by Jerry
“Understand, Johnny.” The voice of Nona still spoke but an undertone of metal was coming into it. “Try to understand how it is to be a mind, alone. I have memories of loving and laughing and sometimes crying, of wanting to live because life could be something new and wonderful each day, but they’re memories without meaning, now.
“It’s the flesh that feels the emotions, that lives and loves and laughs and cries, that even when it grows old can still make the mind remember them all and relive them all. Nature intended for the body and mind to be together. For two billion years it worked to give the body the emotions that will make it want to live and make the mind want to help it live. When you take the body away from the mind you have only a part of something, a part that no longer has any reason to live.
“Understand, Johnny.” The undertone rose higher, not the bitter blare of brass but the whimpering cry of steel. “I have no reason to live. All I ever had is gone and nothing is left to me. Can a metal face ever smile, ever kiss, ever smell the night flowers? Can metal feet ever want to dance when music plays or metal hands ever want to stroke the fur of a kitten? Can metal arms ever want to hold anyone, can a metal heart ever care for anyone?
“They made me like this,” the steel was crying, like the strings of a violin, “a part of something that used to be. They took my body and left me dead memories. They took my life and gave me emptiness and torture. I killed women and children when I destroyed the Vanguard and I had no heart for mercy. How could I have when they had taken my living heart away from me and given me one of metal?
“Understand, Johnny.” The voice of Nona and the crying of the steel merged and were one. “Understand how it is to be like this. If you ever loved the Nona that was, then tell me you understand, and help me, and kill me now.”
He moved his fingers to the firing controls of the blaster. “I understand,” he said, “and I’m sorry, Nona.”
He swung up the black barrel and the sights were misty in his eyes as they found the place where the artificial heart would be pulsing inside its eternalloy cage. He pressed the firing studs and the blaster screamed as the blue beam hissed and crashed through the metal breast.
He took Felder’s pistol and Patricia tried not to cry as they left Nona lying with the Miracle Dawn shining on her cold, beautiful face. They went to the narrow ledge and around it and on into the trees that lay between them and the bowl of the valley.
“Nona,” Patricia said. “To have to go away and leave her alone like that.”
“She’s free now,” he said. “They had made her a prisoner far more than you or I could ever have been, but she’s free now as she wanted to be. We’ll have to think of her like that, Patricia.”
The trees thinned and they saw the metallic gleam of the rescue truck. Patricia’s hand closed on his arm but she did not falter.
“They’re waiting for us—the guards, Johnny. Nona is gone and there’s no hope and nothing left for us. But I wish I had a pistol to help you fight them this last time.”
He remembered the way Nona had pleaded with him: Help me, and kill me now. Marmon would not have to plead. When he awoke into the torturing meaninglessness of his new body he would have only to order his Military Computers to destroy Technorder Capital with the robot A-bomb fleet. The computers were an intelligence without a heart, as the changed Nona had been. They would not care that the bombs would also destroy him, and them.
Perhaps something was left for Patricia. The future, all the years of the future.
They passed through the last trees and saw the men coming toward them. They were not guards. They were Freedomists and even from the distance they walked like men who had known sudden victory.
Patricia stopped, realization like a light on her face as she looked up at him.
“Technorder is dead, Johnny! They thought humans were like their machines and they murdered Nona so they could live a thousand years. And when they did that they loaded the pistol that would kill them all!”
WAITING AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT
Roger Lovin
Hurry up and wait—a vision of a very dangerous future.
“Conjunction, fifty seconds.”
“Mark it. Stand by, all boards.” Sara’s voice is calm and alert, for she is on both NervUp and BeCalm: it’s the only way you can handle the job.
She sits at a console, in soft green light. Below, fanned around her, are six more consoles, six more figures hunched and poised. But relaxed, yes.
The room a bubble, a blister, an emerald-lit wart on a larger bubble—huge, silver, tumescent; the DallasPlex Ecodome. Four million souls living in the dome. It reaches half a kilo into the clanging brass sky, half a kilo into the blasted dirt, the bones of dinosaurs, the lost dreams of dim life long ago, long ago. Thirty kilos around, the dome, and ringed with green, green, green. And beyond the green: guns.
“Status, board five.” Sara calls her junior back from the tic which is beginning to oscillate his frame.
“Uh, sixty mods on nine south. Two goin’ on, fifteen comin’ off, three transships for the O’Plex rail.”
“The New OrleansPlex freight rail is numbered forty-seven, Citizen Brighton.”
“Okay, Citizen Coordinator. Three transships for rail forty-seven.”
“Thank you, Wes.” She watches his annoyance bring him back up. Will it be enough this time, the next time? Will she catch him if he falls?
Outside the dome, past the green, past the guns . . . the freight rails. A dozen of them coming in and radiating out of the dome, mostly from the east and north. Two south. One west. West into the brush and tumbleweeds and agonies of geology long past. West into the wild lands, the hidden lands, the lands of the Tribes. And eventually, Christ and the Apache willing, west into AngelesPlex to feed the six millions, to fuel their machines, to arm their guns, yes. “Readout, all boards.”
“Two meat wagons on rail twelve. Maybe got a hotbox on the middle module.”
“Fifty mods on the shuffle strip east-bound. Nothing shakin’ here, boss-person.”
“Break on rail thirteen. Two mods jamming, coming through LouisPlex.” Sara hits a switch. “When down?”
“Thirty-three seconds, Coordinator.”
“Put them on the shuffle strip, Lily.”
“What’ll we do with the on-mods?”
“I’ll move them.” Sara is already punching data into the main bank. She feels her stomach tighten. “Conjunction?”
“Twenty-one seconds. Twenty, nineteen, eighteen . . .”
“That’s a confirm on the hotbox, Coordinator.”
“Break the ’liner. Put them on the dump strip.”
“Live cattle, Ma’am.”
“Dump them.”
“Twelve, eleven, ten, nine . . .”
“Mark, all boards.”
“Board one, clear.”
“Clear on board two.”
Sara feels the float of chemical hypertension as conjunction narrows down on her. She detaches, mind and nerve endings coming free of the body, growing into the electrical synapses of the computer; eyes becoming an extension of cathode ray tubes staring greenly back at her, the pips on them moving at incredible velocities.
“Board six, clear.”
“Conjunction, one second. Stand on it!”
Through the tinted window that walls one side of the control room, you can see the rails. Steel arrows so straight the eyes ache. Elevated seven meters off the desert floor, humped by sonic breakers.
Without volition, Sara’s eyes go to rail thirteen.
And it comes, the freightliner. Two thousand kilos per hour, half a million tons packed into sixty modules, all screaming in electric heat toward the Pecos, toward AngelesPlex, toward the dome . . .
And four more just like it, on four other rails, at the same instant. Hail Mary: please, not on my shift.
The entirety of DallasPlex feels it. From the waste processing tunnels to the Class One apartments up under the city’s roof. Four trains slamming into
the freight-yard switching terminal, moving so very, very fast. And if the computer doesn’t drop a stitch, and if the Citizen Coordinator doesn’t have a headache, and if her crew hasn’t been too deeply into the pill bottles, and if for that two and a quarter seconds which count, everything goes exactly right . . .
All four trains flash out the other side of the dome and are gone in actinic stutters of light. Modules went on. Modules came off. Modules went from train to train. And two smashed into the million-liter water tanks designed to stop them and turned their mooing contents into jelly. But DallasPlex stands. Four million souls breathe again.
“Sara?”
She blinks. “Sam. Hi.”
The man rubs her shoulders and gentles her out of the control chair. “I got the board, kiddo. Go home.”
She smiles her thanks and stretches, watching carefully as her relief takes command. How tense is he? Is that a tremble? Can he handle it? Abruptly, she is nauseated. The hell with it.
She small-talks her crew as they leave. Ho, ho, ho. See you tomorrow. How’s the kid? Where are you going for your vacation? Why don’t you all go to hell? Why don’t we just let the damn trains do it sometime, huh? Why . . . Sara takes hold as she steps into the stink of general atmosphere. How long have they been promising to sweeten up the dome? She takes an elevator down to residential, knowing she can’t handle the mob and shove of the escalators. In the dulled glint of the dropper’s aluminum wall she sees a woman gray-haired at twenty-seven, the eyes too tight, the mouth beginning to show the three years on the console. It’s me, yes. It’s me and I think I’ll scream.
But she doesn’t. She beats her way through the crowds on residential five, keeping to the walls, and clings to her door like a drowning sailor. She can’t find the key and resorts to the buzzer.
“Hello?”
“It’s me, Pie-Pie. Open up.”
There is a five-year-old giggle through the speaker. “Me who?”
“Your mother, Cheryl. Come on, honey.”
“What’s the password?”
“Open the damned door!”
The door opens to reveal Chuck, her husband. He has a ladle in one hand and flour on his cheek. His look is accusatory, and he strides off without a word.
Sara bundles her child. “I’m sorry, Pie-Pie. I’m really sorry.”
Cheryl refuses to be comforted and runs into her room, slamming the door. Sara goes to the kitchen as if dazed and sits at the table. Her breath comes hard. She watches Chuck stirring something on the stove. “I thought we were going out tonight?”
“I decided to cook.” He is sullen. “You didn’t have to yell at the kid, you know.”
“Yes, I know. I’m sorry.”
Please listen. Please let me just cry and roll up and not think. Please.
Chuck sets the table and brings a stew. “Cheryl ate.” He spoons her bowl full. “You wouldn’t believe the day I had today.”
Please, my love. Not now. Please.
“First the goddamn ironbrain in sector three blew out and started pouring heat all over a med lab, then the tech who went in to fix it fried himself on a live 220 and I had to go get him. Then . . .”
Sara stands before the mirror, looking at her naked body. Chuck’s snores bounce off the bathroom walls in lumps. Is this all there is, she asks? Lie down, grunt, shower? What happened to Chuck the lover? Or is it what happened to Sara? It’s not the body. One child, lots of exercise, good diet. She’s still trim, her breasts still firm, the fat on the thighs fought to a standstill. What happened? Her hand toys with her husband’s razor . . .
At 2:35 the telephone rings. Sara is awake instantly, even through the fog of leftover BeCalm. If it rings in the middle of the night, it’s for her. No, no, no.
Please.
“Madam Coordinator?”
“Yes?”
“Please report to Western Sector Arming Station, immediately.”
“The Arming Station? What’s happened?”
“Report immediately.”
Sara shifts in the accel chair, trying to find a position where neither her pistol nor her powerpak chafes her hip bones. Goddamnit to hell. Goddamn the Tribers. Goddamn the WatchBureau slug who let a ’liner get hijacked five hundred kilos into the Texas blackness. And goddamn the RailBureau ordinance that put a Coordinator in the militia. Hadn’t she done her service at nineteen? Hadn’t she fought the Second Corporate War up in Canada? Wasn’t she entitled to a little goddamn peace without having to face the filthy, murdering Corporate dropouts in the ugly night?
“Stand by for acceleration.”
Sara wills herself to relax. I’ll stay on the mod. They won’t need me.
Beside her, a young man fingers the butt of his pistol, whistling tunelessly through his teeth. “Get me an Apache,” he croons. “Get me a Triber.”
“Acceleration!”
The module jerks, sways and lurches forward, the hum of its motors rising to a whine as voltage pumps in. Sara is pressed into the seat as the mod’s speed doubles, doubles again, then cubes. There are no ports on the mod: it’s military and armored. But Sara knows the scene. The stubby capsule is running up the accel rail in a long sweep, leaning as the rail curves. Power boosts into the mod every hundred meters until the combined voltage is a fist in the engines. A kilo and an eighth from the loading platform, the accel strip joins the mail rail. By the time the module gets there it will be moving at a thousand kilos per hour. The powerpak grinds into her left hip.
The moon makes a black and silver nightmare of the landscape. Gargoyles crouch on boulders. Giants stand in the sage, thinly disguised as saguaro cactus.
On the rail, a ’liner lies like a broken-backed snake, half its length tumbled to the stony ground. It has taken down several sonic breakers in its fall.
The armored module crawls out of the east, searchlights probing nervously. Gun turrets fore and aft swivel like skittish mares . . .
“Okay, first squad out! Perimeters at fifteen and thirty meters. Go!” The commander is efficient, masculine, and frightened. He turns to Sara. “Keep your people here until I give the signal.”
“They’re not my people. He’s in charge.”
“Okay, whoever. Y’all just stay put, right?”
The examination squad obediently stays put. The young man fingers his pistol and whistles. Sara wonders what it is like to be shot with an arrow. It might be over quickly. They say the Apache poison their arrows. Quickly, and peacefully. Chuck would see to Cheryl.
“Okay, out.”
Sara takes her turn at the ladder, shocked by the sweetness of the night air. Is this what it was like before domes? Is this the pollution we crawled under aluminum to escape? The Green-Techs don’t tell us how nice the air is out here.
“Get on the ’liner, dammit! Get your report together and let’s get out of here.”
The young man has his pistol out. “Where are th’ Tribers? Just let a ’Pache show hisself. I’ll blow him clean to Nevada.”
A woman ahead speaks. “Are you ready for war with the Tribes, son? Do you want to be the one who breaks treaty?”
“We didn’t break it,” the young man says hotly, pointing toward the wrecked ’liner.
“We don’t know that the Tribes did this.”
“It’s proof enough for me. I’m ready for war.” He looks around in the dimness, wearing his macho like a torch. “Any of you think a bunch of hippies and Mansonites with bows can take the Corporate States of America?”
“Not with bows, sonny,” the older woman says. “But they could probably take us if they wanted to.”
“Bull! What are you, some High Tech executive with all the answers?”
“Yes.”
“Oh. Sorry, Ma’am.”
“Just get in there and find out what caused this wreck.”
Sara and the examination crew pour through and over the wreck, looking, looking. The military personnel crouch in the cold of the coming dawn, shivering through their sweat.
&nb
sp; At five-thirty, they find it. A module coupler had broken, dropped, and struck the rail. The following mod had pole-vaulted up the loose coupler and hit a breaker. And the railtrain had become junk. System malfunction. No Triber interference.
“Bring in the perimeters! Get aboard, we’re goin’ in.”
Dawn is full and already heating. Sara waits at the ladder, her arms filled with the wrecked ’liner’s onboard recorder. The military commander stands at the foot of the ladder, still watchful. There are three soldiers, Sara, and himself still on the sand when the alarm sounds. “Down!”
All eyes follow the gun turrets. On a rise a quarter kilo distant are two figures.
The young man is in the mod’s hatch, his pistol braced. “Apache bastards!”
“No!” Four people yell at once; all too late. The young man fires, and in the laser’s whipcrack of coherent light, one of the figures on the rise puffs a burnt steam and collapses.
Almost simultaneously, the other figure raises something to its shoulder.
The military commander takes Sara’s shoulders and flings her toward a boulder a few paces away. She stumbles into it knees-first and tumbles over.
There is a slight motion on the rise and a flash of something dark coming. The young man has time to fire once more before the arrow takes him in the throat. He staggers back into the armored module, knocking the radio operator off his seat. He spasms convulsively, his trigger finger pressing the laser pistol’s firing mechanism again and again. The High-Tech woman is sliced in half. The forward end of the module bursts into flame. Then the young man falls and fires a last time. Upward, directly into the aft gun turret . . .
Painpainpain. Sara reaches convulsively for the readout board, her fingers scrabbling for shunt switches which keep eluding her. On the ’scopes, the pips come together and explode into whirling red light and high-pitched shriekings. No, not the shunt switches; pebbles. Gritted sand, not the console. But the shrieking is real, and it is herself. And the pain is real, and it is herself.