by Mike Resnick
“Nor are we,” I told him. “In fact—” I cut myself short before I said that we were looking for a planet to escape from the Kapars. I did not think that that information would be welcome news to this commanding machine. I could imagine just how Argos might respond to what he would no doubt consider “an invasion” of his planet. “In fact,” I continued before he could react, “we are in the process of considering a final solution for dealing with the Kapars.”
“Wise,” Argos replied. “Perhaps you can learn something in my records that will help.”
“That was our hope,” I replied. “You said that you had primers on your writing?”
“I suspect that you will not find it hard to learn,” Argos replied. “If you look to the tabletop . . .”
The tabletop flickered and glowed with the same light as the panels above it. Words flickered across, and I could almost make out their meaning.
“Perhaps if you could retrieve some of your written texts, we could compare them and I could make adjustments,” Argos offered.
My gut clenched in fear. I did not want Argos to learn anything about Poloda. He’d already once arranged for a madman to flee there. What would happen if he decided to take over the planet for his own?
Just when I had thought that perhaps Tonos might be safe, I realized that she was in even greater peril—and I was responsible.
“It would take a long time to get back to my craft,” I prevaricated. “I think I can almost make out your lettering.”
“Well,” Argos said, sounding slightly miffed, “let us begin.”
For the next two weeks—with little rest—I was at Argos’s whole disposal. I woke when he called, read when he ordered, worked when he allowed. I ate well, slept irregularly, and learned more than I had ever learned before.
The learning was seductive. I could not get enough. As I progressed through the simpler manuals to the more complex machinery, I realized how out of my depth I truly was.
To say that Tonos was a planet of marvels was an understatement of colossal proportions.
I was lucky that I was smart and a test pilot—the two traits stood me in good stead as I worked to repair the vast installation comprising the domes of Tonos.
And the repairs were legion. There were too many for one set of hands. Argos knew this and accepted it early on. But first he wanted to be certain that the worst of the damage was corrected.
So we spent our time working on the big repair machines themselves. It was not enough to repair the little worker machines, we had to repair the repairers and the fabricators, too.
I grew adept at giving orders, for the worker machines were able to understand simple voice commands. Indeed, I began to suspect that I was their primary means of control. I began to wonder how much of the domes were supposed to be controlled by Argos and how much by humans.
Certainly it was clear to me that Argos considered itself far superior to mere people.
I had given my life on Earth battling against such self-deluded tyrants; I was uneasy aiding this one, machine or no.
At the same time, I knew I was learning things that would one day provide me with power over Argos itself.
And, truth be told, I was having fun. The most amazing thing was the worker machines themselves. They came in a nearly infinite variety of sizes and shapes, from smaller machines equipped with nearly silent vacuums to clean up the dust that forever fell in silence to huge man-sized machines.
It was these “soldiers”—as Argos called them—that were the most enjoyable for they were not only amazingly capable but they had mounts on their backs—I could ride on them.
Whizzing down corridors in near silence at speeds I’d only ever before experienced in an aircraft was a joy and delight. The “soldiers”—and I was afraid I knew too well the reason for their name—would obey my every command. In fact, I believe that they were programmed to respond to humans before responding to Argos. I certainly got the impression that he was irritated every time I had to use one, particularly as transport to a distant location.
One night, after a day of extremely demanding repairs, Argos said to me, “Tomorrow I think you should go back.”
“Really?”
“You said you had a compatriot? Handon Gar by name?”
I nodded and then, in case he couldn’t see the movement, said aloud, “Yes.”
“Well, you might perhaps want to follow the events I have recorded recently,” Argos said. “I’m not sure if you will be pleased with them.”
By now, I knew how to access his electronic recordings. I moved to a nearby console, sat down, and keyed the display to life.
“Which record?”
“I am sending it to you now,” Argos said. “I regret that I do not have sound for all of it, but I have analyzed the lip movements and provided what I believe are accurate translations.”
Hmm, I thought to myself. He can read lips. It was another thing to remember about this incredible, unnerving, intelligent machine.
It took over an hour to go through all of his visual records. Argos had not warned me that some of them would be low-light images nor that they would involve intimacies I would normally have avoided.
At the end of it, Argos said, “I am sorry to be the bearer of such tidings. Clearly, you must approach your ‘friend’ with caution.”
“Caution,” indeed! Handon Gar had taken control of the people of Tonos, had seduced both Evina and Danura—first without the other’s knowledge and then with their willing consent. The rules of society on Tonos were not those of Unis—I knew that—but I would have preferred to not have that knowledge thrust upon me so graphically.
Lately, though, I noted with some small sense of relief, Danura had taken to avoiding Gar and seemed aloof in her contacts with him. He had switched to courting Evina solely and seemed ready to force a putsch similar to that of Germany’s tyrant so many years before.
And Argos wanted me to go back into that maelstrom and recruit Handon Gar for his own purposes.
It was not an enjoyable prospect.
Argos wanted me to move quickly—and that was my own inclination—but our goals were not the same at all, so I convinced him that it was necessary that I conduct certain vital repairs before I returned to deal with Gar.
Through simple questioning, I had discovered that the intelligent machine kept a very precise control over the use of material. That much I had expected. While Argos could put many a quartermaster to shame, he was not adept at the art of pilfering. In my flying days both back on Earth and on Poloda, I had learned the necessity of getting a sufficiency of spare parts, and this skill stood me in good stead now.
So while I was making repairs, I was also making duplicates and certain specialty items that I knew I would shortly need.
I also, under the guise of pretending to hear an odd high-pitched noise, managed to learn about the mechanism that caused the worker machines to float. It was, as I’d expected, a variant on the same power amplifier that I’d perfected for my trip here from Poloda—except that it operated on a different frequency. It did not take me long to build a new set of receiving circuits which I could quickly and easily install on my craft when I had the chance.
For I knew that my best hope of survival lay neither with Argos nor with Handon Gar but in getting away from this planet and—hopefully—returning to Poloda. But not immediately. I was under no misapprehensions over how Argos would react if I made my escape and it was not otherwise engaged. Even if I succeeded, I decided that it was criminal to beat a path back to Poloda, certain to be tracked by an Argos already half convinced to take his revenge on the long-fled Kapar.
My plan was, once I’d built a sufficiency of supplies, to introduce Gar to Argos—and escape while they were still trying to gain control over each other. I’d no doubt that, in the end, Argos would triumph—if Gar did not somehow convince the insane machine to unite with him.
Argos grew less and less patient with each passing day, and it became mo
re and more difficult to convince it to accept the reasons for my delay, but secretly I was pleased when, at the end of the week, the intelligent machine demanded that I return to the Tonosians. I had been ready for two days already.
“I think you’re right,” I said. “But, if you’ll permit, I think my best chance is to wait for nighttime, when they are sleeping.”
Argos was silent for a short moment while it thought.
“Yes,” it said finally, “I can see the advantages in that plan.”
So we waited until the evening. I fortified myself with a stimulant remarkably similar to coffee and, just after midnight, donned the gear and equipment I deemed necessary for my plan.
I returned to the main dome through the entry closest to Danura’s sleeping quarters. I’d been monitoring the activities of her, Evina, and Handon Gar ever since Argos had alerted me, and I knew that she was alone in her sleeping quarters.
It did not comfort me to know that Argos could monitor everyone even while they slept—watching them with special low-light cameras and the more eerie heat-sensing cameras, which translated temperature into color. The heat-sensing—or “infrared,” as Argos preferred to call it—cameras made it impossible for a person to feign sleep to Argos, something I was determined not to forget when the time came.
I slipped from the corridor into her room silently. For a moment I merely stood there, looking at her. She was no taller than I, but her lithe figure made it seem otherwise. I flushed then, deciding that it was ungentlemanly to be in a woman’s room without her knowledge.
“Danura,” I said in a low voice. She twitched and turned in her sleep, an odd, endearing smile crossing her lips before they smoothed again in slumber.
I moved to her bed and gently shook her shoulder. “Danura.”
Her eyelids fluttered open and she jerked back when she recognized a strange shape in the dim light. Before she could cry out, I moved forward and put a hand on her mouth, but she twisted and bit it. With a gasp of pain, I pulled it back even as she hissed, “How many times, Gar, must I tell you?”
“It’s me,” I said. “Tangor.”
“Tangor!” Danura sat up in bed, pulling the blankets up against her. Her brows creased in disbelief. I made a gesture with the controls on my belt, and the lights brightened, turning the room from a place of shadows into one of a dim red light.
She threw aside her bedsheets and leaped out of the bed, grabbing me fiercely. “We thought you were dead!”
I was startled by her movement, for she wore only the thinnest of sleeping garments and I had expected her to remain in the bed, demure and shy. My arms reacted on their own, tightening, clutching her to me even as I recalled that I was on Tonos—not Earth nor Poloda.
“I’m alive, as you can feel,” I said, keeping my voice low. She moved away from me, turned and grabbed clothes. Without a backward glance my way, she quickly changed into her day clothes.
“What are your plans?” she demanded when she turned back to me. “Do you know how things are here?”
“I do,” I told her. “And I know more than you.”
“Such as?” Even in her worry, she retained a haughty, commanding demeanor.
I pulled one of my treasures from a deep thigh pocket and extended it toward. “Such as, I know how to read this.”
She grabbed the viewer from me avidly and pored over the glyphs and symbols, looking up at me a moment later with a mixture of sorrow and hope. “Can you teach me?”
“Yes,” I told her. She brightened, her eyes sparkling even in the dim red light. “And I can do more.”
“Your friend Handon Gar said much the same thing,” she observed tartly.
“I do not think that Gar is a friend of mine,” I told her, adding, “Is Evina a friend of yours?”
Danura turned away from me for a moment before turning back to answer, “Once, perhaps. Now?” She shrugged and shook her head. “But the people listen to her, listen to him.” She made a face. “They say that she is with child.”
“She is.” The child was Gar’s—neither of us needed to say it.
“That will be her third,” Danura said, surprising me. “With her third, she gains the power.”
“What?” the word was startled out of me even though I already knew the answer.
“You must know that we are dying as a people,” Danura said. “That we are not as fertile as we need to be. This has been since anyone can remember.”
“And because of it, the women who can bear children are highly regarded.”
Danura nodded. “Up until now, Evina and I were tied with two apiece—”
“What?” The word exploded out of me. I had not for a moment thought that Danura had children. I looked around the room. “Where are your children, then?”
“With their nurses, of course,” Danura said. “I am far too valuable to spend time rearing them, and they are far too valuable to entrust solely to my care.”
“Don’t you miss them?”
“One,” she said in a stifled voice. Her tone changed as she continued, “The other I can see whenever I want.”
It took me a moment to digest what she’d said. The woman in front of me—the person who looked barely old enough to wed—had already had two children. And, by her tone, had lost one of them already.
“Evina’s second is not quite as old as my first was when he died,” she said. She shrugged. “Men are more fragile than women.”
I nodded, not ready to argue with her on this point.
“Until Evina’s youngest exceeds my firstborn’s age, we are tied in our place as mothers,” she said. She raised her eyes to me and added in an undertone, “Both of us saw you and Gar as potential mates.”
“What about your husband?”
“‘Husband’?” Danura repeated the word, her brows furrowed. “It means mate, correct?”
“It means the one you love and take as your sole mate.”
Danura gave me a perplexed look. “Whyever would one want to do that? Such an unnatural selection cannot be good for breeding!”
“Where I come from it is considered the norm,” I told her, unable to keep the stiffness out of my voice.
“And where you come from are there more men than women?”
“Yes,” I admitted.
“Then perhaps it is so because of that,” she threw back at me. “Had you considered that?”
“Are you saying that you don’t have a mate?”
“One lover?” She sounded outraged. “As premier mother, I can pick any male I choose!”
“What?” I cried. “You’re a whore?”
“I do not understand this word, and I don’t care for your tone, Tangor,” Danura responded coldly. “On this world, our survival depends upon my having as many children as I can. All else is secondary to that—including your desires and opinions!”
“No,” I said.
“What?” she cried, furious at being gainsaid.
“I said: ‘no,’” I repeated. Seeing her eyes flame, I continued, “It was not like this always. Your people suffered from a plague, a disease which rendered most of your men sterile.”
“Do you mean to say that we were once like you and the Polodans?” she asked. I nodded. “That women were treated like breeders?”
“Not breeders,” I replied. “They were treated as treasures.”
“I am not sure I like your world, Tangor,” Danura said after a moment. I got the distinct impression that I was included in that denouncement.
“The world you have, Danura, is changing,” I said in reply. “You may not have a choice.”
“With Gar—”
“Gar is part of that change,” I agreed. “But there is more than he knows.”
She raised an eyebrow at me challengingly.
“Sit,” I gestured toward her bed and pulled up the one chair in the room, “it’s a long story.”
With a deep sigh, Danura sat and cocked her head at me attentively.
I told her about A
rgos, about the domes, about the plague, about the machines and reading.
“You say it took you a week to learn to read,” she interrupted at that point. “I will learn in three days.” I raised an eyebrow at her. “You will teach me.”
“First you will hear what I have to say,” I told her. She straightened at that, surprised at my brisk and demanding tone.
“You talk like a premier mother,” she said, affronted.
“Listen,” I said, launching once more into my tale. At the very end, I leaned forward as if to kiss her but instead whispered into her ear at a pitch that I was certain even Argos could not hear. Her eyes widened and she sat back, leaning against the wall, her gaze unfocused. She sat like that for a long time before she nodded.
I straightened up and raised a hand to her, beckoning. She rose and grabbed my hand, following me out into the darkened hallway.
And so began Danura’s education. I brought her not through the entrance I had originally used but through another door nearer her sleeping quarters and down into the nearest control center. I had decided early on that there were some things I did not want her to know.
For the first three days she was an eager student. On the fourth day, discovering that all her effort was only a down payment on the work required, she balked. My wheedling and pleading were rebuffed; it was only when I taunted her with my success—“So you admit that men are superior? That I am better than you?”—that she mulishly returned to her studies.
It was hardly a day later that she had her breakthrough. We had tried a number of texts, but it was only when she discovered romance novels that she found something enticing. We read together, huddled over one of the screen readers, with me reading a portion and then leaving her to finish.
It was getting late, past time to return her to her quarters.
“Danura,” I said, “we need to get you back.”
“Just a moment,” she told me distractedly.
“If you’re too late, it will be noticed,” I said, quoting the words she’d said to me on an earlier occasion when she’d found the going too difficult.