“Come out,” the blond kobold on the porch said. It was a black shadow with a silver nimbus around its head. “Come outside.”
Silas backed away. The bearded kobold crossed to the screen door. “Go on,” it whispered, as if conspiring with them.
Silas came closer to Andrew. “They want to help us.”
Andrew shook his head. “No, they don’t. They don’t want to do anything. Emily tells them what to do. Don’t listen to them.”
“If I could get away, I could get help. It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”
“Don’t go outside, Silas.” He looked toward Thérèse. “You tell him. Tell him not to go.”
“Andrew’s right,” Thérèse said from the cot.
“They said there were others,” Silas replied. “Maybe they helped them get away.”
“You’re wrong. Kobolds can only do what they’re told; they have to be directed. They don’t have minds.” But Andrew heard the doubt in the girl’s voice.
“It’s worth a chance, isn’t it?” Silas said. “Maybe you don’t want to go because you know what’s going to happen to you when you’re caught. You don’t want help to come. You don’t care what happens to us.”
“Don’t go,” Andrew said.
Silas leaned over him; Andrew could feel his breath. “It’s your fault, too.” Andrew shrank back, puzzled. “You should have stopped me before. If you hadn’t come along, I wouldn’t be on this trip. And it’s her fault for having us stop here. I’m not going to stay because of what you say.” He walked to the door; the bearded kobold let him pass. The screen door slammed behind Silas.
Thérèse slid off her cot and stood up. The kobold made a circle with its wand. She moved closer to the creature and it pointed the wand at her. Andrew rolled off his cot toward the sofa, trying to decide what to do. Thérèse backed to the window. The android’s head turned.
Andrew’s hand was reaching for the brass lamp near him. He pulled out the cord. He felt that he was moving very slowly. Thérèse lifted a hand to her face. He picked up the lamp. The kobold was pivoting on one foot. He saw its face as he leaped, bringing the base of the lamp down on its head.
It squeaked. The wand flew from its hand, clattering across the floor. Andrew hit it again, and it was still as it fell, its limbs stiff. He dropped the lamp and began to shake.
Thérèse was breathing heavily. “You took a chance,” she said. “You really took a chance.” She knelt and began to crawl over the floor. “I have to find that weapon.”
“Use your light.”
“I lost my light.”
Andrew remembered Silas. He went to the door. Thérèse was slapping the floor. He breathed the night air and smelled dirt and pollen. Opening the door cautiously, he went out on the porch; his skin prickled as a cool breeze touched him.
The blond kobold was below, in front of the porch. Silas was running across the barren yard, kicking up dust. The troll was blocking him, leaping from side to side and waving its long arms as if playing with the boy. Silas darted to the left, but the creature was too quick for him. It herded him, driving him back toward the house. The boy hopped and danced, coming closer to Andrew.
Andrew came down the steps, pausing on the bottom one. The kobold saw him. He could hear Silas panting; there were shiny streaks on his friend’s face. The troll put its hands on the ground and swung between them on its arms, lifting its knees to its chest. It grinned, showing its crooked teeth. Then Andrew saw Emily.
The woman had come around the side of the house and now stood to Andrew’s left, watching the pursuit. Her white dress shone in the moonlight and fluttered in the breeze. She raised her hands as if casting a spell, and Andrew saw that she was holding a wand.
He opened his mouth to cry out. His throat locked; he rasped as breath left him. The woman pointed her wand. The beam struck Silas in the chest. He fell. Andrew heard a scream.
He stared numbly at his friend. A black spot was covering Silas, flowing over his chest; his eyes gazed heavenward. “Silas?” Andrew murmured. He swayed on the steps. “Silas?” The troll stood up; the kobold stood near Silas’s head. Dust had settled in the boy’s thick hair.
Emily was walking toward him, still holding the wand. She was smiling; the blue stone of her Bond seemed to wink. Andrew faced her, unable to move. His limbs were heavy; invisible hands pressed against him. He saw one white arm rise.
A beam brightened the night. Andrew gasped. Emily was falling. Andrew clutched at his abdomen and spun around, almost falling from the step. Thérèse was climbing through the window; her feet hit the porch. She came to the railing and leaned over it, firing at Emily with her weapon. The white dress was stained. The kobold raised its wand. Andrew dove for it as it fired, and heard a cry. He wrested the weapon from it and knocked the creature aside.
Thérèse was screaming. She continued to fire at Emily. One beam struck the woman in the leg; another burned through her head. One arm jerked. The stone on Emily’s Bond was black. Thérèse kept shooting, striking the ground near the body.
His vision blurred for a moment. He found himself next to the girl. “Thérèse, stop.” She cried out as he reached for her, and held out her left arm. Her hand was a burned, bloody claw; he gasped, and touched her right shoulder. She tore herself from him and went down the steps to Silas. She knelt in the dirt, patting his face with her right hand.
“I was too late,” she said, crying. The kobold sat up, rubbing its head. Andrew gripped his wand, aimed it at the android, then let his arm drop. The troll scampered to the side of its dead mistress. It lifted her in its arms and held her. A sudden gust whipped Andrew’s hair; he caught the metallic smell of blood in the summer’s dust.
IV
Joan tried to stop Andrew at the door.
“Where are you going?”
“I want to say goodbye to Thérèse.”
Joan frowned. “I don’t think you should.”
“She’s my friend.”
“She killed two people.” Joan’s voice tripped over the word kill. “She’s very ill.”
“She’s not. She did what she had to. She had to kill Emily.”
Joan stepped back. “That woman was very disturbed, Andrew. She needed help, reconditioning. She was ill.”
“She wasn’t ill. She was going to die, so she wanted other people to die, too, that’s all.” He thought of Emily’s body in the dirt, and his throat tightened; Thérèse had cursed their rescuers when they destroyed Emily’s kobold and troll. The troll had looked at Andrew before it died, and he had thought he saw awareness in its eyes.
Joan took him by the shoulders. Her eyes were narrowed; her lips were pulled back over her teeth. “You’ll forget all this. The psychologist will be here tomorrow, and that will be that. You’ll think differently about this incident.”
He twisted away and went out the door. Dao was outside. He let Andrew pass.
A tent had been put up at the bottom of the hill, a temporary shelter for Thérèse and the two psychologists who were now with her. They had questioned the girl and interrogated him; they had set up a tent because Joan had been afraid to have the girl in her house. Now they would take Thérèse away. The evil in his world would be smoothed over, explained and rationalized. Thérèse would not be sent to an asteroid; only people who were hopelessly death-loving were sent to one, and even they could change, given enough time. That was what the female psychologist had told him. They had high hopes for Thérèse; she was young enough to heal. They would help her construct a new personality. The mental scars would disappear; the cruelty would be forgotten. Andrew thought of it, and it seemed like death; the Thérèse he knew would no longer exist.
Thérèse came out of the tent as he approached. The brown- skinned woman followed her; the red-haired man was near their hovercraft, putting things away. Thérèse reached for Andrew’s hand and held it for a moment before releasing it. The psychologist lingered near them.
“I want to talk to him alone,” Thérèse said
. “Don’t worry, you’ll find out all my secrets soon enough.” The woman withdrew. Thérèse led Andrew inside the tent.
They sat down on an air mattress. The girl looked down at the Bond on her right wrist. “Can’t get this one off so easily,” she muttered. Her mouth twisted. She gestured with her bandaged left hand. “They’re going to fix my hand first,” she went on. “It’ll be just the way it was—no scars.”
He said, “I don’t want you to go.”
“It won’t be so bad. They told me I’d be happier. It’s probably true. They’re nice people.”
Andrew glanced at her. “Ben might clone Silas. That’s what he told Dao. He’s thinking about it. He’s going to go away.”
“It won’t be Silas.”
“I know.”
Thérèse shook back her hair. “I guess I won’t remember much of this. It’ll be like a dream.”
“I don’t want you to forget. I won’t. I promise. I don’t want to forget you, Thérèse. I don’t care. You’re the only friend I have now.”
She frowned. “Make some new friends. Don’t just wait around for someone else to tell you what to do.” She paused. “I could have just aimed at her arm, you know. Then she would have still been alive.”
“She was dying anyway.”
“They could have helped her eventually. She was dying very slowly. I didn’t have to kill Rani, either.” Her eyes were wide; she stared past him. “I didn’t. He was down; he begged me to stop. I kept hitting him with the poker until his skull caved in. I wanted to be sure he wouldn’t come after me. I was glad, too. I was glad he was dead and I was still alive.”
“No,” Andrew said.
“Stop it.” She dug her fingers into his shoulder. “You said you didn’t want to forget me. If you don’t see me the way I am, you’ve forgotten me already. Do you understand?”
He nodded, and she released him. His eyes stung; he blinked. “Listen, Andrew. We’ll be all right. We’ll grow up, and we’ll be alive forever. When everyone lives forever, then sooner or later they have to meet everyone else, don’t they? If we live long enough, we’re bound to see each other again. It’ll be like starting all over.”
He did not reply.
“It’s true, you know it’s true. Stop looking like that.” She jabbed him with her elbow. “Say goodbye, Andrew. I don’t want you hanging around when we leave. I won’t be able to stand it.”
“Goodbye, Thérèse.”
“Goodbye.” She touched his arm. He got up and lifted the tent flap. He wanted to look back at her; instead, he let the flap drop behind him.
He climbed the hill, trying to imagine endless life. Joan and Dao were on the porch, waiting for him. He thought of Silas. You’ll always be afraid, just like them; that was what his friend had said. No, Andrew told himself; not any more. His friend’s face was suddenly before him, vivid; Joan and Dao were only distant, ghostly shapes, trying to face up to forever.
The Loop of Creation
I
Merripen stood on the wall. A cold wind bit at his face, and he bowed his head, pulling his coat more tightly around himself. The wind shrieked. As it died, he leaned against the ledge and his hand touched an invisible shield. He drew back.
Outside the Citadel, snowflakes swirled as they fell, making white patches on the brown earth below, riming the trees of the forest. He felt the wind again; flakes bathed his face and sprinkled his arms with white specks. The shield was down again. He waited. The snow continued to fall, but he no longer felt it; the wall had corrected the shield’s malfunction.
Merripen sighed. Were such problems becoming more common, or did it only seem that way? He could count on the shield’s failure at least once a season. It had failed during the summer. The temperate weather of the Citadel had been replaced by hot, humid air and thundershowers, forcing him to stay inside until the wall had repaired itself; the repairs had taken two days. He wondered if the shield would eventually fail completely, and told himself it would not matter if it did; the wall would remain.
The wall was high; the ground was over fifty meters below him. Four towers stood at each corner of the wall, guarding the buildings inside the square. The wall could not be climbed; there were no handholds or niches in its smooth metal sides, and the entrances were guarded. But someone could fly in if the shield failed. Merripen shivered, even though he was protected from the wind, and found himself looking up at the gray sky.
Something moved below. He stepped closer to the ledge and saw a shadowy figure running through the forest; obscured by a snowy veil, it was barely visible under the bare tree limbs.
The figure stopped at the edge of the forest, waved its arms aimlessly, then hurried toward the wall. It staggered, leaving an uneven trail of footprints behind it on the patches of snow. It was dressed in a long brown coat; a hood hid its face. Merripen watched the runner calmly, knowing it would be stopped at the entrance. Then the hood fell back, and he saw the thick blond hair.
Merripen turned and ran toward the nearest drop. He jumped into the circular tunnel and floated down through the wall past lighted entrances until he reached the bottom. He hurried through the lighted hall.
Two giants stood at the entrance. The dark-haired giant pulled at the heavy brass door, opening it a little. Merripen heard a shout from outside. A gust of wind scattered snowflakes across the gleaming floor, and he felt the cold. The giant picked up the blond man and carried him inside.
The second giant pushed the door shut, then stood with its back to the entrance. Its small eyes, almost hidden under a mop of brown hair, stared expressionlessly at the other giant, who was setting the man gently on the floor.
Merripen waved the dark-haired giant away. “Leif,” he said, taking the man by the arms. Leif swayed, leaning against Merripen for a moment. He was breathing heavily; Merripen struggled to support him.
The blond man suddenly crumpled to the floor, almost pulling Merripen with him. “Let me get help,” Merripen murmured.
Leif shook his head. “Give me a minute—I’ll be all right.” He sprawled on the floor; his cheeks were chapped and red. “I ran. I was running for a while. I had to stay out there last night. I had to leave my lifesuit behind. Without my heater, I would have been frozen.” He drew back his lips, as if trying to smile.
“Where’s your hovercraft?”
“Gone. I had to leave it.”
“Why didn’t your Bond signal for help?”
Leif held out his arms. His hands trembled; he took off his gloves and began to rub his hands together. “Because I don’t have it on.” Merripen’s right hand darted reflexively to his left wrist and touched his own Bond. “I took it off.”
“But why?”
“They were tracking me. I had to get rid of it. I stamped on it and buried it. Then I started running.”
“Who was tracking you?”
Leif grabbed Merripen’s hand and pulled himself up. Then he fell back again; Merripen caught him just before he passed out.
“Get help,” he called to the giants.
Nulla fugae ratio, nulla spes: omnia muta,
omnia sunt deserta, ostentant omnia letum.
Non tamen ante mihi languescent lumina morte,
nec prius a fesso secedent corpore sensus …
No hope, no signs … all doomed; yet death would not dim his eyes nor would his senses leave him. These were the lines of Catullus Merripen now called to mind; the lusty verses had been forgotten.
He sat alone in Peony’s garden, waiting for her to join him. Her flowers were orange; vines of giant trumpet creepers wound around the trellis near Merripen, the blooms as large as his arm. Flame azaleas bordered the garden, and miniature orioles, tame and timid, pecked at the seeds Peony had scattered while watching Merripen warily with their beady eyes.
A small, flat screen rested on his lap. Idly, he searched his records, and words appeared on the screen.
Any viable modification must preserve human
versatility, human
flexibility, the capacity to adapt
both physically and mentally to changes in environment.
Excessive specialization through biological experimentation
on the human form will always be a dead end.
Merripen frowned. Had he actually written those words? Then he had betrayed them, many times over. He thought of the giants who guarded the Citadel, beings with feeble minds and rudimentary emotions, controlled by implants. Yet the genetic material used in their creation had been human. At least the giants had been created with an end in mind, however limited; the same could not be said for other projects.
Merripen searched through more writings, glancing at the words as they fluttered across the screen. The paper on which he had written them had long since crumbled away, yet the words lived on. It seemed to him that the man who had written them was also gone, and that only his ghost remained.
Why do so many seek death? Too many of us still wish
to die, and even the most unoriginal death cult can still
find adherents. It is as if the mechanisms for death were
inherent. But why do some seek death while others are
content to live? Natural selection—
Some words had been crossed out. He went to another page.
What traits do long-lived human beings need? What
qualities would enable us to best lead our lives? Perhaps
by creating beings who do not share certain traits with us
or who have other characteristics, we can discover what it
is we need. From these different kinds of beings, new
values can emerge, ones which we might share if we
altered ourselves somatically.
In a margin, scrawled by hand, he saw another comment: “Naturalistic fallacy?”
He turned off his screen and set it under his chair. His words lived on in the cybernetic mind of the Citadel, still able to haunt him. The cybermind kept what it wanted, as if sensing that it would one day be the only guardian of the past left. Leif had been chased back here by those who hated the Citadel and all it stood for. Many biologists lived outside the centers now, and had turned against their own work. With that betrayal, the biologists had lost what power they had. Now the world was fragmented. In isolated enclaves, unchanging immortals lived, and waited for the Citadels to die. Most of the houses near Merripen’s had been abandoned. There would be more defections.
The Golden Space Page 19