These were all techniques that had proven themselves through the centuries. It had been decided to save innovation for a war less crucial to the fate of humanity.
Even though Aristide understood perfectly well the psychological conditioning being employed on him, he was grudgingly forced to admit that it worked. Even the fact that he was secretly a member of another army altogether didn’t prevent him from developing pride in his unit and his own accomplishments.
At least Aristide would have the consolation of being an officer. The ordinary fighters of the army would be machines, and even the lowest-ranking human would probably have hundreds of machine warriors under his command. And as for the humans, all would be part of the fighting force. The support and logistical tail would be composed entirely of robots.
In the meantime Aristide quietly rejoiced at the news from the war. Vindex had deployed more and more positron beams on and near Courtland, and continued to riddle the Loyal Ten with matter-rending fire. The United Powers finally constructed pocket universes dedicated entirely to the production of energy and antimatter, and began to deploy their own antiproton cannon. These usually managed a few shots before being pinpointed and destroyed by rebel fire. Vindex was more than holding his own.
The United Powers was now creating antimatter and beam weapons at an accelerated rate, to deploy them all at once, in large numbers, and level the fighting field. Aristide was serene. He felt certain that Vindex had anticipated this plan, and would be able to counter it.
One night, tired after a day of drills and exercises, Aristide found himself approached by a broad, pale-skinned biped with golden eyes.
“Hail, traveler,” the stranger said.
Aristide looked at him in surprise. “Hail, Captain Grax.”
Grax sketched a salute. “Officer Candidate Grax, these days.”
Aristide considered the troll, who now topped him by bare centimeters.
“Your dimension seems to have shrunk along with your rank.”
The troll’s yellow teeth flashed. “I had to fit your damned battle suits, didn’t I?”
Aristide smiled. “What a shame. Beforehand you cut such a towering figure.”
“It’s worth it if I can take a crack at the enemy, and for that I seem to need some of these technology larks you people have.”
“Do you wish you’d had them in Midgarth?”
The troll’s funnel-shaped ears twitched. “If you ask me, they make it all too easy.”
“True, but I think that’s the point.”
Grax shuffled uneasily. “They tell me that when the enemy cracked open my head and filled it with his poison, it was you that saved me.”
Aristide bowed, and concealed his mixed feelings with a gracious smile.
“It was my privilege to do so,” he said, and let Grax take him to the Cadets’ Club, where the troll groused about the quality of the beer.
Aristide was only rarely able to visit Myriad City during his training, and then only because the Standing Committee requested his advice. When possible he tried to spend at least part of the night with Daljit, and give her as much information about the armed forces as he could. In return she kept him informed of the plot to kill Commissar Lin.
Three agents of Vindex were found in Personal Protection, the unit of the Domus that provided bodyguards for important officials. Unfortunately they were low-ranking, and couldn’t assign themselves to Lin exclusively. They would have to wait for their names to come up in the rotation.
Nor could the bodyguards perform the assassination themselves—their parts would be too clear in the matter, and they’d be caught and the existence of the Venger’s secret army revealed. The best that could be hoped is that they would contrive to be distracted during the actual attack.
The place of the assassination was another difficulty. With so much of Topaz under direct or indirect surveillance by Endora, it would be difficult to find anywhere where the assassins wouldn’t be observed, or where their trail couldn’t be picked up. It was impossible simply to tell Endora not to look, as had been done during the assassination of Tumusok. Endora was now the enemy.
“A pity we can’t just drop a piano on him,” Aristide muttered.
“Perhaps we will,” Daljit said in answer.
During the deliberations of the War Subcommittee, Aristide had his greatest triumph. Soldiers in the field would be required to be sealed not only against shot and shell, but against biological, chemical, and nanological attack. Conceivably they would have to survive in their armored suits for days, and several plans had been put forward for helping the soldiers overcome this inconvenience.
Various attachments for purposes of nourishment and sanitation were put forward, and Aristide strongly supported the plan that would require soldiers to have their bodies modified to make machine-enabled nutrition and elimination more efficient.
Thanks in part to Aristide’s support, the plan was put into operation.
Every single soldier would have to visit a pool of life to have his body reconstructed to fit their combat suits.
Every single soldier would rise a servant of Vindex.
The plan to assassinate Lin was dropped. Lin hardly mattered when every trained soldier in the multiverse would soon be able to impose the will of Vindex on all the worlds within the Sol system.
At last came the point in Aristide’s training in which he and his unit would be introduced to his brand-new combat suit. He’d had to back himself up in a pool of life first, “in case of a training accident,” an order that did not create confidence in the technology.
Still, the object was impressive. Standing upright in the base hangar, the suit looked like a silver metal Henry Moore gorilla, with a hole on the head where a sensory complex would soon be installed. The upper part of the suit was detachable, and the lower part was worn like a pair of oversized waders. The complex feeding and sanitary arrangements had yet to be installed, and the soldiers had yet to be modified to suit them—but today’s exercise was to be a get-acquainted stroll, not an endurance competition. A familiar AI voice—Aristide had installed Bitsy’s personality—helped Aristide slip into the webbing and adjust the biofeedback sensors, then seal the suit. The air in the suit smelled of plastic and lubricant.
While waiting for others in his unit to finish suiting up, Aristide performed communication checks and looked out at the world through the limited sensory array that had been patched in as a stopgap, until the more advanced sensor turret could be completed and installed.
“Perhaps,” Aristide said, “I’ll amuse the others by performing a sword form.”
“I suggest you start by moving your arms,” said Bitsy.
Aristide duly moved his arms. He flexed his fingers. A virtual target appeared in his display, and he pressed the bull’s-eye repeatedly with each finger.
Behind him somewhere he heard a fan switch on. He felt a breath of cool air against the small of his back.
“Right,” Bitsy said. “Try moving your head within the harness. Left-right, then up-down.”
“What’s that smell?” Aristide asked.
“I’ll check. Probably lubricant in the fan.”
Aristide moved his head as instructed. He felt only gentle resistance from the harness that was designed to protect him from concussion and from being thrown around inside the suit.
The movements left him slightly lightheaded. He took a deep breath.
“That smell is stronger,” he said.
“Fan lubricant,” Bitsy said.
Aristide’s head swam. He took another breath and a wave of narcosis seemed to pour through his skull.
“There’s something wrong,” he said.
“Can you be more specific?”
“I’m feeling ill,” Aristide said. “Open the suit.”
“Are you sure it’s not claustrophobia? Try to fight it—you don’t want to wash out after all this time.”
Aristide continued his exercises while his mind drifted slowly thr
ough a dark, warm sea. Only gradually did the idea of treachery penetrate his thoughts. He had been betrayed.
In sudden panic, he began to struggle to pull his arms out of the harness so that he could hammer at the seals on the inside of the suit and reach fresh air. But he could no longer feel his arms and so couldn’t tell whether he was succeeding or not.
“Open!” he gasped.
“Afraid not, Pops. Orders from headquarters.”
Aristide realized that he’d got one hand free when he managed to hit himself accidentally in the face. He pounded on the inside of the suit. He felt like he was punching a great block of foam.
Vindex, he thought, in grief, I have failed.
15
He rose through the blood-warm liquid and opened his eyes. The light was dim and welcoming; the air was warm; in the shadowy light he saw three silhouettes.
He turned on one side and efficiently expelled fluid from his lungs. The fluid cooperated and flowed out in one long stream. He drew in a welcome breath. Alveoli crackled in his chest as they expanded with air.
His eyes adjusted. There was a technician in a baseball cap, an unknown man with pale skin, and he recognized the third.
“Commissar,” he said.
“Doctor.”
He passed a hand over his damp hair.
“Was it zombies?” he asked.
“Not exactly.”
Aristide looked down at the silvery fluid that was draining from his coffin-shaped pool of life. “How long have I lost?”
“About a week.”
Aristide blinked, then looked up at Lin in sudden wonder.
“I’ve been working for the other side.”
Lin nodded. “You and tens of thousands of other people. We found a piece of pipe on the sailboat with your blood on it, which indicated that someone had whacked you on the skull. And Daljit’s hyoid bone was broken, which suggested that you’d strangled her. Bitsy and I worked out what had happened by tracing your use of the AI just before you were killed, and the queries you made about Daljit’s colleagues.” He took a breath. “We’re correcting all that as quickly as we can.”
Bitsy jumped up on the edge of the pool, and crouched on her haunches. Her green eyes glittered.
“I had to put you to sleep for a while,” she said. “I hope you’ll manage to forgive me.”
There had been nearly two hundred people in Aristide’s training cadre of six hundred who had been clients of Vindex. All had been rendered unconscious in the same moment, hauled out of their combat suits by their surprised comrades, then restrained and debriefed under drugs.
The remaining cadets had been equipped with both lethal and non-lethal weapons and sent after the thousands of pod people who hadn’t joined the army. A few escaped, but most had been apprehended and likewise debriefed.
After the captives had told all they knew, they were quietly liquidated. No one had yet worked out how to undo the tampering that had been done with their brains, and so it was decided to reload them all from the last backup.
“How did they alter our incarnations to begin with?” Aristide asked.
“It was extremely subtle,” Bitsy said. “Certain changes in the programming were made by those with the authority to do so. Each alteration was checked, and found harmless. But taken together…”
“They created pod people.”
“So they did.”
Aristide looked at Bitsy.
“And you didn’t notice.”
Bitsy lifted her nose into the air. “I believe we have already had the discussion concerning my lack of omniscience, and the reasons for it.”
Aristide left the pool, rubbed himself with a towel, and dressed in his own clothing that Bitsy had arranged to deliver from his hotel room.
“Where is Daljit?” he asked.
Lin gave him a speculative look from his widely spaced eyes.
“In the next room,” he said.
The mole was back on the proper side of her face. It gave him confidence.
Aristide took her to the Fathom Deep. It had worked twice before.
She had not backed up her memories since before the assassination of Tumusok, and he felt an unfair burden of exposition.
It was a warm evening, and they sat by one another in the cockpit with the gusting wind rattling the halliards, the brilliant lightscape of the city behind them, and ahead the green light at the end of the pier. Bitsy went forward somewhere, out of earshot.
“Tumusok died,” he told her. “He was reincarnated from a backup, and briefed by Lin and Endora.”
He looked at her hopefully. She gazed at him in return. “And…?” she said, knowing there was more.
“You and I became lovers that night,” he said, “here on the Fathom Deep.”
He could have wished that there weren’t such a look of surprise on her face.
“I—” She searched for words. “I hadn’t anticipated that.”
“No? Because—speaking as one who was there—it seemed as much your idea as mine.”
“After all these years apart? It must have—” She left the thought unfinished. Her brown eyes gazed into his.
He realized that Daljit had not come to him, after her last resurrection, as one lover to another, but as an agent of Vindex to a useful recruit.
“We must have been rather successful,” she said, “or you wouldn’t be bringing it up.”
“We planned to meet again the next night. But you’d been infected by then, and you tried to kill me with a kitchen knife.”
“I was the zombie?” Her surprise was complete. “I assumed I’d been killed by a zombie.”
“You were killed by me,” Aristide said, “in self defense. I threw you off your balcony.”
For a moment her lips worked, but she said nothing.
“And you came back as a pod person,” Aristide went on, “because the agents of the enemy had corrupted the Life Institute software. After which you murdered me, here on the boat, though apparently I managed to kill you as well. And then we were both clients of Vindex for a while, until Lin and Endora worked out what had happened, and took steps to correct the matter.” He spread his hands.
“So here we are,” he said.
“I’m tempted to say that you’re making this up.”
“I wish I were. But if you have any doubts, you can check the latest news.”
Daljit turned away. Anger flushed her cheeks. “Sex and violence are the staples of the popular media,” she said. “Our story would make a properly tawdry romance.” Her voice shifted, mocked an announcer’s voice, and even threw an extra set of quotes into her tone. “‘Played against the backgrounds of the many worlds at war, the star-crossed lovers…’” Her tone faded. “Love-crossed zombies. Cross-starred frighteners. Star-fraught strivers. Fright-starred failures.”
She rose, took a pace toward the wheel. “I think it will take me some time to absorb this,” she said.
“I expect it will.”
Daljit turned to him. “May I use your car?”
“Yes.” He rose. “I hope you will let me know…” He could think only of hopeless ways to finish the sentence. “How you are,” he finished.
The city painted her face in many-colored light.
“I’ll try to keep in touch,” she said.
“I hope you will,” he said. “I’ve always found war a desperately lonely business.”
The city glittered in her eyes. “You lost your family,” she said.
“Yes.”
“I can’t imagine what that was like.”
“It’s best,” he said, perhaps too sharply, “that you don’t.”
There was silence. A flag snapped over the stern of a nearby motor yacht. Finally he gave an apologetic sigh.
“One last question,” he said, “and I’ll let you go.”
She looked at him without expression.
“Are you afraid of me?” he asked.
Her eyes widened.
“And if you are a
fraid,” Aristide continued, “are you afraid I’ll kill you, or kiss you?”
A muscle moved in her cheek. “It’s a fair question,” she said.
She turned and left the boat. He watched her retreat, and silently sent a message to the Destiny to take her where she wished to go.
He turned and made his way forward. With a hand on the foremast he viewed the bows, the green light at the end of the pier, the gust-galled sea.
“That didn’t go well, I take it,” said Bitsy. She was crouched like a sphinx on the foredeck, eyes shut.
“It didn’t.” Over the bowsprit was a platform from which harpoons could be hurled at large game fish, and Aristide stepped out onto it, the boat bobbing under his weight. There was a splash somewhere beneath him, and he jumped as a surprised pelican thrashed a few yards into open water, then folded its wings and made off at a less urgent pace.
“When I mourn our uncoupling,” he said, “even a bird makes me start.”
Bitsy was looking at him. Half-closed eyes glowed like tiny moons in the light of the pier’s lamp.
“I told you that you’d turn it into poetry,” she said.
“Not me,” he said. “Tu Fu.”
“Your translation, though.”
“Yes,” he said, and looked down at his empty cup. “That is mine, at least.”
Veditur
[a villanelle]
The forms of love will not suffice
The soul a scatter of dry bone
The sad fact is I killed her twice
The wind burns cold as polar ice
Past the worn and tumbled stone
The forms of love will not suffice
From death’s cold hand now fall the dice
The heart’s wild wager overthrown
The sad fact is I killed her twice
How desolate the final price
Our history all overgrown
The forms of love will not suffice
Implied Spaces Page 22