Kiln People

by David Brin

  “Wait a minute. What about digging activity from within the base, aimed outward?”

  I had to rephrase the question several times, forcing the avatar to reexamine the security system’s record of micro-temblors and sonic vibrations in surrounding rock layers.

  “What about areas on the base perimeter with seismic activity levels well above normal?”

  “There have been no unexplained activity levels more than fifteen percent above normal.”

  Rats. So much for that idea. Too bad. It seemed a good one.

  I was about to give up … then decided to follow this line just a bit farther. “Show me the highest-level activity loci with accepted explanations.”

  The map of the underground facility and its surroundings now bloomed with overlapping bands of color, showing peak levels of sonic and seismic noise during the last few years. “There,” I pointed. An area at the perimeter zoomed toward me, haloed by ripples of red and orange. Appended was a notification — sealed and date-stamped — explaining that an ongoing program of boreholes had been ordered, for the purpose of groundwater quality sampling.

  But a cross-check with the base environmental protection office showed no data from these samples! Moreover, the area in question happened to be at the exact spot closest to Urraca Mesa.

  Bingo.

  “So, Ritu. Your dad hacked the military’s security system and forged approval for a seismic variance. All the cover he needed to burrow away to his heart’s content. Impressive!

  “Of course, it still meant having to dig outward from the interior, instead of coming in from the outside. What did Maharal do, smuggle in tunneling equipment?”

  No, there was a better explanation. An easier way to get the job done.

  I thought of checking the base master inventory, to see if someone had been pilfering from the golem stores, taking some of the raw soldier blanks away to use as mining labor. But those auditors Chen had spotted inthearmory … they’d be accessing the inventory system right now for their tallies. They might notice if I snooped that database at the same time, secure portal or no.

  Better go in person, then. See where this trail takes me.

  I started to sign off, but hesitated, my eyes darting among the beautiful viewglobes floating above the desk, each of them responding to my attention by ballooning larger, eagerly, voluptuously. Linked to the wide world again, I felt it draw me, call to me, tempt me with opportunities -

  To contact Clara and let her know I was alive.

  To access Nell’s emergency cache.

  To communicate with Inspector Blane and find out what was new in the Beta Case.

  To check police and insurance company reports about the sabotage attempt at Universal Kilns, and find out if I was still a “top suspect.”

  To get in touch with Pal and have him send a whole army of his wonderful sneak-and-grab dittos, to help me as I headed — vulnerably real — into hazardous territory.

  I had meant to do all of those things, and more, when I first asked Chen’s little ape-dit to find me a safe access port. Only now I held back.

  Contacting Clara might only serve to implicate her in my actions, perhaps ruining her career.

  Nell’s cache? What could it contain that I didn’t already know? All of my dittos vanished days ago. The last one — a sarcastic ebony — was blasted into supersonic pottery shards on Tuesday, around midnight. Since no one else knew how to access the cache, checking it would be a waste of time. Worse, it might alert my enemies.

  As for the UK attack, blame seemed to be shifting already. Open news reports were now showing a raid — led by the LSA’s Blane, of all people — breaking down the doors of a recently shuttered kink bar in dittotown, the Rainbow Lounge. A lurid tale of conspiracy, double-cross, and ritual suicide was rapidly unfolding. One disturbing image showed a cremated woman, surrounded by her own crisped dittos, like the pyre of some Viking potentate departing for Valhalla with an escort of sacrificed thralls.

  Another view hovered over the maestra of Studio Neo, Gineen Wammaker, who swatted at voyeurcams that buzzed around her elegant head while denying that she had any part of the conspiracy, crying out, “I was framed!”

  That made me chuckle …

  … till I recalled what it meant. I wasn’t the sole patsy, or the only person set up as a fall guy. Reputations were toppling all over town, from religious nuts to the ditto Emancipation movement, to purveyors of perversion like the maestra. Yet no one mentioned the three names that worried me most.

  Beta. Kaolin. Maharal

  Seared in memory, I could still see that platinum golem suddenly appearing along a desert highway to bushwhack me. Because of something I knew? Or perhaps something I was about to find out — probably having to do with Kaolin’s ex-partner and friend, with whom he was now at war. Somehow, I had become caught up in a desperate struggle between mad geniuses. And it didn’t even matter that Yosil Maharal was dead! Nowadays, mere death offers no guarantees. In fact, I could feel Maharal’s reach, extending beyond the grave, keeping the war hot. Driving the tycoon to desperate measures.

  More to the point, Maharal had helped to design this very facility I was sitting in. Given his aptitude for skulduggery, Ritu’s father might have laid any number of traps for the unwary. Especially if you stopped in one place too long.

  Better to stay a moving target. Much as I wanted to linger and study the news, probing the Web for details, it really was time to get on.

  I folded the government-issue chador under my belt, then headed east along a corridor I’d seen on the map — a passageway that supposedly should end about a hundred and fifty meters from there in a large storage room — followed by solid rock.

  Only it wasn’t just a storage room.

  True, there were shelves, piled endlessly with machine parts and tools, followed by freezers containing hundreds of ditto blanks, still doughy and unimprinted, ready to be used by the Prexy and Dodecs, should they ever come down here to hide.

  To the naked eye, it all seemed above board.

  My eyes weren’t nude, however. The scout uniform that I wore had lovely infrared scanners, pattern detectors and Dopplers that showed swirls and eddies in the way air gusted across the room. I was no expert at using all that stuff, but I wasn’t exactly clueless, either. I learned as I searched. Anyway, it was obvious which wall to go to.

  The seismic anomalies emanated from somewhere around here.

  I didn’t expect to find any obvious signs of a tunneling operation, but the place was actually spotless. Banks of tall, locked cabinets covered the wall in question, with no sign of anything behind them but native stone.

  Which cupboard should this little doggie try? I pondered. Even if I choose correctly, how do I get through? And what defenses might lie on the other side?

  Instrument readings didn’t show much difference from one cabinet to the next. No swirls of cold, subterranean air leaking from the other side. No telltale heat signatures.

  Maharal would’ve made sure that routine security patrols saw nothing to raise suspicions. Even in his arrogance, did the Professor imagine he could take on PEZ and the entire United States of America? Concealment was Yosil’s only friend. No wonder he worked so hard at developing the skill.

  I fingered the small sidearm that came with the scout uniform — a laser that could be adjusted into a tool for either a machinist or a sniper. Cutting through the locks would be no problem … and then through the backing of each cabinet till I struck a hidden passageway — or else learned the flaw in all my fancy reasoning.

  What about sensors or booby traps? Could I find a way through without alerting whoever lurked on the other side of Urraca Mesa?

  You keep thinking and acting as if Maharal is still alive!

  Any tunnel was probably dusty and unused, ever since the professor crashed and burned way back on Monday. His residual golems would’ve decayed soon after that, leaving a silent sanctuary, with no one left to defend its secrets.

 
Sounds logical. Are you sure enough to stake your life on it?

  Even if Maharal was dead, Kaolin had proved himself active, inimical, and willing to do almost anything. What if the trillionaire was already there, waiting at the other side?

  Another notion occurred to me as I stood contemplating my next move — a piece of advice Clara once offered:

  “When in doubt, try not to think like the dumb hero of some silly movied.”

  Charging into danger was one of those overused cinematic clichés, religiously adhered to by eight generations of brain-dead producers and directors. Another went: A hero must always assume that the authorities are evil, or useless, or bound to misunderstand. It helps keep the plot rolling if your protagonist never thinks of calling for help.

  I had been operating under that assumption for two days. And, well, after all, the cops were after me! Officially as a “material witness,” but clearly I had been set up to be blamed for the sabotage attempt at Universal Kilns. Not to mention the fact that someone had tried to blow me up.

  Twice!

  Still, things were changing. The police and military were clearly upset about the missile attack on my home. Surely some of them were honest and competent enough to realize there were layers to this whole affair, running below surface appearances. What if I showed them how Maharal had hacked the system here at the base, abusing their trust and creating a back entrance for his personal use? It might help clear my name. There could even be a whistle-blower award!

  Suppose I were to phone up my attorney. Have her call a meeting. Bring the base commandant together with a commissioner from the Human Protection Unit and a licensed Fair Witness, to make sure nothing can get hidden away … It would be a profound relief to tell all. The whole story, as far as I knew it. Just recount everything. Let battalions of professionals take over from there.

  And yet, my gut churned at the thought. It wouldn’t feel right!

  I was still running on a high of anger and combat hormones — nothing else could have sustained me across the last few days. Indignation is a drug that burns long and hot. And it can only be properly experienced in your real body.

  Me against Beta. Me against Kaolin. Me against Maharal. Bad guys, all of them, each in his own brilliantly evil way. Didn’t their hatred make me the hero? Their equal?

  That sardonic crack helped me step back.

  It helped me decide what I had to do.

  “A hero is someone who gets the job done, Albert,” Clara once said. “Bravely when necessary. Courage is an admirable last resort, for when intelligence fails.”

  Okay, okay, I thought, feeling humility wash over me with a sense of cleansing relief.

  A man’s got to know his limitations, and I’ve gone way beyond mine.

  Hell, I’m not even a match for Beta! Kaolin and Maharal are clearly out of my league.

  All right. Time to be a citizen. Let’s do it.

  Already bracing for the inevitable long interrogation ahead, I reached for my borrowed chador-telephone and started to turn around -

  — only to stagger back in surprise as a tall figure loomed toward me, out of the shadows!

  The oversized humanoid shape emerged from around the corner of a nearby autokiln, lumbering at me with both arms outstretched.

  The visor of the scout uniform flared with threat diagrams, covering the golem’s silhouette with flaring auras and juttering symbols that might have meant something to a trained soldier. But the garish flood of data only smothered me in clouds of confusion. I threw back the visor from my face -

  — and was immediately struck by waves of odor. New-baked clay, rather sour. The harsh smell might have warned me, if I hadn’t been relying on borrowed army equipment, instead of my own senses.

  “Stop!” I warned, dropping the chador, which got tangled on the holster of my sidearm. Finally pulling the laser free, I frantically tried to find the safety switch. My wounded thumb, slippery with sweat, worked badly and the gloves didn’t help.

  “Don’t come any closer. I’ll shoot!”

  The golem kept shambling forward, emitting a low groan. Something was wrong with it — perhaps faulty imprinting or too-rapid baking. Whatever the cause, it wasn’t slowing down or pausing for rational discussion!

  I faced a sudden choice.

  Try to dodge. Or shoot. You can’t do both.

  The safety clicked. The pistol abruptly throbbed with reassuring power. I chose.

  A hot beam tore through the golem, slicing off one arm, biting the torso.

  It reacted with a roar, and charged. The heavy figure crashed into me as I threw up an arm.

  Wrong choice.

  41

  Oh No, Mr. Hands!

  … a mixture in red and gray …

  D id you know, Albert, that the very first life forms may have been made of clay?”

  Yosil’s damned ghost won’t stop talking. It just keeps yattering while the torment inflicted by his soul-stretching device gets worse by the hour. I yearn desperately to stifle his gray specter. Exorcise its unnatural haunting. Dispatch it to rejoin the maker it betrayed and destroyed, days ago.

  Of course, that’s what it wants — my anger! To give me a focus. Pain will be a center for me to revolve around, while everything else crumbles.

  “A Scotsman came up with the idea, Albert, almost a century ago, and it really was quite clever.

  “By that time, biologists agreed that a rich soup of organic compounds must have formed on Earth, almost as soon as the planet cooled enough for liquid oceans. But what happened next? How did all those drifting amino acids and such get organized into tidy, self-replicating units? Cells, containing DNA and the machinery for reproduction, didn’t just happen! Something got them jump-started!

  “That something may have been vast beds of semi-porous clay, spanning whole sea bottoms, offering an enormous array of patterned surfaces to protect growing molecular clusters. Providing templates for the earliest organisms. Setting a few on the road to greatness.”

  Maharal’s gray ghost preens, slapping its chest.

  “Only now the road is coming full circle, as we return to our original form! No longer organic, but creatures sculpted out of Mother Earth’s own mineral flesh! Don’t you find that interesting?”

  What interests me is getting out of here, especially each time the machinery sends another wave of compulsion down my spine, propelling me against the straps, heaving to get these hands of mine around ditYosil’s neck. I’d grind his undead bones so fine, none of the atoms would ever find each other again!

  From somewhere nearby … closer than nearby … comes a resonant reply.

  Amen, brother.

  The voice is no figment. I know it’s the little orange-red golem, the one Maharal imprinted from me a few hours ago. Now its thoughts come flooding in, swelling and fading, merging with mine. It must be part of ditYosil’s complicated experiment and he seems greatly pleased. Now that a link has been established, the next phase is a memory test. How well can I remember things that “I” never learned?

  With the wave of a hand, he sends about a hundred image bubbles floating in front of my eyes, depicting everything from lunar landscapes to the latest robohockey game. My gaze can’t help flitting among the pictures, involuntarily focusing on a few that look familiar. Certain bubbles flare as I recognize their contents …

  … a Grecian urn that held wine from the age of Pericles …

  … a buxom Venus figure from the Paleolithic era …

  … a full-sized terracotta statute of an ancient Chinese soldier, given to Yosil by the grateful Son of Heaven, for his work at the excavations in Sian …

  I not only recognize these images, I remember being shown the originals, in Maharal’s private museum. Somehow, Little Red is feeding me memories, without benefit of a brain-sifter or thick cryo-cables! We’re inloading each other, back and forth, despite being separated by twenty meters and a thick glass wall.

  So, this isn’t just about wanting to m
ake dit-to-dit copies. Not another industrial process for Universal Kilns. Maharal is trying for another breakthrough. Something bigger!

  The gray ghost chatters in excitement over results from the memory test. For a time it pleases him even more than lecturing to me about evolutionary claydistics. Clamping down, I try hard to shut out the sound of his yammering voice. Quash the irritation and anger! He obviously wants me distracted by hate — an easy emotional state to model and control. One so pure that it may breach the containment of a single vessel. A single body.

  I must resist. Only it’s so hard not to hate. Every few minutes, his loathsome machinery scrapes my pseudoneural array, prodding agonizingly at my ersatz body, provoking the salmon reflex — that craving to go home. To return. To my original. An original he destroyed with a missile, around midnight on Tuesday.

  It’s what he told Little Red. That he murdered me. In order to make this experiment work, he removed the “anchor” of my organic self, hoping it would force two copies of me toward each other, instead.

  I get it. His aim is to set one Standing Wave reverberating across open space. It’s an accomplishment, all right. Like making an electron occupy an entire room with a single, prodigious quantum state. But why? What’s the goal?

  He can’t be after a Nobel Prize. Not when it took both suicide and murder to reach this point. Is he crazy enough to hope he can maintain secrecy indefinitely? Secrets are like snowflakes, nowadays — rare and hard to keep for very long.

  There’s got to be more at stake. Something he plans to bring to a fruition, soon.

  I feel agreement from Little Red — my other half. Each time the big machines pulse, we feel closer. More like a single person, reunited. And yet -

  — and yet, there’s something else. Something outside of us. Something both familiar and strange at the same time. I keep picking up what feel like echoes … like glinting reflections, scattered off distant pools. Are they part of ditYosil’s plan?