by Tom Holt
She shivered from head to toe. Oh, she thought.
13
New York
Once upon a time, K76 had been the cutting edge. It had cost the taxpayers of its parent country far more than they could afford, but nobody questioned the expense, because it was a matter of national survival. Into K76 they’d installed the very latest in laser weaponry, along with communications and target recognition/acquisition equipment nobody knew had been invented yet. Its purpose was to recognise and shoot down missiles launched by one now bankrupt and highly embarrassed country against another similarly bust and bashful country. It had been the last, best hope.
Then, somehow or other, peace sort of happened, and K76’s owners had had other things on their minds, such as shame and economic ruin. Fortuitously, someone remembered to switch off the communications link before the control centre was mothballed. A lot of little red and green lights on K76’s interface console went dark, and that was supposed to be that. If anybody gave it any thought, they assumed that the last, best hope would just sort of stay put for ever, an inert chunk of metal floating weightless and irrelevant in the black velvet sky. And, for a long time, it did.
But then a big thing drew up and assumed a parking orbit right next to it, and K76 suddenly woke up. Maybe the big thing was leaking so much power from its monstrous engines that the tiny weapons platform was able to feed off it, like one of those fish that live by clinging to sharks. Maybe it had been programmed with a super-super-super-secret back-up failsafe system that nobody in government needed to know about, designed to activate an auxiliary power source if a potentially hostile object came within a certain distance. K76 didn’t know. All it knew was that it was back in business, and something wasn’t right.
It activated its crude twentieth-century sensors and scanned the big thing. Threat? it asked itself. It noted the big thing’s primary systems — it couldn’t understand them, of course, just as a frog couldn’t understand a steamroller, but it recognised them as weapons. It had a simple binary decision-making process: yes/no. The big thing, it decided, was a definite yes.
K76 charged its capacitors to bursting point, took aim and fired. A millisecond later, the blast from its twelve laser cannon bounced off the big thing’s shields right back at it and melted it into tiny droplets of molten titanium, which quickly lost their energy and hung in emptiness like a freeze-frame photograph of a shower of rain— Mark Twain jumped, and spilt his coffee.
“Are you all right?” a fellow-worker asked.
“‘What? Oh, I’m fine,” Twain replied. “Just a twinge in my leg. Cramp.”
The fellow-worker nodded sympathetically. “It’s the chairs,” she said. “They give you backache. You can adjust them, but they don’t stay adjusted.”
Twain scanned the nearest chair, noted seventeen obvious design flaws, wondered why nobody had bothered to put them right. “Yes,” he said. “Ah well, back to work.”
He put the coffee cup, now half empty, down on the desk beside him. He had no intention of drinking the stuff. His scans had revealed that the fluid had no nutritional value and was mildly poisonous. But everybody else in the room had drunk at least one cup that morning, and he didn’t want to make himself conspicuous.
He reopened his screen and called up the program he’d been studying. On the face of it, just another primitive Dirter artefact, a seriously inefficient tool for doing an unnecessary job. But there was something about it that reminded him, in a way he couldn’t quite place, of home.
He ran through it as quickly as the workstation’s primeval scrolling facility would allow. Then he did it again, and again. On the fourth run-through, he stopped and stared.
There it was; obvious, now he’d noticed it. As blatant and out-of-place as a plastic handle on a flint axe. It was only a tiny step, a trivial conjunction joining two monolithic blocks of barbaric Dirter code, but it was unmistakably, definitively Ostar. The reason he’d overlooked it earlier was because it was so drearily familiar. In an Ostar program there’d be a million such tacking-together bits, the everyday punctuation of low-grade industrial software. In this context, it was like finding a bottle-top enveloped in a chunk of prehistoric amber.
He examined it carefully. It was just possible that it was the result of inadvertent contamination from his own systems, a shortcut he’d absent-mindedly put in himself, to speed up the scanning process. He double-checked. The program’s tamper seals were intact.
Look at you, he thought. You shouldn’t be here. The question is, where did you come from?
He assessed the possibilities. Why would someone with access to Ostar technology write Dirter programs using Dirter tools, but slip in a tiny bit of Ostar punctuation? Didn’t make sense. Unless, he rationalised, the hypothetical someone was — like himself —trying to pass himself off as a Dirter. He considered the program as a whole: PaySoft XJ5567, a basic commercial operating system that had, in its day (about five months ago), been revolutionary and state-of-the-art. True, it was a flint axe; but it was a much, much better flint axe than the even cruder type the tribe had been using hitherto. It was the sort of flint axe someone who was used to steel axes would make, in order to corner the palaeolithic axe market. But the steel-axe-trained flint-knapper had, at some point, grown tired, or lazy. Couldn’t be bothered with a great big galumphing Dirter conjunction at this point, so he’d slipped in an Ostar one, to save time and effort. Because it was, comparatively speaking, so elegant and sophisticated, so microscopically small compared to the native product, the Dirters hadn’t even noticed it was there; and the function it performed was so mundane and trivial, it hadn’t occurred to them to wonder how it had got itself done. A caveman wouldn’t necessarily notice that the axehead was bonded to the handle by cyanoacrylate adhesive rather than boiled-up sinew glue.
Twain leaned back in his seat (his fellow-worker had been right; these chairs were murder) and tried not to let the flood of implications drown him. Now, then. He had to assume that, previous to his arrival, the only contact between Dirt and the Ostar had been the Mark One— “Hi there.”
He looked up, and saw the Dirter female he’d nearly spilt coffee on. She was standing beside his chair, a little bit further than arm’s reach away from him, and her body language was a thesaurusful of synonyms for nervous, tentative and embarrassed. He ran a recognition/interpretation routine in DirtBrain and identified the symptoms.
Oh, he thought.
He’d specified his human body as a Dish because, according to the cultural database, good-looking Dirters had an advantage over their aesthetically challenged fellows. They were more likely to succeed. Other Dirters instinctively wanted to please them, to be their friend. It was something to do with mating selection criteria and basically rather yucky, but Twain (or rather Mark Two) had reckoned he could use all the advantages he could get. He hadn’t thought it through properly, he realised, or he’d have considered the possible complications.
Etiquette protocols, he screamed at his data server. Get me the etiquette protocols now.
“Hi,” he said, and he noted that his voice sounded atypically high and strained; a physiological reaction built into the flesh and bone, triggered by the female’s behavioural signals.
“It’s your first day, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
The female smiled. It wasn’t nearly as good as his smile. “My name’s Katya.”
“Pleased to meet you,” the etiquette protocols prompted him. “I’m Mark.”
There was an awkward silence. But according to the behavioural database there was supposed to be an awkward silence at this point, followed by an artificially superficial exchange of small-talk, during which both parties did their best to conceal their true feelings. It occurred to Twain to wonder how the Dirters had managed to survive as a species for so long.
You don’t need this, his inner control centre told him. Say something offputting, and she’ll leave you alone. His dialogue composition matrix suggested various su
itable lines: Gosh, you remind me a lot of my wife; Say, why don’t we head for the fire extinguisher locker and do it right now?; I just love mid-twentieth-century musical comedies, don’t you? The commands passed to his speech centres, but he didn’t say any of them. Something was overriding his control commands, and it didn’t seem to be a hostile mil-spec jamming signal. Something else.
“So,” said the Katya female. “Do you think you’re going to like it here?”
His control centre was demanding to know what was going on, but all it got was Program not responding, please wait. Meanwhile, Twain’s mouth replied, “Yeah, it’s great. The work seems very interesting, and everybody’s been so friendly.” Then the mouth stretched into a big, big smile, and Central Control flipped into panic mode. High above the clouds, a whole bank of consoles came alive, a red light started flashing and a siren began to whoop — none of which was particularly helpful, of course.
Central Control said, Pull yourself together, for crying out loud. The fate of the entire Ostar species rests with you. It’s just a bug in the warmware. Ignore it, and execute the most recent command sequence.
Twain’s mind replied, Hmm?
It was a difficult decision, made harder by the fact that the primary decision-making subroutines for his autonomous functions had been downloaded into the Twain module, leaving only backups and auxiliaries aboard the flying bomb in geosynchronous orbit. In an emergency, however, the failsafe back-up had the authority to override the primaries. It resolved on the only course of action it could think of.
It said, Download and run musical sequence diddle-um-diddle-um-diddle-dum-dum.
In spite of the override facility, Central Control couldn’t access the Twain module’s cerebral nodes; but it could, and did, pass a command sequence direct to the fingers. They started to drum on the desktop. Then the left foot joined in, building a rhythm that the brain couldn’t ignore. Quietly, through clenched teeth, Twain began to hum.
“They’re pretty nice people to work for,” the Katya female was saying. She’d noticed the humming, but was pretending she hadn’t. It was bad manners, according to the database, to hum while someone was talking to you. “I’ve been here three years, and—”
“Three years. Gosh.” To counteract the rudeness of the humming, Twain put on his biggest smile and held it there. “Is that a long time?”
The Katya female looked at him. “Well,” she said, “it’s kind of like, three years. Before that, I was with the Edmonton Credit Union. It was all right there, I guess, but I like it more at CredMay.”
“Like what more?”
Her eyes widened just a bit. Too late, his idiom subfunction explained that, in this context, “to like it” means “to be happy”, intransitive. “Well,” she said (she was persuading herself that she’d heard him say something else, something that made sense; resourceful creatures, these Dirters, with a genuine flair for self-deception), “I guess it’s the buzz. The atmosphere.”
By now, what with the hum, he was lucky if he was hearing one word in three. “The atmosphere,” he said. “Oxygen 21 per cent; nitrogen 78 per cent, tum-ti-tum; carbon dioxide—”
She laughed. He analysed, and concluded that she was interpreting his data as some kind of joke. It was a nervous, propitiatory laugh, and she was deliberately maintaining eye contact, the way ehhrt hunters did back home when confronting a cornered, wounded female. It must, he reflected, have been something-wom-ething-umthing he’d said. Unfortunately, his system was now so clogged up with minims, quavers and their consequential vapour trails of mathematical calculation that he couldn’t remember what he’d said, let alone pull it to bits and see what was wrong with it. Never mind; at least he still had the smile. He managed to retract his lips an extra five millimetres each side (that simply wouldn’t have been possible with organic skin, but his synthesized replica had the tensile strength of carbon fibre) and said, “I just made a joke.”
She laughed again, but her eyes were very round and wide, and she was starting to back away. Other members of staff had turned round in their chairs and were staring, too. He realised he was humming out loud, and beating time on the desktop with his clenched fist. The cultural database could offer no specifics, but he was inclined to think that this probably wasn’t orthodox behaviour. Not good. He managed to blurt out, “Excuse me, which way’s the toilet?” without actually singing it. Someone pointed. He jumped to his feet and fled.
Once the toilet door had slammed behind him, there was a profound silence on the seventh floor. Katya groped her way back to her seat and began sobbing quietly. Someone said, “That the new software engineer?”
“Yes.”
“Ah.”
14
Novosibirsk
The two men who quite definitely weren’t werewolves were rummaging in a dustbin round the back of Novosibirsk’s premier restaurant. After a while, they found what they were looking for.
“Will you look at the size of that?” one of them said.
The other one was indeed looking. “What sort of animal—?” His friend shrugged. “Not a cat, anyhow. Though they’ve got some fair-sized cats on this planet.”
“This big?” the other one said hopefully.
“But they just let them wander about wild. No, I reckon this is cow.”
“C—?”
“Sort of a big m’dddt,” the other one explained. “But without the scales.”
That gave them both pause for thought. Then the first one said, “What the hell, a bone’s a bone,” and tucked his prize inside his suit jacket. Then he adjusted his tie. “We’d better clear out before anyone sees us,” he said.
They walked quickly round the corner on to the main street, slowed down and headed east. Nobody seemed interested in them, two middle-aged men in smart suits, though one had his jacket buttoned up and his lapels round his ears, and was hugging himself.
“A m’dddt without scales. That’s weird.”
“It’s all in the FAQ,” the other one said reproachfully. “And they also eat birds.”
“So?”
“With the feathers off.”
That killed the conversation for a while. Then one of them said, “We’d better check on George Stetchkin. Did you bring the monitor?”
The other one held up something that would’ve passed for a mobile phone. “Life-signs are OK. He’s asleep.”
“Ah. Goes to bed early, then.”
“Something like that.” The not-werewolf paused, then said, “Are you sure he’s up to it? I mean, he didn’t strike me as—”
“He figured out about the aposiderium, didn’t he? That’s smart, for a primate.”
“But he ingests harmful toxins known to impair brain functions. That doesn’t make sense.”
“It’s what they do. He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”
His colleague blinked. “Really?”
“That’s what they think, anyway. It says so in the FAQ.” He frowned. “Maybe we should help him some more, though. But subtly. We don’t want to freak him out.” He stopped. To his right, a dark, narrow alley led off the main drag. “Do you…?”
The other one nodded. “Let’s chew it over for a while.” They took turns with the bone. When there was nothing left but splinters, one of them said, “Tastes a bit like y’rwwt.”
“You reckon?”
“It sort of grows on you. Hey, do you think we could buy some cows and take them home?”
His friend shook his head. “You don’t know what they eat.”
“Well?”
He told him.
“You’re kidding.”
“Damn straight.”
“I really wish you hadn’t told me that.”
“Only when they’re young, mind. When they’re older they eat grass.”
“Even so …” The other one shook himself, as though he’d just been in water. “I say we get the job done and get off this planet as soon as possible.”
�
��Agreed.” The not-the-slightest-bit-werewolf eased a sliver of bone from between his front teeth. “So, how do we point Stetchkin in the right direction without scaring him to death?”
The other one thought about that. “We could teleport him up to the ship under heavy sedation, and use the mind probe to implant the clues in his subconscious mind,” he suggested. “Then, we programme him to respond to a latent command, like a password or a sequence of prime numbers or musical notes, and that’d activate the command and he’d remember the clue. Or,” he went on, “we could dose him up with psychotropic drugs and install a hidden back-up consciousness primed to fulfil specified tasks in response to specified stimuli, like exposure to phaleron radiation. Or we could—”
“Or we could write him a letter.”
15
Novosibirsk
Eventually, George found a proper drink. A considerable time after that, he woke up in a gutter in an alley. His wallet was empty, his shoes were missing, and he had a headache.
But surely, said a little voice inside his head, surely the whole point of drinking is to make you feel better, or else why do it? But you don’t feel better, do you?
Shut up, he told the little voice.
In fact, you feel considerably worse.
Yes, he told the voice, I know. It hadn’t escaped my attention.
So why—?
Because I’m an idiot, he said to the voice, and himself at large. Because I’m a loser and a mess. And would you mind keeping my inner voice down, please?
Ah. Right. Sorry.
He got up, groaned, staggered a pace or two and sat down again. As he did so, something in the inside pocket of his jacket prodded him in the ribs. He investigated — he’d never realised before what a complicated mechanism an inside pocket is, and how hard it can be to operate — and found a brand new Warthog. The Mark Six, which he didn’t own. Hell, he thought, I must’ve picked it up by mistake in some bar, thereby adding theft to my litany of cardinal faults. Wonderful.