The Robot's Twilight Companion

by Tony Daniel

  We dry off on the bank.

  “Jill,” he says. “I have to tell you more about sex.”

  “Why don’t youshow me?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean. You’re still thinking like a ferret.”

  “I’ll always be part ferret, Andre Sud.”

  “I know. That’s a good thing. But I’m all human. Sex is connected with love.”

  “I love you.”

  “You are deliberately misunderstanding me because you’re horny.”

  “All right,” I say. “Don’t remind me.”

  But now Andre Sud is looking over my shoulder at something, and his face looks happy and then it looks stricken—as if he realized something in the moment when he was happy.

  I turn and see TB running toward the hoy. Bob is with him. They’ve come back from town along the Bob-ways. And thereis somebody else with them.

  “I’ll be damned,” Andre Sud says. “Molly Index.”

  It’s a woman. Her hair looks blue in the light off the heaps, which means that it is white. Is she old, or does she just have white hair?

  “What are you doing here, Molly?” says Andre Sud quietly. “This can’t be good.”

  They are running toward home, all of them running.

  TB sends a shiver through the grist, and I feel it tell me what he wants us to do.

  “Get to the hoy,” I tell Andre Sud. “Fast now. Fast as you can.”

  We get there before the others do, and I start casting off lines. When the three of them arrive, the hoy is ready to go. TB and Bob push us away while Andre Sud takes the woman inside. Within moments, we are out in the Bendy and caught in the current. TB and Bob go inside, and TB sticks his head up through the pilot’s bubble to navigate.

  The woman, Molly Index, looks at me. She has got very strange eyes. I have never seen eyes like that. I think that she can see into the grist like TB and I do.

  “My God,” she says. “She looks just like her.”

  “My name is Jill,” I say. “I’m not Alethea.”

  “No, I know that,” Molly Index says. “Ben told me.”

  “Molly, what are you doing here?” Andre Sud asks.

  Molly Index turns to Andre Sud. She reaches for his hand and touches him. I am a little worried she might try something with the grist, but it looks like they are old friends.

  “That war you kept talking about,” she says. “It started. Amés has started it.”

  “Oh, no,” Andre Sud says. He pulls away from her. “No.”

  Molly Index follows him. She reaches out and rubs a hank of his hair between her fingers. “I like it long,” she says. “But it’s kind of greasy.”

  This doesn’t please me, and Molly Index is wearing the most horrible boots I have ever seen, too. They are dainty little things that will get eaten off her feet if she steps into something nasty. In the Carbuncle, theground is something nasty. The silly grist in those city boots won’t last a week here. It is a wonder to me that no one is laughing at the silly boots, but I suppose they have other worries at the moment and so do I.

  “I should have listened to you,” Molly Index says. “Made preparations. He got me. Most of me. Amés did. He’s co-opted all the big LAPs into the New Hierarchy. But most of them joined voluntarily, the fools.” Again she touches his hand, and I realize that I am a little jealous. He does not pull back from her again. “I alone have escaped to tell you,” Molly Index says. “They’re coming. They’re right behind us.”

  “Whois right behind you?” I say. This is something I need to know. I can do something about this.

  “Amés’s damned Free Radical Patrol. Some kind of machine followed me here, and I didn’t realize it. Amés must have found out from me—the other part of me—where Ben is.”

  “What is a Free Radical Patrol?” I say. “What is a sweeper?”

  Something hits the outside of the hoy, hard. “Oh, shit,” TB says. “Yonder comes the flying monkey.”

  The pilot glass breaks, and a hooked claw sinks into TB’s shoulder. He screams. I don’t think, but I move. I catch hold of his ankle.

  We are dragged up. Lifted out. We are rising through the air above the hoy. Something screeches. TB yells like crazy.

  I hold on.

  Wind and TB’s yells and something sounds like a million mean and angry bees.

  We’re too heavy, and whatever it was drops us onto the deck. TB starts to stand up, but I roll under his legs and knock him down, and before he can do anything, I shove him back down through the pilot dome hole and into the hoy.

  Just in time, too, because the thing returns, a black shadow, and sinks its talons into my back. I don’t know what it is yet, and I may never know, but nothing will ever take me without a fight.

  Something I can smell in the grist.

  You are under indictment from the Free Radical Patrol. Please cease resisting. Cease resisting. Cease.

  The words smell like metal and foam.

  Cease resisting? What a funny thing to say to me. Like telling the wind to cease blowing. Blowing is what makes it the wind.

  I twist hard and whatever it is only gets my dress, my poor pretty dress and a little skin off my back. I can feel some poison grist try to worm into me, but that is nothing. It has no idea what I am made of. I kill that grist hardly thinking about doing so, and I turn to face this dark thing.

  It doesn’t look like a monkey, I don’t think, though I wouldn’t know.

  What are you?

  But there are wind currents and there is not enough grist transmission through the air for communications. Fuck it.

  “Jill, be careful,” says TB. His voice is strained. This thing hurt TB!

  I will bite you.

  “Would you pass me up one of those gaffs, please,” I call to the others. There is scrambling down below, and Bob’s hands come up with the long hook. I take it and he ducks back down quick. Bob is crazy, but he’s no fool.

  The thing circles around. I cannot see how it is flying, but it is kind of blurred around its edges. Millions of tiny wings—grist-built. I take a longer look. This thing is all angles. Some of them have needles, some have claws. All of the angles are sharp. It is like a black and red mass of triangles flying through the air that only wants to cut you. Is there anybody inside? I don’t think so. This is all code that I am facing. It is about three times as big as me, but I think of this as an advantage.

  It dives and I am ready with the hook. It grabs hold of the gaff just as I’d hoped it would, and I use its momentum to guide it down, just a littletoo far down.

  A whiff of grist as it falls.

  Cease immediately. You are interfering with a Hierarchy judgment initiative. Cease or you will be—

  Crash into the side of the hoy. Splash into the Bendy River.

  I let go of the gaff. Too easy. That was—

  The thing rises from the Bendy, dripping wet.

  It is mad. I don’t need the grist to tell me it is mad. All those little wings are buzzing angry, but not like bees anymore. Hungry like the flies on a piece of meat left out in the air too long.

  Cease.

  “Here,” says Bob. He hands me a flare gun. I spin and fire into the clump of triangles. Again it falls into the river.

  Again it rises.

  I think about this. It is dripping wet with Bendy River water. If there is one thing I know, it is the scum that flows in the Bendy. There isn’t any grist in it that hasn’t tried to get me.

  This is going to be tricky. I get ready.

  Come and get me, triangles. Here I am just a girl. Come and eat me.

  It zooms in. I stretch out my hands.

  You are intefering with Hierarchy business. You will cease or be end-use eventuated. You will—

  We touch.

  Instantly, I reconstitute the Bendy water’s grist, tell it what I want it to do. The momentum of the triangles knocks me over, and I roll along the deck under its weight. Something in my wrist snaps, but I ignore that pain. Blood on my
lips from where I have bitten my tongue. I have a bad habit of sticking it out when I am concentrating.

  The clump of triangles finishes clobbering me, and it falls into the river. Oh, too bad, triangles. The river grist that I recoded tells all the river water what to do. Regular water is eight pounds a gallon, but the water in the Bendy is thicker and more forceful than that. And it knows how to crush. It is mean water and it wants to get things, and now I have told it how. I have put a little bit of me into the Bendy, and the water knows something that I know.

  It knows never to cease. Never, never, never.

  The triangle clump bobs for an instant before the whole river turns on it. Folds over it. Sucks it down. Applies all the weight of water twenty feet deep, many miles long. What looks like a waterspout rises above where the triangle clump fell, but this is actually a pile driver, a gelled column climbing up on itself. It collapses downward like a shoe coming down on a roach.

  There is buzzing, furious buzzing, wet wings that won’t dry because it isn’t quite water that has gotten onto them, and it won’t quite shake off.

  There is a deep-down explosion under us and the hoy rocks. Again I’m thrown onto the deck and I hold tight, hold tight. I don’t want to fall into that water right now. I stand up and look.

  Bits of triangles float to the surface. The river quickly turns them back under.

  “I think I got it,” I call to the others.

  “Jill,” says TB. “Come here and show me you are still alive.”

  I jump down through the pilot hole, and he hugs and kisses me. He kisses me right on the mouth, and for once I sense that he is not thinking about Alethea at all when he touches me. It feels very, very good.

  “Oh, your poor back,” says Molly Index. She looks pretty distraught and fairly useless. But at least she warned us. That was a good thing.

  “It’s just a scratch,” I say. “And I took care of the poison.”

  “You just took out a Met sweep enforcer,” Andre Sud says. “I think that was one of the special sweepers made for riot work, too.”

  “What was that thing doing here?”

  “Looking for Ben,” says Molly Index. “There’s more where that came from. Amés will send more.”

  “I will kill them all if I have to.”

  Everybody looks at me and everyone is quiet for a moment, even Bob.

  “I believe you, Jill,” Andre Sud finally says. “But it’s time to go.”

  TB is sitting down at the table. Nobody is piloting the boat, but we are drifting in midcurrent and it should be all right for now.

  “Go?” TB says. “I’m not going anywhere. They will not use me to make war. I’ll kill myself first. And I won’t mess it up this time.”

  “If you stay here, they’ll catch you,” Andre Sud says.

  “You’ve come to Amés’s attention,” Molly Index says. “I’m sorry, Ben.”

  “It’s not your fault.”

  “We have to get out of the Met,” Andre Sud says. “We have to get to the outer system.”

  “They’lluse me, too. They’re not as bad as Amés, but nobody’s going to turn me into a weapon. I don’t make fortunes for soldiers.”

  “If we can get to Triton, we might be okay,” Andre Sud replied. “I have a certain pull on Triton. I know the weatherman there.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Trust me. It’s a good thing. The weatherman is very important on Triton, and he’s a friend of mine.”

  “There is one thing I’d like to know,” says TB. “How in hell would we get to Triton from here?”

  Bob stands up abruptly. He’s been rummaging around in TB’s larder while everybody else was talking. I saw him at it, but I knew he wasn’t going to find anything he would want.

  “Why didn’t you say you wanted to go Out-ways?” he said. “All we got to do is follow the Bendy around to Makepeace Century’s place in the gas swamps.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “I thought you knew her, TB. That’s the aunt of that witch that lives in the ditch. I guess you’d call her a smuggler. Remember the Old Seventy-Five from last year that you got so drunk on?”

  “I remember,” TB says.

  “Well, she’s where I got that from,” says Bob. “She’s got a lot of cats, too, if you want one.”

  We head down the Bendy, and I keep a lookout for more of those enforcers, but I guess I killed the one they sent this time. I guess they thought one was enough. I can’t help but think about where I am going. I can’t help but think about leaving the Carbuncle. There’s a part of me that has never been outside, and none of me has ever traveled into the outer system. Stray code couldn’t go there. You had to pass through empty space. There weren’t any cables out past Jupiter.

  “I thought you understood why I’m here,” TB says. “I can’t go.”

  “You can’t go even to save your life, Ben?”

  “It wouldn’t matter that I saved my life. If there is anything left of Alethea, I have to find her.”

  “What about the war?”

  “I can’t think about that.”

  “You have to think about it.”

  “Who says?God? God is a bastard mushroom sprung from a pollution of blood. ” TB shakes his head sadly. “That was always my favorite koan in seminary—and the truest one.”

  “So it’s all over?” Andre Sud says. “He’s going to catch you.”

  “I’ll hide from them.”

  “Don’t you understand, Ben? He’s taking over all the grist. After he does that, there won’t be any place to hide because Amés willbe the Met.”

  “I have to try to save her.”

  The solution is obvious to me, but I guess they don’t see it yet. They keep forgetting I am not really sixteen. That in some ways, I’m a lot older than all of them.

  You could say that it is the way that TB made me, that it is written in my code. You might even say that TB has somehow reached back from the future and made this so, made this the way things have to be. You could talk about fate and quantum mechanics.

  All these things are true, but the truest thing of all is that I am free. The world has bent and squeezed me, and torn away every part of me that is not free. Freedom is all that I am.

  And what I do, I do because I love TB and not for any other reason.

  “Ah!” I moan. “My wrist hurts. I think it’s broken, TB.”

  He looks at me, stricken.

  “Oh, I’m sorry, little one,” he says. “All this talking, and you’re standing there hurt.”

  He reaches over. I put out my arm. In the moment of touching, he realizes what I am doing, but it is too late. I have studied him for too long and I know the taste of his pellicle. I know how to get inside him. I am his daughter, after all. Flesh of his flesh.

  And I am fast. So very fast. That’s why he wanted me around in the first place. I am a scrap of code that has been running from security for two hundred years. I am a projection of his innermost longings now come to life. I am a woman and he is the man that made me. I know what makes TB tick.

  “I’ll look for her,” I say to him. “I won’t give up until I find her.”

  “No, Jill—” But it is too late for TB. I have caught him by surprise, and he hasn’t had time to see what I am up to.

  “TB, don’t you see what I am?”

  “Jill, you can’t—”

  “I’myou , TB. I’m your love for her. Sometime in the future you have reached back into the past and made me. Now. So that the future can be different.”

  He will understand one day, but now there is no time. I code his grist into a repeating loop and set the counter to a high number. I get into his head and work his dendrites down to sleep. Then, with my other hand, I whack him on the head. Only hard enough to knock him the rest of the way out.

  TB crumples to the floor, but I catch him before he can bang into anything. Andre Sud helps me lay him gently down.

  “He’ll be out for two days,” I
say. “That should give you enough time to get him off the Carbuncle.”

  I stand looking down at TB, at his softly breathing form. What have I done? I have betrayed the one who means the most to me in all creation.

  “He’s going to be really hungry when he wakes up,” I say.

  Andre Sud’s hand is on my shoulder. “You saved his life, Jill,” he says. “Or he saved his own. He saved it the moment he saved yours.”

  “I won’t give her up,” I say. “I have to stay so he can go with you and still have hope.”

  Andre Sud stands with his hand on me a little longer. His voice sounds as if it comes from a long way off even though he is right next to me. “Destiny’s a brutal old hag,” he says. “I’d rather believe in nothing.”

  “It isn’t destiny,” I reply. “It’s love.”

  “Andre Sud looks at me, shakes his head, then rubs his eyes. It is as if he’s seeing a new me standing where I am standing. “It is probably essential that you find Alethea, Jill. She must be here somewhere. I think Ben knows that, somehow. She needs to forgive him, or not forgive him. Healing Ben and ending the war are the same thing, but we can’t think about it that way.”

  “I care about TB. The war can go to hell.”

  “Yes,” Andre Sud says, “the war can go to hell.”

  After a while, I go up on deck to keep a watch out for more pursuit. Molly Index comes with me. We sit together for many hours. She doesn’t tell me anything about TB or Alethea, but instead she talks to me about what it was like growing up a human being. Then she tells me how glorious it was when she spread out into the grist and could see so far.

  “I could see all the way around the sun,” Molly Index says. “I don’t know if I want to live now that I’ve lost that. I don’t know how I can live as just aperson again.”

  “Even when you are less than a person,” I tell her, “you still want to live.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “Besides, Andre Sud wants to have sex with you. I can smell it on him.”

  “Yes,” Molly Index says. “So can I.”

  “Will you let him?”