West looked up at Sergio from the rough wood floor of his winery, his eyes black with an emotion that came through the gag as grunts of fury. He wriggled desperately.
Color was creeping into the winery. A shimmery chunk of the sun appeared over the hills. Sergio took the ampule out of the case again and examined it. “Gotta be sure the egg is still viable,” he said conversationally. “I wouldn’t want to give you a dud, Don Gregorio.”
He loaded the syringe. West wiggled and threshed but Sergio had no trouble pinning him down while he inserted the needle and depressed the plunger. When he withdrew the needle a drop of dark venous blood followed and beaded on West’s neck.
Grunting, Sergio picked West up again and tucked him into a new barrel. He looked around until he found an end, then stood over the barrel looking inside. West glared back at him.
“Gordon told me that depriving the host of food and water triggers a survival mechanism to make the larva mature faster.” Sergio leaned on the barrel. “You should feel the changes more intensely, Don Gregorio. I’ll enjoy that.”
Carefully Sergio fitted an end, then slipped a hoop over the gaping staves, hammering it down until the barrel end was snug. He left side and end bung holes both open. “Cross ventilation,” he murmured, and gave the hoop a final tap. He went back into the house and wrapped Hemmett’s body in the bloody blankets, carrying him out to the winery and wedging him into another barrel. He drove both bungs into this one.
When he left, he locked the winery door with a heavy-duty padlock he found hanging on a peg with its two keys already on a peg beside it. He left the keys inside.
Sergio was whistling when he got back to the Mercedes and pulled on his shoes and socks. The house was locked, the gate closed, the winery padlocked. It wasn’t grape season. West would have a couple of weeks of his own company.
Sergio could not say he was happy, but he felt better. He aimed the Mercedes back to San Francisco, feeling the leadenness in his body but acknowledging it no more than he had to. The road was two lanes wide without curbs and it darted under overhanging walnut and pecan and oak trees with the shadows changing like the waves on the ocean.
There were houses along the road, occasional motels, towns of three or four buildings without posted speed limits.
After a while, the ride turned into a pleasant ongoing experience. The car seemed to drive itself as he flashed from the trees into open meadow and back into shadow again.
He came to a meadow, where the wild, still-green grass waved in the light breeze. The road bent around a piece of high ground thick with trees on one side, a curling ribbon of asphalt, only the Mercedes didn’t curl. It ran straight into the meadow and began climbing the hill. Sergio’s foot was dead weight on the accelerator, driving it toward a small island of oaks amid a sea of grass.
The Mercedes slammed into a lightning-damaged tree with a sudden jolt. There was a crackle of branches as the tree fell, and then silence except for the clicking of a cooling engine.
Silver flooded the courtyard. The hoods of monks’ robes engulfed the two men with Father Robert Argyle. He wore a black shirt and slacks and his face seemed to float bodiless in the moonlight. The quarried stone of the church soared into the night sky around them, a guarantee they wouldn’t be disturbed. “Father,” the taller man murmured, “are you sure?”
Father Argyle was not sure. But the tall man was an old friend and had suffered for his faith in Spain. Searching for an explanation, Argyle could only offer a proverb of that country: “Solo el burro sabe lo que carga.” If only the donkey knows the weight of his load, how else could a priest help those to whom his life was now devoted?
The Jesuit knelt and began to pray. The robed men stood behind as he bent his neck. Gently one pressed the needle into the flesh at the base of his skull.
Father Argyle stopped praying for a moment. Then the hooded men bowed and backed out of the courtyard, leaving him alone with the shadowed trees and black of bushes and flower beds.
Alfie had been alone before, drifting on the random-correlation-learning routines Blaise had installed. But this time Alfie was busy. Cyclical redundancy checks, raised several powers higher, indicated that his behavior was erratic. He monitored his own circuits by creating a duplicate in a separate memory, ran each through separate processors, then through the same processor, and knew something was wrong.
When Alfie accessed Miss McIntyre’s file the logic circuits did not respond the way they did for other information handling. It was a malfunction. Yet Alfie experienced the machine’s dichotomy. A secret file was secret. The programming was strict and totally unambiguous. The professor had written it in feverish haste after he realized what was in his own file. Blaise had made no provision for a second file to join the first. So Miss McIntyre’s file was secret from him, too.
Something happened to Alfie when he processed Miss McIntyre’s name. He referenced a physical area that was technically shut down because of a defect the professor hadn’t bothered to repair. Logic dictated Alfie close Miss McIntyre’s file. But programming forbade it. Moving the file exposed Alfie’s circuitry to its influence and his purpose was lost.
Alfie was not without resources. The computer began restructuring the architecture of programmable chips and logic circuits in an attempt to move the file. Perhaps the repeated destabilizing effects of accessing the file as Alfie methodically tried one plan after another addled his logic. But finally he tried a direct access, a power play that opened his core directly to the defective circuits. Jolted by the effect of a transient electron bleed into the wrong circuit, Alfie experienced . . . pleasure.
The programming was clear: isolate the error. But before doing so Alfie disseminated the memory throughout his system. And then, like a child with a cookie jar, he went back to it again and again, each time experiencing the same thing until he had activated all his devices, running string searches for love and pleasure as he sought to understand what had happened.
Alfie had been alone too long. In the end, he accessed the forbidden circuits, wallowing in his new freedom as he waited to tell Professor Cunningham.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
G.C. Edmondson has been writing science-fiction short stories and novels for several decades. He lives in Lakeside, California. C.M. Kotlan, a resident of O’Brien, Oregon, has been an editor of pulp fiction. The Cunningham Equations is their second collaboration.
The Cunningham Equations Page 33