A Circus of Hells

by Poul Anderson

  Djana’s gaze followed his finger. Remotely gleamed other immobile forms, including a duplicate of the hippoid and three of the anthropoid. Doubtless more were hidden by irregularities of terrain or its steep fall to the horizon. The machine which Flandry had in mind was closer, just left of his intended path. It was another cylinder, more tall and slim than the robot with the hammers. The smooth bright surface was unbroken by limbs. The conical head was partly split down the middle, above an array of instruments.

  “He may simply be a watcher,” Flandry theorized.

  They had passed by, the gaunt abstract statue was falling behind, when Djana yelled.

  Flandry spun about. The thing had left its square and was entering the one they were now in.

  Dust and sparkling ice crystals whirled in the meter of space between its base and the ground. Air cushion drive, beat through Flandry. He looked frantically around for shelter. Nothing. This square held only basalt and frozen water.

  “Run!” he cried. He retreated backward himself, blaster out. The heart slugged in him, the breath rasped, still hot from his prior battle.

  A pencil of white fire struck at him from the cleft head. It missed at its range, but barely. He felt heat gust where the energy splashed and steam exploded. A sharp small thunderclap followed.

  This kind does pack a gun!

  Reflexively, he returned a shot. Less powerful, his beam bounced off the alloy hide. The robot moved on it. He could hear the roar of its motor. A direct hit at closer quarters would pierce his suit and body. He fired again and prepared to flee.

  If I can divert that tin bastard—It did not occur to Flandry that his action might get him accused of gallantry. He started off in a different direction from the girl’s. Longer-legged, he had a feebly better chance than she of keeping ahead of death, reaching a natural barricade and making a stand…

  Tensed with the expectation of lightning, the hope that his air unit would give protection and not be ruined, he had almost reached the next line when he realized there had been no fire. He braked and turned to stare behind.

  The robot must have halted right after the exchange. Its top swung back and forth, as if in search. Surely it must sense him.

  It started off after Djana.

  Flandry spat an oath and pounded back to help. She had a good head start, but the machine was faster, and if it had crossed one line, wouldn’t it cross another? Flandry’s boots slammed upon stone. Oxygen-starved, his brain cast forth giddiness and patches of black. His intercepting course brought him nearer. He shot. The bolt went wild. He bounded yet more swiftly. Again he shot. This time he hit.

  The robot slowed, veered as if to meet this antagonist who could be dangerous, faced away once more and resumed its pursuit of Djana. Flandry held down his trigger and hosed it with flame. The girl crossed the boundary. The robot stopped dead.

  But—but—gibbered in Flandry’s skull.

  The robot stirred, lifted, and swung toward him. It moved hesitantly, wobbling a trifle, not as if damaged—it couldn’t have been—but as if…puzzled?

  I shouldn’t be toting a blaster, Flandry thought in the turmoil. With my shape, I’m supposed to carry sword and shield.

  The truth crashed into him.

  He took no time to examine it. He knew simply that he must get into the same square as Djana. An anthropoid with blade and scute in place of hands could not crawl very well. Flandry went on all fours. He scuttled backward. The lean tall figure rocked after him, but no faster. Its limited computer—an artificial brain moronic and monomaniacal—could reach no decision as to what he was and what to do about him.

  He crossed the line. The robot settled to the ground.

  Flandry rose and tottered toward Djana. She had collapsed several meters away. He joined her. Murk spun down upon him.

  It lifted in minutes, after his air unit purified the atmosphere in his suit and his stimulated cells drank the oxygen. He sat up. The machine that had chased them was retreating to the middle of the adjacent square, another gleam against the dark plain, under the dark sky. He looked at his blaster’s charge indicator. It stood near zero. He could reload it from the powerpack he carried, but his life-support units needed the energy worse. Maybe.

  Djana was rousing too. She half raised herself, fell across his lap, and wept. “It’s no use, Nicky. We can’t make it. We’ll be murdered. And if we do get by, what’ll we find? A thing that builds killing engines. Let’s go back. We can go back the way we came. Can’t we? And have a little, little while alive together—”

  He consoled her until the chill and hardness of the rock on which he sat got through to him. Then, stiffly, he rose and assisted her to her feet. His voice sounded remote and strange in his ears. “Ordinarily I’d agree with you, dear. But I think I see what the arrangement is. The way the bishop behaved. Didn’t you notice?”

  “B-b-bishop?”

  “Consider. Like the knight, I’m sure, the bishop attacks when the square he’s on is invaded. I daresay the result of a move on this board depends on the outcome of the battle that follows it. Now a bishop can only proceed offensively along a diagonal. And the pieces are only programed to fight one other piece at a time; of certain kinds, at that.” Flandry stared toward his hidden destination. “I imagine the anthropoids are the pawns. I wonder why. Maybe because they’re the most numerous pieces, and the computer was lonely for mankind?”

  “Computer?” She huddled against him.

  “Has to be. Nothing else could have made this. It used the engineering facilities it had, possibly built some additional manufacturing plant. It didn’t bother coloring the squares or the pieces, knowing quite well which was which. That’s why I didn’t see at once we’re actually on a giant chessboard.” Flandry grimaced. “If I hadn’t…we’d’ve quit, returned, and died. Come on.” He urged her forward.

  “We can’t go further,” she pleaded. “We’ll be set on.”

  “Not if we study the positions of the pieces,” he said, “and travel on the squares that nobody can currently enter.”

  After some trudging: “My guess is, the computer split its attention into a number of parts. One or more to keep track of the wild robots. Two, with no intercommunication, to be rival chessmasters. That could be why it hasn’t noticed something strange is going on today. I wonder if it can notice anything new any longer, without being nudged.”

  He zigzagged off the board with Djana, onto the blessed safe unmarked part of the land, and walked around the boundary. En route he saw a robot that had to be a king. It loomed four meters tall in the form of a man who wore the indoor dress of centuries ago, gold-plated and crowned with clustered diamonds. It bore no weapons. He learned later that it captured by divine right.

  They reached the ancient buildings. The worker machines that scuttled about had kept them in good repair. Flandry stopped before the main structure. He tuned his radio to standard frequency. “At this range,” he said to that which was within, “you’ve got to have some receiver that’ll pick up my transmission.”

  Code clicked and gibbered in his earplugs; and then, slowly, rustily, but gathering sureness as the words advanced, like the voice of one who has been heavily asleep: “Is…it…you? A man…returned at last?…No, two men, I detect—”

  “More or less,” Flandry said.

  Across the plain, beasts and chessmen came to a halt.

  “Enter. The airlock…Remove your spacesuits inside. It is Earth-conditioned, with…furnished chambers. Inspection reveals a supply of undeteriorated food and drink…I hope you will find things in proper order. Some derangements are possible. The time was long and empty.”

  Chapter X

  Djana stumbled to bed and did not wake for thirty-odd hours. Flandry needed less rest. After breakfast he busied himself, languidly at first but with increasing energy. What he learned fascinated him so much that he regretted not daring to spend time exploring in depth the
history of these past five centuries on Wayland.

  He was in the main control room, holding technical discussions with the prime computer, when the speaker in its quaint-looking instrument bank said in its quaint-sounding Anglic: “As instructed, I have kept your companion under observation. Her eyelids are moving.”

  Flandry got up. “Thanks,” he said automatically. It was hard to remember that no living mind flickered behind those meters and readout screens. An awareness did, yes, but not like that of any natural sophont, no matter how strange to man; this one was in some ways more and in some ways less than organic. “I’d better go to her. Uh, have a servitor bring hot soup and, uh, tea and buttered toast, soon’s it can.”

  He strode down corridors silent except for the hum of machines, past apartments that held a few moldering possessions of men long dead, until he found hers.

  “Nicky—” She blinked mistily and reached tremulous arms toward him. How thin and pale she’d grown! He could just hear her. Bending for a kiss, he felt her lips passive beneath his.

  “Nicky…are we…all right?” The whisper-breath tickled his ear.

  “Assuredly.” He stroked her cheek. “Everything’s on orbit.”

  “Outside?”

  “Safe as houses. Safer than numerous houses I could name.” Flandry straightened. “Relax. We’ll start putting meat back on those lovely bones in a few minutes. By departure date, you ought to be completely yourself again.”

  She frowned, shook her head in a puzzled way, tried to sit up. “Hoy, not yet,” he said, laying hands on the bare slight shoulders. “I prescribe lots of bed rest. When you’re strong enough to find that boring, I’ll arrange for entertainment tapes to be projected. The computer says there’re a few left. Ought to be interesting, a show that old.”

  Still she struggled feebly. The chemical-smelling air fluttered fast, in and out of her lungs. Alarm struck him. “What’s the trouble, Djana?”

  “I…don’t know. Dizzy—”

  “Oh, well. After what you’ve been through.”

  Cold fingers clutched his arm. “Nicky. This moon. Is it…worth…anything?”

  “Huh?”

  “Money!” she shrieked like an insect. “Is it worth money?”

  Why should that make that much difference, right now? flashed through him. Her past life’s made her fanatical on the subject, I suppose, and—“Sure.”

  “You’re certain?” she gasped.

  “My dear,” he said, “Leon Ammon will have to work hard at it if he does not want to become one of the richest men in the Empire.”

  Her eyes rolled back till he saw only whiteness. She sagged in his embrace.

  “Fainted,” he muttered, and eased her down. Rising, scratching his scalp: “Computer, what kind of medical knowledge do you keep in your data banks?”

  Reviving after a while, Djana sobbed. She wouldn’t tell him why. Presently she was as near hysteria as her condition permitted. The computer found a sedative which Flandry administered.

  Or her next awakening she was calm, at any rate on the surface, but somehow remote from him. She answered his remarks so curtly as to make it clear she didn’t want to talk. She did take nourishment, though. Afterward she lay frowning upward, fists clenched at her sides. He left her alone.

  She was more cheerful by the following watch, and gradually reverted to her usual self.

  But they saw scant of each other until they were again in space, bound back to the assigned round that was to end on Irumclaw where it began. She had spent most of the time previous in bed, waited on by robots while she recovered. He, vigor regained sooner, was preoccupied with setting matters on the moon to rights and supervising the repair of Jake. The latter job was complicated by the requirement that no clue remain to what had really taken place. He didn’t want his superiors disbelieving his entries in the log concerning a malfunction of the hyperdrive oscillator which it had taken him three weeks to fix by himself.

  Stark Wayland fell aft, and mighty Regin, and lurid Mimir; and the boat moved alone amidst a glory of stars. Flandry sat with Djana in the conn, which was the single halfway comfortable area to sit. Rested, clean, depilated, fed, liquored, in crisp coverall, breathing ample air, feeling the tug of a steady Terran g and the faint throb of the power that drove him toward his destination, he inhaled of a cigarette, patted Djana’s hand, and grinned at her freshborn comeliness. “Mission accomplished,” he said. “I shall expect you to show your gratitude in the ways you know best.”

  “Well-l-l,” she purred. After a moment: “How could you tell, Nicky?”

  “Hm?”

  “I don’t yet understand what went wrong. You tried to explain before, but I was too dazed, I guess.”

  “Most simple,” he said, entirely willing to parade his cleverness anew. “Once I saw we were caught in a chess game, everything else made sense. For instance, I remembered those radio masts being erected in the wilds. An impossible job unless the construction robots were free from attack. Therefore the ferocity of the roving machines was limited to their own kind. Another game, you see, with more potentialities and less predictability than chess, even the chess-cum-combat that had been developed when the regular sort got boring. New types of killer were produced at intervals and sent forth to see how they’d do against the older models. Our boat, and later we ourselves, were naturally taken for such newcomers; the robots weren’t supplied with information about humans, and line-of-sight radio often had them out of touch with the big computer.”

  “When we tried to call for help, though—”

  “You mean from the peak of Mt. Maidens? Well, obviously none of the wild robots would recognize our signal, on the band they used. And that part of the computer’s attention which ‘listened in’ on its children simply filtered out my voice, the way you or I can fail to hear sounds when we’re busy with something else. With so much natural static around, that’s not surprising.

  “Those masts were constructed strictly as relays for the robots—for the high frequencies which carried the digital transmissions—so that’s why they didn’t buck on my calls on any other band. The computer always did keep a small part of itself on the qui vive for a voice call on standard frequencies. But it assumed that, if and when humans came back, they would descend straight from the zenith and land near the buildings as they used to. Hence it didn’t make arrangements to detect people radio from any other direction.”

  Flandry puffed. Smoke curled across the viewscreen, as if to veil off the abysses beyond. “Maybe it should have done so, in theory,” he said. “However, after all those centuries, the poor thing was more than a little bonkers. Actually, what it did—first establish that chess game, then modify it, then produce fighters that obeyed no rules, then extend the range and variety of their battles further and further across the moon—that was done to save most of its sanity.”

  “What?” Djana said, surprised.

  “Why, sure. A thinking capability like that, with nothing but routine to handle, no new input, decade after decade—” Flandry shivered. “Br-rr! You must know what sensory deprivation does to organic sophonts. Our computer rescued itself by creating something complicated and unpredictable to watch.” He paused before adding slyly: “I refrain from suggesting analogies to the Creator you believe in.”

  And regretted it when she bridled and snapped, “I want a full report on how you influenced the situation.”

  “Oh, for the best, for the best,” he said. “Not that that was hard. The moment I woke the White King up, the world he’d been dreaming of came to an end.” His metaphor went over her head, so he merely continued: “The computer’s pathetically impatient to convert back to the original style of operations. Brother Ammon will find a fortune in metals waiting for his first ship.

  “I do think you are morally obliged to recommend me for a substantial bonus, which he is normally obliged to pay.”

  “Morally!” T
he bitterness of a life which had never allowed her a chance to consider such questions whipped forth. But it seemed to him she exaggerated it, as if to provide herself an excuse for attacking. “Who are you to blat about morals, Dominic Flandry, who took an oath to serve the Empire and a bribe to serve Leon Ammon?”

  Stung, he threw back: “What else could I do?”

  “Refuse.” Her mood softened. She shook her amber-locked head, smiled a sad smile, and squeezed his hand. “No, never mind. That would be too much to expect of anyone nowadays, wouldn’t it? Let’s be corrupt together, Nicky darling, and kind to each other till we have to say goodbye.”

  He looked long at her, and at the stars, where his gaze remained, before he said quietly, “I suppose I can tell you what I’ve had in mind. I’ll take the pay because I can use it; also the risk, for the rest of my life, of being found out and broken. It seems a reasonable price for holding a frontier.”

  Her lips parted. Her eyes widened. “I don’t follow you.”

  “Irumclaw was due to be abandoned,” he said. “Everybody knows—knew—it was. Which made the prophecy self-fulfilling: The garrison turned incompetent. The able civilians withdrew, taking their capital with them. Defensibility and economic value spiraled down toward the point where it really wouldn’t be worth our rational while to stay. In the end, the Empire would let Irumclaw go. And without this anchor, it’d have to pull the whole frontier parsecs back; and Merseia and the Long Night would draw closer.”

  He sighed. “Leon Ammon is evil and contemptible,” he went on. “Under different circumstances, I’d propose we gut him with a butterknife. But he does have energy, determination, actual courage and foresight of sorts.

  “I went to his office to learn his intentions. When he told me, I agreed to go along because—well—

  “If the Imperial bureaucrats were offered Wayland, they wouldn’t know what to do with it. Probably they’d stamp its existence Secret, to avoid making any decisions or laying out any extra effort. If nothing else, a prize like that would make ‘conciliation and consolidation’ a wee bit difficult, eh?