by Mike Wild
Or loved him not.
Schnik.
"Juanita, listen to me."
But who? Who was it that she loved? Juanita pondered the question for a moment, simply staring at the flower she held in her hand. She watched as the petals began to fall away of their own volition and were wafted away on a summer breeze.
Juanita cried aloud, startling the birds in the nearby trees. It was an agonised sound. Her fists beat the grass of the meadow and beat the floor of the cage.
Somewhere deep inside, even deeper than where she was, Juanita knew that she had made herself a promise. It had been a promise that would keep her sane, a promise to step outside. To be with... someone.
To be with... To be with...
Juanita could not remember. She groaned. As she did, a figure came walking slowly to her across the meadow, a figure that stood over her and smiled down benignly. She did not see the hunger in its eyes. There you are, my beloved, Juanita thought, staring at Senator Diaz.
She loved him...
But this was not right. Could not be right. There was another, she was certain.
His name. Please, what was his name?
"Juanita Perez, you must listen."
What am I thinking, Juanita chided herself. There can be no other. My darling, my powerful, powerful senator, you are the only one who cares for me, are you not? The only one.
"Juanita, your thoughts are not your own. Senator Diaz knows that your willpower is strong enough to resist love bombing now. Are you listening, Juanita?"
Yes.
"He has ordered that subliminals are beamed into your cage - yes, your cage, Juanita; powerful subliminals that are aimed directly at your synaptic pathways. You are being more than brainwashed, Juanita. Senator Diaz is rewiring your mind."
My mind, Juanita thought. Oh no - that can't be. The senator has no interest in my mind. It is my body that my darling desires. I will give it to him willingly. In the meadow, Juanita rolled slowly on the grass. I shall prostrate myself before him. He shall anoint me with oils and thick perfumes. I shall writhe beneath his touch, moan at his caress. Oh yes, he shall have my body... And my soul.
Juanita's eyes filled with tears, though she did not know why. He shall have my soul.
"The name you are trying to remember, Juanita Perez... the name you are being forced to forget. It's Joe. Joe Pineapples. Remember, Juanita - it's there. Remember Joe. His name, Juanita - you have to find it. Joe Pineapples. Think for yourself, Juanita. Think!"
I am trying. I know no-
"JOE PINEAPPLES!"
Images came: a robot, blue and sleek; a dance in the heavens; an Elvis impression. The letters... ABC.
Slowly, as if in a dream, Juanita turned to the door of the cage. There was a woman standing outside, her mouth moving, but her words seemed so very far away.
"... 'member... 'nita... 'edpeace... 'usic box... 'member... Your life."
This was no woman that Juanita saw. No ordinary woman. She too was a robot; such a beautiful robot with golden skin, and a mane of wild, wiry, red hair. Dark eyes stared at Juanita imploringly from the flawless face of a flawless head balanced on a flawless, swan-like neck. She looked like a model. She looked so familiar.
"It's Sheen."
"Sh - Sheen?" Juanita said haltingly.
"Yes, Juanita - yes."
"Sh - Sheen Zano?"
Sheen Zano smiled. "As Joe might say - here's looking at you, kid."
JOE, Juanita thought, and it that second it all came flooding back: the night in her room, not that long ago, but what felt like an eternity. The last time she had seen the ABC Warrior, Casablanca, his embrace, his insistence that she go with him, her insistence that she would only slow him down. Then an agonised Joe departing to save the planet, but not before teaching her love - no. NOT her love - not before teaching that bastard Diaz a lesson he would never forget. Then alone again.
Diaz returning her to the cage, determined to make her forget her true love, her lion: Joe Pineapples.
"Oh Gaia, Sheen," Juanita said slowly. Her throat was dry, sore. "How long-"
"Long enough," Sheen Zano replied. "Any longer and you wouldn't-" The model trailed off and let the silence speak for itself.
Juanita nodded. She knew that had Sheen not brought her back when she did, Juanita Perez would have ceased to exist.
"You were here for the fashion show," Juanita realised suddenly. It brought her back to the real world. "What's happened?" Juanita asked urgently. "Joe? Medusa, is she...?"
"Genocidal? Insane? Winning?" Sheen Zano responded. "Maybe all of those things. The last I heard she'd launched an attack on Viking City and Joe and the other ABCs were tackling her head on." The super-model robot decided not to tell Juanita that she'd also heard that the battle was not going well.
"But all that can wait," Sheen Zano said. "First we have to get you out of here." The model paused and the fingernail on her right index finger extended suddenly with a schnik. It was a sound Juanita had heard before.
Sheen inserted it into the lock of the cage, twisted, and the door swung open. She offered Juanita a hand. "Come on."
"Hardly standard equipment for a Pharoah fashion show," Juanita said as she scrambled out.
Sheen smiled as the blade retracted. "What can I say? Modelling's a bitch of a business. We need something to scratch each other's eyes out."
Juanita noticed that the pair of clone guards who had been on sentry duty outside her cage were staring at her from bloodied sockets. These clone guards were known as Dead Dead Eyes - and now they truly were. The business of escaping was obviously a bitchy one, too.
"Sheen," she asked, "why are you doing this?"
The model paused and licked her lips. "Let's just say that John Steel had a certain effect on my inner - um - M-Appeal."
"John Steel?"
"Joe."
"Oh." Juanita stared at the model.
"Don't worry," Sheen said, smiling. "He only has eyes for you."
"How do we get out of here?"
"This way," Sheen said. "There's an access corridor."
The two of them began to move through the underground tunnels of Camp Diaz. They had not travelled far before there was a crackling from some speakers on the wall.
"And just where exactly is it that you two beauties think you are going?"
Juanita felt a sudden chill. That voice. Distorted as it was by the speakers - it was unmistakably that of Senator Diaz. But that was impossible. Diaz had left Damnation Island for reconstructive surgery right after Joe had deliberately dropped him down his own stairwell. The man was a broken, battered wreck, kept alive only by his mobile life support machine, and in desperate need of hospitalization.
He was not meant to be there.
"Wondering why I am still in residence, my luscious peach?" Diaz said, addressing Juanita. "Sadly it appears that the medics, which I had assigned to my... repair, are themselves very much in need of their profession's services - that, or those of a gravedigger." Diaz chuckled throatily and his voice took on a sepulchral tone. "A devastating attack on the hospital in Viking City, I am told. So many dead. Men, women and children. Doctors and nurses - and robots."
Diaz inhaled sharply. "Which reminds me, my dear, we simply must play a game of doctors and nurses, you and I. I'll get you on my operating table and I can probe you until we get to the bottom of things, eh? I know how much you would enjoy that."
"You're sick, Diaz."
Diaz laughed, began to cough. "Sick, am I? I'm not the one cavorting with a mek, now am I? Oh, and by the way, if you are thinking that your tin-man lover-boy has survived and will return here to rescue you, think again. These are dangerous times and I am in the process of making some rather dramatic adjustments to the security here at Camp Diaz. Believe me when I say that if your Mr Pineapples returns then I will turn him into a tin of Pineapples chunks." Diaz snickered at his own bad joke. "Better still, as it looks as though I will now be in this condition for some time, why don't
I make use of him as part of this life support machine he has condemned me to? I need some plumbing for my... waste. I know - I could even use his hollowed-out head as a bed-pan!"
"Go to hell."
"Oh my dear, I am already there," Diaz said coldly.
Juanita and Sheen ran. Ran into the dark. Laughter followed them as they went.
"I think we lost him," Sheen said finally.
"Yeah," Juanita answered. "But where are we exactly?"
They were deep beneath the domes in what looked like a network of ancient service tunnels. Old equipment - very old equipment by the looks of it, possibly even equipment that had been used by the Foundation Fathers - lay discarded against the walls, its purpose forgotten. The tunnels themselves appeared disused; algae plastered the walls and water dripped from cracked pipes, pooling into gradually creeping puddles on the corridor floor. Apart from the haunting, echoing sound of the drips, all was silent.
"There's a door over there. Let's see where it leads."
Juanita and Sheen moved across the corridor to where a stark metal door broke the wall. The door looked out of place in its surroundings, as though it had been installed relatively recently, in the last fifty or so years.
In Diaz's lifetime, Juanita thought.
The door was sealed and had no visible handle. Instead two features marked it. At head height was an old Earth symbol that Juanita recognised as an Ankh. Below that at shoulder height was a panel. In the centre of the panel was the indented shape of an outstretched hand - and in the centre of that, a small pulsating jewel.
The hand lit up. A soft, female voice said: "Identify."
"Palm print access," Sheen said.
Juanita scanned the rest of the door, spotted a small integral microphone. "And probably password controlled," Juanita added. "There must be something pretty valuable in there. Or something Diaz wants to keep very quiet. But even so - a dead end?"
"Not necessarily," Sheen said. She held out her own hand and concentrated hard. As Juanita watched, Sheen's palm began to ripple ever so slightly, subtly changing shape and density, growing lines where it had had none before. It appeared to age. To Juanita's surprise, hairs appeared at the edges - and even a couple of small brown liver spots. She realised she was looking at an old man's hand: Diaz's hand.
"Mnemonic tactility," Sheen explained. "Pharaoh has it installed in all of his top models. That way, when we get all lovey with our rivals at a show - getting a quick feel of their outfits in the process, of course, we can retain the exact details of the fabrics and materials used in the competitor's design. It's just amazing how quickly we can get them on the shelves." Sheen smiled and placed her hand in the door's indentation. "It comes in handy in other ways, too," she punned. The palm-sized indentation grew brighter. "Guess whose hand I shook earlier?"
"Identify," the door repeated.
"We still need the password," Juanita whispered. "Any ideas?"
Sheen shrugged. "Bastard? Pervert? Scum?"
"Nothing so obvious," Juanita said. "Diaz might be all of those things but he's no fool."
"Then what?"
"I don't know," Juanita said in frustration. She paced the corridor, hugging herself against the cold, staring into the air for inspiration. At last it hit her. Diaz had an extensive collection of old movies. Perhaps he had used something from one of them as a password, but what? Gaia, there were so many! Then Juanita realised.
"Diaz lives in a city of domes, right?" she said with some excitement. "And this-" she jabbed a finger towards the algae-covered, puddle-filled corridor and the door with its Ankh, its jewelled palm and its soporific voice that said, "Identify".
"This is familiar. I know this."
Juanita moved to the microphone, her lips moving as she thought hard. "Logan 5," she said finally, waiting for a response. The door beeped flatly - access denied. "Okay... Jessica 6... Sandman... Sanctuary?"
There was no response. Sudden recognition dawned in Sheen Zano's eyes and she waved her hands excitedly. "Daddy, my daddy!" she screeched helpfully.
"Right actress, wrong movie," Juanita said. "That was The Railway Run and this is Logan's Walkabout. Starred that guy - Nathaniel York?"
Think, she told herself.
"Runner... Carousel... Last Day..."
Suddenly, the door beeped in a high tone. It thunked open. Juanita stood back with a gasp.
"We're in," she said breathlessly.
The women moved forward, leaving the corridor behind. A dark staircase led upwards and they took the steps gingerly, intrigued, but also afraid of where they might lead. They were somewhat surprised to emerge inside another dome of Camp Diaz, but one that was quite dramatically different from all they had seen before. For a start, it looked far older, perhaps as old as the equipment in the corridors below. It was lit dimly by emergency lighting and appeared seldom used. Oddly, the entrance - that was the main entrance, not the stairway through which they had come - was blocked and sealed, and it looked as if it had been that way for a long, long time. No one, it seemed, came to this dome apart from Diaz.
A growing sense of unease crept over Juanita. There was something wrong about this place. As their eyes grew accustomed to the reduced light, the two women began to make out details of the interior. The first and most obvious thing was that all of the inner walls were mounted with electronic maps of what appeared to be the planet's biol pipeline network - the pipelines that delivered the universal foodstuff to every inhabited corner of Mars.
The second thing was that above their heads, radiating out like the spokes of a wheel from a central storage tank, were actual pipelines - each of which plunged into the ground and exited the dome beneath each of the maps. There was a feeder wheel on each pipe.
Juanita was no technician but studying the arrangement it seemed to her that Diaz was leaking something into the biol network.
The third thing they saw dwarfed this realisation: on either side of the storage tank were two others, but these were made of glass. Each tank was filled with what looked like diluted biol goo. Banks of computer terminals and analytical equipment surrounded them. And each tank held a body.
The bodies were alive, recognisably female, but only just, because they were bloated beyond belief - bigger than the biggest obeasts Juanita had ever seen. Not only that but they were also horribly deformed, their limbs twisted and misshapen; their faces were mutated, staring out at Juanita and Sheen with terror in their eyes.
The main lights of the dome came on.
"Beautiful, aren't they?" Senator Diaz said. "Allow me to introduce my previous wives."
Juanita and Sheen span. Held aloft by two clone guards who had carried him into the dome, Diaz stared proudly at the bodies. The two guards laid Diaz down on the floor and drew automatic weapons. Diaz trundled forward in his life-support machine.
"You look as if you are cold, Juanita," Diaz commented, ogling her body unashamedly. "Oh my yes, really quite... pert."
"These are your wives?" Sheen said in disbelief. She had heard that his previous wives had disappeared in mysterious circumstances, but she, like everyone else, had presumed that meant Diaz had simply had them removed.
"Strictly speaking, ex-wives," Diaz countered. "But for all intents and purposes still partners, yes." He spread his hands, showing off the dome. "You see, for the last few years, they have been assisting me in my experiments. Experiments that, I should add, you should not have stumbled into."
"What in Gaia's name are you doing here, Diaz?" Juanita asked. "The biol pipelines; these poor creatures. Why are you keeping them like this?"
"I would have thought that was obvious, my dear," Diaz said. He stroked the tanks tenderly. "My ever-faithful darlings are my laboratory rats."
"You did this to them?" Sheen said in horror.
"Of course," Diaz said coolly. "How else could I have isolated what I wanted to know?"
"What are you talking about?"
"Biol, my angel," Diaz declared. "The wondrous secret o
f biol."
Diaz showed them; Sheen and Juanita screamed.
NINE
Had there been any point at all in the routed population of Viking City launching a counter-attack against the point of origin of the tripods, it would not have been difficult for them to locate.
The thousands of tripod machines that had disgorged the previous dawn through the gates of Sunset Motors had left a scar on the face of the planet - a scar that had been trampled into it by the unrelenting and determined march of their heavy metal feet. Even the day after they had passed that way, the dust was far from settled and the rock of the planet remained exposed to the sky like bone.
But Blackblood did not want to think about feet. The swaddling that he had applied to his own road drill leg had already all but been worn away, and he was becoming increasingly irritated by and heavily conscious of the listing swagger that had returned as a result. Moreover, the buzz of servos as they constantly checked his balance niggled at his temper. It was fine nurturing a slightly piratical affectation, but this - this made him look like some crass pantomime villain, or a sad extra in a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Anyone who saw him would regard him like some crippled refugee from the burning city. A pathetic robot cast out into the desert without purpose following ignominious defeat.
They would not think of him as General Blackblood, ABC Warrior. But, ABC Warrior no longer, he reflected. Blackblood fired a chamber full of bullets into the air in frustration. From above, a death-kite squawked and fell to the ground with a muted splat. He was only General Blackblood, killer of birds.
He sighed angrily and knelt down on the desert floor. His joints grated. Deadlock said that there were seven sacred orifices in the body, but the general reckoned that was a woeful underestimate. The desert dust had found its way into far more than seven.
Blackblood's fingers almost subconsciously traced the edge of the tripod-created rut, noting that he had met it at a point where it diverged into three distinct paths. He had stumbled across the trail by accident, having been wandering in the desert without any real purpose, simply collecting his thoughts. Since he had parted from his comrades at the Red House, he had found himself quite surprised - and oddly disturbed - at how different it felt to be alone once more. It had been a very long time indeed since he'd had the freedom to indulge his more independent thoughts, and it made him yearn for the past. For the time before his reprogramming; the time of the Volgon war; the time when he had been Big Daddy, most powerful and most feared of the jungle warriors known as the Straw Dogs. He saw it all so clearly: the majesty of the killing machines known as Daddy-Long-Legs, striding effortlessly through the trees, cutting down all who stood in their way without mercy; the fear on his victims' faces as he descended like a god from his Man O'War, his weapons blazing and the last, desperate gurgles of his defeated ABC Warrior enemies as he tore away their heads and drank deeply of their blood.