He seemed hurt. “No,” he said, “I don’t think I want to tell you.”
Riding the spider did seem to change him. Or maybe it was merely my perspective that had changed. It was easy to pity someone in a wheelchair, someone who was physically lower than you. It was difficult to pity Bonivard when he was looking down at you from the spider. Even when he let his emotional vulnerability show, somehow he seemed the stronger for it.
There was a moment of strained silence. The spider took a few tentative steps into the dungeon, as if Bonivard was content to let it drift. Then he twisted in the cockpit. “It might have something to do with the fact that I’m crazy.”
I laughed at him. “You’re not crazy. God knows you probably had reason enough to go crazy once, but you’re tough and you survived.” I couldn’t help myself. “No, Monsieur François de Bonivard, or whoever the hell you are, I’m betting you’re a faker. It suits your purposes to play scrambled, so you live in a ruined castle and talk funny and eat bugs on the wing. But you’re as sane as I am. Maybe saner.”
I don’t know which of us was the more surprised by my outburst. I guess Macmillan’s message had made me reckless; if I was doomed, at least I didn’t have to take any more crap. Bonivard backed the spider up and slowly lowered it to a crouch so that our faces were on a level.
“You know the definition of artificial intelligence?” he said.
I shook my head.
“The simulation of intelligent behavior so that it is indistinguishable from the real thing. Now tell me, if I can simulate madness so well that the world thinks I’m mad, so well that even I myself am no longer quite sure, who is to say that I’m not mad?”
“Me,” I said. And then I leaned into the cockpit and kissed him.
I don’t know why I did it; I was out on the edge. All the rules had changed and I hadn’t had time to work out new ones. I thought to myself, what this man needs is to be kissed; he hasn’t been kissed in a long time. And then I was doing it. Maybe I was only teasing him; I had never kissed anyone so repulsive in my life. It was a ridiculous, glancing blow that caught him on the side of the nose. If he had tried to follow it up I probably would have driven my fingers into his eyes and run like hell. But he didn’t try to follow it up. He just stayed perfectly still, bent toward me like a seedling reaching for the light. Then he decided to smile and I smiled and it was over.
“I’m in trouble.” I thought then was the time to confess. The old instincts said to trust him.
He was suddenly impassive. “We’re all in trouble.” I could not help but notice his shriveled arm twitch. He saw this; he saw everything about me. “I’m going to die. A year, maybe two.”
I was dizzy. For a few seconds we had touched each other and then without warning a chasm yawned between us. There was something monstrous about the deadness of his expression, his face lit by the flickering of menus across the flatscreen in the spider’s cockpit. I didn’t believe him and said so.
“Reads eye movements,” he nodded toward the screen. It was as if he had not heard me. “If I look at a movement macro and blink, the spider executes it. No hands.” His laugh was bitter and the servos began to sing. The spider reared up to its normal meter-and-a-half walking height and stalked to the third pillar. On the third drum of the pillar was carved “Byron.”
“Forgery,” said Bonivard. “Although elsewhere is vandalism actually committed by Shelley, Dickens, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Byron didn’t stay long enough to get the story right. Bonivard was an adventurer. Not a victim of religious persecution. Never shackled, merely confined. Fed well, allowed to write, read books.”
“Like you.”
Bonivard shrugged.
“It’s been so long,” I said. “I barely remember the poem. Do you have a copy? Or maybe you could give a recitation?”
“Don’t toy with me.” His voice was tight.
“I’m not.” I really didn’t know how things had gotten so bad, so quickly. “I’m sorry.”
“Django is restless.” The spider scuttled from the dungeon.
* * *
Nothing happened.
No assaults by corporate mercenaries, no frantic midnight escapes, no crashes, explosions, fistfights, deadlines. The sun rose and set; waves lapped at Chillon’s walls as they had for centuries. At first it was torture adjusting to the rhythms of mundane life, the slow days and long nights. Then it got worse. Sleeping alone in the same damn bed and taking regular meals at the same damn table made my nerves stretch. I couldn’t work. What I could do was eat, nap, worry, and wander the castle in a state of edgy boredom.
Sometimes I saw Django; other times Bonivard. But never the two at once. Perhaps they met while I was asleep; maybe they had stopped speaking. Django made it clear that their negotiations had snagged, but he did not seem upset. While I had no doubt that he would have killed either or both of us to get his payoff, I had the sense that the money itself was not important to him. He seemed to think of it in the way that an athlete thinks of the medal: a symbol of a great performance. My guess was that Django was psychologically unfit to be rich. If he lived to collect, he would merrily piss the money away until he needed to play again. Another performance.
So it was that he seemed to take a perverse enjoyment in waiting Bonivard out. And why not? Bonivard provided him with all the flash he needed. Bonivard’s telelink could access the musical library in Montreux, long a mecca for jazz. Django would sit in his room for hours, playing the stuff at launch pad volume. Sometimes the very walls of the castle seemed to ring like the plates of some giant vibraphone. Django had just about everything he wanted. Except sex.
“Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me.” He had been drinking some poison or other all morning and by now his singing voice was as melodious as a fire alarm. “List while I woo thee with soft melody.”
We were in the little room which the pogos called the treasury. It was long since bankrupt; empty except for debris fallen from the crumbling corbels and the chilling smell of damp stone. We were not alone; Bonivard’s spider had been trailing us all morning. “Stick it, Django,” I said.
He drained his glass. “Just a love song, Eyes. We all need love.” He turned toward the spider. “Let’s ask the cripple; he’s probably tuned in. What about it, spiderman? Do I sing?”
The spider froze.
“Hey, François! You watching, pal?” He threw the plastic glass at the spider but it missed. Django was twisted, all right. There was a chemical gleam in his eyes that was bright enough to read by. “You like to watch? Cutters leave you a plug to play with while you watch?”
I turned away from him in disgust. “You ever touch me, Django, and I’ll chew your balls off and spit them in your face.”
He grinned. “Keep it up, Eyes. I like them tough.”
The spider retrieved the glass and deposited it in its cockpit with some other of Django’s leavings. I ducked through the doorway into Chillon’s keep and began climbing the rickety stairs. I could hear Django and the spider following. Bonivard had warned Django that the spider would start to shadow him if he kept leaving things out and moving them around. Its vision algorithms had difficulty recognizing objects which were not where it expected them to be. In its memory map of Chillon there was a place for everything; anything unaccountably out of place tended to be invisible. When Django had begun a vicious little game of laying obstacle courses for the spider, it had responded by picking up after him like a doting grandmother with a neatness fetish.
According to Ego, who had first shown me how to get into the musty tower, the top of the keep rose twenty-seven meters from the courtyard. Viewed from this height Chillon looked like a great stone ship at anchor. To the west and north the blue expanse of Lake Geneva was mottled by occasional drifts of luminescent red-orange algae. To the south and east rose the Bernese Alps. The top of the keep was where I went to escape, although often as not I ended up watching the elevated highway which ran along the shore for signs of troop movements.
<
br /> “Too much work,” said Django, huffing from the climb, “for a lousy view.” He wobbled over to join me at a north window. “Although it is private.” He tried to get me to look at him. “What’s it going to take, Eyes?” The spider arrived. I ignored Django.
I gazed down at the ruined prow of the stone ship. Years before an explosion had stripped away a chunk of the northeastern curtain wall and toppled one of the three thirteenth century defensive turrets, leaving only a blackened stump. Beside it were the roofless ruins of the chapel, which connected with Bonivard’s private apartment. This was the only part of Chillon to which we were denied access. I had no idea whether he was hiding something in his rooms or whether secretiveness was part of the doomed Byronic pose he continued to strike. Maybe he just needed a place to be alone.
“He must have played in Montreux,” said Django.
I glanced across the bay at the sad little city. “Who?”
“Django Reinhardt. The great gypsy jazzman. My man.” Django sighed. “Sometimes when I listen to his stuff, it’s like his guitar is talking to me.”
“What’s it say: but IBM?”
He seemed not to hear me, as if he were in a dream. Or maybe he was suffering from oxygen depletion after the climb. “Oh, I don’t know, It’s the way he phrases away from the beat. He’s saying: don’t think, just do it. Improvise, you know. Better to screw up than be predictable.”
“I’m impressed,” I said. “I didn’t know you were a philosopher, Django.”
“Maybe there’s a lot you don’t know.” He accidently pushed a loose stone from the window sill and seemed surprised that it fell to the courtyard below. “You get a flash pretending you’re better than me but remember, you’re the one following me around. If I’m the rat here that makes you a flea on my ass, baby. A parasite bitch.” His face had gone pale and he caught at the wall to hold himself upright. “Maybe you deserve the cripple. Look at me! I’m alive—all you two do is watch me and wish.”
And then I caught him as he passed out.
* * *
“The walls are everywhere,” said Bonivard. “Limits.” I found myself absently picking a pole bean from its vine before I realized that I didn’t want it. “You’re not smart enough, not rich enough. You get tired. You die.” I offered it to him. “Some people like to pretend they’ve broken out. That they’re running free.” He bit into the bean. “But there’s no escape. You have to find a way to live within the walls.” He waved at the growing benches; I’m not sure whether it was his arm or the spider’s that waved. “And then they don’t matter.” He took another bite of bean, and reconsidered. “At least, that’s the theory.”
“Maybe they don’t matter to you. But these particular walls are starting to close in on me. I’ve got to get out, Bonivard. I can’t wait anymore for you and Django to work the deal. This place is scrambling me. Can’t you see it?”
“Maybe you only think you’re crazy.” He smiled. “I used to be like you. Rather, like him.” Bonivard nodded at the roof. Django’s direction. “They spotted me in their electronic garden, plucked me from it like I might pluck an offending beetle. Squashed and threw me away.”
“But you didn’t die.”
“No.” He shook his head. “Not yet.”
“Who says you’re going to die?”
“Me. More you don’t need to know.” I think he was sorry he had told me. “Leave any time. No one to stop you.”
“You know I can’t. I need help. If they catch me, you’re next. They’ll squash you dead this time.”
“Half dead already.” He glanced down at his withered left side. “Sometimes I wish they had finished the job. Do what’s necessary. You know Voltaire’s Candide? ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin.’ It is necessary to cultivate our garden.”
“Make sense, damn it!”
“Voltaire’s garden was in Geneva. Down the street from ground zero.”
* * *
Thwock-thwocka-thwock.
I’d been getting tension headaches for several days but this one was the worst. Every time Ego’s rubber foot hit the floor of the banqueting hall, something hammered against the inside of my skull. I felt as if my brain was about to hatch. “Get away from me.”
“I have been sent to demonstrate independent action,” it said pleasantly. “I understand that you do not believe in artificial intelligence.”
“I don’t care. I’m sick.”
“Have you considered retiring to your room?”
“I’m sick of my room! Sick of you! This pisspot castle.”
Thwocka-thwocka. “Bonivard is dead.”
“What!”
“François Bonivard died in 1570.”
I felt a thrill of excitement that my headache instantly converted to pain. What I needed was to be stored in a cool dry place for about six weeks. Instead I was a good reporter and asked the next question, even though my voice seemed to squeak against my teeth like fingernails on a blackboard. “Then who is … the man … calls himself Bonivard?”
Thwock.
I began again. “Who—”
“Carl Pfneudl.”
I waited as long as I could. “Who the hell is Carl Pfneudl?”
“That is as much as I can say.” The pogo was bouncing half a meter higher than usual.
“But…”
“A demonstration of independent action through violation of specific instructions.”
I realized that I was blinking in time to its bouncing. But it didn’t help.
“Had he known,” continued the pogo, “he would have forbidden it and I would have had to devise another demonstration. It was a difficult problem. Do you know where Django is?”
“Yes. No. Look: don’t tell Django, understand? I command you not to tell Django. Or speak to Bonivard of this conversation. Do you acknowledge my command?”
“I acknowledge,” replied Ego. “However, contingencies may arise beyond…”
At that point I snapped. I flew out of my chair and put my shoulder into Ego’s three spot. The pogo hit the floor of the banqueting hall hard. Its leg pistoning uselessly, it spun on its side. Then it began to shriek. I dropped to my knees, certain that the sound was liquefying my cochlear nucleus. I clapped hands to my ears to keep my brains from oozing out.
Id, summoned by Ego’s distress call, was the first to arrive. As soon as it entered the room, Ego fell silent and ceased to struggle. Id crossed the room to Ego just as Django entered. Bonivard in the spider was right behind. Id bounced in place beside its fallen twin, awaiting instructions.
“Why two pogos?” Bonivard guided the spider around Django and offered an arm—his own—to help me up. It was the first time I’d ever held his hand. “Redundancy.”
Id bounced very high and landed on Ego’s rubber foot. Ego flipped into the air like a juggling pin, gyrostabilizers wailing, and landed—upright—with a satisfying thwock.
“You woke me up for this?” Django stalked off in disgust.
Bonivard had not yet let go of me. “How did it happen?”
“A miscalculation,” said the pogo.
* * *
It had been years since I dreamed. When I was a child my dreams always frightened me. I would wake my father up with my screaming. He would come to my room, a grim dispenser of comfort. He would blink at me and put his hand on the side of my face and tell me it was all right. He never wore pajamas. After I started to go to school I dreaded seeing him naked, his white body parting the darkness of my room. So I guess I stopped dreaming.
But I dreamed of Bonivard. I dreamed he rode his spider into my room and he was naked. I dreamed of touching the white scar tissue that covered his stumps and the catheterized fold where his genitals had once been. To my horror I was not horrified at all.
* * *
Django’s door was ajar. I knocked and, without waiting for a reply, entered. I’d never been in his room before; it smelled like low tide. A bowl of vegetables was desiccating on the window sill. The bed hadn’t
been made since we’d arrived and clothes were scattered as if Django had been undressed by a whirlwind. He sat, wearing nothing but underpants and a headset, working at a marble-topped table. White ten-gigabyte memory chips were stacked in neat rows around his computer cuff, which was connected to a borrowed flatscreen and a keyboard. He tapped fingers against the black marble as he watched code scrolling down the screen.
“Yeah, I want to be in that number—bring it home, Satchmo,” he muttered in a sing-song voice, “when those saints come marching in!”
He must have sensed he was not alone; he twisted on his chair and frowned at me. At the same moment he hit a key without looking and the screen went blank. Then he lifted the headset.
“Well?” I said, indicating the chips.
“Well.” He rubbed his hand through his hair. “It thinks it’s an artificial intelligence.” Then he smiled as if he had just made the decision to trust me. “Don’t know yet. Interesting. Hard to stretch a program designed for a mainframe when all I’ve got to work with is kludged junkware. I’d break into Bonivard’s heavy equipment if I could. Right now all I can do is make copies.”
“You’re making copies? Does he know?”
“Do I care if he does?”
I grabbed some dirty white pants from the floor and tossed them at him. “I’ll stay if you get dressed.”
He began to pull the pants on. “Welcome to the Bernese torture chamber, circa 1652,” he said, doing a bad robot imitation.
“I thought the torture chamber was in the dungeons.”
“With two there’s no waiting.” He tilted a plastic glass on the table, sniffed at it suspiciously, and then took a tentative sip. “Refreshments?”
I was about to sit on the bed but thought better of it. “Ever hear of someone called Carl Pfneudl?”
“The Noodle? Sure: one of the greats. Juice was that he set up the SoftCell scam. Made money enough to buy Wisconsin. Came to a bad end, though.”
Suddenly I didn’t want to hear any more. “Then he’s dead.”
“As a dinosaur. Mindkillers finally caught up with him. Made a snuff video; him the star. Flooded the operators’ nets with it and called it deterrence. But you could tell they were having fun.”
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourth Annual Collection Page 55