Strings

by Dave Duncan

  Suddenly her rambling mind stopped and peered back along its own tracks. That did not ring true! Why should a demagogue dispose of his own followers? Why ruin his own power base? And what in the name of all the gods was he getting at now?

  “…fortunes are linked. Our supporters would welcome evidence that our cooperation is a willing one. And will remain so.”

  The light was better now. He was leaning very close, squeezing her hand. Alya shied suddenly at the piercing intelligence in those jet eyes. She tried to pull her wits together—the man was dangerous—but she was too staggered by the implications. She had not realized! Even Kas had not guessed what Jathro must have in mind. Why be prime minister of a postage-stamp kingdom when one could hope for so very much more? The audacity of his ambition staggered her. And now this? He was twice her age and twice divorced. Oh, wonderful! Just what I need.

  “Dr. Jar…this is a difficult time for me. You will pardon me if I reserve consideration of your words?”

  Whatever all that meant, it seemed to satisfy him. He smiled, showing excellent teeth. The lights were up at last. The sky in the viewscreen was brightening. Reentry had started, and the passengers were sinking deeper into their seats.

  “But of course. I will do everything to ease your burden. Rely on me totally.”

  “I appreciate that, Dr. Jar. You are very thoughtful.”

  What would Kas think, back in Banzarak, if she were to announce her engagement to Jar Jathro? It might even bring him running.

  “For example, you may refer all questions to me. I speak good English. Questions about your predecessors, your relatives…I shall refuse such questions. I shall infer that it is impolite to ask about family matters.”

  Alya made noncommittal noises.

  “If you do find yourself in conversation and I am not to hand, just keep these precepts in mind. I am visiting America on behalf of the World Refugee Authority. You are accompanying me as my—” He smiled brazenly. “But I just promised not to rush your decision, didn’t I? Accompanying me to be shown a little of the world. Americans approve of women who know things, but keep the talk to babies and clothes if you can. That would be safest.”

  “I’d better write that down,” Alya said, very quietly, hoping the rising clamor outside would drown the words.

  “Oh, no, that will not be necessary. You’ll remember. But just in case I am not around…keep in mind that there has never been a Class One world found. That is very important. Many Class Twos—those are worlds that look Earthlike, you understand? But detailed investigation has always turned up some flaw, a poison of one kind or another. Heavy metals, whatever they are, are mentioned a lot. A Class One world, one really safe for people—that would be an earth-shaking discovery.”

  “What’s a Class Three world, then, Dr. Jar?” Alya felt sure that her fury must be showing—her cheeks felt hot enough to fry eggs—but that pompous little prick was probably interpreting it as something else. Lust, maybe? Everyone knew that women were unstable and prone to attacks of lust.

  “You really don’t need to worry about such things, but a Class Three is one with some sort of life on it, yet not like the Earth. Threes turn up all the time. Every week or so. Class Twos—the ones that look like our own world, remember?—only a few of those are discovered each year. Sometimes people even talk about Class Fours, which have no life at all. They are the most common. But stick to babies.”

  How could a successful politician be so blind? Perhaps he had never met an educated woman. He must truly believe that women should stick to babies. In the slums and the camps they had no choice. He could probably quote the Koran on the subject, too.

  At last Jathro removed his sticky hand. He leaned back for a moment, yielding to the gee force, easing a back that must have grown stiff with leaning, looking pleased with himself. The roar of reentry rattled the cabin and every bone in it. The viewscreens showed hellfire glowing along leading edges.

  Quickly the yammering softened, the force and noise began to wane. The pressure eased.

  Jathro turned to her again, fumbling in his breast pocket. “I have something for you to look at, Highness.”

  A sudden prickling warned her. “Yes?”

  He passed over a small scrap of paper, a leaf ripped from a spiral notebook. Eight words were written on it in pencil.

  Nile

  Orinoco

  Po

  Quinto

  Rhine

  Saskatchewan

  Tiber

  Usk

  Oh God! Satori!

  There it was!

  For a moment Alya was incapable of speech. She feared she might vomit. She clutched her hands to her lap to hide their trembling.

  “Rivers,” she mumbled, unconsciously switching to English to match the spellings. “I don’t know Quinto, and I’m not sure of Usk, but the others are all rivers.”

  The little turd had trapped her. Never had she felt so clear a satori, never had the buddhi shouted so loud—and Jathro was much too acute to have missed her reaction. His eyes burned like black lasers. “Yes, they’re all rivers, Highness, but in fact they’re code names. File names, if you prefer. These are rivers, but the name of cities get used, also. Or mountains, or poets. Fish, men, women, battles…eventually they start all over again. Any world of any interest is given a file name.”

  “Etna,” she said, with sudden memories of Omar soaring in her mind like chords of funeral music. And Tal—Tal had drawn “Raven.”

  “Exactly,” Jathro murmured. “I just wondered if any of the names on this list seemed…significant?”

  She forced a swallow down a dry throat. “No,” she murmured.

  “Ah.” He sounded disappointed. He looked unconvinced.

  Alya returned the paper without a word. It quivered.

  “None at all?” he persisted.

  “No. They’re just words.”

  “Ah. Just words?”

  Seven names of rivers written in pencil, and one in letters of fire…How could he not see that one of the eight blazed as though scribed by the finger of God?

  But she would not say. She must be sure. She must be absolutely certain, with no grain of doubt anywhere. Thousands of lives! Why her?

  The captain completed his turn, shedding his sonic boom over the ocean. The super came wailing down the sky at subsonic speed, dropping rapidly, hunting for land like a storm-pressed gull. The screen showed a momentary image of stark city towers standing in the sea, waves running around their feet, and scavengers’ barges floating in the debris-laden streets. Then it was gone and yellowish-green countryside drifted past below in a damp dawn light.

  5

  Nauc, April 7

  EVEN AS BAGSHAW’S armored gauntlet slammed the door, shutting out horrors of melted metal and burning carpet, all the percies sprang into motion. Cedric’s leaped back so suddenly that he thought his eyeballs would fall out. Then it spun around and hurled itself across the room rear first, heading for the shower. He felt it flip up onto the pad; he saw the wall in his mirror, and then—impact!

  The shock rang all the way to his teeth. Had he not been pinned like a pit in a plum, he would have been pulped. The wall shuddered and fractured. At once his percy hurtled forward toward the bed, passing one of the others, which had just attacked the wall on the far side of the room. The third had lifted the fourth in its claws and was pounding it into the ceiling. Tiles and dust and debris sprayed everywhere.

  Cedric’s percy twisted around so that it was again going backward as it slammed into the weakened wall by the bed. That reversed assault was probably designed to make things a little easier on him, he thought groggily, because he saw the second unit smash into the wall by the shower and it was still going face first. Nice of Bagshaw to be so considerate.

  “Glee Club, this is Knuckles.” Bagshaw’s voice sounded close by Cedric’s ear. He was speaking very quietly. Cedric could not see where the man himself had gone, which was hardly surprising in the fog of dust and f
lying rubble. Again Cedric’s robot and its opposing partner surged forward and flashed by each other. Again that lurch over the shower pad—and this time his percy burst right through the wall in an explosion of debris and broken pipes and jets of water. It tripped, tipping almost horizontal, and then straightened. Cedric’s stomach stayed at floor level, and the percy was accelerating again even before it was upright.

  “Knuckles, we read you.” That must be Glee Club.

  The room next door—where Cedric now found himself—was dark, but vision enhancement had clicked in for him. It gave false color images, so that the terrified face above the heap of bedclothes was bright pink and the teeth in her mouth were red. He could not hear the woman’s screams as his percy raced across the room toward her and impacted the wall beside the bed. He hoped she would have the sense to get out of the way quickly.

  “Glee Club, I have picked up Sprout.”

  “Report Sprout’s condition, Knuckles.”

  “Okay so far. Virgo intacta, I should think. But the natives are restless.”

  That was putting it mildly. Cedric’s percy was backing up again, almost as far as his own room. It stopped just short of the aperture rimmed by twisted pipes squirting water and clouds of steam. Why could there not have been hot supplies like that when Cedric was having his shower? If things got much more exciting, he was going to need another shower very shortly. Fortunately, his brain did not seem to be accepting any of this as real.

  Then he was being accelerated again for another attack on the wall by the bed. My Life as the Human Hammer, or The School of Hard Knocks. The pink-faced woman had dived for the floor on the far side and disappeared. How long would it be, Cedric wondered, before the attackers in the corridor came—impact!—came in through the doors?

  “Angel, this is Glee Club. Do you read?”

  “Glee Club, this is Angel. We have a fix on Knuckles. There’s a swarm of hornets around, though.”

  Suddenly Cedric recalled Bagshaw’s remark that these percies would survive a fall of twelve stories. No—the equipment would survive more than that. The occupant might survive twelve stories. How unfortunate that Cedric’s room was on the sixteenth floor.

  Impact! again…

  Bagshaw’s strategy was fairly obvious, although Cedric was having trouble keeping his mind on logic. The enemy was out in the corridor with a fusion cannon, and the good guys did not have the armor to face that. So he had scattered his troops—Cedric going one way, an empty percy in the opposite direction, and a third straight up. It would take the baddies a few minutes to work out which thimble hid the pea.

  “Angel, give me an ETA.”

  A searing white flame filled the bedroom. Cedric saw the bed sheets turn purple and burst into brown flames even before his video overloaded and the percy was lifted by the blast and rammed bodily into the wall it had been about to strike again. The woman would have been charred instantly, he thought as the wall collapsed, spilling him through into a third room and burying another bed in an avalanche of concrete. He could not see if there had been anyone in it.

  Please, God? People are dying here, God.

  This was no holo drama. This was real, squalid murder. He was rolling…

  The vision enhancement had returned. The ceiling was a very pretty green. He was lying on his back, and half the vids had gone dark.

  “Ced—Sprout? You okay?”

  “Sprout fine,” Cedric said weakly. He really did not believe that all this was happening, but that had been Bagshaw’s voice, so somehow the bull had survived the explosion, too.

  And so had Cedric’s percy. The vids flickered on again—most of them—and it swung up to a vertical position. He discovered a curious salt taste in his mouth. That distracted him for a moment, until the door of the room crashed down before him and he was out in the bright lights again, hurtling along the corridor, swaying mightily and gathering speed all the way. It was a very long corridor. There were men behind him—at least three of them, all wearing much the same sort of armored suit as Bagshaw—and they were crouched over something that Cedric was certain was a fusion cannon. Clearly they had just fired it into his original room. At the moment they were turning it to point at him.

  The carpet was still smoldering from the first blast. Burned blotches scarred the walls at regular intervals, as though the plasma had rippled from side to side. Doors were opening, frightened guests coming out to see what was happening. All of them managed to leap back to safety in time, before he ran them down. The noise should have been shattering. There should have been screaming and explosions and sirens, but he could hear nothing at all from outside. Life seemed strangely peaceful around Cedric. Maybe his hearing had failed, or his brain.

  The voices on the network were chattering, but he did not register what was being said. He was amazed at how time seemed to have slowed down, or his own thought processes speeded up, because years were going by while his percy raced along that corridor and the enemy did whatever they were doing to ready that gun.

  And then the percy swerved, cannoned off a wall, and impacted another door, stumbling through into a stairwell. The corridor flamed white behind him, and half the vids winked off and then came on again. His ears popped. There was a strong smell of sweat, but so far only sweat. There had been people…

  Oh, God! There had been people—doors open, people looking out.

  He had thought that the percy would head downward; he had not even known that a percy could climb stairs, but this one could, jolting Cedric up and down like a maraca. One floor up it grabbed the doorhandle in its claw. Then it soared out into another bright corridor and headed back in the direction it had come.

  A door just ahead of him burst open, erupting smoke and an armored man whose feet did not quite touch the floor. He raced along the corridor—not floating, but running like a skater, and gathering speed rapidly.

  “Sprout, that’s me ahead of you.”

  “Read you, Knuckles.” Had that been his own voice? So calm? Cedric decided that he must be in shock. Shrieking hysterics would be the correct reaction.

  The armored man was still accelerating. Cedric’s percy seemed to be slowing, and he felt a sudden terror that it might have been damaged, that he would be left behind. Where was the enemy? Bagshaw had come up through the ceiling, of course. How had he kept control of so much equipment? How many innocent people had died?

  “Sprout, we’ll have to do something unorthodox here. Better keep your eyes closed for a while.”

  “Screw you,” Cedric said—but quietly, and surprisingly matter-of-factly.

  Bagshaw, far ahead now, reached the end of the corridor without breaking stride and then leaped upward. He threw out arms and legs to strike the window spread-eagled. Frame and glass and drapes and man vanished into darkness, leaving a rectangular black hole where there had not been one previously.

  Seventeen floors, or somewhere between fifty and sixty meters—exact measurement did not matter much, did it?—Cedric wanted to scream. He opened his mouth to scream, but all he heard was his own voice dryly ordering his percy to stop. Vaguely he saw that armored figures had appeared in the distance behind him, visible in his mirror, and they had their cannon with them. His percy was losing speed, but he did not think it was obeying his commands, and the black rectangle was pouring itself straight at him, growing larger and larger, but more and more slowly. There was absolutely nothing more he could do. Bagshaw had the con—if Bagshaw was still alive—or else the machine was damaged and out of control. Cedric was immobilized in a traveling coffin, and the black space grew larger and larger, but slower and slower. He could not guess what the final result was going to be.

  The pitch fell short. The percy reached the window just as it ran out of velocity and came to a complete stop. Relief! For a moment Cedric stared out at the lights of the city, a forest of towers still bright against a first faint light of morning. He breathed a deep sigh. He wondered how he went about surrendering. Surely the men behind him w
ould see that he was trapped and helpless inside his percy? They would not fire at him now. Bagshaw had hinted at all sorts of horrors if he were to be captured, but those lay in the future. Cedric would much rather wait for them than be instantly fried by a fusion torch—or be jellied by falling seventeen stories out that window.

  Then his percy tipped slowly and deliberately forward, and toppled over the sill.

  He spent a little over three seconds falling to the street—he had System calculate it for him, much later. He thought that he was very young to die, but then he decided that he had aged many years in those three seconds. He never knew whether it was luck or Bagshaw’s skill that had him flat on his back as he reached the ground, in the position where his fragile protoplasm could best take the stress, pressing back into restraining padding.

  Bagshaw caught him.

  IMPACT!

  He was alive. The gray sky was still above him, there was rain on his viewplate, and he could hear his heart.

  “Okay, Sprout?”

  Cedric repeated the obscenity he had used earlier that evening and augmented it with every other one he could think of. Not very many, really. Not enough. A real man would know more bad words.

  Bagshaw set him upright in the percy and flexed his arms as though they hurt. He bent over to view his feet. “Lookit that!” he said. “Cracked the sidewalk.”

  “I’d like to break it with your head.” Cedric, tasting salt again, decided that he had bitten his tongue.

  “Angel should be along shortly. Let’s go meet him.”

  “And I’ll have you know,” Cedric said bitterly, “that I’m not virgo intacta.”

  Bagshaw drew in breath with a hiss. “Hot damn!” he said. “Tell me about it sometime.”