Paradise Drift

by Sherwood Smith

  Pimiko, astonishingly still unmarried, who had knifed the two suitors strong enough to pass muster by her father and brothers. She did not tolerate underlings speaking in her presence without direct leave. The crew fell silent.

  She drifted across the Command Deck, her raw-silk kimono, embroidered over with the cherry blossoms of mourning, not hiding the swing of her hips.

  Her father paid her no heed, her brother watched her narrowly as she crossed to the other door and then vanished.

  She was smiling when she reached her cabin, and tapped into the main vid system, then she sat back as she used an ancient whet-stone to buff her knife, one edge, the other, one, the other, the soft hasping sound a soothing rhythm.

  TWENTY

  Teach me half the gladness

  That thy brain must know,

  Such harmonious madness….

  —VERSES FROM PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,

  ADAPTED FOR MAGISTER LUDRAS’S

  IN SEARCH OF LOST VEDRA, CY 10011

  Beka, Harper, and Cyn tramped in single file along a jungle trail. The air was hot, close, and full of insects, or things that were fully as annoying as insects.

  “Did I mention just how much I loathe planets?” Beka murmured to the thick layers of greenery overhead. “And that goes for fake planets. Especially the ones that think they have to hit you with stinks, muds, bugs, and far worse, weath—”

  At that moment a flare of bluish lightning blinded them, a crash of thunder roared, and rain beat down.

  Harper was wet in seconds. He looked absurd in his tight tunic and jodhpurs, but the rain did slightly, just slightly, ease the misery of the itch. He hid his chit against his side, thinking, Sorry, Beka. But you aren’t full of poison.

  “Do you think this gun is real?” Cyn asked, hefting the rifle that had appeared from the nanopainters, along with her own set of tunic, white helmet-hat, and jodhpurs. She’d watched it assemble itself, fascinated; it was like one of the old how-to vids sped way, way up.

  “Don’t we wish,” Beka said sourly.

  “In that case, we’re out of here—before we find the tiger,” Harper said. He raised his voice slightly. “The blackberry jam tastes like fish.”

  The sunlight flickered, they walked past more of the dense jungle, and then emerged into a clearing that was filled with round grass huts. The central one had a faint greenish gleam. They neared, spotted the door, and burst through.

  Another sterile anteroom; this time, they were confronted by eight doors with flickering nanolights above each.

  “Rommie?” queried Beka.

  No answer.

  “Did the water fry your comlink, maybe?” Cyn asked, sighing as the rifle disassembled itself. The stupid costume—tight jacket, weird pants—at least vanished as well.

  “Not a comlink put together by yours truly, with Rommie’s help,” Harper said, frowning. He palmed his, bent over it, tapped, waited.

  Nothing.

  “Well, this stinks,” Harper muttered.

  “Maybe she’s—doing ship duty,” Beka guessed, with a glance at Cyn, half-distrustful, half-warning.

  Harper knew she’d been about to say being ship-Rommie. The problem was, and Beka knew it if she stopped to think, Rommie could do both. Harper had seen to that.

  That is, she could do both unless both functions were stressing her resources to the max. Then she would revert to ship-Rommie, her core programming.

  His lips parted, he frowned from Cyn’s mute question to Beka’s wariness, then shook his head. “Let’s figure it out on our own, then.”

  They looked up at the first of the displays.

  Two men in long cloaks, one with a wreath of some sort of leaves on his head, standing in a rocky declivity. Before them, two naked men struggle in a pit of muddy water, one gnawing on the others scalp….

  “Moving right along,” said Harper.

  A dark hall, stone walls weeping with moisture, ranks of archaic technical equipment gleaming with light, electric arcs snapping and flaring between contact points. Two men, both with eyes gleaming in anticipation, watch as a primitive chain-and-gear mechanism elevates a table with a shrouded form on it toward a hatch open to the sky in the distant ceiling, lightning playing among the churning clouds….

  “Where do they come up with these things?” muttered Beka.

  “Oh, that’s famous,” said Cyn. “But I don’t think we want to go there.”

  Ping!

  “Rommie!” hissed Beka, urgently.

  No answer.

  They whirled around, looking at the other images, but they were even worse. Harper glared across the antechamber at Beka, hands up and palms out. “We are not going for the tooth shampoo,” he said.

  “Oh, like anyone’s going to argue about that one,” Cyn muttered, and Beka snorted a laugh.

  The door behind them opened with a loud, weird screeling noise.

  “Right. We’re out of here.”

  “At least I know this one,” Cyn said, pointing, and they rushed through the door under the image that now flickered with constant lightning.

  When the door sealed behind them into a mossy stone wall, the costume-bots appeared out of nowhere, their faint high hum now familiar. All three looked down at themselves to discover what sort of costume would appear next. Harper groaned at the rough shirt that covered his handsome Hawaiian silk shirt, the old, greasy breeches.

  Beka and Cyn stared at each other in stained, ugly gowns that appeared to be made of itchy wool, bonnets confining their heads, and both of them grimaced.

  “I’d love to show up at Dylan’s diplomatic party in this thing,” Beka said, holding out her moth-eaten skirt.

  “At least they don’t smell as bad as they look,” Cyn said.

  “Oh, I’m sure the stinks are coming,” Beka muttered. “So far, they haven’t stinted us.”

  “Here y’ar,” a male voice growled, and a huge, grizzled man wearing clothing even nastier than Harper’s appeared around the side of the mossy wall, carrying flaring torches. Sure enough: with him came a waft of old horse sweat, rancid oil, and ancient ordure.

  The man thrust one torch at Harper, who took it quickly before the flame could get near his face. Another at Cyn.

  “Now c’mon!”

  When two or three more huge louts appeared, carrying torches and pitchforks, the three figured the better part of wisdom was to follow, at least for now. But when one of the louts shoved a pitchfork at Beka, she took it gratefully, thinking of it as possible self-defense.

  As they fed into the stream of people yelling and roaring, torches bobbing, Cyn looked around and gasped.

  “What? What?” Harper demanded, wincing. “Or do I really want to know?”

  “It’s Victorian, some of the clothes—and that old house up there—” She pointed to the moldering, towered castle on the hill that the torches were streaming up toward. “Well, it’s the vid. Ancient vid. Not the, the, you know, the story.”

  “Story?” Harper asked.

  “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” Cyn began.

  Beka sighed. “If this particular nightmare is not the story you mentioned, why do we have to discuss it?”

  Harper ignored her. “Is the one we used to watch in the museum, with the guy made out of body parts? Oh, and the bad brain and not the good brain?”

  Cyn gave a brief, painful grin. “And Brendan used to say that that explained a lot about you.”

  “No, I got the genius brain,” Harper said. He looked around at the villagers, busy shouting and waving their torches. The air currents carried a faint scent of burning pitch. “You know, we could really use an Igor about now.”

  Beka looked up at the thin, silvery clouds fleeting across the top of the gigantic full moon that silhouetted the castle. “Do I really want to know what we’re supposed to be doing?”

  Harper opened his mouth, then both he and Beka felt pings on their still-open comlinks.

  “Keep going,” came Rommie’s voice. “The door o
ut is in the castle.”

  “The safe words?” asked Harper.

  “Working on it.” She clicked off.

  “About all we can say is that this mob isn’t wearing bedsheets, and the weapon of choice seems to be farmyard implements instead of bronze knives. But it looks like a lynch mob,” Beka said. “It sounds like a lynch mob. And it smells like a lynch mob.”

  “That’s because it is a lynch mob,” Harper and Cyn said, almost together. They flicked looks at each other, both too stressed for much humor.

  Beka sighed. “My only question is, then, is the lynchee someone we really want to save or not?”

  “It would be the body-part guy,” Harper said.

  “Body-part guy.” Beka groaned. “I’m almost ready to just tell Ujio to take me now. Except he’s probably been hired to make me into body-part girl.”

  A surge in the crowd right then forced them back, and a group of big men trotted by, breathing hard, and carrying a mighty tree trunk.

  The crowd fell in behind, hustling them at top speed the last of the way up to the massive castle gates. When they arrived, the crowd was gathered in a mass, screaming, shouting, as the men swung the battering ram back and forth, smashing it into the gates.

  Each smash splintered the wood more, and the crowd sent up frenzied yells. When the ram finally broke the door down, the mob surged forward, carrying the three with them.

  It was dark inside, except for sputtering torches high on walls green and black with moss. The air, close and cold, stank of ozone and bat guano.

  “Did I mention how much I really hate planets?” Beka muttered.

  “No,” Cyn said.

  And Beka laughed, as the mob forced the three up the stairs, breaking through another door into a strange, nightmarish sort of primitive laboratory.

  Ahead they saw a man in a long white coat, and a hunched-over servant: the table they had seen in the ad vid rested once again on the floor.

  Ignoring the mob, the two men stared up at a huge patchwork creature sitting on the table.

  The monster roared, raising its arms and clawing at the air.

  “This was scarier when I was ten,” Cyn whispered.

  “Yeah, well, anything is scary right about now,” Harper muttered back, poking at his comlink. “Rommie? You could give us safe words anytime.”

  The monster leaped off the table and charged the torch-bearing villagers, who screamed, some of them dropping their torches to smolder on the mossy stone floor. One or two torches guttered out, leaving disgusting grease spots to mix into the black mold.

  The people vanished out the door, the monster chasing them, and the doctor and his hunchbacked assistant scuttled out another door, leaving the three alone, except for those burning torches.

  Rommie’s voice startled them. “Don’t retreat. The door is in that room. No safe words found yet.”

  And back through the main door the monster appeared.

  It charged toward them, swinging its arms and roaring. Cyn thought it sounded more afraid than anything, but the impact of one of those huge fists would still rip a person’s head off—or would it? She didn’t want to find out just how real this bontemp was.

  Next to her Harper grabbed two thick black cables snaking up a stone pillar and yanked desperately at them. The cables popped free from two bright copper complexities a short distance up the pillar; Harper whirled and faced the monster. He struck the two copper tips together. A rasping droning arc a foot long rippled up from them.

  The monster shrieked and stumbled back, covering its face with its arms, then whirled about and stomped back out the door the mob of peasants had fled through. Cyn could hear them shouting amidst the sounds of things breaking and crashing to the ground.

  “Where’s the door, Rommie?” Beka shouted.

  No answer.

  Cyn’s heart thudded even harder.

  “Pull the switch!” yelled Harper, holding the cables at arm’s length and jerking his head sideways at a huge control panel: rank upon rank of switches of all sizes, all of them ancient-looking things she’d seen only in cartoons, with porcelain handles.

  Cyn gaped helplessly; which one did he mean? But Beka didn’t hesitate. She ran over to the console, glanced back at Harper, and then decisively pulled one down. The arc died.

  The engineer flung the cables to the floor, looking wildly across the banks of archaic electrical equipment, then paused.

  “Capacitors.” He pointed. “Lots of ’em. Crackbrained, stone-age capacitors. These guys went in for realism, big-time.”

  “Harper, this is no time to indulge in a techno-fit.”

  “A fit is exactly what I’m going to create,” said Harper as he began disconnecting cables, quickly hooking up a nightmarish tangle of black cables and gleaming copper connectors, gauges the size of his head, and other ancient tech that Cyn didn’t recognize.

  “Ah, Harper?” Cyn asked. “We’re not going to get fried along with all this stuff, are we?”

  “Trust him,” Beka said, not without some wryness. “He does know technotrash.”

  “I’m giving them an old-fashioned EMP fit. Reroute all this, what did you call it? Victorian high-tension technotrash through the capacitors and blooey! All the security gear for ten meters in every direction forgets its name—and everything else.”

  Ping!

  “Including nanobots?” asked Cyn.

  “I’m an engineer, not a magician,” replied Harper. “Get over behind that desk!” He yanked on a huge porcelain-handled switch. Arcs flared, the air shivered with power as they ran away from the control panel. Beka vaulted over the desk as Cyn scrambled around it; Harper almost landed on top of her.

  “Cover your eyes!” he yelped.

  Wham!

  Actinic light flared through her hands and closed eyelids with bloody vividness. A giant cupped his hand and slammed it down on her. Her ears rang. Ozone caught at her throat, and she coughed helplessly for a moment.

  Beka shook her head blearily. “Next time. Pick a place with humans, Harper.”

  Cyn blinked away blobs of light floating in her vision, then stumbled forward as Beka grabbed her hand and pulled her toward a door she couldn’t yet see clearly, which had apparently opened in the middle of a wardrobelike contraption against one wall.

  Another anteroom. Oddly, there was an archaic lamppost in the middle of it.

  “What is that thing?” Beka asked, pointing in distrust at a tall pole shedding pale light.

  “Lamppost,” Cyn said.

  “This has got to be the nexus of all bontemps based on steam-age England,” Harper said, his eyes glittering, then going dark as he turned his head from side to side. “Six of ’em, looks like.”

  “Steam age,” Cyn whispered, cast back in mind to one horrible winter when the weather outside had been below zero for weeks, and the Nietzscheans prowled the streets shooting anyone they saw walking. She’d watched vid after vid about this era the commentators kept calling barbaric, thinking that they couldn’t be more barbaric than real life.

  She shook her head to rid herself of the memories.

  Six choices again—but no choice at all, Cyn thought, looking up at one image of elegantly dressed young men and women decorously sipping tea. It was the first nonviolent, almost normal bontemp they’d seen.

  “Rommie?” said Beka, but again, there was no answer.

  “What about that one?” asked Cyn.

  “Looks suspiciously peaceful to me,” said Beka. Then she hefted her chit. “But Harper’s electrical parade seems to have fried all but the basic functions of our chits, so no more information.”

  “Do your corns work?” asked Cyn.

  “The heartbeat protocol is up,” said Harper. “And the EMP shouldn’t affect High Guard equipment.”

  Beka shrugged. “So, we wait for Rommie, unless—”

  Ping!

  “Someone’s coming!”

  They plunged through the door.

  TWENTY-ONE


  Perceive that which cannot be seen with the eye.

  —MIYAMOTO MUSASHI,

  ANCIENT JAPAN,

  PRIVATE COLLECTION OF TOKUGAWA ODIN-THOR

  According to his usual habit, Tokugawa Odin-Thor did not permit any communication with the planetary or Drift kludges.

  The planet Rigos remained silent, but not so the Paradise authorities. The underlings on his Command Deck exchanged covert amused comments in an undertone as some Than appeared and issued questions, and from time to time increasingly obdurate threats. As expected. Also as expected, the Drift had scrambled slip-fighters, who took up a defensive position between the Odin-Thor fleet and the Drift. The Andromeda hailed them a second time; they would wait on his pleasure.

  What caused a mild sense of question in Tokugawa Odin-Thor was why he had not yet heard from Alphyra Kodos. He knew she was one of the governing powers on the Drift; he suspected she had acted without the others’ knowledge.

  “Seii Taishogun,” the communications officer said. “Incoming, private signal.”

  “Put it on,” Tokugawa said, thinking: Things at last begin.

  Alphyra Kodos appeared in the screen, and once again Tokugawa was surprised at her beauty. It was an exotic beauty, unlike any of the blond Valkyries his family tended to produce. She was, of course, a kludge—her proportions were small, therefore weak—but he could appreciate that beauty in the way the superior mind appreciated any work of art—a five-thousand-year-old painted screen; a face demonstrating exquisite genetic choice; the tricksterish randomness of nature in the colors dappling the back of an insect…

  “Seii Taishogun,” she said, inclining her head.

  The vid was not as clean as it should be, but he could see faint marks of tiredness under her eyes. Then he couldn’t see her eyes as her head dipped, and he saw only the thin, glowing chain of silvery moon-pearls she had threaded through the complicated knots in her glossy hair.

  One who understood the life of art. He’d forgotten that; it was what had first attracted her to his notice, during those long-ago days on Vedra-Shin, young as she was. That and her ambition, so determined. He remembered regretting she could not have been born Nietzschean.