by Brian N Ball
Danecki felt the stirring of primeval fear in the back lobes of his brain. Could Dross be right in this too? Were the robots evolving personality patterns for themselves? Certainly this invisible automaton was an elusive, mocking thing.
Khalia resisted an urge to giggle at its falsetto voice. The robot was so much an archetypal harem eunuch that the situation had the chief elements of farce.
“Tell me where we are located!” Danecki ordered.
The machine was prompt and precise. “Two floors beneath Central Command, sir! Seven above the lowest levels of all. Laterally there are the rest of your quarters. On your right—no, sir, as you were standing just then, beside the young lady—is the medical complex. What in particular do you wish to know, sir?”
Danecki stared at the girl, hardly seeing her. Had Dross and Wardle found a way around the monstrous maintenance automaton? Were they even now searching the distraught installation for the missing Batibasaga? Or had they already been seized by one of the security nets?
“Is the Commander happy with my arrangements?” minced the voice.
To stay, or to try to find out more about the mystery of the age-old fort! Danecki knew that without more information all Dross’s scheming was of no value. “No!” he snapped.
Khalia noted the abrupt tone of decision. She wanted to tell him to be careful, but she knew that he would always take care now.
“Really, sir? How can I be of further assistance?”
“Explain how to abort the control systems in Level Nine.”
Khalia felt herself tremble. Danecki had plunged into the mystery with no hesitation. And yet, what else could he do? The archaeologist’s robot had failed to come to their assistance. Time was sliding by, so that only four hours remained until the frightful Army marched, and the fort destroyed itself. But at least this unseen robot offered its services.
Danecki sensed her fears. But he saw the resolution too in her eyes. He wanted to tell her that the fort was fighting itself, that there was hope in the zany situation developing in the various levels all around them. But there was no time.
“Abort procedures for Level Nine!” Danecki repeated.
There was a whispering of electronic noise—so faint at first that it was unidentifiable. But there was a menacing quality about the ghostly noise as it increased. Like a frosted spirit, menace crept into the room.
Khalia recognized the sound.
The harem attendant was giggling. It giggled softly for a minute, and then the sound increased to a dreadful imitation of laughter. The sound bounced eerily around the green and gold room, off gilded walls, then filtering back along the ceiling to the two shocked listeners.
“Explain the joke!” snapped Danecki, outraged by the thousand-year-old robot’s mockery.
“Hee-hee-hee, sir! You’ll appreciate the joke, sir! May I show you?”
Khalia shivered. The thought of the thing that had handled her while she lay in a coma of expectant bliss make her skin crawl. “It wants to show you something,” she said in a low voice. “It tried to tell me about it too. Then it decided it wouldn’t.”
“Four hours, though!” Danecki reminded her.
“It’s important. I had a hazy feeling that this has all happened before!” Khalia’s beautiful eyes were clouded with anxiety. “The lovers, Danecki. Remember?”
Danecki still rebelled against the idea of spending more time in the harem. He recognized, however, that it was the attendant robot that dismayed him. It would not have been so insidiously fearful if the thing had gone into an outburst of electronic panic. But the evil laughter had stirred unknown terrors deep Inside his mind. He put them down once more. “Level Nine!” he snapped. “Tell me!”
The giggling filtered about the room for a few seconds. Then the thing said: “That’s what the lady said before, sir!”
“Did you?” Danecki said to Khalia.
“No.”
The lady? Danecki knew that the enigma of the ancient fort was bound up in the lisping automaton’s words. “Explain!”
“Well, sir, war-robots aren’t exactly in my province.” It tittered metallically. “Lovers are.”
“Then explain it!”
“With pleasure, sir! I have recordings.”
“We’ll see them,” Khalia said firmly. “Now!”
“As madam wishes!”
A swish of displaced air made Danecki look upward. He saw slots in the green and gold of the ceiling. Through them thin rods of light began to stream down around him and the girl. She looked at them with terror.
“Don’t worry,” Danecki said. “Some viewing device. It’s going to show us the way it was when the lovers were here.”
He recognized the device forming around them as one of the earliest toys of an advanced civilization: a total-experience simulator. With it came a panel of controls that draped themselves around his arms. Sensor-pads thrust themselves forward. They were the directing mechanisms of the machine that would re-create totally the sounds and sights of what had passed in the fort a thousand years before.
“It was all a long time ago,” Khalia said. “I have the feeling they can see us still!” She moved closer to Danecki and, in silence, they waited.
Danecki felt a sensor control vibrate insistently. And then the events of ten centuries ago sprang into new existence along the insubstantial walls of the simulator.
“The lovers!” gasped Khalia. “It’s true!”
The pitiful story had the slow-moving inevitability of sunset. The events occurred fast enough, but their sequence was predetermined, a tragedy of betrayed endeavors.
Danecki tried to yell a warning, but the words clung to the roof of his mouth. He realized that he was watching the beginning of events that were old long before he was born. They had happened here, in this gaudy room, ten centuries before.
The sensor-pads lingered on the girl who stood in the green and gold room. They seemed to delight in her anxiety. She was the girl whose skeleton now lay in the winding tunnel far below, the heap of bones which still bore the long, bright hair about the skull. He had always known that she would be beautiful.
She was thin-boned. He knew that already. But here, shown in the living flesh on the filmy skein of light waves all around them, she was well-rounded, a muscular girl, with high-thrusting firm breasts and skin that shone brown in the rosy light of the Duty Commander’s harem.
She was naked.
A one-piece garment disappeared, moved away by a diligent servo-system. She stood proudly upright, anxious but not fearful.
This was what the disgusting harem robot wished him to see: the naked girl in her proud beauty.
The sensors in Danecki’s palm nudged at nerve endings, asking the questions that such controls spun out endlessly. Did he wish to view the events chronologically? Did he wish to travel with the Duty Commander to the waiting girl? Should the simulator project an external view of the fort as it had been before the final assault? Was he satisfied with the clarity of the projection? Would he like to adjust all his senses to the scene? Smell the smells? Hear every faint sound? Touch a re-created model of the girl?
He fed in commands. He wanted to watch what the girl did from the moment she entered the underground fortress. What she did was the key to the mystery. Danecki froze. The spin-shaft!
The one-piece garment was the uniform of the personnel of the base above. She was wearing it when she stepped lightly into the low cavern that was the Central Command Area. And she came from the spin-shaft.
Once down, she paused. She had been there before, often. Her eyes traveled over the various exits from the Central Command Area, noting everything. This was a girl who was trained. Even though there could be no one else in the fort, she still checked.
Her wide-set eyes, startlingly blue, betrayed her nervousness. She walked to the control panels.
Twice she stepped away as a sensor-pad wavered towards her, inviting her to assume command. Danecki heard Khalia’s indrawn breath of warning. Bu
t, with one swift movement, she had taken a tiny glittering disc from beneath her suit and slipped it below the big console.
Danecki, like Khalia, again felt a warning taking shape in his throat. But he reminded himself that they were watching a scene from the past, that it was all a long time ago, that she lay where she had lain for an entire millennium.
“It’s her, isn’t it,” Khalia whispered. “The girl?” The bright hair was like a beacon in the light of the cavern.
“It’s the girl,” said Danecki. “God help her.” He followed her proud walk to the green and gold room. It took a few minutes, but he wanted to see the whole of the ancient story of disaster.
“Is that why we could come down the shaft?” asked Khalia. “What she did with the thing she carried?”
“I’d guess so.”
“She didn’t put it there for us.”
“No.”
“For her lover, then.”
The girl waited. Slowly she peeled off the one-piece suit. Attendant servo-mechanisms fluted at her, spraying perfume and attempting to sponge her exquisite body.
“Ugh!” Khalia shuddered. “Those things!”
Then the girl was smiling a wide, false smile as the Duty Commander arrived in the green and gold room.
Danecki recognized the sturdy frame. The officer was a man of about his own age, an alert, upright, soldierly figure. He rushed to the girl and threw her bodily up into the air. It was a part of their love play. The girl was caught in a net of force-fields. They formed a golden cage about the beautiful, treacherous, utterly committed woman.
It was clear that he was in a hurry, while she sought only to gain time. They made love—he with a skilled frenzy, she responding with a calculated passion that knew about the time it took for the other man to find his way into the lower reaches of the fort. And although both Danecki and Khalia knew that what they saw was only a recording of the events of a thousand years ago, they could feel a shock of pity for the desperate courage of the girl.
“The Duty Commander?” asked Khalia.
“Yes.”
Khalia wept at the girl’s attempts to interest the officer in the resources of her body. Eager at first, he was becoming anxious at the passage of time. He looked at his watch, spoke easily to her, then sharply. She pretended drowsy delight.
Danecki allowed the control sensor-pads to show him the rest of the story.
The girl’s fellow-spy—her lover?—was in Level Nine. He raced along the sides of the serried row of automatons, knowing exactly where to find what he sought. He was a tall, well-made man, perhaps in his middle twenties. And he was a skilled engineer. He reached the reviewing platform where Khalia and Danecki had stood such a short time before. But this man knew the secret of the Black Army’s controls.
He took a tool of some sort from his belt, and a brief spurt of energy flickered along the wall of the recess. At once a large glowing panel of controls was revealed. The man stepped back. Before he resumed, he looked back towards the winding corridor.
A single glance convinced him that the girl was able to play her part. He turned to the glowing console and began work. From his tunic pockets he drew out a web of gleaming coiled cylinders.
Danecki said aloud: “Cell-growth circuits! I didn’t think they could have developed them!”
Primitive though they were, the cylinders of glowing membranous tissue would eat into the depths of the systems which controlled the Black Army, forcing their decision-making mechanisms into new channels. The man worked deftly, but with extreme caution.
Khalia said: “But how were they caught?”
The sensor-pads screamed at the nerve endings in Danecki’s hands. “They knew,” they said! “They knew!”
* * *
CHAPTER 16
It was the robot from the harem that betrayed the girl and the man who was in Level Nine.
The effeminate voice stirred insidiously in the heavy-scented room. The Duty Commander was ready once more to perform the act of love with the languorous, beautiful girl.
The robot’s words stopped him: “Duty Commander! Your concubine asked for information about the controls of Level Nine! On the occasions of her last two visits, she has demanded certain information regarding control circuits, sir. Shall I—”
The girl was well trained. While bewilderment, then shock, then fear played on the face of the officer, she was already jumping from the golden frame that was their couch and through a recess that opened at her approach. She went to warn her lover.
The words lisped out again: “She claimed she was authorized, sir! Was I wrong, sir?”
Outraged and confused, the officer struggled with his clothes. He grabbed the pouch containing his personal hand-weapon.
Unbidden, the sensors allowed Danecki and Khalia to see the saboteur. He was grinning slightly as he fed the coils into the console. He heard the girl’s shouts long before she reached the vast cavern. And, ignoring his mission, he rushed to meet her.
Danecki recognized the impulse. It was a blind and uncomprehending disregard of all else but the safety of the woman he knew was his. He heard Khalia again call “No!” as the girl raced along the narrow, winding corridor, with its subtle curves and steep sides.
The long-dead girl’s hair streamed behind her with the speed of her headlong descent. Then the sensors insisted on letting Danecki and Khalia see the fright and murderous rage in the Duty Commander’s face.
He was a man who had betrayed his command. Himself betrayed too, he was angry with an anger beyond heat and passion. He needed to kill, and kill soon. He checked the loading of his blaster.
Danecki was momentarily puzzled.
There was a deliberateness about the grim-faced officer’s action that seemed unsuited to the urgency of the situation. Then Danecki remembered. The Duty Commander would know how to use the black shafts that wormed their way swiftly through the length and breadth of the huge underground fort.
The girl met her lover at the preordained place.
The drama played itself out with an horrific inevitability. They met, embraced, and then the Duty Commander stepped out to confront them.
Khalia closed her eyes and clung to Danecki.
He watched the last act, but his thoughts were on the scene he had witnessed before the final tragedy. What had the saboteur done to the Black Army!
The girl died first. The gobbetting fury of the blaster’s charge took her in the head. Blood spurted in the dim, uneven light. A red-black stream splashed over the arms of her lover. It ran, too, over the bright, yellow hair.
The man’s teeth were bared, and he had the golden-handled knife in his hand.
Danecki knew his feelings here, too: Blind, wild fury! Bitter, all-embracing hatred. He saw only the thing he had to kill.
He threw the knife with all his strength.
Even now, a thousand years after the three actors in the tragedy had died, Danecki could share the man’s feelings.
The knife flickered twice in the confined space. Harsh black-yellow fury answered it, extinguishing all fury, hate, and love. The man’s body arched backwards and crashed across that of the girl.
The Duty Commander looked down at the handle of the knife. He nodded once and crumpled.
“So that’s how they died,” whispered Khalia. “The girl kept the officer with her while her lover went to Level Nine. She must have worked in the installation above. And the Duty Commander brought her down here in secret.” She clung to Danecki as the ancient images faded away.
The projecting device withdrew into the ceiling of the rosy-hued room.
“It was a long time ago,” said Danecki. But he too was still shocked by the abrupt tale of sacrifice and violence.
“That’s why the Army couldn’t march,” Khalia said.
“Yes.”
Khalia mastered her emotions. She looked down at her body. “I haven’t anything to wear. It’s ridiculous, but it matters. The machines took my things.”
“Clo
thes!” snapped Danecki.
“Of course, sir!” lisped the invisible robot.
A one-piece garment wafted from an opening in the wall. Khalia fingered it gently. “Hers,” she said. “The girl’s.”
She dressed and turned to him. “It was the robot that betrayed her! It’s evil—evil!”
“It is. Dross is right again about this fort and its systems—they’re evolving personality patterns never intended by the Confederation engineers. It’s absurd, but I feel the thing is our enemy!”
Danecki wondered how it was possible for a man of modern times to feel a pure uncomplicated detestation for a machine. Especially for one that had lain dormant for ten centuries. Yet he did feel hate for it, and with a rage that was unquenchable. The lisping automaton had sent three people to their death. The machine was a devious, malicious enemy. Yet it was a robot!
“What did the man do to the controls of the Army?” asked Khalia. “He must have stopped it, but what else?”
“That,” said Danecki, “is what we have to find out.”
“Can you?”
“I think so. I watched him.”
He looked about the green and gold room. There was a faint whispering of robotic glee in the place; it was as though the age-old harem attendant watched with an evil glee. Danecki shook himself. Fatigue was eating into his reserves of energy, slowing his thinking.
“Listen!” he snapped loudly. “I am the Duty Commander!”
“If you say so, sir,” the robot lisped.
“The Black Army is in danger!”
“I’d rather guessed that, sir,” the thing said, with the hint of glee again present in its falsetto voice.
“You have information on abort procedures for the controls of the Army?”
“Certainly, sir! How can I be of assistance?”
Danecki stared at Khalia. Could it be this easy? Ask for the information, and have it surrendered like this?