The Island - Peter Watts

Peter Watts 36 The Island
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 wake me every couple of
weeks, burn a little more of my candle in case the enemy tries to
pull another fast one; but for now it seems to be behaving itself.
DHF428 jumps towards us in the stop-motion increments of a life's
moments, strung like beads along an infinite string. The factory
floor slews to starboard in our sights: refineries, reservoirs, and
nanofab plants, swarms of von Neumanns breeding and
cannibalizing and recycling each other into shielding and circuitry,
tugboats and spare parts. The very finest Cro Magnon technology
mutates and metastasizes across the universe like armor-plated
cancer.
And hanging like a curtain between it and us shimmers an
*