Edda

by Conor Kostick

  Penelope turned the switch all the way around, rushing through dozens of images until a much more interesting one flashed past. A short scroll back and there it was. Penelope in Edda was looking at Penelope in the human world. The princess at the pauper. Poor helpless creature. So undernourished. So lonely. And so strange-looking, too, like her head and hands were those of an insect. For a long, long time she stared at herself, knowing that she was crying, but that the resolution of the camera was not powerful enough to pick up the trails of moisture that slid from the corners of her eyes.

  The wave of unhappiness that had struck her at this unexpected reminder of her helplessness gradually receded and it was replaced by a growing sense of purpose that drew her back to her investigation. This room might have all the answers to her questions. Ready to press on, she reached up to brush away the tears and her avatar’s action made her smile. Of course, there were no tears here in Edda to wipe.

  So this was the room that the humans had built so that Lord Scanthax—and others?—could interface with them. It had to be the place that Ambassador came to when he talked to her in the human world or when he directed the robots. He must have spent hours here when she was a baby. Had Lord Scanthax kept any records? Perhaps the other controls would access them. This surely must be the room that also contained the life-support instructions for her body.

  The controls at the next seat had a keyboard and switches that lit up three monitors. Again, most showed gray images of scenes that were presumably other rooms of the abandoned human colony. One way to proceed would be to try to find the cameras in the library and send a robot there to search for records. But right now that would take too long. After she had trapped all of Lord Scanthax’s manifestations in the Feast Hall, she could pursue that option at her leisure, especially if she could find the controls for her life-support system.

  Meanwhile, not all the screens were displaying video feeds from the human world. There was one that simply had a small > icon flashing in the top left corner. Was it inviting her to write a command? The problem was that all her scripting skills were based on Edda’s menus and her manipulations of three-dimensional objects. It was doubtful that any of the commands she knew would apply here. Still, before moving on, she tried typing on the keyboard to see if the letters appeared on the screen. They did.

  >ADFOPWEF

  >✱ACCESS DENIED

  >RUN

  >✱ACCESS DENIED

  >LOGIN

  >✱ACCESS DENIED

  >START

  >✱ACCESS DENIED

  >LIST

  >✱ACCESS DENIED

  >LORD SCANTHAX HAS MOLDY UNDERWEAR

  >✱ACCESS DENIED

  Rather than waste any more time with the computer, if it was a computer, Penelope moved on to the next set of controls. These sent her heart soaring. Before her was a very promising set of dials and sliders, just the sort of instruments you would construct to regulate an environment for the life functions of a human body fixed up to a machine. The three screens, when they came on, were promising, too. Moving and static graphs appeared, showing an enormous amount of information. None seemed immediately relevant to bodily functions, though. There were maps, too; or not exactly maps, but technical drawings of buildings and arrangements of buildings, much like those Architect did for Lord Scanthax. For a while she scrolled through the drawings, recognizing none of the buildings they described. As she continued to search through the drawings for a clue as to what she was looking at, Penelope noticed that the adjacent screen was also changing in association with her actions. It had been merely flickering before, but now it was flaring up with color. Slowly now, she scrolled back until suddenly graphs and charts appeared on the second screen that were alive. Among the readings were those labeled “temperature,” “pressure,” “heart rate,” and “atmospheric composition”—and they were all in motion. It had to concern her! Returning her attention to the first screen that she had been scrolling through, she noticed that one section of the schematic on display was slightly brighter than the lines around it. After a short experiment with the controls, she zoomed in on it until it was a large oval, with two smaller rooms beside it and an air lock labeled at one end. This was it! She’d found herself and the life-function controls for her room.

  “Ha! Well, well, Lord Scanthax. Who needs you anymore?”

  The fact that she’d spoken aloud drew her attention back to her dimly lit surroundings and her sense of elation faded slightly as she reminded herself that the longer she remained here, the higher the risk of discovery. Nevertheless, for a delicious moment she sat back, suffused with happiness, looking at the plan of her room, its position in relation to the rest of the base—which itself was very interesting and warranted further exploration sometime—and, above all, the graphs on the adjacent screen measuring the state of her body and the environment around it.

  In the wrestling match between her and Lord Scanthax, their positions had changed dramatically. Having been pinned to the floor, nearly helpless, she had wriggled free and was now stalking him. The discovery she had made tonight meant she was no longer dependent on his survival for her own. Even if the invaders destroyed him, so long as they didn’t find this room, she would remain alive. If she wanted to—not that she did—she could go back to her own daydream of blowing up Lord Scanthax and all his manifestations in the Feast Hall on Redistribution Day. She didn’t need him anymore!

  Repeating the phrase over and over to herself, Penelope felt giddy. For the first time in her life, she really didn’t need Lord Scanthax for anything. She wasn’t completely free of him yet, though. Even now, if she was discovered here or missing from her room, the advantage would shift back toward him. To have total freedom, she would have to be able to prevent Lord Scanthax from ever using these controls again. Then she could roam as she pleased in avatar form and there would be nothing he could do to stop her. She’d leave the castle for good and somewhere out there—in Saga, if not in Epic, Ruin, or Myth—she would find other humans.

  Deciding not to linger too long and risk being caught away from her bedroom, Penelope got up from her seat. There was, however, one more set of controls and although she had intended to switch everything off and leave, the buttons and labels in front of the last chair were too intriguing. They were almost the same as those that she used upstairs when she wanted to watch a film. She simply could not pass up the chance to see what they actually represented and so she slipped into the seat. Two screens came on, one just a pale light and the other displaying a menu that was easy to navigate, leading to thousands and thousands of what Penelope assumed were indeed film titles. Films of the entertainment sort held no interest for her, but from the way the files were grouped, it seemed that the back catalogue of human cultural activity was only part of the total. The other part had lots of subcategories, but above them all was a curious-sounding title: “A Farewell to Edda.” She selected the file and pressed “play.”

  “To the lords and ladies of Edda.”

  A middle-aged woman was sitting before a large glass window. Outside was a landscape of rugged mountains. Her expression was somber.

  “We are leaving our colony in the next few days, and we have decided to leave Edda behind. For some years now the conditions on this planet have been worsening, and life support is taking up more and more of our resources. We have located a planet that looks far more suitable to our needs, and our ships are nearly ready for departure.

  “Why are we leaving you here, when, after all, Edda was designed to occupy us during spaceflight? Because we learned from Earth of a terrible onslaught against humans by electronic lifeforms similar to you, but derived from the game of Saga. While you have shown no sign of antipathy toward humans, you have, understandably, desired to interact more with our environment through robots and so on.

  “We leave you with interface rooms in every lordship so that you can continue to learn about the universe in which your own is contained. We also leave you with enough batte
ry power to last about two hundred years; or two hundred years at a minimum, because so long as you maintain in working order the solar panels we also leave you with, you will be able to generate enough power to continue Edda indefinitely. Perhaps, with your increasing control over the robots, you will be able to make a better success of this colony than we managed to.

  “Our fear, however, is that after our departure, you will set about attempting to conquer one another within Edda. It is in your nature, after all. But if there are survivors who learn to cooperate, then perhaps you will not think too unkindly of those who brought your world into being and who have taken measures to ensure it continues to exist into the far future.

  “We are sorry to leave you at this formative stage of your development and hope that one day in the future, humans and electronic lifeforms from Edda will be friends who can assist one another. But for now, that cannot be assured, not in light of the catastrophic attack on the population of Earth. So, until our descendents meet with you, farewell.”

  The woman leaned forward and the recording stopped. Another human.

  At once, Penelope pressed “play” again, this time oblivious to the meaning of what the woman was saying, now entirely absorbed in listening to the tones of her voice, watching her hand gestures, looking again and again at her face. Another human. Penelope felt like laughing for joy and at the same time experienced a pang of loneliness so deep that her vision blurred with tears. Only when a wave of dizziness had passed, could Penelope play the file a third time and concentrate on what the woman was saying.

  The message was another major discovery. For one thing, it explained why, years ago, Lord Scanthax had insisted there were more worlds to discover. He had known about Saga. More important for Penelope, however, she had just heard a voice from the human community that had left her behind fifteen years ago. It was conceivable even that the woman in the film was her own mother. She was about the right age, or perhaps a little too old. But Penelope clamped down on her wishful thinking before she got carried away; given that the colony had contained about three million people, there was next to no chance that the speaker was really her mother. Still, despite the mention of some sort of disaster affecting the humans of Earth, on the whole the film gave Penelope encouragement. They were all out there, somewhere, on their new planet. Her parents, too. Somehow she had to join them. As she hurried around the room, switching off all the equipment and returning it to darkness, Penelope’s thoughts were overtaken by a new daydream. In it, she was arriving at the new planet and everyone was welcoming her, amazed and thrilled that the baby they had lost had found them and had come home.

  Chapter 22

  SCATTERED BULLETS FLOW

  Still in shock from Milan’s death, Erik wanted to unclip and seek out the comfort of his family and friends. But that would have to wait, as the next portal beckoned. With the army that had once surrounded it now defeated, there was nothing to prevent Cindella and the others from stepping through to the new world beyond the shimmering metallic surface in front of them. What would it be like? Who would be there? Perhaps, at last, they would meet the EI people in charge of these gray armies. Perhaps, too, there were other avatars of humans to be found.

  Just ahead of Cindella was the air elemental, ready to lead the way, its torso now swirling erratically as a result of the damage it had sustained in the battle.

  “Pass through that gate, and prepare to defend me on the other side!”

  On the command of its master, the elemental swept powerfully through the silvery sheen that was the portal. A heartbeat later, side by side with Jodocus, Cindella stepped into the unknown.

  For an instant everything went fuzzy and Erik heard the hiss of static in his ears, but then they were beyond the portal, walking out into the new world through a curtain of water. Cindella was dripping onto the cobblestones of a wide square that seemed to be set in the ruins of a large town. A zipping noise, like the buzzing of angry wasps, testified to the fact that bullets were already being fired at them, but there was no sign of their assailants. As it shielded Cindella and its master, the air elemental was noticeably slowing down, with dozens of bullets caught in its swirling body.

  “Defend me!” Jodocus held out his right arm and just as an enormous earth elemental sprang into being, hundreds of droplets of blood appeared on the elementalist’s skin. If it hurt Jodocus to perform this action, he did not let it show.

  “Defeat my foes!” His left arm was now outstretched and with a rushing noise, a sulfurous wave of fire came into being as the tattoo on Jodocus’s left arm became a bloody mess.

  Whereas the earth elemental was vaguely humanoid and stood as squat as a house, the fire elemental was a constantly writhing pillar of orange and red. It was already in motion, flowing over broken cobblestones to the nearest doorway. A moment later the air elemental expired with a faint sigh, the bullets it had absorbed clattering to the ground. In its place, the enormous creature of earth effortlessly absorbed the incoming bullets, but its bulk completely obscured their view.

  “We can wait here till the fire elemental clears out whoever is shooting at us,” said Jodocus calmly.

  “I’m fine.” And Cindella stepped around the left side of the enormous bulk of the monster. Immediately several bullets struck her and although these did no damage to her health, Cindella made for the buildings on the near side of the square at a run. The houses had been wrecked by modern weapons rather than fantasy ones. Their roofs were missing, as though they had been bombed, while bricks and beams were piled high on the floors and the plaster on the walls bore telltale trails of bullet marks. The damage to the buildings was not caused by the kind of high-energy weapons in use in Saga; nor were the buildings themselves anything like those in Ghost’s world. In Saga, a forest of enormously tall towers obscured the sky. Here, it was clear that even intact, the walls of the stone buildings reached up only two or three stories.

  After leaping over the rubble in a series of light skips, Cindella rolled through an open door to come back to her feet, weapons in hand. The room was empty. There was a large hole high up in the far wall, torn out of plaster and brick, through which she could enter the next house. To reach it, Cindella had to put her weapons away and pull herself up. As she crawled through to the shadows of the room beyond, a ruby light glittered in Erik’s eye and a bullet hit Cindella in the head. Jumping forward and running fast across the piles of dusty bricks, she drew her magic dagger. Where was the enemy? Another bullet hit her directly over the heart and Erik could see a little red dot moving across Cindella’s body. Although the roof had mostly collapsed, in one corner there remained enough planks to support a kneeling soldier. It was from there that the nose of a rifle was pointing toward Cindella. Without her magic protection she would have been dead twice over and helpless against her assailant, as there was no obvious method for a person of normal abilities to reach the sniper. But with one leap of extraordinary agility, Cindella was up on top of the soldier and stabbing his gray plastic flesh. He fell back, inanimate, dropping his rifle.

  The fallen weapon caught Erik’s attention. It seemed to be an improved version of the rifle they had encountered with the soldiers in the earlier armies, in that it had sights with lenses and projected a thin red laser light to assist with targeting. Cindella peered through the sights and played with the focus. They were as powerful as binoculars, capable of considerable magnification. It was a shame B.E. wasn’t here; he would be interested in these guns. Erik stored the rifle in the Bag of Dimensions, diligently placing it in a subfolder that would be fairly prominent in the rather large and cluttered grouping of weapons.

  From behind the jagged ruin of the outer wall of the house, Cindella peered out carefully to see what was happening in the square below. It was much as she had left it. Seemingly untroubled by the constant patter of bullets, the earth elemental was standing in front of the portal, guarding Jodocus, who could not be seen from this angle.

  There was a curious pipe r
unning along a slender scaffolding around the gray sheen that Cindella had come through. Water was pouring down from it like a curtain over the portal, before running away down a drain in the cobbles. What purpose did that serve? Erik stared at it for a minute, wondering if he was missing something important. Was it dye? Something flammable? It looked like water, though. Was it designed to wash something off?

  On the far side of the square, a glow flared up dramatically, as though a bomb had gone off inside a building, drawing Erik’s attention to the progress of the fire elemental. It was working its way counterclockwise through the houses that surrounded the square, systematically clearing away the snipers, and Erik decided that he would match the elemental’s progress from his side.

  This was a little like a game of hide-and-seek, except that Cindella did not have to play the game as seriously as her opponents. Nearly every time she encountered a sniper, the enemy got his shot in first, often accurately hitting her head. But it did them no good. One by one she hunted them down, until she saw a red glow on the ruined walls of the building ahead, indicating the approach of the fire elemental, which suddenly flowed into the room. If the sniper units had been capable of emotion, they would have found it terrifying: that roaring column of fire moving toward them. As the fire elemental found its latest opponent, the flames of its body seemed to pulse and Erik could see a heat wave ripple through the air as a blast of flame shook the house. A fraction of health came off Cindella’s bar; she had been too close.