Strings

by Dave Duncan

  “I want to set up some codes.”

  “Stipulate whether codes are for general use or voice specific.”

  “Voice specific.”

  “Proceed.”

  “If the instructions represented by those codes require an override command, you will assume the override command, but not make it effective until I activate the code. Is this understood?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “First code word: ‘Palomino’…”

  20

  Cainsville, April 10—11

  ALYA, ALSO, HAD been placed under house arrest. The Institute had taken considerable pains to sever all public connection between itself and the princess, and was not going to let her be seen around Cainsville now. Like Cedric, she was confined to one floor of Columbus Dome. The impassive, impassable North Brenda guarded the spiralator, letting no one in or out. System refused to place calls.

  A day of playing cribbage with Moala was relieved only when Alya was taken by O’Brien Patrick to view Usk—and that was the briefest planetary inspection yet. Binary suns cut Usk from the list and sent Alya back to jail.

  She swore a lot, especially when she realized that Jathro must be wandering loose, not confined as she was. None of her brothers or sisters had been insulted in such a way by Director Hubbard, but then none of them had seduced Hubbard’s grandson, either.

  And she worried intensely about Cedric. His unexpected fit in the night had terrified her. He was supposed to be the indestructible man, yet something had driven him completely catatonic for a couple of minutes—going cold, heartbeat dropping and fading. Then he had shuddered and sprung back in typical Cedric style. But something had done that to him. Almost certainly Alya had unwittingly said something to trigger a post-hypnotic code implanted very deep inside his mind. She could not have spoken the whole code, obviously, just enough of it to bring a partial memory up near the surface—and that partial memory had hurled him into psychic fugue and catalepsy. It was a tribute to his incredible toughness that he had recovered so easily.

  Who had managed to tamper with his head? BEST? Or—Alya kept remembering Hubbard’s sneer that Cedric was only a pawn, and a pawn that might have to be sacrificed.

  If what had sent him into that fit had been something Alya had said, then the only word that could possibly have done it was kamikaze.

  She fretted more when she remembered her promise to call Kas and Thalia and the kids that evening. The time came and went with System still uncooperative. Kas would have certainly tried to call her, and had obviously been blocked. Frustrated, Alya decided that she might as well go to bed. Tiber was not due for hours yet, and the previous night had been strenuous in the extreme—Cedric had wonderful stamina, bless him. Oh, Cedric!

  Much to her surprise, she felt herself sliding into sleep almost at once.

  The disadvantage of that, of course, was that she felt so unholy awful when she was wakened by a ping! from the com, and Baker Abel’s voice.

  “We expect Tiber in half an hour, ma’am. Transportation is standing by.”

  “I want—” Alya said.

  “Caller has disconnected,” System said.

  Escorted by a squad of unfamiliar bulls, Alya was golfied over to Philby Dome and delivered to a big, pentagonal office. It was an exact replica of Hubbard’s office in Nauc HQ, or perhaps slightly larger. The big table was heaped with papers; a dozen men and women were slouched around on chairs, all looking totally exhausted. There was no sign of Hubbard Agnes. The two giant com screens were unrolling screeds of multicolored data: text and three-dee graphs, maps, and images. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention.

  Alya sped around the room like a ballistic missile aimed at Baker Abel, who was leaning against a wall, rubbing his eyes. His denims were rumpled, his tawny hair mussed and limp.

  “Where is Cedric?” she demanded.

  Baker peered at her blearily. “I don’t know. System won’t tell me. I don’t know where his grandmother is, either. Or anyone.” He started to say something else and it became a yawn.

  Suddenly Alya felt sympathetic. Baker was hard to dislike.

  “You haven’t been to bed recently, have you?”

  He shook his head. “Thanks for the invitation, but you’ll have to clear it with Emily. I’m supposed to be pairing with her, and it’s getting so I can barely remember why.” Then he grinned.

  “Like hell you can’t,” Alya said, returning the grin. She glanced around and was annoyed that Jathro was missing. Where and what was he doing, and why? “What’s happening about Tiber, Abe?”

  Baker shrugged and heaved himself off the wall. “About ten minutes until window. Another ten to run all the data into System. Most of it’ll be precooked already, so five for analyses. Then decision time.”

  An unpleasant quiver ran through Alya. “Who makes that decision?”

  He blinked bloodshot eyes at her. “You do. Unless there’s something obviously wrong, of course. Them’s my orders—go or no go comes from Princess Alya.”

  “And I lead the parade?”

  “Waving your baton.”

  Her palms were clammy. “And if I want more time to consider?”

  He frowned and shook his head. “No instructions. My guess would be that Mother shuts the file. If you’re not certain, right away, then it’ll be no go.”

  “I won’t leave without Cedric!”

  Baker shrugged again. “I can do nothing about that. I’m telling the truth. I—you okay?”

  She nodded, angry that a princess could be so transparent. “I think I need to freshen up.”

  He pointed in silence at the wall beside them, and she saw the almost-invisible door in it.

  The washroom was garishly bright and decorated in holographic tiles, a style briefly popular long before Alya had been born. Some of them had fallen off and not been replaced. Mother Hubbard had been economizing behind the scenes, obviously.

  Alya washed her face and combed out her hair, and began to feel better. A couple of cups of coffee and perhaps some of the curly-dry sandwiches she had seen out there, and she—

  The comb slipped from her fingers. She felt herself bowled over by a great cold wave of terror, and all the holo tiles seemed to gape and wink like fanged mouths as the walls rushed at her. She stuffed a knuckle between her teeth and fought for control.

  Danger! it was saying. Go now! Escape!

  And the Escape! seemed to echo, over and over.

  She backed up against the wall, sweat streaming down her face. Never had she felt a satori so strong. It was crushing, over-powering. She could no more think straight than if she had seen a bull charging straight at her, or a man coming with a knife—it was as irresistible as that. A screaming sense of danger choked her mind, making her heart race and her hands shake.

  What had happened? Cedric? Was something threatening Cedric?

  Or Tiber? If the window was open, then the choice was clearly available to her at last. That was it! All she had to do was walk out of there and say “Yes!” and she would be whisked away to a safer world. Relief! Cedric might be important, but obviously he ranked a distant second as far as the buddhi was concerned.

  Alya forced herself to pick up the comb. She struggled to compose her face before the mirror—she thought she resembled a terrified coconut—and then she squared her shoulders and tottered back into the big, pentagonal office.

  She sensed the satisfaction at once. The people had all collected before the two big coms. One was still rippling data, much faster now. The other showed three men in a very cramped interior. They wore denims, and the close cram of instrument boards and controls around them identified the locale as a skiv lab module. The men were laughing and all trying to talk at the same time. Sunlight was streaming through a window behind them.

  One of the women in the office said something that provoked more merriment. Baker Abel slipped out of the group and came around to Alya. He was grinning broadly and had lost most of his tired look.

 
“Hundred percent on science!” he said. “System needs a few moments yet, but the team commander says it’s a big improvement on Earth itself! You ready to lead that parade now?”

  It was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.

  “No!” Alya said. Every nerve screamed.

  Baker’s jaw dropped, and for a moment he reminded her again of Cedric. “No?”

  “I need Cedric to help me decide.”

  Baker frowned, studying her, then gestured to a couple of chairs. Alya perched on one, and he pulled the other between his legs, so that he sat on it backward, arms folded, his usual flippancy gone.

  “I swear,” he said quietly, “that I don’t know! She’s gone off on some mysterious project of her own, and Cedric’s probably with her. I know he was locked up on the top floor of Columbus. He’s not there now, ’cause I looked.”

  “Keep looking. He hasn’t left Cainsville?”

  “How should I know? System won’t talk. I can’t even get through to the deputies now. Something odd’s going on.”

  Alya leaned back. “Then we’ll have to wait, won’t we?” She hoped her trembling was not too obvious.

  “Alya, please! Believe me—I’m on his side! Truly, I want to help Cedric. I’m delighted that the two of you are pairing. He’s a great kid! But I can’t find him for you right now.”

  “Then I shall go and look for him myself.”

  He shrugged, baffled. “Swell! Meanwhile I’ve got two thousand refugees and three thousand tons of supplies and trucks and more teams of rangers. Three hours, ten minutes left on the window, maybe. What do I tell everyone? What do I do with them, Alya?”

  Rising, she smiled her meanest smile. “Set them to work looking for Cedric!”

  “Hold it!” He seemed to be thinking very hard, chewing his lip and staring at her with calculating gray eyes. If he made a wrong decision, Baker Abel was going to be in very deep trouble. “You can find him?”

  “I can try.” Actually, Alya was not sure she could even find her left ear—the sense of imminent danger was beating on her like a steam hammer.

  “You want help? Bulls? No—you don’t need bulls, do you?”

  She shook her head. Baker was obviously looking for a solution and willing to risk his neck for her.

  “If I call ’em off for—an hour?”

  Alya nodded with sudden relief at having a workable compromise.

  “You’ll come back and tell me in an hour?” he asked. “Promise?”

  “Yes! Thanks, Abe. I—thanks!” She marched to the door, and he let her go. Bulls sitting in the corridor started to climb to their feet and then settled back, exchanging puzzled glances.

  Alya headed for the spiralator. At ground level she climbed into a golfie. She closed her eyes for a minute to think—or feel, maybe.

  “That way! I mean—what way is this golfie facing?”

  “The personnel cart is pointed west.”

  “Then make it go north.”

  After that it was all either right, left, or straight ahead.

  21

  Cainsville, April 11

  LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT Cedric was summoned by an anonymous voice on the com. He headed for the spiralator with his mind churning an immiscible mixture of relief and apprehension. There was no more nonsense of flashing lights. He was borne swiftly and silently down to ground level.

  He was at once surrounded by an armed escort. They were all large-economy gorillas; even the women among them looked tough enough to snap him with one hand. Nor were they an honor guard—they gave him a thorough body search. He could almost find that amusing—him, dangerous? He knew none of the faces, but he saw some of those faces register shock when they recognized his, for he was a celebrity. He had died tragically on world holo the previous day, lost on a nightmare planet of a distant star. His presence back on Earth was a physical impossibility.

  The mixture of uniforms told him who was going to be at the meeting. Four bulls wore Institute red, four grass green, and four shiny gold. The greens bore shoulder-patch logos of a stylized, five-line house containing a globe, and that was the symbol of the World Chamber. The golds’ shoulders said simply BEST.

  He was more surprised to see that the visitors were armed. That was a major breach of standard practice. That explained why the four Institute bulls were glowering so resentfully, why hands hovered so obviously near holsters. Eight Daniels and four lions—and all of them so tense that they almost crackled.

  He had expected to be led to a meeting room, but nothing like that happened at all. He was crushed into a two-man golfie, with a gold bull on one side and a green on the other. He tried making conversation, and neither would speak a word.

  Soon he was in unfamiliar territory. The streets and corridors were deserted. He would have expected to see at least a few people around, even at that hour. He wondered if Cainsville could be under martial law.

  Other golfies raced ahead and behind and, when the road was wide enough, kept pace on either side. He found such celebrity treatment ridiculous, and in a brighter moment would likely have found it amusing. Of course, he was not being guarded for his own sake, but rather to protect others, as if one moment’s lapse in vigilance might let someone turn him into a walking bomb.

  Ridiculous or not, the possibility was being taken seriously. His destination turned out to be a medical facility like the one when he was first admitted to HQ, back in Nauc. He groaned loudly and said, “Not again?” No one registered that he had spoken. The reception room held at least twenty people in lab coats, but even they were color-coded, with green and gold outnumbering red. They all turned to look at him and waited expectantly. Resignedly, Cedric began to unzip.

  If possible, the ensuing examination was even more thorough than his ordeal of four days earlier. The visitors took at least an hour to satisfy themselves that there was nothing inside Hubbard Cedric’s skin except Hubbard Cedric and one earpatch. They struck a piece of shiny metallic tape over that to inactivate it. When at last they could find nothing more to scan, poke, or measure, they reluctantly allowed him to dress himself again. His clothes had a rumpled look, and he could guess that they had been inspected also. When he asked for a comb, his request was brusquely debated and then refused. Not only did the greens and golds distrust the reds, they obviously distrusted each other also. Who could say what infernal machine might be hidden inside an innocent-seeming comb?

  After that nasty tribulation, he was taken to a waiting room and told to sit. He sat on a hard bench and leaned against a hard wall while another half hour dragged by in sickening small-hours lethargy. His questions were ignored. His only diversion was dabbing tissue at his wretched nose, which had started dribbling blood again. The medics had done that while exploring his sinuses.

  He had known that there was another victim being examined at the same time as himself, for he had heard voices from cubicles he had recently vacated, but he had not been sure who it was. Finally the door opened, and he saw Gran standing outside. She was thin-lipped and flushed, much less spruce and poised than usual. Sauce for gander is sauce for goose now? Cedric began to grin, shaping a wittily catty remark, but the look she gave him caused it to die of an attack of discretion.

  Again he was crushed into an overloaded golfie as an enlarged procession took off on an even longer journey. Again the road was unfamiliar to him, and deserted. The hour was late, the lighting dim. The prospect of meeting two of the world’s most powerful men held no attraction. He was sleepy and hungry.

  He mooned gloomily over Alya. The window to Tiber might be open at that very moment. She might already have departed, never to return. He remembered the look in her eye when she spoke of her new world. He hoped it had checked out well. He hoped she had not been so stupid as to wait around for him. He did not think he was going to see that new world again.

  Then he felt cold air on his face. The corridors had taken on a functional, echoing, rivets-and-hard-shadows look, and the temperature had dropped. The
train of golfies trundled through a high metal doorway and Cedric snapped alert, astounded at what lay before him. The great dome was huge, larger even than de Soto or David Thompson, but it could not be a transmensor facility, for the floor was flat. In icy air, under a hard actinic glare, stood three great winged monsters. The smallest was a Boeing 7777, and the other two were supers, a Hyundai Six and a Euro Starscraper. All loomed enormous. He felt like a mite on the bottom of a bird cage, but it was not their size that astonished him as much as their mere presence. He had always understood that there was no airport at Cainsville.

  With wheels drumming on rows of rivets, the golfies raced across the steel prairie of the floor toward the Boeing, which bore the house-and-globe logo of the World Chamber on its green tail. By the time Cedric was delivered to the steps, his grandmother was already halfway up. He thought despairingly of Alya and wondered where he was going to be taken.

  The answer, apparently, was “nowhere.” The plane was outfitted like a home, or even a palace. He followed his grandmother through to a very luxurious lounge and there folded himself into a thick-pillowed armchair. Red, gold, and green guards all remained standing, all watching one another as much as the prisoners.

  Prisoners?

  “Gran? What the hell is going on?”

  His grandmother pursed her lips, as if he were speaking out of turn. Then she said, “Look!” and pointed at a window.

  Cedric swung around and peered. He was just in time to see the great exterior doors slide open. Snow and even darkness itself seemed to pour into the hangar and swirl around the floor—or at least the snow did. He watched the guards stagger as the wind struck at them. He moved to a closer chair and, in his eagerness, jostled his tender and swollen nose against the plastic. In a moment another giant Boeing emerged from the night, advancing under its own power. It was painted gold and bore BEST’s logo. The doors slid shut. A rumble of titanic motors died away. Even with four such monsters present, the dome was still not full.