The Sixth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  All of a sudden Ms Keltree snapped out of her pretend daze, perhaps at the realisation that the sex slanted ploy might not work.

  “Would you agree to a contract…on the validation of our information?”

  “I don’t know that your information would be worth my trouble. Runcible jaunts are not so cheap.”

  “We are prepared to offer a thousand solars block payment to assist things along. This way nobody loses. We get a story, and if you do not get information on Bird you will at least have the money for much more com time with Dragon when you return.”

  This was more like it. My digestion improved measurably.

  “Okay, I presume this conversation is being recorded.”

  “Under seal.”

  “Then I agree. When do we go, and where to we go?”

  Ms Keltree had difficulty suppressing her smug look of victory and I turned away to allow her a moment to get herself under control. My gaze strayed to a nearby table where a man sat alone with an untouched meal on a plate before him. He was staring at me intently. I let my slide over him and brought my attention back Ms Keltree. I knew that man, but I could not remember where from.

  “If it is agreeable to you we will leave early tomorrow morning. If I may I will join you at your roofport and we’ll take an AGC to the Runcible at about eight. Is that alright?”

  “Fine,” I said, still distracted by the familiar face. Ms Keltree then told me where we were going and all my attention returned to her. There, that place, full circle.

  We talked a while longer and it was with a kind of inevitability I felt that we ended up in my hotel room for another drink or two. When Ms Keltree asked me if I would like to have sex with her I said ‘yes’ immediately, my decision having been made on an unconscious level sometime before, almost like it wasn’t my decision at all.

  * * * *

  Buying time on my hotel AI I confirmed that Horace Blegg had indeed been reported by the runcible AI of Thurvis to be present on that world. There was no other information about him; why he was there, how long he would be there, and where exactly on that world he was. The time when this information became available and the place it became available from put breaking strain on the long arm of coincidence.

  The morning air was chill and specks of reddish snow blew here and there and melted on the skin to form droplets like blood. My bare arm already appeared to have been worked over with needles. Dawn swore about the red specks evenly speckling her skin-tight white trousers.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Bloody snow!” she said, which seemed apposite. She then went on to explain that this colouring was caused by a mixture of dust and iron salts blown up into the air and mixed with the high-peroxide water. The result was similar to being spattered with blood. The stuff turned brown as it dried out.

  The AGC was in better condition than the one I arrived in and turned out to belong to the Cartis Observer. Once we were seated inside the vehicle and it was airborne Dawn removed a small cleaning device and ran it over her trousers. That such a device was available in the AGC showed this snow was common.

  At the runcible station there was no wait. We went directly to this open air runcible and after keying and palming to confirm our destination we stepped through one after the other into the huge lobby at Thurvis and a chaos of crowds.

  “We just made it,” Dawn told me as we fought our way to the exit. She pointed to the announcement board. The runcible had gone into one way operation to prevent dangerous overcrowding. People could now only leave Thurvis, they could not arrive. All over the runcible network people bound for Thurvis would be stepping through the Skaidon cusp to be stored in no-space, basically ceasing to exist, for a while.

  “I wonder what all this is about?” I asked.

  “Horace Blegg,” she told me, and only then did I notice the amount of recording equipment scattered throughout the lobby. Like a swarm of huge silver bees holocorders hovered in the air. I noted with interest how some of them became confused when Bird, though not visible in the human spectrum, floated past or through them. On the floor scent recorders and all manner of analysers scuttled about on metal insect legs, or squealed about on fat little tyres. Hover luggage weaved in and out of this crowd like pets seeking owners, which was much the case, so to speak.

  “’Lo Dawn!”

  “Nice to see you Dawn!”

  “Ms Keltree!”

  Dawn nodded and smiled at fellow professionals, but I could see she looked very worried. Perhaps she was thinking it very unlikely she would be able to get to see Horace Blegg. I was not so sure there would be a problem. Once we were free of the lobby and out in the open where the crowds were being thinned by the AG taxis, she called up the local AI on a console inset into a rock in the shade of a huge oak tree.

  “Could you give me the present location of Horace Blegg?”

  “Thurvis.”

  “Could you be more specific?”

  “No.”

  I took hold of her arm.

  “There are people I can try,” she said. “I have contacts.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but first we have somewhere to go. Call up a taxi.”

  The taxi took a while to arrive as obviously the local service was under some pressure transporting the press of many worlds to the capital city of this one. When I told it where I wanted to go I am sure I evinced surprise from the on board computer. It took us anyway.

  Thurvis: recently opened for colonization after terraforming, but only certain areas. It was a place of immense forests and heaths. It was a park world. But there were also a few places kept deliberately bare of life, places where the ancient remains of a civilization already fallen into ruin when humans had not yet decided which direction to take: back into the sea or out onto the plains of Africa. The AGC landed us in the same place I had landed only a few weeks before. As I climbed out I could hear the vacuum cleaner running in the excavation. The old man was there, carefully uncovering the shape of a wall in the earth. He looked up as we approached.

  “Horace Blegg I presume,” I said.

  He grinned wickedly.

  * * * *

  “I sent you to Dragon because Dragon will have the answers.”

  I nodded, sipped at the glass of whisky he had provided, and slowly studied the interior of his tent. Dawn, sitting on a cerametal box marked ‘Artefact, Do Not Transmit’ was in her idea of heaven now she was over the initial shock. Around her, in the air and on the ground, was a formidable array of recording equipment. She was even writing in a paper pad.

  “Dragon was uncooperative,” I told him.

  “You should not have used the com. You should have walked directly to Dragon.”

  I nodded with cool assurance as if I had considered this. In reality, after learning about the two-kilometre line Dragon had drawn around itself, I hadn’t. Blegg went on.

  “I feel Dragon fears Bird. I would like to know why.”

  “So would I, if that is the case, but I am here now and I would like to know what you can tell me, and what your interest is.”

  Blegg looked at me with eyes like lead shot and I felt certain that behind those eyes was a millstone of a mind that ground very fine indeed. Something about this man exhilarated me, frightened me.

  “First, my interest: I am agent Prime Cause and I work for Earth Central. Anything that might affect the stability of the human civilization is of interest to me. Bird is an unknown with unknown capabilities. As to what I know…I can tell you there is a constant subspace link between you and Bird that has a pseudo-physical integrity. It is almost matter yet it lies in the realm of the psyche.”

  “What might that mean?”

  “It probably means that Bird is part of you, an extension of you, but I know little beyond that without a probe.”

  I felt the danger then, but my need to know was stronger.

  “Probe me then.”

  “It could kill you.”

  “You also,” I looked over my
shoulder to where Bird, now visible, turned slowly in the air like a string hung ornament. As I turned back to Blegg he suddenly seemed to be miles away from me. Abruptly I felt an abyss opening round me, then Blegg was before me again.

  “First, this.”

  He held in his hand a small pistol that seemed made of the most delicate chalky shell and weighed almost nothing.

  “Why? What do I need this for?”

  “It is there for need. You will know.”

  I looked at the pistol in my hand. It was like a toy, and it faded out of existence as I looked at it. I knew then I was in some kind of dream space. I looked round at Dawn and she looked blank, mindless.

  “Now,” said Blegg, and the abyss filled with fire. I might have screamed then, I do not know if it was me or Blegg. I heard the vicious drone of Bird as I had once heard it before. I think I warned him, for Blegg went flat as a picture, turned into a line, and disappeared a microsecond before Bird passed through where he had been.

  * * * *

  “Okay, you’re okay now.”

  Dawn was holding my head against her breast and rocking me. I cannot remember what happened between this moment and the disappearance of Blegg. I breathed easy and pulled my head away. Her shirt was soaked with blood. I checked my face and head for wounds.

  “Your nose bled, and you were crying blood too.”

  A little unsteadily I reached for Blegg’s bottle of whisky and not bothering with a glass I drained a fair bit of it.

  “Let’s get back to Dragon territory. You got enough for a story?”

  “More than. Too much.”

  I stood up, capped Blegg’s bottle, and peered at something he had been cleaning on a portable table. It looked like a small ceramic gun, and that reminded me of the gun he had given me, or not given me. I felt a pressure, light as a fly, at the centre of the palm of my hand. I did not believe it, and anyway, runcible proscription never let weapons through. I turned away, leaving the bottle for him, for I suspected he would be back for it. It was good whisky.

  * * * *

  The runcible facility had cleared of crowds by the time we reached it—we learnt to our surprise we had been gone for eleven solstan hours—though we got some strange looks from a few individuals as we walked across the lobby. I had blood crusted on my face and Dawn, what with my blood and her spattering from the red snow of Aster Colora, looked as if she had been taking a bath in it. Before heading for the runcible we stopped and enquired at a console.

  “Could you tell me the present location of Horace Blegg?” I asked.

  “Who’s asking?” The question shot back immediately, and I knew I was talking directly to the Runcible AI and not one of its subminds.

  “John Walker.”

  “Blegg is quite safe and will be in contact with you again after you return to Aster Colora.”

  Fine.

  We headed for the runcible.

  * * * *

  Stepping from the cool outdoor runcible on Aster Colora I felt exhaustion come down on me like a lead sheet. Looking to Dawn I saw that she felt much the same. We slouched to the only AGC in the area and with a feeling of relief climbed inside.

  “I want a shower, some brandy, and a sleep,” she said.

  I nodded and after pushing in my credit card I spoke into the AGC’s computer, “AGC, take us to the metrotel.” Obligingly it lifted into the air. I lay back and closed my eyes.

  “What happened when Blegg probed you? Why did Bird attack him?”

  “It decided he was attacking me in some way.”

  “And always reacts so to a threat to you?”

  “Always.”

  I drifted for a moment until she brought me back with another question.

  “What about indirect threats?”

  “I don’t know. Nothing, I think. Bird only direct threats to my life. There has only been one other occasion.”

  “Yes, I know about that. Someone kidnapped you and tried to get information from you about Bird.”

  “They used drugs and VR first and when that did not work they tried pain. That is when Bird reacted. She killed three men and two women in about a second. Two of them were cyborgs. They were all Separatists.”

  There was a long silence then before Dawn spoke again. I had almost drifted off to sleep.

  “This AGC isn’t taking us to Cartis.”

  Suddenly I was very awake. In that instant two facts became very clear to me. The man in the McCaffrey was one of the Separatists who had not been present when his fellows had decided to use torture. And I had been with Bird for more than the fifty years I had supposed and more than the three centuries Dawn Keltree had suggested.

  * * * *

  The AGC fled on the red sunrise of another day, not that the sun could be seen. Dawn tried all her communications equipment to no avail. I tried the one in my wristwatch and only got static. The solstan time-setting broadcast by the runcible AI had also been interrupted. I looked behind the AGC and Bird was there as solid as a heat-seeking missile.

  “Try the panel. Try manual control.” Dawn sounded like she was playing a role in some VR drama. I studied her for a moment but she would not meet my gaze and I could not plumb why something seemed off about her. I next carefully pulled at the fastenings to the control panel and found them locked solid. I took hold of the joystick and found it also was locked in place.

  “Oh for fucksake!”

  Dawn smashed her nigh indestructible holocorder against the panel and tried to pull open the casing from the split she had made. A small red lightning flung her back in her seat and filled the inside of the AGC with the smell of burning hair.

  “You alright?”

  She nodded, but she was shaking badly, as if her VR role had just turned real.

  “That wasn’t from the console,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. I recognised the red lightning from somewhere. Where? Oh yes, place now called Tantalus III, static discharge projected through subspace, the weapon that brought an empire down. I was cold, emotionless, until I realised that the empire I had been thinking about had not been a human empire, had not in fact been of any race I should have known…I got the horrors then.

  The AGC came into land as Dawn recovered her composure and made sure all her recording devices were operating. We landed in conditions of fine sleet and would have stayed in the AGC if the door had not opened and a threatening flicker of red fire expanded into existence between us. Dawn got out first with her recording devices moving out ahead of her like faithful sheep dogs. As I stepped out there was a sound like a metal wall being hit with a hammer and all her devices ceased to function. The holocorder fell out of the air.

  “What the hell is this?” she asked, and almost seemed as if she wasn’t asking me.

  “Separatists I think.”

  “But where?” Back in her VR role.

  I shrugged. There was no one about. We moved out into the wasteland as the AGC lifted into the air behind us and headed back to Cartis. Was that it then? We weren’t going back? They would be more prepared this time. Something would happen. Something. The ground shook then and fifty metres ahead of us something broke through it and rose into the air. I recognised the giant cobra shape immediately, as did Dawn.

  “Dragon, then,” I said.

  It rose ten metres into the air, another rose beside it, then another on the other side. Trinocular vision? Three eyes like blue crystal observed us from where a cobra mouths should have been. I took a step forward, then hesitated. There was something else. Had it risen to the surface also? Lying between us and these fleshy extrusions of Dragon—they reached for many kilometres under the ground so the tapes told me—lay something else, a black shape, almost like a coffin, only streamlined and somehow sinister.

  “What is that?” she asked, playing her part.

  I had no reply for her. The shape rose into the air, something rippled across its surface and a circle of ground underneath it roared and boiled and turned molten. I step
ped back and Bird was in front of me in an instant, hanging in a shimmering curtain that bowed under the pressure of some force radiating from the black object. A terrible screaming filled the air. Dawn clapped her hands over her ears and fell to the ground. I felt my eardrums burst and something running down my neck. The pain did not hit me until the shimmering curtain broke and Bird and the black object met with a thunderclap, then I too fell to the ground and clasped my hands over my bleeding ears.

  The storm did not abate, it moved away. The ground shook and the sky filled with flashes of light I quickly averted my eyes from. Even then the vision out of my right eye seemed charred. This was the kind of light that would do to a retina what that sound had done to my eardrums. Dawn was up onto her knees next to me. She said something, but all I got was a dull mumbling. I shook my head and wished I had not. The lights in the distance dimmed a little and I dared a quick glimpse. A flicker of something there, like a gull picked out by sunlight against tearing cloud, and its shadow, black. So much nearer the three cobra heads were watching, perhaps immune to the light that had burnt the vision of my right eye. I gestured to Dawn and we both turned away from the battle and those distant dangerous lights, right towards a closer danger.

  Fifty years ago the Separatists had tried for the technology Bird represented. Two of them had been cyborgs, illegal cyborgs, because they were part man and part proscribed weaponry. One of them had been much like this one no hovering ahead of us. He was half a man, the torso, perched on a translucent sphere inside which, like metalled guts, hung an array of devices. Segmented tentacles projected from where his arms should have been, three from each shoulder, and each ending in a different tool or weapon. Behind and curved round his distended and surgery-scarred head was a metal box like a bloated horse shoe. From this metal struts speared down through his back into the sphere. He was floating about a metre off the ground. And he had come for me. I glanced at Dawn and saw that she was saying something to the cyborg. She seemed to be remonstrating with him, which struck me as decidedly odd. When she stepped to one side to retrieve her holocorder, arc light flared between then, and the cyborg blew her spine and part of her ribcage out of her back.