hers.

She blinked. ”It would have been okay. Actually I was looking for you earlier.”

”Oh? Do you have news?”

”Me? No, not particularly. I just thought maybe -”

”I have news,” Ar said brightly. He gestured to the seat beside his.

Startled, she sat. ”What is it?””That depends somewhat on whether you are free to take a rigging job. And whether you want to.”

Jael opened her mouth, dumbfounded.

One corner of Ar's mouth went up; the other corner went down. ”Does that mean that you are? That you do?”

”Well, I -yes - I mean, of course, I'd have to apply for clearance.” She stammered, only half sure of what she was saying, because she was trying to absorb all of the possible implications of his question.

”There's that whole legal thing.” Still, she remembered, Commander Gordache had implied that they'd allow her to work.

”I understand,” Ar said. ”But if they're willing to let you go, there's an opening on a flight coming up, for a two-crew.” He hesitated. ”I know this is awfully quick. But would you be interested in rigging with me?”

The rush of thoughts made her dizzy. ”Yes - that is, I think so. Yes. But ... Ar? There's one other thing I have to ask you.” This was going to sound ridiculous, but she had to say it. ”Do you remember Ed, the parrot? in the rainforest environment?” Ar's eyes glimmered as he nodded. ”Well ... Ed sort of asked to come along with me the next time I flew.”

Something funny happened in Ar's eyes. They brightened, then darkened. ”Hewhat?” The left corner of Ar's mouth formed a zigzag.

”He, uh - he wants to see dragons, he said.”

”Dragons!”

She raised a hand hastily. ”Okay, okay, don't say it! I know. I told him I didn't know any way to do it.

But I ... well, I promised to try to find a way. And - I just found out that they're taking him out of the system soon. The whole rainforest. He's going to be - ” she swallowed ” - terminated.”

Ar made a soft wheezing sound, which might have been a laugh, or a sign of distress. ”Ed? Dragons?”

”I know. I know. I told him I might never get to fly that way again, anyway. But he wants to come along.

In theory it ought to be possible, right? It's just a technical question, isn't it?”

”Well - I don't know, really.” Ar's eyebrows flexed, dusty silver against his bluish forehead.

”It must be. Okay, so you don't believe in the dragons. I suppose you'll say that Ed isn't real, either.”

Jael looked down at her clenched hands. She could hardly blame him. Certainly she had given him enough impossible things to believe already.

Stroking the ridge of his head, Ar answered, ”I wouldn't say that exactly. Ed is a cyber-parrot, yes, so in one respect he is an artifact. But if he's based upon a real parrot, and if his personality has been allowed to evolve naturally, then I would have to say that he is real. Even if he doesn't exist outside of the psychetronic environment.”

Jael felt an impulse to ask how, then, he would distinguish Ed from the dragons he thought unreal, but she thought better of it. Time enough to argue about that later. Instead, she asked, ”If I can get clearance, and we rig together, will you help me try to get a copy of Ed onto our s.h.i.+p?”

Ar stared at her for a long time. His eyes seemed to flicker, as though very fine lines of fire were dancing upon the violet wool in their clear depths. Then his face broke into a broad, cracked zigzag. ”You havemade yourself,” he said, ”a deal.”

Nineteen.

Cyber-rescue.

Getting clearance from the police took just one visit with Commander Gordache. The police were no longer interested in restricting her movements, and Gordache encouraged her to find work so that she would not have to continue drawing housing credit from the s.p.a.ceport administration. It seemed likely that her claim for flight pay against the Mogurn estate would be held up in the legal process for weeks or months.

With Ar, she went to the rigger offices and applied for the posted two-crew position. They were hardly the only riggers looking for work, but the situation was far less grim than it had been on Gaston's Landing. As it happened, most of the present compet.i.tion was vying either for larger s.h.i.+ps or solos.

However, since she and Ar had never crewed together, they were required to take a simulator test to demonstrate compatibility. They did that in the afternoon, in the bas.e.m.e.nt of the rigger hall.

They were installed in linked rigger-stations, where they rehea.r.s.ed all normal checkout procedures for flight. Computer-generated Flux simulations were fed into the sensory net, along with randomly selected flight problems. It was strongly reminiscent of her training simulations, and Jael felt in the groove almost from the beginning. She and Ar developed a quick rapport, trading images back and forth as they zipped through the synthetic landscapes. With surprising ease, she put her fears aside, closing off those areas that she wished to keep private, and testing only the imaging powers that she needed in the net with Ar. But then, of course it was easy: she knew it was only a test. That was both the beauty and the weakness of tests of this sort; they were useful enough as a gross measure of competence, but they could not really show how a team would function in the actual tricks and twists of the Flux. Only starflight itself would reveal that.

With their partners.h.i.+p rating in hand, they were left to await word on the position itself, which could easily take days. That gave them time to think about other matters - among them, Ed. Rescuing the parrot was not going to be easy. She knew, even as she planned to do it, that her desire was not entirely rational. But the parrot had somehow found a place in her heart - quite unexpectedly - a place of warmth that in a strange way reminded her of Highwing. Could a cyber-parrot give the same kind of friends.h.i.+p as a person - or a dragon? She supposed he would be closer to a pet. But she didn't care; she just knew she didn't want to lose Ed, not now, not without giving it her best try to rescue him.

Unfortunately, she could not locate the young man who had helped her last night, and the people who worked in the back rooms today either couldn't or wouldn't tell her exactly when the Environment Alpha system would be removed, or even whether the rainforest element would be left intact until then. She did learn that the data grains were all imported from off planet and allowed to grow and mature in place. The Ed that she knew was a unique denizen of this particular artificial intelligence ”data garden.” If she couldn't save him before he was removed, there was virtually no hope of recovering him. There also seemed little hope of her obtaining a data readout of his personality in any straightforward manner. Her spirits were low as she reported back to Ar.

Ar told her that he had an idea or two. The rest of the afternoon, while Jael worried, Ar did some asking around the s.p.a.ceport. That evening he met her in the dining hall. ”I might have a method,” he reported.