Odyssey iarc-1

by Michael P. Kube-Mcdowell

  Beyond and above Aranimas was a huge curved viewing screen on which eight different views of the asteroid’s surface were being projected. Superimposed on most of them were blue-lined targeting grids and small characters Derec took to be numbers. Some of the characters were changing constantly, and others seemed to change in response to Aranimas’s hands moving over the console and to the endless pattern of explosions and groundslides on the surface.

  “Praxil, denofah, praxil mastica,” he was saying, apparently into a microphone. “Deh feh opt spa, nexori.”

  Derec took a step forward. “Aranimas?”

  The alien turned his head slightly to the left, and a chill went through Derec. The lizardlike eye that peered back at him was set in a raised socket on the side of Aranimas’s head. From behind, Derec had mistaken the eye bumps for ears.

  “Sssh!” the caninoid alien said nervously, grasping Derec’s hand and pulling him back. “Don’t interrupt the boss. ‘E’ll talk to ‘u when ‘e’s ready.”

  Aranimas turned back to his work and resumed speaking. Derec had the impression that he was issuing orders, chiding, prodding, reprimanding, assigning targets and grading gunners. There was nothing moving on the surface and nothing stirring below, and yet the carnage went on.

  After a few minutes of watching, Derec could no longer restrain himself. “There’s nothing down there anymore,” Derec blurted. “They blew it all up. What are you doing this for?”

  “Prrractice,” Aranimas said. His voice was high-pitched and he trilled the “r” sound.

  It went on for another ten minutes that way, millions of watts of energy expended uselessly against an inert and lifeless world. Then Aranimas ran a fingertip along a row of switches, and the screens went blank.

  “Rijat,” he said, and turned his chair to face them. “What is your name?”

  “Derec.” Only one of Aranimas’s eyes was trained on him; the other glanced around randomly. Derec could not imagine what it would be like to view the world that way. Did the alien’s brain switch back and forth between the two inputs, like a director choosing a camera shot? Or did it somehow integrate the two images into one?

  “This device you used to attack my ship,” Aranimas continued. “What was it?”

  “An augmented worksuit-altered to allow the leg servos to operate at full power. But I wasn’t attacking you. I was escaping.”

  Aranimas’s other eye pivoted forward and focused on Derec. “Were you a prisoner?”

  “I was stranded on the asteroid in a survival pod. The robots found me and then wouldn’t let me go. I had to steal that equipment from them to get away.”

  “And where did you come from before you were stranded?”

  “I don’t know,” Derec said, frowning. “I can’t remember anything before that.”

  “Don’t lie to ‘im,” the caninoid whispered. “It makes ‘im angry.”

  “I’m not lying,” Derec said indignantly. “As far as I can tell, five days ago I didn’t exist. That’s how much I know about who I am.”

  While Derec spoke, Aranimas reached inside the folds of his clothing and extracted a small golden stylus. Seeing it, the caninoid cringed and turned half away.

  “Oh, no,” it whined. “Too late.”

  Aranimas pointed the stylus at Derec’s side, and a pale blue light began to dance over the entire surface of Derec’s hand. He screamed in pain and dropped to his knees. It was as though he had trust his hand into a raging furnace, except that no skin was being destroyed and no nerve endings deadened. The pain just went on and on, sapping his strength until even the screams caught in his throat, too feeble to free themselves.

  “I know something of the rules of governing robots and humans,” Aranimas said calmly while Derec writhed on the floor. “Humans build robots to serve them. Robots follow human direction. If you were the only human on this asteroid, then it follows that the robots here were under your command, and serving your purpose.”

  Aranimas tipped the stylus ceilingward, and the blue glow vanished. The pain vanished with it, except for the memory. Derec lay on his side and sucked in air in great gasping breaths.

  “I will know who you are and what you know about the object you brought aboard,” Aranimas said quietly. “To end the pain, you need only tell me the truth.”

  His face as emotionless as his trilling voice, Aranimas pointed the stylus at Derec once more.

  Chapter 8. Test Of Loyalty

  At some point, it ended. But by that time Derec was in no condition to know clearly why Aranimas had interrupted his torture. He had only a vague awareness of Aranimas’s going away, and of being dragged away from the control center by the caninoid.

  Unable to either resist or help, he was taken to another section of the subdivided compartment and laid on a thinly padded board. He lay there drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes aware of the caninoid crouching solicitously beside him, sometimes aware of nothing but his own confusion and fatigue.

  In one of his lucid moments he became aware that the alien was holding a cup of clear liquid for him, and struggled up on one elbow.

  “ ’U bettrr tell Aranimas what ‘e wants to know,” the caninoid whispered as it offered the cup.

  Derec tipped his head forward and reached for the cup. His right hand trembled uncontrollably, so he had to use his left to steady the cup as he sipped at the cool liquid. It was sweet, like a thin honey, and bathed his ravaged throat with relief.

  “How tough do you think humans are?” he croaked. “If I knew anything I’d have told him in the first five minutes. If he keeps this up he’s going to kill me. Why won’t he believe me?”

  The caninoid glanced nervously around before answering. “Do ‘u know Narwe?”

  Derec could not tell if the name was of a species or an individual, but it did not matter to his answer. “No.”

  “Aranimas knows Narwe. Narwe ‘ass to be forced to be honest. If ‘u ask Narwe a question, it will lie or pretend it doesn’t understand or hass forgotten. Hurt Narwe enough and it always tell.”

  “I’m not a Narwe!” Derec protested weakly. “Is he too stupid to see that?”

  “Aranimas thinks ‘u use the Narwe trick,” the caninoid said. “Besides, Aranimas iss very angry.”

  “Why is he angry at me? I didn’t do anything to him.”

  “When Aranimas iss angry, everyone in trouble,” the alien said. “Gunners werr not supposed to destroy robot nest.”

  “They didn’t. The robots did it themselves.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Aranimas wanted to capture robots to work forr ‘im.”

  Derec closed his eyes and laid back. “I’m afraid there won’t be much to capture.”

  “Aranimas went to see what salvage team brought back,” the alien said. “Eff truly not much, ‘e’ll be worse when ‘e comes back.”

  “Can’t you help me?” Derec pleaded. “You believe me, don’t you?”

  “Not my job to believe or not believe,” the caninoid shrugged. “Can’t ‘elp.”

  With a sigh, Derec lowered himself back to a reclining position and closed his eyes. “Then he is going to kill me, because I don’t have anything to tell him. And maybe that’s just as well.”

  The caninoid reclaimed the cup from Derec’s hand and stood up. “Perfect Narwe thought. Don’t let Aranimas ‘ear ‘u.”

  Dozing, the first Derec knew of Aranimas’s return was when the alien seized him by the arm and hauled him roughly to a sitting position.

  “It’s time to stop playing,” Aranimas said. “I grow impatient.”

  “That was playing?” Derec said lightly. “You people have some funny ideas about games. Remind me not to play cutthroat eight-card with you.”

  At that, the caninoid, crouching in a doorway a few meters away, closed its eyes and began to shake its head. Aranimas’s answer was to reach inside his clothing for the stylus.

  “Wait,” Derec said quickly, holding up a hand palm out. “You don’t need that.” />
  “Have you decided to share your knowledge after all?”

  “I always was willing to. You just didn’t want what I had to offer.”

  “I will know who you are and what you know about the object you brought aboard,” Aranimas said.

  Derec slid off the edge of the bench and found his feet. Aranimas still dwarfed him, but even so, he felt better standing. “The fact is, you know as much as I do about who I am, and I wouldn’t be surprised if you knew more than I do about the silver box. But there is something I know more about than you do, and that’s robots. How did your prospecting go?”

  One of Aranimas’s eyes cast a baleful glance in the direction of the caninoid, which hunched its shoulders and retreated from the doorway. “They brought back fragments only,” Aranimas said. “Your robots were very efficient about destroying themselves.”

  “They weren’t my robots,” Derec said. “But why don’t you show me what you have?”

  Aranimas lowered his arms to his side and slowly massaged his knees with his hands while he weighed Derec’s proposition. “Yes,” he said finally. “That will be a good test of your intentions and usefulness. I will have you build me a robot.”

  Derec’s face paled. “What?”

  “If you truly do not know who you are, then you have no loyalties or obligations to any other master. When you have built me a robot servant I will know that you have accepted your place serving me.”

  Derec knew better than to pick that moment to make a noble speech about freedom and choice, but he still could not simply accept Aranimas’s terms. “What if I can’t build you a robot out of what you have? I said I knew a lot about them. I didn’t say I could manufacture one out of good intentions. I need certain key parts-”

  “If you fail, I will know that you are either unreliable or have no usefulness to me at all,” Aranimas said, “and that I should not waste valuable consumables keeping you alive.”

  Derec swallowed hard. “What are we waiting for? Show me your inventory.”

  Aranimas had not been minimizing the problem when he termed what the scavengers had recovered from the asteroid “fragments.” I would have said scrap, he thought as he stood in the ship’s hold surveying the raiders’ paltry booty. The largest intact piece was the one Derec himself had brought aboard-Monitor 5’s arm. The next largest was a Supervisor’s knee joint. Chances were that it was from Monitor 5 as well.

  No other piece was bigger than the palm of Derec’s hand: a badly scorched regulator, an optical sensor with a cracked lens, bits of structural forms like shards of broken pottery. There were no positronic brains and no microfusion powerpacks-the two absolutely indispensable items.

  And all the Crown’s horses and all the Crown’s men couldn’t put the robots together again, he thought. “Is this all you have?” he asked with a heavy heart.

  Mercifully, it was not. In one of the storage corridors, he was shown two tall lockers, each of which contained a nearly intact robot.

  “I see this isn’t a new hobby of yours,” Derec said, stepping forward to examine the collection. The new robots were of a familiar domestic design. He would know more about where they had come from and what they had been used for when he used a microscanner on the serial number plates found at various sites on the robots’ bodies. Clearly, though, he was not the first human the raiders had encountered.

  There seemed to be enough good parts to make about one and a half robots. One of the robots was headless, and the mounting circle on the neck was twisted and deformed. That told Derec something about the circumstances under which the robots had been acquired.

  More important at the moment, it meant there was only one positronic brain. But there was no guarantee that it was functional. The upper torso of the other robot was torn open at the chest as though by some sort of projectile weapon, and the right shoulder area was rippled as though it had been seared by intense heat. Not only did that hold out little hope for the key components located in the torso, but it also virtually guaranteed that the brain’s powerdown had been anything but orderly.

  But at least there was something to work with, and an outside chance, at least, of success. Derec stepped back from the lockers and turned to look up at Aranimas.

  “So what do you have in the way of an engineering lab around here?” he asked with a breeziness that was more show than real. “I’m ready to get to work.”

  Aranimas nodded gravely. “I will give you that opportunity.”

  Answering Derec’s query about a place to work meant going deeper into the confusing maze of the raider ship. Unlike when he had been inside the asteroid, Derec found it impossible to retain any sense of direction. There were too many turns, too short sight lines, and too few absolute references. Once he lost track of where he was in relation to the command center, it was over.

  Despite being lost, Derec was still collecting useful information with every step. He learned that different parts of the ship had slightly different atmospheres, and the storage corridors acted as interlocks between them. In one section, something in the air made Derec feel as though a furry ball were caught in his throat. In another, yellowish tears ran from Aranimas’s eyes. Only the caninoid seemed at home in all the atmospheres.

  The ship was not only a maze, but a zoo as well, featuring at least four species. Derec sawfive of Aranimas’s kin, all of high rank to judge by the activities Derec saw them engaged in. Curiously, the caninoid seemed to be the only one of his kind aboard.

  Most numerous were the gaunt-faced Narwe, several of whom had been recruited by Aranimas to carry the robot parts. The Narwe were short bald-headed bipeds with gnarled skull ridges like false horns, which made them look fierce and formidable. But it was clearly only protective coloring, for Aranimas and the caninoid alike cuffed and bullied the Narwe without fear.

  The fourth species was the most interesting and the most elusive. Inside the compartment where Aranimas’s eyes began to tear, Derec caught a glimpse of a strange five-limbed wall-clinging creature not unlike a giant sea star. It retreated as they approached, and was gone from sight by the time they reached the spot.

  Fascinated as Derec was by the parade of alien biologies, he was also concerned about having so casual a contact with them. He knew that his own body was host to a rich biotic community: bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. He did not know just how different the aliens were from him. He hoped they were wildly different. The more similar their fundamental structure was to his, the greater the risk that his symbiotes could endanger them or theirs endanger him.

  He could only hope that Aranimas had either taken precautions or determined that no precautions were necessary. He based that hope on the fact that the raiders had evidently had some previous contact with humans. The scavenged robots and the aliens’ command of Standard proved that.

  But that was another mystery for his lengthening list. Derec was positive that human beings had never crossed paths with even one intelligent alien lifeform, much less with four of them. To understand interplanetary politics, he had to know history and economics, but not xenobiology.

  Did the raiders’ presence mean that he was far out on the fringes of human space? Or had knowledge of the contacts been made a state secret, meant only for those with a need to know? Were the raiders pirates, prospectors, or pioneers? Had they perhaps come looking for the same thing the robots had been looking for? And having found it, were they carrying him toward their home, or his?

  They were questions with serious consequences. Tensions were high enough between Earth and the Spacers without any random factors to jumble the picture. An attack of the sort Derec had already witnessed, directed against one of the many human worlds with no planetary defense net, could bring on war.

  Which brought Derec back to the silver artifact. If it was as important as the robots’ search for it implied, if it was powerful enough or important enough for the raiders to come after it, then it was too important and too powerful to be left in the raiders’ hand
s. As much as he hated to be thinking about anyone’s problems but his own, Derec had an obligation to try to reclaim it for humanity.

  Mercifully, the lab was located in a section with a normal atmosphere, though the air was a bit warm and dry. While Aranimas settled into a chair and supervised the Narwe’s arrangement of the robot parts on the open areas of the floor, Derec browsed the workbench and wall racks with the caninoid at his elbow to answer questions. By the time he finished, the Narwe were gone.

  “Explain each step as you perform it,” Aranimas said, crossing his arms as though settling in.

  “Do you intend to sit there and watch?”

  “I intend to learn what you know.”

  “Then I hope you’re a patient sort,” Derec said.

  “According to your story, it took you only a short time to convert an article of clothing into an escape propulsion system,” Aranimas said. “This should require even less time, since you only need to turn a robot into a robot.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” Derec said, throwing his hands in the air. “I’m not sure I’m going to be able to do it at all, much less in an hour or two.”

  “Explain the problem,” Aranimas said.

  Derec bit back a laugh. In the hopes of loosening the noose Aranimas had around his neck, Derec had been rehearsing complaints that the equipment in the lab was ill suited, too crude, anything to lower Aranimas’s expectations.

  But his dismay was real, not manufactured. He had prepared himself for instruments designed for nonhuman hands, to having to have one of the raiders at his elbow coaching him. But he had not been prepared to do without what he thought of as the basics.

  “The problem is you don’t have the right tools,” Derec said. “I need a diagnostic bench, an etcher, micromanipulators-There’s nothing in here that would even pass for a chip mask or circuit tracer-”

  Even as he spoke, he realized that he should not have been surprised. Aranimas would not be so curious about robots, would not need to have Derec repair them, if the culture which he represented were capable of making them. The fact that the raiders employed gunners instead of autotargeting systems should have tipped him off that their computer technology was deficient.