"Isn't that dangerous?"
"No, I don't think so," Slant answered promptly, but even as he said it, he was unsure he was right. Was he actually certain he could control the computer?
Yes, he told himself, of course he could. He had the release code.
"Did the demon do anything else to you, besides make' you obey?"
Slant shrugged "Sometimes it did." It struck him as an odd question. "Why do you ask?"
"Oh, I don't know; you acted differently before Furinar killed the demon."
"Of course I did; I had to do what I was told or it would have blown my head off." The people of the caravan were drifting in to the common room two or three at a time, and the inn servants were rushing to and fro carrying mugs and plates.
Neither spoke for a moment; Slant was watching the caravan crew, and Ahnao was picking at her food and thinking.
"Why," she asked after an interval, "did you come to Dest?"
"The computer told me to."
"Why did it do that? Our cities had already been smashed, hadn't they?"
"Yes, of course they had. The computer wanted to be sure that the survivors weren't doing anything that might harm Old Earth."
"Oh. Why did it make you kill Kurao?"
"It wanted a wizard's head. It thought that wizards might be dangerous; we never found any on other planets … I mean worlds."
"Oh." Ahnao lapsed into thought again.
Slant was suddenly uncomfortably aware that one of the men from the caravan was staring at him—specifically, at the back of his neck. He had forgotten that the socket was still there, even with the computer shut down, marking him as something other than an ordinary human being.
He did not want to attract attention or start any trouble; he pushed his chair back and rose. "It's getting crowded in here," he said. "Let's go up to our room."
Ahnao looked up at him in surprise, then looked down at the table. "All right," she said.
Slant realized with annoyance that his words must have sounded like a sexual invitation, which was not at all what he'd had in mind. He was still trying his best to resist his attraction to the girl. Nonetheless, he wanted to get out of the common room; he could straighten out her misapprehension later. They left the table and made their way upstairs.
Chapter Eighteen
THE INSTANT THE HEAVY WOODEN DOOR OF THEIR ROOM swung shut behind them, Ahnao flung her arms around his neck. Reacting automatically, his right hand swept up and then down in a killing stroke; by a ferocious effort of will, he managed to slow the attack before it reached the back of the girl's unprotected neck, but he was unable to stop it completely. As she reached her face up to kiss him, the blow landed.
"Ow!" She jumped back as suddenly as she had approached. "You hit me!"
"I'm sorry; you caught me off-guard and I reacted without thinking."
She rubbed the back of her neck; Slant hoped that he had not done her any real harm. He wondered how she would react to learning that the blow had been intended to kill by snapping the spine, but was not curious enough to tell her and find out. He was committed to spending the night in her company, at the very least, and there was no point in stirring up hostility.
She looked at him resentfully. "I thought you wanted me to do that."
"No, I'm sorry, but I didn't, and I don't."
"Then why did you want me to come up here?"
"Have you ever looked at the back of my neck?"
"No." Her frown vanished into a crooked little smile. "Is it as bruised as mine feels?"
"No. Look." He reached up and pulled his hair to the side, then turned so that she could see.
It seemed he could feel her staring, though he knew that was nonsense. After a long silence, she asked, "What is that? It looks like part of you."
"It is." He let his hair fall back in place and turned to face her. "That's where I was joined to the computer."
"You mean that was where the demon got into you?"
"That's right."
The smile was completely gone again. "That's horrible. How could your people do that to you?"
"I volunteered."
"But how could you volunteer?"
Slant shrugged. "I didn't really know what I was doing."
"Oh. What has that got to do with asking me up here, though?"
"I just wanted to get out of the main room down there. Someone was staring at me from behind. I prefer not to attract attention."
"Do you think he saw that thing?"
"I don't know. That's why I wanted to leave, though. I'm afraid that it had nothing to do with you."
"Oh." Ahnao stood, quietly considering that, while Slant seated himself on the edge of the lone bed and pulled off his boots. When he had done that, he placed them on one side and stared critically at the narrow mattress. He had not specified how many beds he wanted, and the innkeeper had naturally assumed that one would serve, but he was not at all sure it would. He did not care to put himself in unnecessarily close proximity to Ahnao for the night; his resolution was not strong enough relative to his sexual interest for him to be willing to put it to such a test. He would, he decided, let Ahnao have the bed, while he found something for padding and slept on the floor.
As he reached this decision, Ahnao let out a soft little wail. "Why don't you like me?"
He looked up in surprise. "What?"
"Why don't you like me? Why don't you want me? What kind of a man are you, hitting me like that?"
He stared at her for a moment, his mouth slightly open, completely at a loss. The girl was about to start crying, he could tell, and he had no idea how to deal with it. Something stirred in the back of his mind; he stood and was suddenly no longer in control of his body, but merely watching.
One of his construct personalities had come to the fore, one he did not recognize; it was not the warrior or the pilot or any of the cover identities he had used in the past.
He felt the expression on his face softening into a sympathetic smile; his arms reached out, and he heard himself say something soft and soothing.
Ahnao ran to him and fell into his embrace. He bent down and kissed her forehead; a hand brushed away a lock of hair that had fallen into her eyes. She hugged him tightly, and they sank onto the bed.
Somewhere within himself, Slant watched in powerless annoyance as this newly discovered personality systematically made perfect love to the girl. He was little more than a detached observer, going through programmed actions in carefully calculated response to Ahnao's words and motions.
It made sense, he realized. Spies had always had a reputation for romance, and there really were times when seduction was the best possible approach to the gaining of information, the easing of suspicions, or other goals that an IRU might pursue. From the point of view of the Command, it mattered very little what the cyborg happened to think about it, and even less what the target of the seduction thought or felt. What mattered was getting what they were after.
They had never told him how many different personalities they had programmed in, or what they were; most had been built up during long sessions under hypnosis, none of which he remembered at all. He wondered how they had conducted the training of this particular one.
It annoyed him that, when it came down to the point of decision, he had had no choice whether to resist or not. He wondered whether the regulatory mechanisms really had shut down, or whether perhaps his hormones had been triggered somehow to prepare his body for this lover persona's use. Even with the computer gone, he was still a puppet, controlled by his programming and the machines built into him.
As matters progressed he began to marvel at what he was doing, and to wish that he was able to feel it normally and control his own actions. His previous sexual experience had been limited to a few brief liaisons in his last year as a civilian and a few single nights on leave; he had been, like most teenagers, eager and clumsy. Now he was moving with smooth assurance, and Ahnao was responding with enthusiasm in ways none of those lo
ng-ago women had responded.
He hoped he would be able to remember some of this later on.
When his primary personality returned to control of his body he was lying on the edge of the bed, relaxed and calm; Ahnao lay beside him, sound asleep, a smile on her face and the sheet beneath her stained with sweat. It was full night outside; he could see stars through one of the room's two windows.
He sat up, careful not to disturb the girl, and looked about, trying to decide if there was anything that should be done before he went to sleep himself. There no longer seemed any point in sleeping on the floor, and though crowded, there was room in the bed.
His supplies were piled in one corner. The horses had been taken care of earlier. He found a chamber pot under the bed. The only thing left to do was to close the shutters and go to sleep.
He rose and crossed to the south window, then paused and looked out at the night.
There was something wrong. It took him a few seconds to identify exactly what it was, but at last he realized that there was a blue glow visible behind the building across the street
He was on the top floor of the highest building in the village, but his view still consisted mostly of the roof across the street, so that he could not see where the glow was coming from. It had not immediately registered as something out of the ordinary because it resembled the light of a distant city, albeit bluer than most such lights.
On this planet, however, there were no cities that were lit with anything more than torches, to the best of his knowledge. Even if there were enough torches to produce a glow of that magnitude, the color was wrong; torchlight was yellow, not blue.
Did Praunce, be asked himself, have gaslights? He did not recall that any such light had been detected during the orbital inspection of the planet, but it was entirely possible a single such city had been missed. It might have been on the day side during most of the scanning.
He was not content with this explanation, and he realized why. Praunce lay to the east, and he was looking south. There was nothing to the south but farmland and occasional barren spots, and those great upthrusts of bare stone.
He remembered the dragon suddenly and Thurrel's description of Praunce as a city built on nuns, where there were many abnormal births, and realized what caused the blue glow, and what the strange outcroppings were, and why there were barren patches scattered in the fields.
The bomb that had done all that must have been really hellish, he thought. The outcroppings, he guessed, were displaced chunks of surface that had been rammed up against the crater wall and welded in place by the heat and pressure, so that they stayed where they had been flung; the barren patches were caused by chunks of semi-molten stone and metal that had spattered outward from the explosion. The gleaming spots must be resolidified metal, or soil fused into glass.
He wondered how people could live so close to the crater. The environment, he was certain, must be extremely unhealthy. If there was enough radiation to produce that glow, it was surprising there were any live births at all. How could a major city have grown up at the very edge of such a place?
He suddenly found himself wondering whether he wanted to visit Praunce after all. Perhaps the locals were all more or less radiation immune; from a population of two billion there were bound to have been a few people with abnormally high tolerance, and those people would have been far more likely to survive the initial holocaust and to have been the ancestors of the current population.
The local inhabitants might be almost as far removed from the common run of humanity as he was himself. Three hundred years were a mere instant in evolutionary terms, but with the added push of extreme radioactivity a significant selection process might have occurred.
There could even be a connection with wizardry.
His mind was running ahead of itself, he realized. He was guessing. He thought back and recalled that the planet had an abnormally high level of background radiation, but nothing approaching the unlivable.
The inhabitants of Praunce might simply not know any better.
That was a depressing thought. He closed the shutters on both windows, lay back on the bed beside Ahnao, and willed himself to sleep.
His last waking thought was to wish that he had brought dosimeters from the ship.
Chapter Nineteen
SLANT AWOKE THE FOLLOWING MORNING WITH A VAGUE impression that he had had very unpleasant dreams, though he could not remember any of them. He did not let it bother him for more than a few seconds.
Not wanting any unnecessary delay on the day when he expected to finally reach Praunce and perhaps be freed of the bomb in his brain, he woke Ahnao almost immediately. She came awake with a happy smile on her face, and reached up to embrace him.
There was little point in resisting, he decided; it would only confuse the poor girl and perhaps bring his newly discovered personality back into control. He allowed her to hug him but then pulled away.
"We have to get moving," he told her.
The smile faded slightly. "All right," she replied.
Half an hour later they were mounted and on their way. The eerie blue glow that Slant had seen the night before was invisible in the daylight, but he was uncomfortably aware that it was still there.
Ahead of them the towers of Praunce reared up black against the rising sun, the city and its suburbs spread out below. They grew gradually closer throughout the morning, and Slant studied them.
He realized by midmorning that all his previous estimate had been off; the tallest tower was easily two hundred meters high, and they would not reach the city wall—which was also higher than he had thought—by noon.
For the first time, he realized what the towers were. He had been amazed before that such a primitive culture could have built anything so tall; he was amazed no longer. The towers were prewar skyscrapers. Their original glass or concrete walls had probably been replaced; he doubted that the glass could have survived for three hundred years even if it was not shattered—as it almost certainly had been—by the shockwave from whatever had created the crater to the south. The steel frames, however, could easily have stood for a few centuries.
He guessed that the crater had been the planet's main spaceport. That might even be one reason for Praunce's predominance and large population; it had probably been the world capital, or at least the center of trade, and traditions tended to linger.
Shortly thereafter they began to pass scattered houses, growing steadily closer together, until they found themselves riding down streets lined with buildings. Ahead of them the city wall reared up, black and solid; half an hour after noon they reached a point where it blocked the looming towers from their sight.
The wall, Slant was sure, must have been postwar in origin, and it was as impressive as he had first thought the towers to be, a solid, unbroken barrier that at points reached a height of thirty meters above the ground.
Perhaps, if the skyscrapers had survived, some construction equipment had as well; he could not imagine such a structure having been built by hand by the survivors of a nuclear attack.
The street they rode on widened, and traffic increased; where they had passed an occasional pedestrian at the outskirts they were now surrounded by wagons, horses, oxen, and a perpetually moving crowd on foot. There was something subtly wrong with the appearance of the crowd, Slant thought; he looked more closely and realized what it was.
There was too much variation.
In an ordinary crowd there would be a mix of all kinds of people, but the majority would always fall into certain categories. Most would be more than a meter and a half in height, but less than two meters, for example.
That was not quite true here. There were dozens of people of both sexes who stood no taller than children, and others who towered over their companions. Some hands had too many fingers, or too few, or none at all. Some faces were distorted or damaged, eyes shaped strangely, noses enlarged or shrunken or missing. There were a great many bald or balding heads, and far more
white hair than was normal.
Perhaps most peculiar of all, none of the people in the crowd paid any attention to the deformities of their neighbors. Obviously, they were completely accustomed to them. Slant wished again that he had brought radiation badges, or that the computer were still active to report radiation levels for him.
The street emptied into a large market square at the foot of the great wall; on the far side of the square was a huge opening in the barrier, a gate into the city proper.
The market was jammed with people; where the crowd on the street leading in had been sparse enough to allow travel at Slant's accustomed pace, here the horses had to advance one step at a time, practically pushing aside the pedestrians who blocked their paths. Their progress was further slowed by the fact that there was a steep slope to the ground; the wall stood along the top of a ridge here, and the market lay on a slant of at least ten degrees leading up to it
Here, in addition to the freaks and sports that mingled with the more ordinary citizens in going about their business, there were several who were so badly deformed as to be crippled. These, Slant realized, were beggars; bowl in hand—or foot, or their teeth—they accosted their more fortunate fellows. There were more of them the closer one got to the gate itself.
He glanced back at Ahnao; she, too, had noticed the nature of the crowd, and her expression was compounded of dismay and revulsion. Residual radiation was apparently not a problem in Awlmei, Slant thought, or perhaps they practiced infanticide to keep its products under control; in any case, it appeared she had never before encountered creatures like these.
They made their way most of the way across the square without undue difficulty. As they approached the gate, one of the more grotesque freaks, a woman—or at any rate a female—with incredibly long, oddly jointed arms and too many fingers leaped from her place and clutched at Slant's vest. Her breath stank of liquor and rotting teeth. She gabbled something incomprehensible at him. . He thrust her aside, knocking her to the ground, and rode on.
The Cyborg and the Sorcerers Page 19