Collected Short Fiction, page 755
“We find your attitude regrettable,” it purred at last. “The only consequence of your attempted defiance will be certain restrictions upon the service we are able to provide you. Our investigations will continue, through whatever means we find most efficient. During your own interrogation, you will remain in this room—”
“I won’t—” Desperation nerved him. “I—I’m leaving now.”
Though it made no move, its blind gaze held him fixed.
“Sir, we cannot allow you to depart. You have been associated too long, in too many ways, with research we cannot permit and with individuals hostile to us. We beg you, however, not to become unhappy—”
“So you care?”
“We exist to serve you, sir. We’ll bring you food and drink. You may request certain other permissible necessities. We will not allow you to suffer any pain or fear. If we should detect symptoms of any undue apprehension or dejection, we have affective means to relieve them.”
Close to panic, he peered around the room. The huge thermal windows didn’t open. Of the three doors behind him, one probably led to a bath and one to a dressing room or closet. The one he knew, to the spiral stair, was no doubt the only exit.
“We must warn you, sir.” It must have sensed his muscles tensing. “Any attempt at violence would be unwise. Although we will do our utmost to guard you from harm, our service here on Kai is not yet complete and we may be unable to prevent you from causing injury to yourself. Certainly you cannot escape our attention. The human body, we must remind you, is a relatively feeble and fragile device.” Useless fists clenched, chilled with his own sweat, he stood staring past it at the vast white bed and the mocking stare of Chelni’s breasts.
“If that object disturbs you, we’ll remove it.”
Darting to the bed, it swept up that still-disturbing mask, bent to gather up his shirt and her scarlet wrapper, came back to him with everything draped over one lean and gleaming arm, Chelni’s lustrous hair dragging on the rug behind the swinging halves of her split face.
“Give us your trousers, sir.” Its free hand reached to unbuckle his belt. “You will not require—”
Afraid to breathe, but trying not to move too fast, he had slid his right hand into his pocket. Trying not even to think about the tiny rhodo weapon, he let his fingers close around it. His thumb found the swell of the tiny palladium monopole, pushed the slide to unshield it.
He snatched the weapon out of his pocket, and thrust it into the humanoid’s face.
The humanoid’s protesting melody was cut sharply off. Its snatching hand was paralyzed, almost upon the monopole. Caught off balance, it toppled slowly toward him, frozen rigid. Fending it off, he watched it fall.
Though there had been no sound, no flash, no other effect that he could sense, it was dead. It rolled on its own stiffened arm and thudded to the rug, coming to rest with one of Chelni’s breasts staring strangely from its sleek black belly.
His heart was pounding and his mouth felt dry. Clutching the monopole, his hand was shaking and clammy with sweat. The victory had been so easy, so sudden and complete, that he hardly dared believe he had won.
Or had he?
It hadn’t come to Kai alone. Perhaps two hundred of its fellow machines were here on the planet, most of them no doubt still masked as the Fortune’s people, each linked with every other in their interstellar net, each aware of all that any one perceived or knew.
Certainly, now, they had already sensed this unit’s fate. All of them would know that he had used the rhodo monopole, which human beings were not permitted even to know about. They would be coming after him, fast, acting in a unison orchestrated by that remote computer plexus.
The monopole itself could betray him. However effective at a meter or so, at greater ranges it would only be a beacon, revealing where he was. With a sense of hazardous experiment, keeping a cautious distance from the fallen machine, he pushed the slide to shield it again.
The humanoid stayed dead.
Faintly cheered, he slid the weapon back into his pocket and turned to search for a way of escape. The high room would be a trap if they arrived in time to block the stair. He snatched his shirt, where the falling machine had flung it, and ran for the door.
Breathing hard, he came back down into the hush and gloom and dusty scents of that cavernous hall where past Vorn’s scowled out of their dim holostats at the modeled ships and machines that had made them great. He stopped to listen.
Stillness. The celebrating servants were still out. If other humanoids were closing in, they were not yet here. He ran for the entry. The long floor was polished marble, and his footfalls crashed and echoed alarmingly.
In the entry tunnel, he paused to pick up his jacket where the Chelni thing had tossed it. Bending for it, he saw a galleyman’s yellow badge lying inside an open closet door, where some departing servitor must have flung it when he heard the humanoids were assuming his duties.
He scooped up the badge. Leaving the jacket, hoping it might deceive some searching humanoid, he snatched the galleyman’s winter cloak, which hung beside the silver-braided crimson robe the doorman must have worn to welcome guests in heavy weather.
An antique silver cauldron stood inside the tall summer gate heaped with quota tokens for those guests. Though he knew they’d have no place in the humanoid world, he filled his pockets before he hauled at the massive doors. Warily, he walked outside.
At this late-night hour, the tunnels were nearly empty. The slideways carried only occasional clusters of upperdeck shipfolk, a few drunk or disarrayed but most of them chattering happily, returning, he supposed, from affairs honoring the humanoids.
Feeling conspicuous in his rough green cloak, he clung uneasily to his role of servant on some solitary errand, walking down the platform until he could reach a handbar at a respectful distance from his betters. He heard the sirens moaning before he had gone a block. Though his muscles jumped, he waited for the intersection before he swung off and slouched as slowly as he dared into the downway.
Orange-painted patrol cabs were screeching from two directions by then, and the slideway was grating to a stop. Afraid to look behind him, he imagined footfalls behind him in the ringing din.
At the first tunnel down, and the second, the air was still alive with sirens, as if the whole patrol force had been mobilized to surround him, but those below seemed quieter. A dozen levels down, he stepped off.
Playing the galleyman here, he felt a little more at home. It was a work tunnel lined with small shops and factories, most of them now closed and dark, though here and there a flashing holorama showed a bar still open. With the slidewalks off for the night, he could hear voices and music in the bars. Piled refuse rotted on the platforms and industrial fumes edged the icy air. These workfolk would be easy victims of the humanoids.
What now?
Walking along the cluttered platform he had begun to feel a little calmer. The tunnel was nearly empty. The few solitary figures hastening through the gloom had no reason to notice another galleyman. Until the sirens picked up the trail, he had at least a moment free.
He longed to rejoin Cyra and his father, but even if he could somehow find them the humanoids might be following. He thought wistfully of Bosun Brong, even of Nera Nyin. A few more ships might be leaving for the Zone, he supposed, before the humanoids took over everything, but he had no quota for passage.
A lean, beer-breathed woman hauled at his sleeve, tugging him toward a bar. He shrugged her off and tramped on around a little crowd of workfolk standing under a news holo at a tunnel intersection.
“—preparations to receive them.”
Panic arrested him when he heard that ringing voice and saw the Navarch’s blue-blazing eyes looking straight at him. Heart stopped, it took him a moment to recall that a holo image couldn’t see.
“Now or never, we must choose!” People stood awed and gaping, captured by the rhodo power beneath that white-maned mask.
“I speak for the life of Kai.” Its more-than-human voice rolled and echoed down the tunnels. “If we choose life, we have certain essential steps to take. The Bridge must legislate a formal acceptance of humanoid service. The fleets must prepare adequate landing pads for their transports. Most urgent of all, the shipwatch must hunt down the few lunatic terrorists who oppose their coming.
“Once they arrive, there will be no terror. No more violence, no more war, no riots or strikes—because there will be no more injustice to set one person against another. They promise total happiness for every human—but that cannot begin until these criminal madmen have been destroyed.”
“Fleetfolk, likely.” A reeling man in galley green pushed himself in front of Keth. “They don’t need humanoids. Not with us to serve them.”
“—three dealers in terror,” the Navarch’s stolen voice was pealing. “Members of the infamous Lifecrew. Ryn Kyrone and Cyra Sair are leaders of the gang. Murderers, shipfolk! Monstrous killers!”
The galleyman was offering an open bottle. When Keth shook his head, he lifted it to his own lips but then forgot to drink.
“Just today, they killed four trusted and beloved members of my own staff.” The simulacrum paused, blazing eyes dropped as if in grief. “People I had sent to bring them our amazing news. Trapped in a tubeway pod and slaughtered with some hidden weapon.”
“Bastards!” The bottle had slipped out of the galleyman’s hand and lay gurgling in the litter at his feet. “I’d gut them like mad mutoxen!”
Keth turned and bent to conceal a flash of satisfaction. That hidden weapon must have been a monopole. Cyra and his father must have used it to defeat the masked machines sent to capture them. Perhaps they were still at large!
“—third member of the gang, even more dangerous.” He heard that brazen boom again. “Keth Kyrone, son of that murderer.”
Staring open-mouthed at the holo, the galleyman gripped Keth’s arm.
“Beware of him, shipfolk! He’s hiding somewhere among you, perhaps even now washing the innocent blood of a fair young girl from his foul hands. His own crimes are unspeakable—hideous beyond belief. Watch for him, shipfolk! Kill him on sight.” He forced himself to nod.
“You believe me, shipfolk. The facts will turn you ill. This Keth Kyrone has proved himself inhuman—a merciless monster parading as a man. Only tonight, in the midst of our celebration of the humanoids, he forced his way into Vara Vorn.
“He found his defenseless victim there, alone and undefended. Fleetmate Chelni Vorn, the young and lovely cousin of Commodore Zoor. She had been with us aboard the Fortune and the whole ship’s company had learned to love her. I have wished she might have been my own daughter.”
Blowing its nose, the machine produced a mellow hoot.
“The monster, it seems, had met her at school. In her euphoria over the humanoids, she may herself have opened the door to her own dreadful death. We’ll never know. But we do know what the monster did.”
Keth wrenched to free his arm. “The monstrous Keth Kyrone ripped the skin off that lovely child while she was still alive.” The giant voice quaked with horror. “He raped her as she died. Sadly, I have to say that he escaped before the patrol arrived. He’s still at large among you, dripping with that girl’s lifeblood.”
The galleyman was clutching blindly at him as he tried to edge away.
“Watch for him, shipfolk. Watch every man you meet. He carries a forged quota card with the name J. Vesh. He is doubtless armed, with the same blade he used to flay that child. If you see him anywhere, don’t risk a word. Don’t waste an instant. Kill him where he is.”
“Let’s get him, mate!” The galleyman had turned to look for him, blinking drunkenly. “Let’s take his bloody hide!”
“Here are holostats,” the machine was pealing. “Study them well, and search every tunnel. Let no suspect escape—in case of innocent error, you have my own personal promise of a pardon. I am authorizing a million-point reward, to be paid from my own discretionary funds, for the death of each of the three.
“Shipfolk, the holostats—”
The Navarch’s commanding image dissolved into one he had given Chelni the Wintersend before. Head bare and hair windblown, teeth gleaming through a somewhat wistful smile, he thought he looked strangely fresh and young, certainly too diffident to kill.
“The most inhuman monster! See the sneering evil on his features—and watch for him, shipfolk!”
Shrinking toward the tunnel wall and into his hood, trying to hide his face without seeming to, he recalled that the Prime Directive did not require the truth.
The galleyman staggered against him, knocking against his shoulder. “We’ll gut the bastard!” The galleyman hauled at him savagely. “Won’t we, mate?
“Where’s my bottle, mate?”
He pointed at it, lying in the reek at their feet.
“You swilled it, mate!” The slurred voice lifted. “My full bottle!”
“I’ve got tokens.” He dug into his pockets. “I’ll pay for it.”
“Tokens, mate?” The galleyman was abruptly amiable, gripping his arm again. “Let’s drink ’em up—to the humanoids!”
“Later.” Nodding at the holo, now blazing with a holostat of Cyra, he spilled tokens into the galleyman’s hand. “I’m on my way to work.”
“Work?” The galleyman bristled indignantly. “That’s for humanoids.”
“They aren’t here yet. We’ve got to fix the spacedecks.”
“Not me.” The galleyman turned to the light at last to count his tokens. “Not till these are gone.”
Muttering with shock and indignation, the watchers were scattering. The galleyman lurched away toward the holorama of a bar. Hunched into his hood, Keth moved after him and veered toward the downway.
Nobody shrieked or pursued.
When Chelni had taken him to tour the capital on that first trip with her, so long ago, their guide had warned them about the people of the bilges.
“Thieving shiprats! Swarming down below the law. No cops or tax collectors. No slideways or sanitation. No reason to go there—not unless you’re looking for a knife in the neck.”
The bilges seemed less dangerous now.
“Lord of Kai!” the tattered rockrat beside him whispered. “What a ship!”
He had wandered the maze of the bilges, searching for tunnels toward the spacedeck and his last thin hope of escape to Malili. A wise-eyed urchin had offered to guide him and robbed him while he slept. When the tunnels quaked and caved under the weight of the interstellar transport, he had joined the frightened shiprats in flight from the bilges to higher ground.
They had come out into what had been a summer park, still crusted now with winter snow. Last summer’s ice-bloom trees were black skeletons, not yet uprooted and replaced, and the humanoid transport loomed beyond their naked branches toward the purple zenith.
A silvery cylinder, so vast it dazed him: a topless curving mirror shadowed with a thinned black image of Northdyke Peak and burning with a narrowed crimson sun. The gathering crowds had ringed it, but the nearer snow was bare, kept clear perhaps by fear of its very vastness.
Though its crushing descent had obliterated many port installations, he found a row of shuttle pads, reduced beneath it to foolish toys. Five stood empty, but the last tower still nestled its tiny craft.
Still waiting!
Hardly pausing to review the long odds against him, he began working his way toward it, down the slope of the ringwall, around the old impact crater that held the deck. Before he had moved a dozen meters through the jostling pack, a new sound boomed out to silence the clamor.
“The Navarch!” The whisper rippled around him. “Speaking to the humanoids.”
It echoed against that soaring tower, and the humanoids answered with another wordless hooting, louder than the Navarch’s. He watched an enormous metal arm thrusting from near the foot of the mirror tower, level at first but slowly dipping until the near end smashed down upon the dollsized shuttle he had hoped to reach.
A black stain flowed out of it, crawling fast across the snow.
“Humanoids!” A storm of sound swept toward him through the crowds until he could hear the words. “Welcome the humanoids!”
He fled.
They were still too far for him to make them out as individual figures, but his frightened mind could see them. Many million tiny black machines, steel eyes blind, rhodo senses perceiving far too much. Every one of them would know him for their most deadly enemy, the man who had dared strike back with that forbidden weapon. They would soon find that he no longer had it, and they would hunt him forever.
He tripped himself into a pool of icy mud. Lying there, he smeared it to cover his face and his hands and the galleyman’s hood. On his feet again, head down and limping as if hurt, he worked his way back up the slope against that human tide.
Nobody stopped him.
The ridge beyond the tubeway stations was empty of humanity. It was a power district, idle now, the winter’s storm damage to windwheels and sun-cells not yet repaired. The orange-slashed work vehicles stood abandoned, their crews gone down to meet the humanoids.
He climbed doggedly through the half-wrecked wheels and slogged down the longer slope beyond the power farm. The icy ridge behind him soon hid Malili’s reddish dome, but the shining spire of the interstellar ship probed the sky above it. He was shocked to see the wavering line of his own footprints, a plain trail for hunters to follow.
When he came to a cleared road, with no snow to betray him, he followed it gratefully until it curved across the sunbud fields into an isolated villa. Reckless by then, reeling with hunger and fatigue, he limped toward it. No sound or movement met him. The winter doors stood open, and he stumbled inside.
The place must have belonged to shipman-farmers, he decided, now gone to meet the humanoids. He found food and wine in the kitchen and slept on a stack of humus in the hotpit where the new season’s sunbud seedlings were waiting to be transplanted.
Awake again, he searched the vacant premises. Though there were deep-dug winter tunnels, he found no exit to any tubeway system. The absent owners had taken nearly all the vehicles, but in the cluttered shop beneath the hotpit he stumbled upon a power sledge, motor and batteries pulled out of it.
