Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two

by Short Story Anthology

  —Quiet, said McGlowrie, wondering why the HKs didn't attack.

  —What is it?

  —Quiet!

  The man beckoned—an oddly rickety gesture. McGlowrie pointed to the HKs and spread his hands in a display of perplexity. The man beckoned again.

  It made no sense to believe that the man was controlling the HKs, but nothing about him made sense—it was impossible for anyone to survive in the Emperor unprotected, yet there he was. McGlowrie couldn't think of an alternative explanation. Bottom line, if the man wasn't exerting some control over the HKs, then they were finished, no matter what course of action they took. He told Bromley to come out and clambered down the side of the crusher. Up close, the man was even more bizarre-looking. The dreadlocks were silvery-gray and, as the light of McGlowrie's lamp played over them, displayed a rippling iridescence—so, to a lesser degree, did his skin. His face, partially obscured behind twists of hair, had a shriveled, witchy look, a match to his emaciated body. Goggles shielded his eyes. A tattered bookbag with a faded logo was draped over his shoulder—it was stuffed with a variety of the weeds that, against all odds, grew throughout the pit.

  —Shit! Bromley said.

  McGlowerie told him to bring Denise down.

  —HKs. You see them? Bromley's voice trembled.

  McGlowerie said, Yeah, I see them. Get her down here.

  The man reached out his hand toward McGlowrie's shoulder—such a laborious movement, McGlowrie didn't flinch—and plucked something from his back. A gray flier that had the approximate size and evil aspect of a dragonfly designed by H.R. Giger. Diagnostic unit. So much for the value of scans, McGlowrie thought. He'd led the HKs straight to the crusher.

  —What now? he said, and gave an exaggerated shrug, signaling his helplessness, his willingness to be led.

  The man averted his eyes.

  The tumult of the mine came at McGlowrie from every side, yet if the Emperor were a storm, it seemed they were standing in its eye, a bubble of comparative tranquility. The HKs had not changed their position. He switched on his night vision so he could see them more clearly, then looked at the man and caught his breath. The man had become a creature of light, a solarized angel. Apparently, there was a considerable amount of metal in his skin and hair. The embers of McGlowrie's childhood religious training were briefly fanned into a flame. Miracles, he thought. What the hell!

  The man took two backward steps and beckoned. Again, that rickety motion, as if his joints were dry. He took another backward step and repeated the gesture.

  —Okay. McGlowrie glanced at Bromley, a few paces behind him. We're going to stick real close to this guy. Can you keep up?

  Bromley breathed through his mouth, staring at the man as if mesmerized. Yeah, he said. But …

  —Either we're going to make it or we're not, said McGlowrie. Best not to calculate the odds.

  Keeping up did not prove a problem. The man walked with terrible deliberateness—terrible, because it took so long to move past the hunter-killers, McGlowrie thought he would lose his nerve and run. He expected every step to be his last and set himself to accept the bone-crushing, organ-pulping shock that an HK could deliver. He had the impression that the man was not sure-footed, that his balance was poor, his limbs weak, and he was stepping carefully so as to avoid falling. A black oblong shape on his back appeared to be a patch of some sort, positioned above his liver. Occasionally he would stop and drink from a plastic bottle and, in the process, shuffling his feet, would make a complete turn to see how they were doing; then he would go forward again at the same stiff-legged pace, his brittle precision reminding McGlowrie of a mantis picking its way along a branch.

  They were five yards beyond the hunter-killers (which, all the while, had remained motionless), when the HKs abruptly broke formation and sped off in different directions, responding to signals of machine distress in various sections of the mine. McGlowrie felt like shouting but kept his exultation to himself, not wanting to give Bromley an excuse to get sloppy. Yet as they trudged through the roaring black-and-green turmoil of the Emperor, their footsteps dredging up squirts of dust, McGlowrie let himself get sloppy, permitting his mind to unclench from the mental fist that he had—for the most part—maintained since Saddler's death, and considered the glowing figure of the man who led them. Walking with that peculiar stiff gait. Head too large for his body, a disparity exaggerated by the snakes' cauldron of hair that nearly trebled its apparent size. McGlowrie made a biblical assessment of their situation: And lo, in the midst of the wasteland, friendless and surrounded by beasts, I came upon a hermit, his hair wreathed in light, and he was the wings of my liberty and the proof of my salvation.

  He was jumping the gun a bit. It was a longer walk to salvation than the one they were taking, and liberty … liberty was light-years away. Yet it suited the moment.

  And I did cleave unto him, McGlowerie said to himself. And he yielded unto me the keys of Paradise.

  · · · · ·

  Beside the wreckage of a sixty-year old command-control unit was a laser-cut tunnel more than wide enough for all four of them to walk abreast. One of the boxcar-sized factory units attached to command-control had not been totally cannibalized and was still trying to perform its function, whirs and grinding noises issuing from the darkness of the gaping hole ripped in its facing. Within the tunnel was a hatch door, which the man opened by punching in a code. Beyond was a scrubbing room, now inoperable, where the crew had washed the poisons off their suits, and beyond that lay a corridor and about a dozen small dimly-lit, sand-blasted rooms, most without furnishings. It was hot inside, high 80s at least, and reeked of a sour smell that McGlowrie came to associate with the man. In one of the rooms, they found a pallet. The man wandered off and McGlowerie told Bromley to keep an eye on him while he tended to Denise. He stripped off her suit, arranged her on the pallet, covered her with a grimy sheet, and gave her a shot of antibiotics—not that it would help. He hovered over her, trying to think of something more he could do, but there was nothing. She was still lights-out, and that was a blessing. He should, he told himself, go and see about the man; but he remained kneeling beside the pallet, subdued by a weariness of spirit, staring down at her, thoughtless in his concern. Growing hungry, he rummaged through her pack, grabbed a jar of peanut butter, sat at the foot of the pallet and ate with his fingers. When he was done eating, he screwed the top back on the jar and hung his head. He slept then, but it was not a restful sleep; anxiety nibbled at the edges of his consciousness. He was still half-asleep when Bromley, stripped to a T-shirt and shorts, carrying a couple of notebooks, came in and asked what they were going to do.

  —I told you to keep an eye on him, said McGlowrie.

  —He's playing video games, Bromley said. He's not going anywhere.

  —Video games?

  —Yeah, he's got an old PC … an antique.

  It seemed incongruous that the man, after performing a heroic act, would play games; but then he himself was the ultimate incongruity.

  —His name's Peck, Bromley went on. Demetrius Peck. He was part of a team that tried to take over the mine back in '38. Not long after they stopped work on this tunnel.

  —He's a terrorist. That figures.

  Bromley's expression became indignant. That's not how I see him.

  Anger pierced McGlowrie's mental fog. That's because you're a Goddamn terrorist, too.

  —That's not how I see myself, either.

  —You killed a friend of mine. You caused this. McGlowrie pointed to Denise's ankle. You tried to kill me, but you didn't have the balls. You're a terrorist. Now what else did he say?

  —We're in this together, said Bromley. We should try and put aside politics...temporarily, anyway.

  —You're fucking with me, right?

  —No, I'm …

  —Because if you're not fucking with me, you must be witless. Let me tell you what politics are. They're not something an asshole like you can use. They're a machine for grinding p
eople up. All you are is another hamburger. And as far as us being together, the only reason we're together is I haven't shot you yet.

  Bromley refused to look away from McGlowrie's stare, and McGlowerie began to feel stupid for staring. He turned his eyes to the floor and told Bromley again to tell him what the man had said.

  —He didn't say anything. He's retarded … or out of his head. Or senile. He's got to be eighty years old. Maybe older. It's all in here. Bromley flourished the notebooks. They were going to use the tunnel as a platform to launch an attack on command-control, but they died before they reached it. All except Peck. I don't guess the company was even aware of them.

  —Let me see those. McGlowrie held out his hand, and Bromley gave him the notebooks. He read part of the first couple of pages, a lot of high-flown, badly spelled hogwash about "sacred duty" and "sacrifice" and "living with Gaian ideals."

  —Did you read these? he asked Bromley.

  —I skimmed 'em. Want me to summarize?

  McGlowrie motioned him to go ahead, and Bromley sat down in the middle of the floor.

  —Peck was dying when he located the tunnel. He had no means of communicating with anyone. It was over. But for some reason, the AI decided to keep him alive. Maybe it wanted to study him, maybe …

  —Don't editorialize.

  —Fine … whatever. The AI sent machines to break into the tunnel. Peck was terrified. He thought the HKs were coming, but the AI was making the place more livable. It started communicating with Peck, telling him it could save him by performing a medical procedure. Peck was feeling seriously shitty. Machines were all buzzing around him. He was confused, he felt like he didn't have a choice. He did the procedure. That's how he ended up with that thing in his back.

  —You're talking about that patch?

  —It's not a patch. Some kind of implant. He's got an implant in his neck, too. But the one on his back, that's the one the AI was talking about. It promotes liver function somehow. That's all Peck knows. He didn't really inquire about it.

  —Why the hell not?

  —Before the procedure, like I said, he was really sick. Then afterward, he was recovering … he didn't feel so hot. By the time he felt well enough to write things down, he wasn't interested anymore. Take a look in the back of the first notebook. Yeah, that one. He starts out writing something every few hours. The testimony of a dying man and all that. Messages to his friends, his girl. Then—Bromley leaned forward and turned pages for McGlowrie—after the procedure, right around here, the entries start getting weird.

  Some entries were written backward, some were in spiral form; others consisted of various eccentric symbologies; others yet appeared to be collections of random shapes, or a there would be a page filled with the same shape repeated over and over. The entries in the second notebook all consisted of patterns of tiny neat lines laid out in rows.

  —There's a ton of notebooks, said Bromley. They're full of that stuff.

  —Where is he now?

  —In the back. That's where I left him, anyway.

  McGlowrie heaved up to his feet, and Bromley, too, made as if to stand; but McGlowrie laid a hand on his shoulder. Stay. If she starts to wake up, give her another shot.

  —We should tell her what's going on.

  McGlowrie could barely keep a rein on his anger. He threw back the sheet, exposing Denise's ankle—horribly swollen, but the worst thing was the red striations beginning to spread up her leg, mapping the progress of the poisons through her veins. I don't want her feeling any pain, he said.

  —All right, Bromley said.

  —Can you handle it? Can you manage this one simple chore?

  —I can handle it, okay!

  —But you're irritated? My attitude annoys you?

  —I just think we should try and be civil.

  —You disgusting little bitch, said McGlowrie, his voice hoarse with strain. I cannot wait to shoot you. Is that civil enough? Does that suit your notion of decorum?

  Bromley, wisely, gave no reply, and McGlowrie stepped into the corridor; then he had a thought and went back into the room.

  —Don't eat all the peanut butter, he said.

  · · · · ·

  Demetrius Peck was playing his video game on a PC that must have been old in 2038—it had a plasma screen, and the computer itself was small as a change purse. But the game itself, McGlowrie realized after watching for a while, was sophisticated for a shooter game, consisting of evolving scenarios generated, he supposed, by a cached version of an old AI program. You started the game by crossing a plain and entering an evergreen forest covering the slopes of hills that were deployed beneath a sharply upthrusting peak of ice and stone. Once in the forest, the scenarios did not repeat themselves, yet Peck was doing well, his bony hands working the joysticks with practiced dexterity, and he seemed to be thinking adroitly, anticipating the program's moves. That put in doubt Bromley's diagnosis of senility or retardation … though crazy was still open to question. McGlowrie tried speaking to him, calling him by name. Each time he did, Peck brought his left hand up beside his ear, made a rapid, complicated movement with the fingers, and responded with what McGlowrie at first took to be non sequiturs but came to understand were references to the game. Troll behind the fir tree, was one such. Two cloud demons, was another. His voice seemed to have been sanded down into a dry-throated burr. Altogether, the responses seemed to embody a logic, a linguistic coherence, but McGlowrie had neither the time nor the patience to begin puzzling them out; he suspected that their obliqueness was redolent of autism because of the pains Peck took to avoid meeting his eyes … an autism induced, perhaps, by the implants that allowed him to survive in the pit. The largest of them, the one on his lower back, was protected by a gray metallic shell that fused with the flesh, humped like a beetle's carapace; indeed, the shape of the entire implant, as much as McGlowrie could see of it, was similar to that of a beetle. Peck grew nervous when McGlowrie examined it, twisting and turning in his chair, and that limited his observations.

  Judging by Peck's features, he was of African descent, but though his skin's basic color was a light brown, it had shifted toward the gray and had an oily iridescence that put McGlowrie in mind of a ham gone bad; that same iridescence manifested to an even greater degree in his dreadlocks, and both gave evidence of massive quantities of metal in his body. If Bromley was right, and he had to be close to right, Peck was almost eighty, yet his skin was unlined and showed no trace of liver-spotting. At his feet, close by the desk atop which the PC rested, were four plastic cartons. The first contained dirt; the second, batteries, some bearing tooth marks, as if they had been vigorously chewed; the third, paper; and the fourth, weeds. At one point, Peck broke off playing, dipped a hand into the box of dirt, and rapidly ate several handfuls, followed by a gulp from a bottle of water mixed with a grayish sediment. Probably rainwater.

  Apart from the PC and desk and Peck's chair, the room held a clutter of notebooks, filthy rags (McGlowrie suspected them to be items of attire), and containers of various sorts. A sorry collection, he thought, to be the sum of a man's life. In an adjoining room were metal bedframes, mattresses that had been ripped open, sticks of demolished furniture, broken appliances, more rags, and, buried under the rags, Peck's wallet. There was no ID, but there were cards bearing his name and a folded printout of an Earth First webpage bearing a group photo of young men and women gathered about Peck and captioned Demetrius and the Vandals. Peck's hair was salted with gray. Even a conservative estimate of his age at the time the photograph was taken would put him at forty. That meant he was now at least ninety-eight years old … if the photo had been snapped in '38 and not before. McGlowrie wouldn't have minded having a crack at the tall brunette on the end of the front row, but she was gone to dust, either dead in the pit or succumbed to natural causes. A posse of pretty young idiots, off to slay the dragon with Peck, their sensei,leading the charge.

  In a closet, on a shelf, along with sundry other objects, McGlowrie f
ound three surgical packages enclosed in transparent sterile envelopes. One was diminutive and broken—it had started to perform its function inside its envelope and had come apart; fine wires dangled from its underside. The others appeared to be identical to one another, each gray and about eight inches in length; oblong, but not perfectly so, sort of a streamlined scarab shape. He took one down, surprised by its lightness, nearly dropping it when, with a faint whirring, two winglike sections were extruded from its sides, extending out three inches. The bottom of the package was slightly convex, perforated by numerous tiny holes, contoured so as to fit against a smooth, curved surface. He carried it into the room where Peck had been playing games and was now curled up on the floor beside his chair, sound asleep. He knelt and compared the package to the implant in Peck's back, to the implied shape beneath the skin. They were, to his eye, a match. He nudged Peck to wake him, and Peck sat up with a start.

  —This, said McGlowrie, showing him the package. This is the same as your implant, right? The one in your back.

  Peck averted his eyes, mumbling words that were too garbled to make out. McGlowrie gripped his face, holding his head still, and forced him to look directly into his eyes. Listen to me, Peck. Is this the same as your implant?

  —Peck, said Peck. Pecking order. Peckish. Work on your …

  McGlowrie gave him a shake—Peck felt as flimsy as a kite made of sticks and string—and asked his question a third time, a fourth. The fifth time he asked, Peck responded by saying, Not the same, not the same. Spare.

  —You mean it's like yours, but it's a spare? The AI made you spares?

  Following another bout of questioning, Peck admitted this to be the case, and McGlowrie released him. He lay back on the floor, pulling his dreadlocks across his face as if to hide from McGlowrie but quickly gave up on this and returned to playing his game.

  The light, which had come slowly to McGlowrie's brain, struck home with sudden force and he grasped the implications of what they had discovered. He slumped down against the wall and said, Holy Shit! Like a man with a winning lottery ticket, making certain of every number, he turned over the details in his mind again and again, until he could accept what he had learned … or what had been revealed, for he felt as if he had experienced a revelation. The miracle of Peck's existence was nothing by contrast to the greater miracle it signaled, one that could affect all mankind, and it raised a fair number of questions. Why, for instance, given its "death" was a fait accompli, a suicidal compulsion programmed in, had the AI been concerned with Peck's survival? And what was he, McGlowrie, to do with the knowledge that he'd been handed? Thinking in the abstract was not McGlowrie's strong suit. Without some concrete focus, his mind tended to wander. Working was his means of processing information. He went to the closet where he'd discovered the packages. He removed his micro-tool kit and a jeweler's lens from a trouser pocket, slit the wrapping of the broken instrument package with his knife, and began taking it apart.