by Tanith Lee
“If we agreed to go,” said Kam abruptly, “you’d stop the signals, stop these bombs going off?”
“I myself have no power to stop my own signal emission. I would need to be dismantled.”
Nilla screamed again.
“I’ll go,” she screeched. “I don’t want to be hurt,” and she fled toward the grove and the plane.
“Yes,” said Esten. “We’ll all leave, won’t we? But look,” he went toward the Q-R anxiously. “I left some stuff in the ship. Could I just go and get it before—”
“It happened too fast for me. Esten flung himself into Moddik. Too fast for Moddik as well. An android is physically constructed like a human, at least externally, so the fist that went into his thorax upset the lung and heart mechanism, and the other fist that cracked on the jaw jarred those hard bones just enough to black-out, momentarily, the steel brain that whirred inside the plastic skull. Moddik fell, crashed full length, and, as he did so, Talsi and Glis fell also. Esten crouched over the Q-R, his face wild, desperate and gray-pale through the desert tan.
“In his workshop,” he shouted to me. “Electronic knives—a pane of ice-glass—anything sharp—”
I ran. I’d never run so fast on legs made entirely of lukewarm water. The workshop shelter was a confusion of bits and pieces. I grabbed a molecule-needle knife and ran out again.
“Here,” I dived down beside Esten, then turned my head, not ready for the thing he did with the knife, the spurt of completely human-looking blood.
“This is going to be messy,” he said, looking sicker than me, but more in control of himself.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” I blurted.
I could hear Nilla and Felain screaming from the background. The others just stared.
“Partly,” he said. “I read it up, android and robot basics—History Tower. I had an idea they might try something like this—but not yet—not so soon—”
“What can I do?”
“Get one of the robots. We need some kind of liquid spray—water, oil, anything, just to wash this damned red metallic plasma out. I’ve got to cut through every single nontissue organ to stop that signal.”
I got up and around again, but Kam said, “I’ll do it,” and ran, as I had, toward the forest area where the robots were hoeing.
Esten’s hands gnawed on the corpse. Glis and Talsi lay as if dead. Moddik was definitely finished, and, extensions of him, the two “women” had presumably stopped like chronometers once he ceased to be.
Kam sprinted back, the robots clanking after.
“OK,” Esten said, “now I handle it. The rest of you get out, and take those screaming fools with you.”
“We stay,” said Kam. “We can’t miss it if it goes off, anyway.”
“You might. Get as far away from the ship as you can, and climb down into one of those irrigation canals when it’s due. Take a breath and lie on your faces under the water and stay put. It might work. Now do it, for God’s sake.”
The knife sizzled and spat through liquid, more slowly through steel fibers and hard plasti-rubber. The engines of android life lay spasmodically bare between the rushes of plasma and the squirting oil sprays of Jaska and Yay. It was a somber golden oil. When it met the “blood” it turned the color of Moddik’s garnet hair.
“Go on,” Esten raged coldly, not looking at us. “You’ve got about three splits.”
“All right,” Kam said.
I felt but did not see them moving, going swiftly to do what he said. Nilla and Felain were taken too, wailing. Loxi had started wailing as well. Would they be able to get the swan down from the roof, or wherever it was? What about the Gray-Eyeses? What about—?
“You too, you bitch,” Esten said. I hadn’t made a sound, but he knew I wasn’t gone. I don’t know why I wasn’t. I was half-dead of fright. I wanted to run screaming like the Jang girls, run and not stop. But somehow I felt safer there, standing behind him.
“I’d—” I said, but he cut in as if he hated me.
“Push off. I’m trying to save your shitting land and your stupid hide. Let me do it.”
So I did what he said. I ran. But not very far. There was a channel quite close—too close, but I couldn’t seem to reason it out, and half fell down into it. The water was very shallow, barely reached my ankles. I lay in it, attempting to pull the water up over myself.
I was crying in dry throaty gasps, and trying to count.
But I wasn’t counting. I was praying. Like once before. A sort of prayer. Although nobody had answered that one. “No, please no, don’t let it—Oh please no oh no oh no—”
It wasn’t quiet. There were lots of noises. Animals, breezes through reeds and flowers and leaves. As if everyone were speaking for the last time, hurrying to get out its song of life before the blast tore it in shreds.
Then I heard someone shriek, off to the west. Nilla, maybe. Was it time, and did they know over there?
Now it happens.
Now it comes.
The red wind, the black sound.
Pain and silence forever.
I don’t want to die. I’m not ready. None of us are ready. I don’t want this to die, all this around me. I want the ache in my muscles from a day’s work, I want the ache in my heart from anger or despair. I want every misery and joy I’ve ever known, and the rest to come. I want them all. They’re all precious. And the trees, and the earth, and the sky …
Why doesn’t it happen? I’ve bitten through the skin of my hand. Do I have to start on the other hand? It’s going to, so let it be now.
Nothing
Happened
At
All.
Kam was hauling me up the bank of the canal, through the pretty weed.
“Kam, are we dead?”
“No,” he said, quite reasonably, as if I’d said something intelligent and unusual that deserved a thinking man’s answer. “We’re OK. It didn’t happen. Felain had a chronometer—Glis’ chronometer, ironically enough—and I time-checked. Fifteen splits now since it should have happened. All clear.”
“Then where’s Esten?” I sprang up covered in mud, weed, the complete detritus my position had offered me, and hurled myself past the purple trees, onto the lawn.
Or practically.
He was still there by the Q-R corpse, the knife silent and immobile in his hand. He looked exhausted, literally shattered, as if some framework in him had given way. But then, was that yet another complication of the poet-body syndrome?
“Esten—” I called out, and he shouted:
“Wait—stay back.”
“But it’s finished,” I said. “Fifteen splits since it should—”
“I got them all,” he said, “all but one. I got that too, when I found it, but I was over the time. It could be safe. It may not be. Something may still—” he broke off, staring at me, then cried at the top of his lungs: “Down, get down!”
Kam was behind me, and pushed me. We fell like desperate lovers together into the grass and the green land smashed us, rising.
The noise was like no-noise, a bang so big it went beyond sound into a sort of clap of deafness.
The sky rained fire and debris. Leaves fell in masses and covered us.
Presently, it was over.
It had only been one water mixer, the seventh and farthest from us at the center of the semicircle. Esten had cut all the signals in time but the last; that last went on long enough to eat through the bomb casing and then peter out. The nerve of the bomb flickered, hesitated, wondering if it were detonated or not. It wondered for fifteen splits. Then decided it was, and blew.
Smoke was clearing in snatches.
I wasn’t hurt, but so divorced from myself I could only crawl on my hands and knees. Kam, also unhurt, muttered after me, but I took no notice.
I got to Esten quickly, even that way. I thought he was going to be dead, but I still had to get to him.
He wasn’t dead. He was breathing and simply looked like a beautiful
poet passed out on some romantic lawn. That was from his left side. When I went around to the other side, the side the blast had been, I saw that he was never going to be beautiful, never going to look as I had looked, ever again.
14
I knew very well what the answer would be, but I had to try. I tried for hours, for days. I tried shouting, pleading, speaking extremely serenely and rationally. I wept and I swore.
The computer simply reiterated its message. We were to use the painkilling drugs we possessed, the antibiodermics, the healing salve. Further supplies would be sent us.
“The salve isn’t good enough,” I kept saying. “It can’t heal that kind of wound—not properly.”
The computer said that pain could be alleviated, and infection prevented, that this was the most that we were entitled to, exiles as we were. We knew that new bodies were no longer allowed us, or any form of surgery or replacement.
“But the skin is—the scar will be—”
Rattle click. Rattle click.
Click.
“Damn you,” I screamed, “it’s your fault!”
Rattle, rattle.
“Your bloody fault—your plot—it didn’t come off! Your stinking Q-Rs are melted all over the grass out there—”
Kam shut off the link before I could elaborate.
“No use,” he said. “It’s on Receive Only. You won’t get any more reaction.”
“Whatever they send—drugs, supplies—how can we trust them?”
“We’ll check everything they send,” he said, “as you suggested earlier. But I don’t think they’ll try again. That point about their programming still holds good—they could only go as far as they did by blinding themselves to it. It’s out in the open now. Next time they would know. Ergo, they won’t.”
“Oh, what does it matter, anyway?”
There was a great stillness in the ship. They were mostly sitting in the saloon. Nilla and Felain were intermittently crying, but very softly, holding on to each other for dear life. Naz was generally pacing in the corridor; each time he turned at either end the Jang topaz beads on his trouser hems came together with a little cold clink. We had been going on like this, with minor variations, for five units.
I opened the door of my cabin.
Danor was sitting with him. She was quite motionless, and so was he, but he was at last awake.
I’d been hoping he wouldn’t wake up for an indefinite while, though, of course, there wasn’t any pain, not with the miraculous drugs, so easy to use and so expedient. The whole of the right side of his face and neck was shielded by a silk-of-ice bandaging, under that the anesthetic foam barrier, keeping the material from actually touching the ruined flesh. The blast had ripped the side of his face open, peeling back the tissues in layers—somehow, incredibly, it had missed the mouth, the nostril, the eye. So it was with two eyes, those eyes that were still mine, that he was able to look up at me as I came toward him.
“Hello, Esten,” I said.
“Hello,” he said.
The right eardrum had been badly damaged, but that didn’t necessarily have to matter. The robots and the machines had already worked out and implanted some sort of miniaturized something or other that would do the ear’s work for it—a process they knew, since it was part of their own self-servicing technique.
Danor rose and went out. I didn’t want her to go. I didn’t want the responsibility of being alone with him, conscious. Unconscious, I had sat by him here four days, four nights, barring my sessions with the monitor computer, when Kam or Danor relieved me.
I’d felt helpless enough then, useless enough. But now.
I didn’t know what I could say to him. Particularly since—
“Sit down,” he said courteously. “I suggest that we should talk.”
“Do you feel up to talking? I think—”
“I think you’d rather not talk, and you’re putting the onus on me. But I say we have to, and I’m fine, so pull up a float-chair and sit down.”
“Very well.”
I sat, and I peered at him. I wanted to cry. He said:
“You don’t bravely have to stare me out, you know.” So I lowered my stinging eyes, ashamed.
“I look fairly grizzly, I imagine,” he said calmly, “and when this excellent bandaging comes off, I’m going to look sixteen times worse. Aren’t I?”
“Not necessarily. You see, the salve is still very good. And if you keep on using it—it may take a while, but—”
“Shut up, ooma,” he said. “You never could lie about anything that really mattered to you. Just listen to me, and then we’ll have it straight. I came out to this place to get you, and I got you, and I don’t regret it. Neither do I regret saving your greenery from extinction. However, I do see that as your bed mate, with this face, my days are numbered. So, in a little while, Naz is going to bring me in his total hoard of renounced ecstasy and a few other things as well, and I’m going blissfully to overdose myself out of this Ego-Life, into PD.”
I jumped—off the chair, backward, upward—
“No,” I shouted. “PD is out. Suicide is out. You’d give them the satisfaction of voluntarily doing what they tried to push us into—after this?”
“Ooma, it’s my life, what’s left of it. It’s up to me.”
“No, not any more it isn’t.”
“Please don’t squeeze out a host of insincere protestations of eternal affection, or start howling that my irrevocable hideousness will make no difference to you. You’ll only regret it, and I shan’t swallow a syllable.”
Somehow I’d got back to the chair, and flattened myself down in it as if an ogre were after me. Perhaps it was.
“Let me do what I want,” he said. “There’ll be other males along, you can be sure of that. Run a check to make sure they’re human next time.”
“Be quiet,” I said. I tried to get my breath, and realized I wasn’t going to be able to, so I’d have to explain it all to him without breath. “First, I know it makes a difference. What else could it do? Every time I look at that scar—oh, yes, there’s going to be one bloody awful scar—my guts are going to knot up like a nest of reinforced steel cobras. Not with revulsion, with anger. Anger that it happened to you. What other difference could there be? You’re still you—still me, you body-thieving bastard. If your hair went white, would I stop feeling anything for you? What does it matter anyway? In Four BEE and BAA and BOO the physical side was, in any case, a joke, wasn’t it? If you fell for someone, you fell for them, their personality—their—their self, whatever it is—not whatever flesh they happened to have put on that unit. Which is why any true feeling was rare. Oh, yes, the body turned me on, looking like me and everything, but it’s you who got through to me, you fool. And this thing that’s happened to you—it’s something that was done to you, not you yourself. You’re still you.” I managed to get a breath then, and I stabbed the last words out at him as a final cold blow to bring him back to his senses and to me. “Still you—Hergal.”
“Oh,” he said, quite lamely. He looked as if he might be going to laugh.
“Of course,” I added, “maybe you’re so effete you can’t live with it yourself. Maybe you don’t give a damn about me. You just want to piss off to nice PD and leave me here alone for the rest of my days with your filthy little child to bring up.”
“What?” he said.
I caught up with myself just then.
“Er, I hadn’t quite meant to tell you, like that. Oh, I’m not even absolutely sure. Actually. So, er. Yes.”
“Well, I think you’d better tell me. Again. Quietly and in detail.”
I rose, and then sat on the edge of the bed.
“You see,” I mumbled, feeling acutely embarrassed for some reason I couldn’t fathom, “Kam and I were near the bomb blast, so we ran checks on ourselves to be sure everything was still in order physically. And it was. But my machine had a little fit and spat out bits of blue tape over me, and it said I was—it’s the old word—
pregnant. That means that you and I have done what we wouldn’t have been allowed to do in the cities, which is, make a child. Only instead of growing in the crystallize tanks, ever so hygienic and safe and everything, the poor little idiot’s going to have to grow inside me. I’m carrying, fecund, in the club, um, etc. I couldn’t work out why, to begin with, but the machine did eventually. It’s the ‘home-grown’ food I’ve been devouring so rapaciously. Those tubers and sun-peaches and lettuce things. It has altered my body chemistry, screwed up the contraceptive properties that apparently linger in our exclusive city diet. So, whoops, we’re going to be makers, Hergal, and if you go off and leave me here, I’ll never forgive you.”
He just lay there, expressionless. I wondered if he’d grasped what I’d said; I could hardly grasp it myself. Then he took my hand, and he said: