by Simon Ings
Very quietly, Brant retrieved the worn trip ticket and wrote on it: Follow me.
He went out into the corridor and started down it toward the control room, Powell at his heels. The living ship remained silent only for a moment.
“Return to your cabin,” the voice said.
Brant walked a little faster. How would Bennett’s vicious brainchild enforce his orders?
“I said, go back to the cabin,” the voice said. Its tone was now loud and harsh, and without a trace of feeling; for the first time, Brant was able to tell that it came from a voder, rather than from a tape-vocabulary of Bennett’s own voice. Brant gritted his teeth and marched forward. “I don’t want to have to spoil you,” the voice said. “For the last time—”
An instant later Brant received a powerful blow in the small of his back. It felled him like a tree, and sent him skimming along the corridor deck like a flat stone. A bare fraction of a second later there was a hiss and a flash, and the air was abruptly hot and choking with the sharp odor of ozone.
“Close,” Powell’s voice said calmly. “Some of these rivet-heads in the walls evidently are high-tension electrodes. Lucky I saw the nimbus collecting on that one. Crawl, and make it snappy.”
Crawling in a gravity-free corridor was a good deal more difficult to manage than walking.
Determinedly, Brant squirmed into the control room, calling into play every trick he had ever learned in space to stick to the floor. He could hear Powell wriggling along behind him.
“He doesn’t know what I’m up to,” Brant said aloud. “Do you, Bennett?”
“No,” the voice in the air said. “But I know of nothing you can do that’s dangerous while you’re lying on your belly. When you get up, I’ll destroy you, Brant.”
“Hmmm,” Brant said. He adjusted his glasses, which he had nearly lost during his brief, skipping carom along the deck. The voice had summarized the situation with deadly precision. He pulled the now nearly pulped trip ticket out of his shirt pocket, wrote on it, and shoved it across the deck to Powell.
How can we reach the autopilot? Got to smash it.
Powell propped himself up on one elbow and studied the scrap of paper, frowning. Down below, beneath the deck, there was an abrupt sound of power, and Brant felt the cold metal on which he was lying sink beneath him. Bennett was changing course, trying to throw them within range of his defenses. Both men began to slide sidewise.
Powell did not appear to be worried; evidently he knew just how long it took to turn a ship of this size and period. He pushed the piece of paper back. On the last free space on it, in cramped letters, was: Throw something at it.
“Ah,” said Brant. Still sliding, he drew off one of his heavy shoes and hefted it critically. It would do.
With a sudden convulsion of motion he hurled it.
Fat, crackling sparks crisscrossed the room; the noise was ear-splitting. While Bennett could have had no idea what Brant was doing, he evidently had sensed the sudden stir of movement and had triggered the high-tension current out of general caution. But he was too late. The flying shoe plowed heel-foremost into the autopilot with a rending smash.
There was an unfocused blare of sound from the voder more like the noise of a siren than like a human cry. The Astrid rolled wildly, once. Then there was silence.
“All right,” said Brant, getting to his knees. “Try the controls, Powell.”
The UN pilot arose cautiously. No sparks flew. When he touched the boards, the ship responded with an immediate purr of power.
“She runs,” he said. “Now, how the hell did you know what to do?”
“It wasn’t difficult,” Brant said complacently, retrieving his shoe. “But we’re not out of the woods yet. We have to get to the stores fast and find a couple of torches. I want to cut through every nerve-channel we can find. Are you with me?”
“Sure.”
The job was more quickly done than Brant had dared to hope. Evidently the living ship had never thought of lightening itself by jettisoning all the equipment its human crew had once needed. While Brant and Powell cut their way enthusiastically through the jungle of efferent nerve-trunks running from the central computer, the astronomer said:
“He gave us too much information. He told me that he had connected the artificial nerves of the ship, the control nerves, to the nerve-ends running from the parts of his own brain that he had used. And he said that he’d had to make hundreds of such connections. That’s the trouble with allowing a computer to act as an independent agent—it doesn’t know enough about interpersonal relationships to control its tongue. There we are. He’ll be coming to before long, but I don’t think he’ll be able to interfere with us now.”
He set down his torch with a sigh. “I was saying? Oh, yes. About those nerve connections: if he had separated out the pain-carrying nerves from the other sensory nerves, he would have had to have made thousands of connections, not hundreds. Had it really been the living human being, Bennett, who had given me that cue, I would have discounted it, because he might have been using understatement. But since it was Bennett’s double, a computer, I assumed that the figure was of the right order of magnitude. Computers don’t understate.
“Besides, I didn’t think Bennett could have made thousands of connections, especially not working telepathically through a proxy. There’s a limit even to the most marvelous neurosurgery. Bennett had just made general connections, and had relied on the segments from his own brain which he had incorporated to sort out the impulses as they came in—as any human brain could do under like circumstances. That was one of the advantages of using parts from a human brain in the first place.”
“And when you kicked the wall—” Powell said.
“Yes, you see the crux of the problem already. When I kicked the wall, I wanted to make sure that he could feel the impact of my shoes. If he could, then I could be sure that he hadn’t eliminated the sensory nerves when he installed the motor nerves. And if he hadn’t, then there were bound to be pain axons present, too.”
“But what has the autopilot to do with it?” Powell asked plaintively.
“The autopilot,” Brant said, grinning, “is a center of his nerve-mesh, an important one. He should have protected it as heavily as he protected the main computer. When I smashed it, it was like ramming a fist into a man’s solar plexus. It hurt him.”
Powell grinned too. “K.O.,” he said.
(1941)
I MADE YOU
Walter M. Miller, Jr.
Walter M. Miller Jr. was born in New Smyrna Beach, Florida in 1922. He fought as a tail gunner during the Second World War, and participated in the bombing of Monte Cassino – an experience that, after more than fifty combat missions, still profoundly affected him. After the war he married, studied engineering, and converted to Catholicism. Between 1951 and 1957, Miller published over three dozen science fiction short stories, winning a Hugo Award in 1955 for the story “The Darfsteller”. But he is best known for the only novel he published in his lifetime, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959), a post-apocalyptic tale about humans, their technology, and their demonic urge to use machines destructively. A Hugo winner and never out of print, it has sold more than two million copies. Miller, prone to depression and newly widowed, committed suicide in 1996. He left behind around 500 manuscript pages of a sequel to Canticle, Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman (1997), which was completed, at his request, by Terry Bisson.
It had disposed of the enemy, and it was weary. It sat on the crag by night. Gaunt, frigid, wounded, it sat under the black sky and listened to the land with its feet, while only its dishlike ear moved in slow patterns that searched the surface of the land and the sky. The land was silent, airless. Nothing moved, except the feeble thing that scratched in the cave. It was good that nothing moved. It hated sound and motion. It was in its nature to hate them. About the thing in the cave, it could do nothing until dawn. The thing muttered in the rocks
“Help me! Are you all dead? Ca
n’t you hear me? This is Sawyer. Sawyer calling anybody, Sawyer calling anybody—”
The mutterings were irregular, without pattern. It filtered them out, refusing to listen. All was seeping cold. The sun was gone, and there had been near-blackness for two hundred and fifty hours, except for the dim light of the sky-orb which gave no food, and the stars by which it told the time.
It sat wounded on the crag and expected the enemy. The enemy had come charging into the world out of the unworld during the late afternoon. The enemy had come brazenly, with neither defensive maneuvering nor offensive fire. It had destroyed them easily—first the big lumbering enemy that rumbled along on wheels, and then the small enemies that scurried away from the gutted hulk. It had picked them off one at a time, except for the one that crept into the cave and hid itself beyond a break in the tunnel.
It waited for the thing to emerge. From its vantage point atop the crag, it could scan broken terrain for miles around, the craters and crags and fissures, the barren expanse of dust-flat that stretched to the west, and the squarish outlines of the holy place near the tower that was the center of the world. The cave lay at the foot of a cliff to the southeast, only a thousand yards from the crag. It could guard the entrance to the cave with its small spitters, and there was no escape for the lingering trace of enemy.
It bore the mutterings of the hated thing even as it bore the pain of its wounds, patiently, waiting for a time of respite. For many sunrises there had been pain, and still the wounds were unrepaired. The wounds dulled some of its senses and crippled some of its activators. It could no longer follow the flickering beam of energy that would lead it safely into the unworld and across it to the place of creation. It could no longer blink out the pulses that reflected the difference between healer and foe. Now there was only foe.
“Colonel Aubrey, this is Sawyer. Answer me! I’m trapped in a supply cache. I think the others are dead. It blasted us as soon as we came near. Aubrey from Sawyer, Aubrey from Sawyer. Listen! I’ve got only one cylinder of oxygen left, you hear? Colonel, answer me!”
Vibrations in the rock, nothing more—only a minor irritant to disturb the blessed stasis of the world it guarded. The enemy was destroyed, except for the lingering trace in the cave. The lingering trace was neutralized however, and did not move.
Because of its wounds, it nursed a brooding anger. It could not stop the damage signals that kept firing from its wounded members, but neither could it accomplish the actions that the agonizing signals urged it to accomplish. It sat and suffered and hated on the crag.
It hated the night, for by night there was no food. Each day it devoured sun, strengthened itself for the long, long watch of darkness, but when dawn came, it was feeble again, and hunger was a fierce passion within. It was well, therefore, that there was peace in the night, that it might conserve itself and shield its bowels from the cold. If the cold penetrated the insulating layers, thermal receptors would begin firing warning signals, and agony would increase. There was much agony. And, except in time of battle, there was no pleasure except in devouring sun.
To protect the holy place, to restore stasis to the world, to kill enemy—these were the pleasures of battle. It knew them.
And it knew the nature of the world. It had learned every inch of land out to the pain perimeter, beyond which it could not move. And it had learned the surface features of the demiworld beyond, learned them by scanning with its long-range senses. The world, the demiworld, the unworld—these were Outside, constituting the universe.
“Help me, help me, help me! This is Captain John Harbin Sawyer, Autocyber Corps, Instruction and Programming Section, currently of Salvage Expedition Lunar-Sixteen. Isn’t anybody alive on the Moon? Listen! Listen to me! I’m sick. I’ve been here God knows how many days… in a suit. It stinks. Did you ever live in a suit for days? I’m sick. Get me out of here!”
The enemy’s place was unworld. If the enemy approached closer than the outer range, it must kill; this was a basic truth that it had known since the day of creation. Only the healers might move with impunity over all the land, but now the healers never came. It could no longer call them nor recognize them—because of the wound.
It knew the nature of itself. It learned of itself by introspecting damage, and by internal scanning. It alone was “being.” All else was of the outside. It knew its functions, its skills, its limitations. It listened to the land with its feet. It scanned the surface with many eyes. It tested the skies with a flickering probe. In the ground, it felt the faint seisms and random noise. On the surface, it saw the faint glint of starlight, the heat-loss from the cold terrain, and the reflected pulses from the tower. In the sky, it saw only stars, and heard only the pulse-echo from the faint orb of Earth overhead. It suffered the gnawings of ancient pain, and waited for the dawn.
*
After an hour, the thing began crawling in the cave. It listened to the faint scraping sounds that came through the rocks. It lowered a more sensitive pickup and tracked the sounds. The remnant of enemy was crawling softly toward the mouth of the cave. It turned a small spitter toward the black scar at the foot of the Earthlit cliff. It fired a bright burst of tracers toward the cave, and saw them ricochet about the entrance in bright but noiseless streaks over the airless land.
“You dirty greasy deadly monstrosity, let me alone! You ugly juggernaut, I’m Sawyer. Don’t you remember? I helped to train you ten years ago. You were a rookie under me… heh heh! Just a dumb autocyber rookie… with the firepower of a regiment. Let me go. Let me go!”
The enemy-trace crawled toward the entrance again. And again a noiseless burst of machine-gun fire spewed about the cave, driving the enemy fragment back. More vibrations in the rock
“I’m your friend. The war’s over. It’s been over for months… Earthmonths. Don’t you get it, Grumbler? ‘Grumbler’—we used to call you that back in your rookie days—before we taught you how to kill. Grumbler. Mobile autocyber fire control. Don’t you know your pappy, son?”
The vibrations were an irritant. Suddenly angry, it wheeled around on the crag, gracefully maneuvering its massive bulk. Motors growling, it moved from the crag onto the hillside, turned again, and lumbered down the slope. It charged across the flatlands and braked to a halt fifty yards from the entrance to the cave. Dust geysers sprayed up about its caterpillars and fell like jets of water in the airless night. It listened again. All was silent in the cave.
“Go ’way, sonny,” quavered the vibrations after a time. “Let pappy starve in peace.”
It aimed the small spitter at the center of the black opening and hosed two hundred rounds of tracers into the cave. It waited. Nothing moved inside. It debated the use of radiation grenade, but its arsenal was fast depleting. It listened for a time, watching the cave, looming five times taller than the tiny flesh-thing that cowered inside. Then it turned and lumbered back across the flat to resume its watch from the crag. Distant motion, out beyond the limits of the demiworld, scratched feebly at the threshold of its awareness—but the motion was too remote to disturb.
The thing was scratching in the cave again.
“I’m punctured, do you hear? I’m punctured. A shard of broken rock. Just a small leak, but a slap-patch won’t hold. My suit! Aubrey from Sawyer, Aubrey from Sawyer. Base Control from Moonwagon Sixteen, message for you, over. He he. Gotta observe procedure. I got shot! I’m punctured. Help!”
The thing made whining sounds for a time, then: “All right, it’s only my leg. I’ll pump the boot full of water and freeze it. So I lose a leg. Whatthehell, take your time.” The vibrations subsided into whining sounds again.
It settled again on the crag, its activators relaxing into a lethargy that was full of gnawing pain. Patiently it awaited the dawn.
*
The movement toward the south was increasing. The movement nagged at the outer fringes of the demiworld, until at last the movement became an irritant. Silently, a drill slipped down from its belly. The drill gnawed deep into the r
ock, then retracted. It slipped a sensitive pickup into the drill hole and listened carefully to the ground.
A faint purring in the rocks—mingled with the whining from the cave.
It compared the purring with recorded memories. It remembered similar purrings. The sound came from a rolling object far to the south. It tried to send the pulses that asked “Are you friend or foe,” but the sending organ was inoperative. The movement, therefore, was enemy—but still beyond range of its present weapons.
Lurking anger, and expectation of battle. It stirred restlessly on the crag, but kept its surveillance of the cave. Suddenly there was disturbance on a new sensory channel, vibrations similar to those that came from the cave; but this time the vibrations came across the surface, through the emptiness, transmitted in the long-wave spectra.
“Moonwagon Sixteen from Command Runabout, give us a call. Over.”
Then silence. It expected a response from the cave, at first—since it knew that one unit of enemy often exchanged vibratory patterns with another unit of enemy. But no answer came. Perhaps the long-wave energy could not penetrate the cave to reach the thing that cringed inside.
“Salvage Sixteen, this is Aubrey’s runabout. What the devil happened to you? Can you read me? Over!”
Tensely it listened to the ground. The purring stopped for a time as the enemy paused. Minutes later, the motion resumed.
It awoke an emissary ear twenty kilometers to the southwest, and commanded the ear to listen, and to transmit the patterns of the purring noise. Two soundings were taken, and from them, it derived the enemy’s precise position and velocity. The enemy was proceeding to the north, into the edge of the demiworld. Lurking anger flared into active fury. It gunned its engines on the crag. It girded itself for battle.
“Salvage Sixteen, this is Aubrey’s runabout. I assume your radio rig is unoperative. If you can hear us, get this: we’re proceeding north to five miles short of magnapult range. We’ll stop there and fire an autocyb rocket into zone Red-Red. The warhead’s a radio-to-sonar transceiver. If you’ve got a seismitter that’s working, the transceiver will act as a relay stage. Over.”