by Ian Stewart
"If these . . . objects . . . were genuine alien machinery, then they would have a recognizable internal structure." He gestured with a varicolor laser pointer at the room's large display screen, so that the public gallery and the eighty-million-strong W audience could follow the reasoning for themselves. As he ticked off his points, he flicked the laser from one color to another, at random, for dramatic effect. "However, these scans show no sensible internal structure. All we see is a random mishmash of irregular domains of high- and low-density metal, with numerous small voids."
Strunck interrupted. "Sir Charles, are you aware of any manufacturing process that would create such an arrangement?"
"Yes, Madam Chair, I am."
"Please enlighten us."
Sir Charles paused for effect. "I have seen very similar scans in sculptures made by artists from the Recyclist school of the 2140s."
Strunck seemed puzzled. "Professor Dunsmoore: are you seriously suggesting that these so-called wheelers are sculptures?"
Sir Charles gave a mirthless smile. This was going to be devastating. "Not exactly I am suggesting that they were made—I have no idea by whom, but I am sure Ms. Odingo could tell us ..." He waited for Prudence's legal team to object, but they failed to rise to the offered bait. "But I should not speculate about such matters. My point is that exactly this kind of scan is to be found in metal objects that have been cast from partially melted scrap." Oh, yes. "The so-called wheelers, in my expert opinion, are . . .junk."
Laughter scattered through the gallery: Sir Charles's public was enjoying a virtuoso performance. And now. Prudence realized, it was all set up for him. Sir Charles was going to call "expert witnesses" to hammer home his thesis that the wheelers were trash. Literally. Backed up by phony evidence, forged documents, and fake Xnet files.
What made it worse was that in a way he was right. Prudence had seen the scans—her defense team had a right to see all material evidence in advance—and they made no engineering sense whatsoever. You couldn't build machines like that— the pieces interlocked so intricately that there was no way to put them together. Melted scrap wasn't a bad description. She was beginning to wonder whether she'd made it all up in another personality. Was she going mad? But would alien machinery make any sense to terrestrial engineers, anyway? The thing about aliens is, they're alien . . . Maybe the wheelers were damaged, decayed, corroded, corrupted . . . whatever.
Even the chair was nodding her head—not much, but perceptibly. She looked at Prudence. "Ms. Odingo, do you have any explanation to offer?"
Prudences counsel chipped in smoothly, "Dr. Strunck, my client prefers to reserve all such explanations for her over statements."
"Do you with to cross-examine the panel concerning the validity of this evidence?"
"Not at all. Dr. Strunck. Ms. Odingo accepts that the magnetic resonance scans are technically valid, but reserves her interpretation."
Strunck asked Sir Charles to continue. Sir Charles used the laser pointer to highlight the salient features of the scans. He dwelled at length on the presence of wheels, in machinery allegedly dug up from the ice of a distant Jovian satellite. His quip that wheels were scarcely appropriate for burrowing into a miles-deep ice layer caused some amusement. Prudences heart sank. She had no idea why the bloody things had wheels. She'd just dug them up.
It made no sense. This was going to be a disaster.
Several of the wheelers had been arranged on a small table at the front of the court, and Sir Charles now walked over to them. Prudence held an agitated conversation with her lawyers. Sir Charles noticed. "I promise not to touch any of the valuable alien artifacts," he said, with the faintest hint of a sneer.
The cameras caught the look in close-up. The gales of full-throated laughter from the gallery were overlaid as ambient sound. Angle looked distraught. "This is awful. What's wrong with that legal team? Last time they get any business from me—"
Sir Charles's laser played over the wheelers, switching colors as he dissected them verbally in a low-key monotone.
"Do these look a hundred thousand years old?" he said, as if daring anyone to contradict him. "Do they look like machines made by intelligent extraterrestrial beings? No. They look like crude castings of a child's toys." He glanced sideways at Prudence.
You bastard. You're trying to remind me about Moses. Try as hard as she might, she couldn't stop a few tears from running down her face. She wiped them away with the back of her hand. The cameras followed every movement.
"Yes, toys. And only a child would be fooled by them!"
The laser's spot, now red, now canary yellow, lingered lovingly on the nearest artifact, circling around its front wheel, cycling through the spectrum in a luminescent counterpoint to his hard-worked script.
"Wheels! Wheels without a power source! Wheels without axles! Wheels that don't turn! Wheels made from partially melted junk!"
There was a faint click, and a low-pitched hum reverberated through the courtroom, but Sir Charles was in full flow and noticed nothing. Neither did Cashew, Bailey, or Angle. But Jonas suddenly leaned forward, his eyes glued to the flatfilm screen. Prudence had heard the slight sound, but assumed it must be something in the air-conditioning.
"Junk," Sir Charles repeated. The laser darted here, there, colors flashing. "Wheels? These so-called machines are solid. Cast. They can no more move than the Great Pyra ..."
His voice trailed off.
Later, they worked out that the modulating colors of the laser pointer were responsible. But at the time, what they saw—what eighty million people witnessed, live, in close-up detail—was the wheeler.
Slowly, unequivocally, its wheels started to revolve.
Something was happening along its "spine." It seemed to unfurl. Strangely shaped vanes grew from the wheeler's back, forming a kind of frill, like the plates on an ancient dimetrodon.
The frills rippled.
Then the wheeler began to glow, a dull multihued light that seemed to diffuse from somewhere deep inside the solid metal. It was as if the metal had turned into stained glass.
Sir Charles and eighty million others had fallen silent. The atmosphere in the room was electric. Prudence felt the hairs rise along the nape of her neck.
The wheels continued turning. The wheeler jerked forward. It hummed. It throbbed with weird light. Tiny jags of lightning— slow lightning—flickered within.
Relentlessly, it rolled toward the edge of the table.
Sir Charles, suddenly released from paralysis, dimly aware that he had to do something, stepped forward to catch it before it smashed to the floor.
His hands cupped empty air.
Humming, glowing, its wheels still turning, the ancient machine continued along its horizontal track as if the table were still beneath it. As eighty million viewers sat rooted to their seats, it levitated its way across the open space between the public seating and the panel, heading directly toward the mesmerized chair.
It was almost certainly the only occasion on record when a terrified scientific assessment panel had fled in panic in response to an item of evidence.
It was definitely the only occasion on record when the chair had been in the vanguard of the rout.
Xi Ming-Kuo was a billionaire, in whatever currency you preferred. In Free China, a crooked businessman that successful would normally have run to fat—the archetypal self-indulgent, cunning, evil-minded slob. Not at all. Xi was slim and athletic, despite his eighty-six years, and not so much evil- as single-minded. In his own self-appraisal he was a moral man who had overcome the competition by dint of sheer ability, but in truth he was seldom burdened by conventional scruples. Xi Ming-Kuo cut his own swath through the ethical minefield, and unlike most of his fellows, he had always seen the barbarian culture of Ecotopia as a potential source of revenue. In order to survive the attentions of the power brokers, who promoted an isolationist, nationalistic ideology, he had to find very good reasons for importing barbarian goods. He had been in his early twenties
when it occurred to him that a revival of traditional medicine would be the perfect vehicle for an extremely lucrative trade in animals that no longer existed in the urban Ant Country of his homeland. That such trade was not only illegal in the West, but subject to drastic penalties, was a practical obstacle rather than a moral issue.
He solved it by inventing the backward-looking creed of the Hunt, and recruiting to its ranks a substantial number of young men whose common traits were greed and an obsession with killing wild animals. In the overregulated, underpopulated, indulgent, softhearted West, his agents found many such men. In an earlier age they would have rampaged through the forests of the Normerican Midwest with automatic weapons, recreational sports vehicles and a trunk full of six-packs; in the twenty-second century Xi had turned the barbarians' severe restrictions on guns into an advantage by insisting on a chivalrous return to the bow and the knife. Swords had crossed his mind, too, but he had ruled them out as impractical. A Hunters bow was a pretty high-tech instrument, mind you—laser sights, a photomultiplier scope for night vision, quarrels with depleted uranium tips for increased penetration.
He sat at a modern desk in a heavily draped room in the suburbs of Liuzhou, surrounded by as magnificent a selection of antique art as could be found in possession of anyone outside the upper echelons of Free Chinas convoluted, inconsistent, overmanned bureaucracy. Chou bronzes and ceramics, finely inlaid armor from the time of the Three Kingdoms, exquisite jades from the court of the T'ang emperor Kao-tsu, blue-and-white ware from the Yuan Dynasty when China had briefly been overrun by Mongol tribes under Genghis Khan, a massive cast bronze tetrapod, and in pride of place a Late Shang ritual vessel from the thirteenth century bc. Other rooms in his palatial mansions—of which he owned eleven, all over Free China— contained equally rich collections, and one secret chamber boasted close on a hundred items of Western art—sculptures by Moore, garments by Versace, paintings by El Greco, Van Gogh, Picasso, Warhol, Gibbons-Jones, and Lambretta. Any one of them would see him jailed for life, if not shot, were they to come to the attention of the Cultural Enforcement Bureau—except that the CEB was hopelessly corrupt and he knew he could bribe his way out of any investigation. No, what worried him was not the CEB, but the drug baron Deng Po-zhou, warlord of the White Dragon Gang. Xi knew that Deng was envious of his success, and his gang was trying to muscle in on his lucrative trade in traditional medicines. The merchant threw his head back and laughed: the powers that arranged the universe were on his side! The White Dragon Gang was a mosquito buzzing about a tiger. Speaking of which: it was high time that his illicit tiger-breeding program over near Ershiqizhan, on the Siberian border, started to show a profit. More than enough had been expended in bribes. He made a mental note to look into the matter.
Xi Ming-Kuo had to admit that the new recruit, Carlesson, had in some respects performed surprisingly well. There was of course the small embarrassment of the African child, a serious mistake which in slightly different circumstances might well have cost Carlesson his life. But Xi had a grudging respect for arrogant young men who were prepared to take the initiative—they reminded him of his younger self—and it was fortunate for Carlesson that his misjudgment had coincided with a soaring demand for cheetah bones.
Xi found himself uncharacteristically indecisive. Did Carlesson's foolish error outweigh the priceless hoard of bones that he had acquired? The Hunter had shown courage and initiative, and these could bring many future benefits to Xi's business empire. He had abandoned his more experienced companion without a backward glance, an admirably callous act that was in full obedience to the Hunt's stringent rules. If Xi had the man killed now, he would lose that potential—and the problem of the black child would remain unchanged. He saw little gain there. The important thing was to ensure that Carlesson never made the same mistake again, and now the decision was easy. Xi would send some of his trusted men around to deliver an appropriate warning, fine the Swede thirty percent of his fee, and assign him more dangerous and more tedious tasks for future Hunts. If the Hunter survived, his skills would be honed by his experiences, and Xi could make good use of such a man. If not. . . well, that was business.
Xi had a sudden, irrational desire to look at the child, face-to-face. Although his business interests required an extensive network of corrupt barbarians, he had seldom spoken to any of them in person, for the obvious reasons of security and secrecy. His sense of self-preservation was as strong as the walls of his secret collection of forbidden art, and he had no intention of slipping up now, just to look at a youthful barbarian face—but he could do the next best thing. He spoke a few quiet syllables to his desk, and a gigantic holoscreen diffused into existence in the center of the room, gray mist crystallizing into solid light. Another command, and the room's ambient lighting lowered to improve visibility.
The dark-skinned child, still bound but showing signs of awakening from its drug-induced catalepsy, hovered in midair, twice its real size. The eyes opened and swiveled wildly as the child began to take in its spartan surroundings. The boy lay on a cold, concrete floor in a small, bare room, whose only furnishings were an outdated fluorescent lamp and a hidden spy camera.
A cockroach the size of a human hand scuttled across the floor, inches from the child's face. The eyes followed it, but the face did not jerk away Ordinarily, the roaches would be crawling all over the captive by now—Xi found that it was an easy way to soften captives up. But the child's body seemed free of such vermin, which surprised him. He looked deep into the child's eyes and believed that he read something there. Or perhaps it was the child's bearing—inasmuch as one could have bearing, prone and bound—or the cast of his bruised, scratched face. Whatever it was, it sent a shiver along Xi's spine.
Such a child might, given training and encouragement, go on to achieve great things. Such a child would be a grave source of danger.
Xi was clever, ruthless . . . and superstitious. He believed in . . . well, not exactly believed, for he considered himself a supremely rational man ... let us say that he found it hard to suppress the idea that powers beyond human knowledge had selected him for success, and were constantly rearranging the universe to ensure that this continued. In return, all that they demanded of him was that he should be responsive to any stray thoughts that they might insert into his mind. Over the years, he had developed a sixth sense for such messages from beyond terrestrial time and space, and he had learned to back his hunches. As he watched Moses' eyes flicking from side to side, while the child—who must be desperately frightened—showed no other outward signs of distress, Xi's sixth sense tingled as never before.
With a word, he instructed the camera to widen its field of vision, and drew his breath in sharply. A pale circle surrounded the boy's head, like a halo. It flowed down and around the child, forming a complete outline of his body as it lay on the floor.
The outline was unobscured concrete. Beyond it, hundreds of cockroaches crawled over the floor, scuttling obscenely in a dark, heaving mass.
Inside, the floor was bare.
Xi shuddered. This was beyond his comprehension, but it was a clear sign that the kidnapped boy had to be disposed of. Any thought of compassion fled from his mind at the astonishing sight. On the other hand, though, whatever lay behind such unusual powers commanded a degree of respect. So it would be necessary to contrive the child's death without being directly responsible for it.
For Xi Ming-Kuo, inspiration was never far away. He saw immediately that the conundrum had a neat, simple, elegant solution.
With Prudence being publicly exonerated in such a spectacular fashion, the case against her sister Charity collapsed, all charges dropped. But her doctor had been forced to place her under sedation—she was finding it impossible to cope with Moses' disappearance.
Angle Carver was already taking steps on her behalf to sue the local, state, and Nyamwezi national police for negligently allowing Moses to run away.
The police were mounting a huge international search effor
t. So far, it hadn't paid off.
Prudence was high in the stratosphere, on her way to Kenya and her sister, in one of Angle's private jets.
Sir Charles had managed to extract himself from the fiasco of the inquiry, while ensuring that the hated Professor Strunck took the blame. Already a scientific consensus had sprung up to the effect that the wheelers were genuinely ancient and almost certainly some kind of alien artifact, although a few skeptics were still convinced that the wheeler's ability to levitate was either faked or had some entirely prosaic explanation. Sir Charles found this both amusing and exasperating: why did otherwise intelligent people go into denial rather than change their minds in response to dramatic new evidence? He had long ago decided that in such cases the explanation must be that their minds were too rigid to change except by snapping under the strain: in effect, they went the tiniest bit mad.
A flurry of Xsites had grown up around the wheelers—graphics, pirated MagRes scans of their interiors, poems, discussion groups, sites where you could buy flatfilm holoposters. One site had named some of them after classic vehicles of the past—Ferrari, T-bird, Karyma . . . The one with the missing wheel had been named Reliant Robin after a celebrated three-wheeled car from twentieth century Britain. The media plugged the names and they quickly stuck. Angles lawyers felt this was good for Prudence: it made the alien machines seem friendly.
Sir Charles had also managed to get himself appointed convenor of an international project to investigate the wheelers and was already seeking a court order for possession of every wheeler that Prudence had found. Angle's new legal team—she had fired the old one—was fighting a rearguard action to restrict him to Ferrari, T-bird, and Karyma, the exhibits at the inquiry, with an informal offer of half a dozen more if he would settle out of court. Angle was helping Prudence to hide all of the remaining wheelers where the law would never find them, just in case they lost.