“Oh yeah.” Django settled gingerly into one of the wheelchairs at the table. “Maybe I forgot to mention Eyes. Say, what do you do for drugs around here anyway? I’ve eaten a fistful of forwards already today; I could use some Soar to flash the edges off.”
“My name is Wynne Cage,” I said. Bonivard seemed relieved when I did not offer to shake his hand. “I’m a freelance…”
“Introductions not necessary. Famous father and all.” Bonivard nodded wearily. “I know your work.”
It was hard to look at the man who called himself François Bonivard and I had been trying to avoid it until now. Both of his legs had been amputated at the hip joint and his torso was fitted into some kind of bionic collar. I saw readouts marked renal function, blood profile, bladder and bowels. The entire left side of Bonivard’s torso seemed withered, as if some malign giant had pinched him between thumb and forefinger. The left arm dangled uselessly, the hand curled into a frozen claw. The face was relatively untouched, although pain had left its tracks, particularly around the eyes. And it was the clarity with which those wide brown eyes saw that was the most awful thing about the man. I could feel his gaze effortlessly penetrate the mask of politeness, pierce the false sympathy and find my horror. Looking into those eyes I thought that Bonivard must know how the very sight of his ruined body made me sick.
I had to say something to escape that awful gaze. “Are you related to the Bonivard?”
He smiled at me. “I am the current prisoner.” And then turned away. “There was a pilot.”
“Past tense.” Django nibbled at a radish from the vegetable bowl. “How about my flash?”
“Business first.” Bonivard rolled back to the table. “You have it then?”
Django reached into his pocket and produced a stack of memory chips held together with a wide blue rubber band. “Whatever WISEGUY is, he’s one fat son-of-a-bitch. You realize these are ten Gb chips.” He set them on the table in front of him.
Bonivard rolled to his place at the head of the table and put two smart chips in front of him. “Passcards. Swiss Volksbank, Zurich. As they say, the payoff. All yours now.” He slid them toward Django. “You made only one copy?”
And here was the juice. I could have strangled Bonivard for wrecking the microcam.
Django eyed the passcards but did not reach for them. “Not going to do me much good if the mindkillers get me.”
“No.” Bonivard leaned back in his wheelchair. “But you’re safe for now.” He glanced up at the ceiling and laughed. “They won’t look in a prison.”
Django snapped the rubber band on his stack of chips. “Maybe you should tell me about WISEGUY. I put my plug on the cutting board to get it for you.”
“An architecture.” Bonivard shrugged. “For a new AI.”
Django glanced over at me. The look on his face said it all. He was already convinced that Bonivard was scrambled; here was proof. “Come again?” he said slowly.
“Ar-ti-fi-cial in-tel-li-gence.” Bonivard actually seemed to enjoy baiting Django. “With the right hardware and database, it can sing, dance, make friends and influence people.”
He was pushing Django way too hard. “I thought true AI was a myth,” I said, trying to break the tension. “Didn’t they decide that intelligence is a bunch of ad hoc schemes glommed together any-which-way? Supposedly there’s no way to engineer it—too big and messy.”
“Have it your way,” said Bonivard. “WISEGUY is really the way IBM keeps track of toilet paper. I’m in pulp. Want their account.”
I knew my laugh sounded like braying but I didn’t mind; I was trying to keep them from zapping each other. At the same time I was measuring the distance to the door. To my immense relief, Django chuckled too. And slipped the WISEGUY chips back into his pocket.
“I’m so burned-out,” he said, “maybe we should wait.” He stood up and stretched. “Even if we make an exchange tonight, we’d have a couple of hours of verifications to go through, no? We’ll start fresh tomorrow.” He picked up one of the passcards and turned it over several times between the long fingers of his left hand. Suddenly it was gone. He reached into the vegetable bowl with his right hand, pulled the passcard from between two carrots, and tossed it at Bonivard. It slid across the table and almost went over the edge. “Shouldn’t leave valuable stuff like this lying around. Someone might steal it.”
Django’s mocking sleight-of-hand had an unexpected effect. Bonivard’s claw started to tremble; I could tell he was upset at the delay. “It might be months, or years, or days—I kept no count, I took no note…” He muttered the words like some private incantation; when he opened his eyes, he seemed to have regained his composure. “I had no hope my eyes to raise, and clear them of their dreary mote.” He looked at me. “Will you be requiring pharmaceuticals, too?”
“No, thanks. I like to stay clean when I’m working.”
“Admirable,” he said as the pogos bounced back into the hall. “I’m retiring for the evening. Id and Ego will show you to your rooms; you’ll find what you need.” He rolled through a door to the north without another word and Django and I were left staring at each other.
“What did I tell you?” said Django.
I couldn’t think of anything to say. The hall echoed with the sound of the pogos bouncing.
“Voltage spikes in his CPU.” Django tapped a finger against his temple.
I was awfully tired of Django. “I’m going to bed.”
“Can I come?”
“Stick it.” I had to get away from him, had to run. But it was too late; I could feel it behind the eyes, like the first throbs of a migraine headache. By the time I reached the hall leading to the stairs I knew the mania had faded and depression was closing in. Maybe it was because Bonivard had mentioned the famous father. A weak and selfish man who had created me in his image, brought me up in an emotional hot house, used me and called it love. Or maybe it was because now I had to let go of Yellowbaby, past tense. Who probably wasn’t that much of a loss, just the most recent in a series of lovers with clever hands and a persuasively insincere line. Men I didn’t have to take seriously. I came hard up against the one lesson I had learned from life: good old homo sap is nothing but a gob of complicated slime. I was slime doing a slimy job and trying to run fast enough that I wouldn’t have to smell my own stink. Except that there was no place to go now. I was sorry now I hadn’t hit that crazy scut Bonivard for some flash.
Thwocka-thwock. “This way, please.” One of the pogos shot past me down the hallway.
I followed. “Which one are you?”
“He calls me Ego.” It paused for a beat. “My real name is Datacorp R5000, serial number 290057202. Your room.” It bounced through an open door. “This is the Bernese Chamber. Note the decorative patterns of interlacing ribbons, flowers, and birds which date…”
“Out,” I said and shut the door behind it.
As soon as I sat on the musty bed, I realized I couldn’t face spending the night alone. Thinking. I had to run somewhere—there was only one way. I decided that I’d had enough. I was going to wrap the story, finished or not. The thought cheered me immensely. I wouldn’t have to care what happened to Django and Bonivard, wouldn’t have to wonder about WISEGUY. All I had to do was burst a message to Infoline. I was sure that my disks of the snatch and the crash of the wing would be story enough for Jerry Macmillan. He’d send the muscle to take me out and then maybe I’d spend a few months at Infoline’s sanctuary in the Rockies watching clouds. Anyway, I’d be done with it. I emptied my diskpack, removed the false bottom, and began to rig the collapsible antenna. I locked onto the satellite and then wrote the message. “HOTEL BRISTOL VEYTAUX 6/18 0200GMT PIX IBM WING.” I had seen the Bristol on the walk in. I loaded the message into the burster. There was a pause for compression and encryption and then it hit the Infoline satellite with an untraceable millisecond burst.
And then beeped at me. Incoming message. I froze. There was no way Infoline could respond that quickly, no way they wer
e supposed to respond. It had to be prerecorded. Which meant trouble.
Jerry Macmillan’s face filled the burster’s four centimeter screen. He looked as scared as I felt. “Big problems, Wynne,” he said. “Whatever your boys snatched is way too hot for us to handle. It’s not just IBM—the feds are going crazy. They haven’t connected you to us yet. It’s possible they won’t. But if they do, Legal says we’ve got to cooperate. National security. You’re on your own.”
I put my thumb over his face. I would have pushed it through the back of his skull if I could have.
“The best I can do for you is to delete your takeout message and the fix the satellite gets on your burster. It might mean my ass, but I owe you something. I know: this stinks on ice, kid. Good luck.”
I took my thumb away from the screen. It was blank. I choked back a scream and hurled the burster against the stone wall of Chillon, shattering it.
* * *
Sleep? It would have been easier to slit my throat than to sleep that night. I thought about it—killing myself. I thought about everything at least once. All my calculations kept adding up to zero. I could turn myself in but that was about the same as suicide. Ditto for taking off on my own; without Infoline to back me up I’d be dead meat in a week. I could throw in with Django except that two seconds after I told him that I’d let a satellite get a fix on us he’d probably be barbecueing my pancreas with his penlight. And if I didn’t tell him, I might cripple whatever chances we’d have of getting away. Maybe Bonivard would be more sympathetic—but then again, why should he be? Yeah, sleep. Perchance to dream. At least I was too busy to indulge in self-loathing.
By the time the sun began to peer through my window I felt as fuzzy as a peach and almost as smart. But I had a plan—one that would require equal parts luck and sheer gall. I was going to trust that plug-sucking Macmillan to keep his mouth shut and to delete all my records from Infoline’s files. For the next few days I’d pretend I was still playing by the rules of spook journalism. I’d try to get a better fix on Bonivard. I hoped that when the time came for Django to leave I’d know what to do. Because all I was certain of that bleary morning was that I was hungry and in more trouble than I knew how to handle.
I staggered down the hall back toward the banqueting hall, hoping to find Bonivard or one of the pogos or at least that bowl of veggies. As I passed a closed door I heard a scratchy recording of saxaphones honking. Jazz. Django. I didn’t stop.
Bonivard was sitting alone at the great table. I tried to read him to see if his security equipment had picked up my burst to Infoline but the man’s face was a mask. Someone had refilled the bowl in the middle of the table.
“Morning.” I took a bite of raw carrot that was astonishingly good. A crisp sweetness, the clean spicy fragrance of loam. Maybe I’d been eating instant too long. “Hey, this isn’t bad.”
“My own.” Bonivard nodded. “I grow everything.”
“That so?” He didn’t look strong enough to pull a carrot from the bowl, much less out of a garden. “Where?”
“In darkness found a dwelling place.” His eyes glittered as I took a handful of cherry tomatoes. “You’d like to see?”
“Sure.” Even though the tomatoes were even better than the carrot, I was no vegetarian. “You wouldn’t have any sausage bushes, would you?” I laughed; he didn’t. “I’d settle for an egg.”
I saw him working the keypad on the arm of the wheelchair. I guess I thought he was calling the pogos. Or something. Whatever I expected, it was not the thing that answered his summons.
The spider walked on four singing, mechanical legs; it was a meter and a half tall. Its arms sang too as the servo motors which powered the joints changed pitch; it sounded something like an ant colony playing bagpipes. It clumped into the room with a herky-jerky gait although its bowl-shaped abdomen remained perfectly level. Each of its legs could move with five degrees of freedom; they ended in disk-shaped feet. One of its arms was obviously intended for heavy duty work since it ended in a large claw gripper; the other, smaller arm had a beautifully articulated four digit hand that was a masterpiece of microengineering. There was a ring of sensors around the bottom of its belly. It stopped in front of Bonivard’s chair; he wheeled to face it. The strong arm extended toward him. The rear legs stretched out to balance. Bonivard gazed up at the spider with the calm joy of a man greeting his lover; I realized then that much of the pain I had detected in him had to do with the wheelchair. The claw fitted into notches in Bonivard’s bionic collar and then, its servos screaming, the spider lifted him from the chair and fitted his mutilated torso into the bowl which was its body. There must have been a flatscreen just out of sight in the cockpit; I could see the play of its colors across his face. He fitted his good arm into an analog sleeve and digits flexed. He smiled down at me.
“Sometimes,” he said, “people misunderstand.”
I knew I was standing there like a slack-jawed moron but I was too croggled to even consider closing my mouth. The spider swung toward the stairs.
“The gardens,” said Bonivard.
“What?”
“This way.” The spider rose up to its full height in order to squeeze through the door. I gulped and followed. Watching the spider negotiate the steep stone steps, I couldn’t help but imagine the spectacular segment I could have shot if Bonivard hadn’t wasted my microcam. This was main menu stuff and I was the only spook within ten kilometers. As we emerged from the building and passed through the fountain courtyard, I caught up and walked alongside.
“I’m a reporter, you know. If I die of curiosity, it’s your fault.”
He laughed. “Custom-made, of course. It cost … but you don’t need to know that. A lot. Wheelchairs are useless on steps but I keep them for visitors and going out. I’m enough of a monster as it is. The spider has to stay here anyway. Even if it could leave, imagine strolling through town wearing this thing. I’d be on the main menu of telelink within the hour and I can’t allow that. You understand?” He glanced down at me and I nodded. I always nod when people tell me things I don’t quite understand. Although I was pretty sure that there was a threat in there someplace.
“How do you control it?”
“Tell it where I want to go and it takes me. Rudimentary AI; about as intelligent as a brain-damaged ant. It knows every centimeter of Chillon and nothing else. Down these stairs.”
We descended a flight of stone stairs into the bowels of Chillon and passed through a storeroom filled with pumps, disassembled hydroponic benches, and bags of water soluble nutrients. Beyond it, in a room as big as the Banqueting Hall, was Bonivard’s garden.
“Once was the arsenal,” he said. “Swords to ploughshares and all that. Beans instead of bullets.”
Running down the middle of the room were four magnificent stone pillars which supported a series of intersecting roof vaults. Facing the lake to the west were four small windows set high on the wall. Spears of sunlight, tinted blue by reflections from the lake, fell on the growing benches beneath the windows. This feeble light was supplemented by fluorescents hung from the ceiling on adjustable chains.
“Crop rotation,” said Bonivard, as I followed him between the benches. “Tomatoes, green beans, radishes, soy, adzuki, carrots, pak choi. Then squash, chard, peppers, peas, turnips, broccoli, favas, and mung for sprouts. Subirrigated sand system. Automatic. Here’s an alpine strawberry.” The spider’s digits plucked a thumbnail-sized berry from a luxuriant bush. It was probably the sweetest fruit I had ever eaten, although a touch of acid kept it from cloying. “Always strawberries. Always. Have another.”
As I parted the leaves to find one, I disturbed a fat white moth. It flew up at me, bounced off the side of my face, and flitted toward one of the open windows. With quickness that would have astonished a cobra, the spider’s claw squealed and struck it in midair. The moth fluttered as the arm curled back toward Bonivard. He took it from the spider and popped it into his mouth. “Protein,” he said. His crazed giggl
e was just too theatrical: part of some bizarre act, I thought. I hoped.
“Come see my flowers,” he said.
Along the eastern, landward side of the arsenal, slabs of living rock protruded from the wall. Scattered among them was a collection of the sickest plants I’d ever seen. Not a single leaf was properly formed; they were variously twisted or yellowed or blotched. Bonivard showed me a jet-black daisy that smelled of rotting chicken. A mum with petals that ended with what looked like skeletal hands. A phalaenopsis orchid that he called “bleeding angels on a stick.”
“An experiment,” he said. “They get untreated water, straight from the lake. Some mutations are in the tenth generation. And you’re the first to see.”
I considered. “Why are you showing this to me?”
When the spider came to a dead stop the whine of the servos went from cacophony to a quietening harmony. For a few seconds Bonivard held it there. “Not interested?”
Although he glanced quickly away, it was not before I had seen the loneliness in his disappointed frown. There was something in me that could not help but respond to the man; a stirring that surprised and disgusted me. Still, I nodded. “Interested.”
He brightened. “Then there’s time for the dungeon before we go back.”
We passed through the torture chamber and Bonivard pointed out burn marks at the base of the pillar which supported its ceiling. “Tied them here,” he said. “Hot irons on bare heels. Look: scratch marks in the paint. Made by fingernails.” He smiled at my look of horror. “Mindkillers of the Renaissance.”
The dungeon was just beyond, a huge room, even larger than the arsenal. It was empty.
“There are seven pillars of Gothic mold,” said Bonivard, “in Chillon’s dungeons deep and old. There are seven columns, massy and gray, dim with a dull imprisoned ray, a sunbeam which hath lost its way.”
“Byron’s poem, right?” I was getting fed up with all this oblique posturing. “You want to tell me why you keep spouting it all the time? Because, to be honest, it’s damned annoying.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 54