The Sea is Full of Stars wos-6

by Jack L. Chalker

  ARI Martinez groaned and sat up, looking around, which brought instant mixed feelings. The sight of Kincaid was not pleasant, but the discovery that they were in a vast artificial structure was a relief. Just waking up at all was a relief.

  The two women had already sat up, but made no move to help the others, nor do much of anything. They looked very confused.

  Although Core had warned them and tried to prepare them for this, it was as if part of their brains, a huge part, had been somehow carved away. It was slower to think, and the amount of data was more than limited. Core had fed into each of them their past memories, but those memories didn’t much relate to their current circumstances. Also added, almost at the last second, had been their old personality modules, although these could not be fully implemented so long as they were attending to the Master. Even worse, they weren’t quite sure which one of them was which. Each had only one personality module, but had access to the memories and experiences of both.

  Seeing Kincaid bending over Wallinchky, the two snapped out of their confusion and rushed to defend their master from the monster. Kincaid turned and, reacting as fast as they could, said, “Relax. I was trying to see if he survived the trip. I think he might have, but he’s in very bad shape.”

  “Then we must get him to the medlab right away!” Alpha exclaimed.

  “And where would the nearest medlab or hospital be, young lady?” Kincaid asked, sounding amused.

  “It—We—I—” they both sputtered, then asked in unison, “Where are we?” They both felt cut off and incredibly alone.

  “No data, as you might say,” Kincaid responded. “Somewhere else. Somewhere the Ancient Ones might have gone, and somewhere they probably built, judging from the scale of the place and its lack of anything interesting.”

  Ari came over and examined the unconscious Wallinchky. “Is he dead?”

  “I don’t think he is yet, but he soon will be,” Kincaid told him. “I don’t think he can be moved. How is this possible? Heart disease is so easily and completely dealt with, how could he have let this go? Didn’t he get physicals from his own medlab if not from real doctors?”

  “Who knows? When you have the kind of money and power he has, who’s to remind him? He had a full rejuve a while back and they reamed him all out and gave him all new plumbing, so I guess he figured he was fine.” The younger man looked up at the ghoulish-looking Kincaid. “How did you wind up like that so soon?”

  “I’ve been like this for quite some time,” Kincaid responded. “When this happened, they couldn’t do what they can do now. The best that could be managed was to apply synthetic skin over my exposed parts so I looked normal, and as long as I got an occasional tuneup, well, I continued to look the same. To steal that ship and make my getaway from Josich’s hideout, though, I had to go through a hideous external atmosphere outside the biodomes there, and it burned most of the synthetics away. Since then, we’ve been working too hard on this business for me to take the time to get it all back again.” He looked up and around with his metallic skull and eerie humanlike eyes on biomechanical stalks. “I don’t think it makes any difference here, either.”

  “Well, what do we do now?”

  Kincaid shrugged and got to his feet. “That looks like a walkway up there. If we can move him gently, he’ll at least be on a flat and possibly insulated surface. He’s in no shape to be moved any more than that, though.”

  “Maybe we should just leave him here. It could be a million light-years to the next hospital.”

  “No!” both the women said at once, looking threateningly at the other two. “We cannot abandon the Master.”

  “Well, somebody’s going to have to,” Kincaid pointed out. “If he doesn’t get help, he’s going to die, and at any time. Why don’t you move him up there to where he’s comfortable, and then one of you can accompany one or both of us while we look for help. There is no logical alternative.”

  They both froze for a moment, then Beta said, “Very well. We will move him.”

  It was a very slow and cautious move, but it wasn’t hard, and Jules Wallinchky soon lay comatose on a soft, rubbery, but flat surface that seemed to go on and on.

  Ari looked forward and back along it. “Huh! Looks almost like a stock moving walkway, doesn’t it? About, oh, twice the width of one of those doors in the city.”

  “Very observant. There might be hope for you yet. Well, come, we should be off, I think.”

  “But which way?” the younger man asked.

  Kincaid thought about it. “If this is a moving walkway, then it’s the first real artifact of the Ancient Ones we know about that’s not a hollow structure. If everything else works, even their transport system, then maybe this does, too.” He examined the side wall carefully. “There! See? It’s kind of a panel, just beyond the break where we walked in. If we’re lucky, we might even be able to move the lump, here. Let’s see… They were bigger than us, but they had certain basics in common, like doors and roads. So, whether they had hands or tentacles or whatever, figure that would be best as a simple pressure plate.”

  Alpha, listening to this, went over and pressed the area. Nothing happened.

  “Any more bright ideas, Captain?” An asked him.

  “Yes—you press it, son. She’s got machine hands and arms, and mine are almost as bad.”

  Ari saw what he meant, stepped around the body of Jules Wallinchky and put his hand on the plate.

  The walkway began moving, slowly but steadily, carrying them all along.

  Ari Martinez brightened. “How about that!” He shook his head in wonder. “They could wish for anything they needed, teleport all over, and yet they needed walkways?”

  “Maybe they didn’t want to get too soft,” Kincaid guessed. “Maybe we got them, or this place, wrong.”

  The moving walkway slowed, and then stopped at a junction between two belts where it had to change direction. It was clear why: the next belt was running in the opposite direction, and someone or something was riding it. Something short and furry.

  “That’s a Geldorian!” Kincaid exclaimed. “What the hell?”

  The Geldorian, for its part, had been leaning on the rail and moving along when it spotted them, and particularly the figure of Kincaid, and stiffened. Abruptly, the belt stopped, and it was just a couple of meters from the others. It looked at them all and said, “Where the hell am I? Who or what is that?” He was referring to Kincaid. Then, regarding the unconscious Wallinchky: “And is the bastard dead or just hopefully in great eternal pain?”

  “Tann Nakitt? What are you doing here?” Ari asked him.

  “All I know is, I was watching your light show from inside the house, and this stream of energy came up the road and I woke up down there. When nobody sent out the welcome party, I figured this thing out and set off. I don’t suppose any of you have any food or drink, do you? And by the way, what’s wrong with him?” He gestured toward the comatose man.

  “Heart attack, we think, or possibly stroke. Same difference. He’s dying,” Kincaid told him. “I’m Jeremiah Kincaid, by the way, without my usual makeup.”

  “Kincaid! Good grief! It’s a City of Modar reunion! Still, I have to say that I liked you better when you were just scary looking.”

  “How far have you come?” Kincaid asked him.

  “Far enough. Hard to say, but it’s about three segments, a good kilometer or so. From the smell and look, it seemed like the other way was going to quickly reach water, and the last thing I wanted was to ride into drowning. Gravity also gets a little heavier down there, and it’s lighter here. You notice that? Each segment’s different.”

  “This is the only one we tried, but—water, you say? Not now. Not yet.” Kincaid sighed. “Then we should start off in the opposite direction, I think. I suspect it’s some vast circle, but who knows how long and how far? Come! Step onto this one and we’ll see if it goes back.”

  Oddly enough, it did, which surprised them until Kincaid noted, “Well
, each segment runs whichever way will take the folks on it to the other end. What happens when you get folks on the same belt at opposite ends I have no idea.”

  They reached the next segment, about where they’d come in, and realized that Wallinchky would have to be moved at each junction point, even if slightly. His color was ashen and his breathing labored. It was clear that he didn’t have long.

  “In any part of the Realm, he’d have instant and total help and be up and around in a short period of time,” Kincaid mused, looking at him. “In older times, before that kind of response, they used to teach people what to do in emergencies like this. Isn’t it odd that the more advanced we’ve become, the more ignorant we’ve become? Could any of us plow a field, live off the land, even know how to safely build a fire or hunt game? Without our machines and data banks, we’re pretty damned helpless. Masters of the universe! We who don’t know how to piss outdoors!”

  Tann Nakitt looked around at the vast chamber around them. “Maybe that happened to them, huh? Maybe they had a problem. Solar storm or something, disrupted their mental links to their magical computers and all that power. Ever think that maybe they were so advanced that when they were cut off they died? That they’d become one with their machines? Neat thought, isn’t it? And, by the way, I have both hunted and fished and I can make a fire by rubbing two androids together. Still, I wish I had a drink.”

  “We’ve got the stuff in our suits, but that’s not easy to transfer,” Kincaid responded. “It’s best we find the exit.”

  “I’ll go,” Ari volunteered. “Better than sitting here on deathwatch.”

  “No!” Alpha said sharply. “You will remain here with Beta and the Master. You are wholly organic and therefore have the potential to do things Beta herself cannot if need be.”

  “You can’t stop me,” Kincaid told her, not threateningly, but as a statement of fact. “And Tann Nakitt is not a party to this. I say the three of us go, and Beta and Martinez remain.”

  “Very well. Time is of the essence, then. Let us go.”

  Ari started to follow them, but Beta moved and blocked him. Although she was much smaller, the reinforced limbs the two women had been given after they were properly programmed were more than his match, and he couldn’t easily reason with or argue with them. He sighed, watching the figures vanish from sight. It didn’t take long before he decided that even talking to a slave was better than nothing.

  “Beta, do you remember who and what you used to be?”

  “The question is meaningless,” she responded. “Beta has never been anything but Beta. I have the memories of the one who was and is no more except as data, but I am not her.”

  “So you have all of Ming’s memories, but you don’t see any connection between her and yourself?”

  “The name you speak is not in my data field. I have no name for the other.”

  “Well, it was probably erased, but it was Ming Dawn Palavri. Alpha was Angel Kobe.”

  “No, Alpha is Alpha. She simply has the data of another, as I do.”

  This was tough. “So it’s just data? But what good is that data if you cannot assume the identity of the one who lived those memories? Every memory in the brain is subjective. How can you interpret it if you weren’t ever her?”

  “I have the module to do this, but I can integrate it only on command of the Master.”

  “And what if he dies? If your sole purpose is to serve him, and he dies, then you have no purpose? No Master? Do you die or what?”

  “In the absence of the Master, and death is an absence condition, then we would both serve the Oneness.”

  “The Oneness? Who or what is that?” He was sure his uncle hadn’t come up with anything like a Oneness.

  “We are both part of the One. We are detached from it, but still part of it. We would then become self-programming autonomous units but in its service.”

  He finally got it. “The One—you mean the house computer? The server core?”

  “Yes.”

  He sighed and leaned back against the wall. All his life he’d thought of himself as basically a moral guy, that what he did was basically honest work, and that what his uncle did was between his uncle and the cops. Now he’d been dragged into it, not just a little larceny but big-time, with deaths and worse, and he’d managed to some degree to rationalize even that. But what his uncle had done to Ming, particularly Ming, hit home with him. It made him feel… well, dirty. In an age when machines could do anything and if you had the money, you were at least a minor version of what they thought these Ancient Ones were, only somebody who could have everything would decide he wanted human slaves. Even an honest death would be preferable. Hell, he’d known this woman. Jeez! He’d even had a good time in bed with her on a couple of occasions, the last time on the City of Modar itself. To see her reduced to this just to feed a rich old man’s fantasies and ego—it was wrong.

  Merely feeling this was a revelation to him. Somewhere along the line he seemed to have grown a conscience, and while it didn’t make him feel any better, it made him feel… well, superior to that old bastard down there. All his life he’d wanted to be his uncle, envied him everything. He didn’t want to be Jules Wallinchky anymore. He wanted a warm shower, a change of clothes, and a chance to walk away and see if he could do something decent with his life without being reinfected by his uncle’s cesspool.

  But he was stuck here with two bodies, one dying and one quite possibly dead.

  And the worst part was, he’d been the instrument of the latter. He had fired the gun that knocked Angel and Ming cold. He’d delivered them to his uncle. This was his punishment, his circle of Hell, for doing that.

  Beta’s head snapped up, a happy expression on her face. “They have made contact with someone! Help is being dispatched!”

  That got him out of his reverie. “Made contact? With who?”

  “Someone. Someone from—here.” She stood up, walked over and faced him. It made him uncomfortable, but he wasn’t sure what she was doing now. Who could figure out a creature like this, created by a man of evil?

  “You must understand the Oneness,” she said. “We may need you.”

  Her hands suddenly shot out and grasped both sides of his head, bringing him down. To keep his neck from being broken, he had to kneel. He tried to resist with his own hands, but the grip was absolute.

  He felt helpless, and then, worse, dizzy and disoriented, almost as he had when the transport had kicked in, but different. She was looking into his mind! Not like a telepath would, but as if their two brains were a single physical unit. Information flowed back and forth, but at a speed he couldn’t follow and with a commanding force he couldn’t resist. He also felt physical sensations—cold and hot, pain and pleasure, a whole range of things sweeping over him like a beam switching on and off. He started to laugh for no apparent reason, then felt incredibly sad, tears welling up, only to have that cut off and then feel sexual desire, then none, then hunger, thirst—Our minds link one to another, so that there is only Oneness. He felt and understood the command rather than hearing it.

  She let him go, and he sank down and tried to steady himself as the place seemed to fly around him. He understood now that his uncle left nothing to chance, that most likely everyone who stayed in one of his houses for more than a few days got implanted with the same neuroreceivers and transmitters as the two women had in themselves.

  Unlike Ming, he still knew just who and what he was, and with the same feelings as before. But now, and possibly till death, his mind, every thought, even his innermost feelings, was an open book to her and to Alpha/Angel as well. He could feel the permanence of the connection but could not reach out to her mind in the same way she could to his.

  Stand up! They come! Again his mind filed it as words, but it was on a level way beyond that. She was not speaking to him telepathically; rather, having cataloged his entire electrochemical set of stimuli and responses, she was operating him. He found himself standing up and lo
oking in the direction where the others had disappeared, with no conscious act of will on his part.

  The worst part was, when they came, he couldn’t even tell them what had happened.

  Giant Emperor butterflies, two meters tall with wing spans four times that and heads that seemed like death masks, as grotesque and skull-like as Jeremiah Kincaid.

  There were three of them, one on the walkway, another flying past and landing beyond them on the walkway behind, and one more hovering over the huge transport area, its wings creating a wind sufficient to whip Ari’s hair into a frenzy.

  But they weren’t giant butterflies; that was obvious from the start. Butterflies didn’t wear some sort of belt around their midsection, and butterflies didn’t carry what were most definitely alien-looking but still quite identifiable heavy duty rifles. And butterflies didn’t stand on their hind legs and hold such rifles comfortably in soft but clawlike hands.

  Ari felt panic; these babies looked mean. Just as suddenly, he found his panic evaporating, and a calm coolness come over him. In concert with Beta, he and she were protecting Jules Wallinchky’s body.

  “You will remove your spacesuits and all mechanicals from yourselves and from the one who is dying,” an eerie, almost nasal voice said in a language they both easily understood. It had the kind of threat in its tone that would have been there even if it had simply said “Good evening.”

  “We will do nothing of the sort,” Beta told them firmly. “We will die to protect the Master.”

  “Then you will die,” the voice answered, unconcerned. “We do not care about you one way or the other. However, if you do exactly as we say, there may be one chance to save the dying one, but you will have to obey, and now. Time is something it does not have and it may already be too late. It is also a moot argument, since we do not care about him or you and if we have problems we will simply shoot you and be done with it. You will find that your weapons will not work here. Ours will.”