Forge of the Elders, page 57
"I am coming to that, Doctor Nguyen, if you will kindly exercise whatever faculty you possess for patience. Please accept, for the sake of this discussion, that these minds are somewhat akin to the various worlds of alternate reality—touching at their borders, even communicating with one another with the advent of interdimensional translocation—yet separate, distinct. Often that distinctness is their most sharply defining quality. Do you accept this analogy?"
"Model 17, I can accept anything that will help me understand what the hell is happening to me." Despite her circumstances, Rosalind had to laugh at the idea of being given a lecture on the virtue of patience by a machine. "You're saying alternative universes are like different individual minds. I understand that you don't mean this literally, but simply as an illustration. Please go on."
"Very well, I draw upon what I have learned of your culture over the past several days, much of which remains as incomprehensible to me as this must be to you. Consider a fictional character or location created by an individual mind. If that mind works hard enough, if it dwells upon that character or location with sufficient concentration for a long enough time, does not that character or location begin to assume—if not reality, then an importance to that mind, and perhaps to others, comparable with that of real people and places?"
Rosalind thought about it for a long moment. Mostly she thought about Sherlock Holmes, Lazarus Long, Lord Darcy, Jim Kirk, and Win Bear. Model 17 was right: they were all more real to her, or at least more important, than, say, Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, or Tom Sellick. She knew more about them, and cared more about them, too. They were the intimate companions of her childhood and immortal, whereas the others were just dead presidents, in their own way more fictional than her childhood friends.
"All right, Model 17, but I still don't see—"
"Excuse me: in the sense that a fictional person—an artificial mind—may abide within the mind of a real individual, so, given the technology, may an artificial subcontinuum abide within the confines of a natural one. Such a subcontinuum requires an anchor, a point of physical focus in the originating universe, if it is neither to dissipate nor assume the qualities of a genuine universe itself. It is the function of these blocks to provide such a point of focus."
Rosalind's head ached, and her last reserves of energy suddenly seemed to have drained away. "That's interesting, Model 17, and I'd like to know more, right after the lobotomy. But how do we get out of here?" She thought of Eichra Oren. "My friends will be looking for me, sooner or later." Outside, they could hear Deshovich's angry rumbling, counterpointed by a higher voice, and Rosalind realized that the robot had never answered her second question.
"They already are," Model 17 declared. "Please watch the apparent surface of the wall you appear to be facing."
Rosalind shook her head at what all those apparent qualifications seemed to imply (now she was doing it), but turned her attention to the wall as instructed. What she saw was a colorful three-dimensional image of Eichra Oren, Toya Pulaski, and Corporal Owen, coming to her rescue, if Model 17 was to be believed. The trouble was that they were passing through an enormous room which she had never seen before and which had never been described to her by anyone, human or otherwise, who'd explored the asteroid's interior.
To begin with, the vast floor of the stadium-sized chamber was slanted, down and to her friends' left, nor did any of the walls intersect each other or the ceiling—several hundred meters above their heads—at right angles. It was amazing how disorienting a simple thing like that could be. In addition, the room was strung with millions of, for want of a better term, big rubber bands the thickness of her little finger, set parallel to one another no more than a handspan apart. In order to get through them, the three adventurers had to push them apart, step through, push the next set apart and let the first bunch snap back—sometimes with a painful slap at various portions of their anatomy—into place.
What this "facility" was meant for, Rosalind had no idea. It was far from the first time 5023 Eris had handed them such a mystery. Eichra Oren bore the hardship of traversing the room with a grimly set jaw and stoic silence, while Corporal Owen's language grew fouler with every meter. Toya, constitutionally incapable of imitating either of them, alternatively shrieked whenever one of the bands stung her and whimpered quietly to herself, but she kept going, nevertheless.
Abruptly, Rosalind was staring at a blank wall again.
"Your friends," Model 17 told her, "will arrive eventually. They have been delayed so that circumstances may be prepared for them. In the meantime, I am here to assure that no further harm comes to you, since this falls within the category of responsibilities for which I was programmed. I regret that unless it threatens the ship, I cannot take a greater hand than that in what is about to happen."
"You mean you can't get me out of here? What is about to happen, Model 17?" Rosalind sat up. "And who the hell is out there, arguing with the Banker?"
The robot's voice grew more solemn than before, if that was possible. "A conflict is taking shape between two, possibly three groups of Successor species. I was created to serve all Successors alike, and may not take part in conflict between them."
Rosalind nodded. "Which is why none of us saw anything of you during the invasion from Earth. I guess that makes a certain demented sense. But you can prevent the Banker from doing horrible things to me, for which I thank you very much."
"No need to thank, Doctor Nguyen, it is my function. Had I known the Injured One intended to kidnap you, I would have prevented it. As it is, I now believe that he deceived me with regard to his purpose here, and will have to reevaluate everything else he told me."
"And is it also your function to avoid answering the question I've asked you twice already?"
"Who argues with the Injured One? No, Doctor Nguyen. Only . . ." It was the first time she'd heard the robot hesitate. "I'm uncertain I can credit the answer myself. She claims to be the maternal progenitor of Eichra Oren, who is called Eneri Relda."
SIXTY-SEVEN Eneri Relda
"Our friend Roger has an implant," Sam insisted, "that's the only explanation!"
Forcing his way through a tangle of giant rubber bands he'd privately decided had been built simply to provide a workout for sedentary trilobites, Eichra Oren muttered his reply under his breath. "That's totally impossible, Sam. The Americans are adopting many customs from the Elders' people, just as we're adopting some of theirs. But I believe we'd have heard if somebody from the expedition had gone ahead and done that. And why would he keep it secret?"
"I can't explain anything these Soviet Americans do, Boss, any more than you can. Maybe he doesn't want his own people to know. Maybe it's against some regulation. The fact remains he heard me, and he saw your mother."
"Ow!" As he grabbed at the next one, the rubber band he'd just released slapped him in the back of the head. "Sam, we're not absolutely certain she's an illusion."
"No, we're never absolutely certain of anything, are we? Maybe Eneri Relda simply materialized on this miserable, stinking planetoid in a cloud of happy thoughts and pixie dust, without benefit of the dimensional translator. It's time to shave with Occam's Razor, Boss, the simplest explanation is always the likeliest. I caught a virus somewhere, passed it on to you, and now Corporal Owen's got it—which can't happen unless he has an implant. `Q,' as they say, `ED.' "
"Don't get yourself in a solipsistic lather." The man grinned, knowing his canine friend would share the sensation—and the annoyance. "What if we're simply hallucinating the evidence that Owen has a cerebrocortical implant?"
"Yaaaagh!" Sam replied.
"What the hell are you two muttering about?" The recent subject of their silent conversation tapped the moral debt assessor on the shoulder with a thick, heavy finger. "Do either of you get the sneaking feeling we're being watched?"
The Antarctican opened his mouth to reply. Somewhere behind him, Toya muffled a shriek of pain and fury as one of the elastic bands they fought their way through slapped her on the backside. "Whoever it is, I hope they fucking enjoy it!"
"Now that you mention it," Eichra Oren nodded, "I do." He continued in what he hoped was a casual tone, "We've no idea, of course, how well-wired this place is for observation. I suppose the signals could somehow be impinging on our implants."
Owen shook his head. "They're impinging where they always do, on the fine hairs at the back of my neck, and I don't like it one bit. It would help a hell of a lot if the goddamned floor were level. It feels like we've been at this for days. While you're supposing, how much further do you suppose this mess goes on, anyway?"
"Nice try, Boss," Sam responded, "but score one for the corporal, aplombwise."
Owen's question received an answer almost immediately, when they suddenly ran out of rubber bands. Toya gave a huge sigh of relief, but Eichra Oren wasn't quite so certain it was justified. Before them, a long, high wall angled away from them, fading away in the darkness overhead. At its foot it was penetrated by hundreds of the squat, trilobite-shaped doors they'd long since gotten used to, each of them spaced no more than two or three meters from its neighbors.
"I'll be damned," predicted the corporal.
Just as Eichra Oren was about to turn and say something to Owen and Toya, his mother suddenly appeared in one of the doors, fifty or sixty meters to their left. Unable to do more than stand and stare, he watched her beckon urgently at them without moving.
"I see her this time!" hollered Toya, more excited than the Antarctican had ever heard her.
"Then I guess you'd better do something, Sergeant Pulaski," Eneri Relda shouted back from the doorway. "If we leave it to the men, you'll still be standing there gawking, another billion years from now. Do hurry, dear—I'm extremely busy elsewhere at the moment, and I wasn't supposed to interfere, in any case!"
Sam's voice crackled in Eichra Oren's head. "Boss, you heard the lady, get a move on!"
Feeling his two American friends pressing eagerly at his back, the moral debt assessor stumbled forward, trying without much success to gather his wits about him.
"Please listen to Sam," his mother agreed, still beckoning. "I'm no hallucination, my dear, not by half. But I haven't got time to explain what's going on at the moment. Come this way before it's too late. Lovely Rosalind is depending on you!"
Somehow that was what it took to break the spell. In possession of himself once more, the Antarctican jogged forward toward the door, followed by the sergeant and a puffing corporal.
However, by the time they reached the doorway she'd indicated—and exactly as Eichra Oren had expected, somehow—the legendary Eneri Relda had vanished again.
"Enough of this nonsense, girl," the monster that had been Nikola Deshovich demanded, "get out of my way now, or you'll be the one I satisfy myself with!"
"Girl?" Eneri Relda sneered. "I happen to be more than fifteen thousand years older than you are, you twit!"
Considerably more than fifteen thousand years in one sense, she thought to herself. Still, she couldn't help being the tiniest bit flattered. She'd maintained her appearance rather well over the millennia. No one would possibly guess, for example, that she was the mother of a fine, big, strapping fellow like Eichra Oren (always secretly her favorite), and more than a score both before and after him. Perhaps it came from spacing her children so far apart. Enjoying a baby no more than every quarter century or so always seemed to give her ample time to pull herself back into shape.
"As for satisfying yourself," she roared, feeling it appropriate, "you and whose Galactic Overlords, you vile, disgusting, smelly reject from a deli counter?"
Frothing with fury, the Banker lunged forward, countless claws and one remaining hand outstretched for her tender unprotected throat. It wasn't the first time he'd tried that sort of thing. Lifting the hem of her long dress, she extended a casual index finger and touched the merest edge of his grafted-on carapace. Deshovich reeled as if struck by a land vehicle, spun around several times, and fell backward, landing in a heap against one of the metal blocks that filled the room.
Shaking her head sadly, Eneri Relda rearranged her silky gown and sat on another cube, the one she knew presently served as a physical focus for the parasitic subcontinuum where her likely future daughter-in-law (or outlaw—after more than fifteen thousand years, one finally grew relaxed over ceremonial trivialities) was being watched over by the Predecessor robot, Model 17.
Slowly, and with many a groan, the remains of a human being which had been pasted on the inside of an artificial trilobite carapace, wired together electronically, and coated in protective plastic, rose from where the energy of his own anger had tossed him.
"I thought," Deshovich glared at her, "you weren't supposed to interfere with what happens here."
Eneri Relda shrugged. It was a very pretty shrug, she knew, because she happened to be a very pretty girl, small of stature, but slender enough and with sufficient presence to impress those who met her as much taller. Small-breasted and with narrow hips offset by an even narrower waist, she had sea green eyes exactly like her son, and the same fine, spun-golden hair, falling well past her shoulder blades. On one hip she even wore a tiny plasma pistol like her son's, a gift from him and Sam. All of that must have been annoying to the Banker, who believed girls in general and pretty girls in particular were only good for one thing.
Eneri Relda was good for that, all right—very good, in light of plain fact and unsolicited testimonial—but she was also good for about a million other things, as well.
A poet had once compared her beauty to that of a brightly colored songbird whose melodious trilling and brilliant plumage somehow translated across the aesthetic barriers between species to be appreciated by all sapients alike. She'd never cared for birds (or their sapient equivalent, if dreadful truth be told) but she treasured the remark because it had been made by Eichra Oren's father. Like most individuals associated with the Elders, he'd died violently, that being the only thing left, statistically—old age and disease having lost to science—to kill him. What made it particularly poignant was that it had been during one of Mister Thoggosh's beinged surveys of this system, during a squalid little mess the locals grandly referred to as World War Two, not far from the coextant location of their own home, at a place called Anzio.
"That wasn't interfering, you poor miserable excuse for a life-form. It may be successfully suppressed where you come from—that's usually the way with governments, I understand—but every sapient has a fundamental right to defend itself."
A glimmer appeared in Deshovich's good eye. "And if I refrain from any threat to you again, what can you do? I can do anything I wish, and you can't do anything about it except . . . I understand! You're stalling, aren't you? You're attempting to delay me until something else happens! Until somebody arrives who can interfere!"
"Why Nikola, darling." Eneri Relda smiled her sweetest smile, a smile which had been known to change the course of history in more than one universe on more than one occasion. "Of course I'm stalling. And it's worked pretty well so far, hasn't it?"
The once-human monster trembled with frustration, but did not advance. Even if he hadn't had her to deal with, Eneri Relda knew, his plans for Rosalind might be thwarted inside the cube (she couldn't help thinking of it that way, although she knew it wasn't literally true) by Model 17. Then again, they mightn't—Eneri Relda wasn't certain—the trilobitoid machine was powerful and unrelenting, but had a spectrum of limitations of her own to work within, imposed on her by Creators who were well out of the current picture.
"I don't know who you are," rumbled Deshovich, "or where you come from, but I'm going to—"
An odd noise came to them both, much like the sound of something frying in a pan. She looked down and saw the robot, who (despite the real physics of the matter) appeared to be emerging from the surface of the cube Eneri Relda perched on.
Model 17 lashed out with a long, slender, jointed metal antenna even one of the sea-scorpionoids would have been proud to display. It stopped just short of the Banker's nose as it cracked like a pistol shot. "You are going to do nothing, you devious organism, except stand there and be absolutely quiet!"
She turned to Eneri Relda. "I've warmed the subcontinuum's fluorocarbon with my built-in welders and supplemented its oxygen from the same source. Doctor Nguyen has fallen asleep." As quickly as with the lightweight feeler, the robot threw a massive claw at the Antarctican woman, seizing her by one fragile-looking shoulder. "Now at last I have the time to deal with you, agent of the Eldest!"
"News flash! Mister Thoggosh relays word from Model 17—confirmed by observation on the outer surface—that 5023 Eris has crossed the orbit of Pluto. That's on the general implant system. What isn't onsystem is that Model 17 says she's detected the first traces of the Ancient Enemy, but doesn't go into any more detail.
"Mister Thoggosh has doubled the shifts rebuilding one space shuttle from the ruins of three, and has ordered all three plasma cannon mounted on her. He's also ordered several more drilling rigs converted for mounting on the surface of the canopy itself. That's all for now from the Canine News Network, Cybernetic Sam reporting."
Eichra Oren repeated what Sam had told him for Toya and the theoretical benefit of Corporal Owen. Their roundabout path had finally led them to a familiar neighborhood within the asteroid. They were in the passage between what appeared to be an amphitheater filled with desktop computers and the room where Sam had been hurt.
Owen raised an eyebrow. "Benevolent Mister Thoggosh, censoring what goes out over the network?"
The Antarctican shook his head. "Until he releases it, the information is his property, to do with—"
He was interrupted by what sounded like a gunshot coming from the room with the metal cubes, followed by somebody shouting. "You are going to do nothing, you devious organism, except stand there and be absolutely quiet!"
