“What the hell do I care what they want?” Thaddeus asked, as he sank back into his seat. “I want it! I never claimed to be doing this for anyone else!"
Geste abandoned that line and groped for another.
“You could get killed,” he said. “You don't know what's happened out there these last few centuries. You might run smack into some sort of interstellar police force, or somebody else's empire, and get yourself killed."
“I'll risk it,” Thaddeus said. “I don't believe it, for one thing; I saw what you decadent babies were like, and now that you're all fake immortals, four hundred years wouldn't be enough to change that. You people need a thousand years just to decide what to have for breakfast."
“But what if some group of short-lifers took charge, caught someone by surprise..."
Thaddeus stared at him in such open disbelief that Geste did not bother to finish his question.
“Short-lifers,” Thaddeus said, “are absolutely harmless. They don't live long enough to learn anything dangerous. I've survived seven thousand years of the worst short-lifers can throw at me. If there's a short-lifer empire out there, all I have to do is wait for it to fall. It never takes very long."
The Trickster was by no means certain Thaddeus was right about that, but he did not see any sign that Thaddeus could be swayed by logical argument, and he did not continue that line of debate. “All right,” Geste said, “let me think.” He reached up and scratched his ear.
Thaddeus took the opportunity to signal a housekeeping machine for a drink. He turned to Geste, intending to play the gracious host and offer the Trickster something, and found himself staring at a sparkling web of metal in Geste's hand, a web he recognized immediately as a stasis field generator, though he had never seen one so small.
Before he could say anything, Geste triggered his weapon, and Thaddeus froze into total immobility, a sphere of air around him freezing with him. The soft light in the room refracted strangely through the interface between normal air and the motionless field, and the colors within the field—the red of Thaddeus's angry face, the grey of his chair, the black of his hair, the brown of his clothing—seemed to fade.
As the stasis field reached full intensity the three-meter globe first turned a dead, flat black, then brightened to gleaming, reflective silver, as light became first unable to leave the field, and then unable to enter.
Thaddeus was gone, sealed inside a mirror-finish bubble of timelessness. The housekeeping machine carrying his drink, a floating wedge of black with a crystal goblet embedded in it, bumped futilely against the bubble's bright, impenetrable surface.
Geste stared, trembling. He had forced himself to remain calm while arguing with Thaddeus; he had had his internal machines and symbiotes under orders to keep him calm, and a semi-intelligent biochip chanting gently hypnotic reassurance directly to his audial nerves. He had been as slick and smooth as anyone could have wanted in pulling the stasis generator from the bent-space pocket he had built into his ear.
Thaddeus had scanned his guests up and down the spectrum, checked for every sort of emission imaginable—Geste had expected as much, and had detected some of the operative devices with his own internal mechanisms. Thaddeus had blasted them all with high-speed flashes of high-intensity ultraviolet, infra-red, and gamma radiation that were too quick to seriously harm human tissue, but which would fry virtually all surface-dwelling or air-carried tailored microbes, and would burn out the metastable energy fields that made up noncorporeal intelligences—not that they had brought any noncorporeals to Denner's Wreck, or had the means to create them. He had doused them all in chemical suppressants to prevent any sort of pheromone-assisted psychological assault. He had removed their clothing and searched it, all the way down to the subatomic level.
Their symbiotes had been damaged, their own tissues somewhat damaged as well, and Geste was fairly sure that he had lost some magnetic memory somewhere, but Thaddeus had been reassured that he had disarmed his visitors.
However, he had not checked on the shape of the spaces they occupied.
Even Thaddeus could not think of everything.
Geste had counted on that. He had never heard of putting a bent-space pocket into a human body, and he had hoped that Thaddeus hadn't either.
Not that that had been his only trick. Thaddeus had wiped out a wide variety of artificial bacteria and a few viruses with his disinfectants and ultraviolet, and had confiscated more than a dozen weapons of various kinds in Geste's clothing.
The bent-space pocket had been the Trickster's best gimmick, though, and he knew it. People built the pockets into floaters all the time, but not into themselves; it seemed somehow unhealthy to put a hole through one's own body, even a polyspatial hole that bypassed mere normal-space flesh. For one thing, an opening was needed. Virtually all the natural openings in the human body were already spoken for, and creating new holes was dangerous and unesthetic.
Geste, of course, had been desperate. He had considered anchoring the pocket to the roof of his mouth, but had rejected that; he had needed to be able to talk. Instead, he had sacrificed the hearing in his right ear. He hoped that removing the pocket and rebuilding his inner ear would not be too difficult.
His trick had worked, and Thaddeus was captured, and now Geste's programmed calm had run out. Adrenalin poured into his blood unregulated by his damaged and panicky symbiotes. He stood, shaking, as the realization sank in that he had done it, he had stopped Thaddeus.
A sliver of triumph worked its way through the numb relief, and then shattered into full-blown gloating. He had done it! Thaddeus was neatly boxed up and out of the way.
On the heels of exultation came doubt. Was Thaddeus boxed up? It seemed too easy, somehow.
Perhaps there were machines that were programmed to release Thaddeus. Perhaps there were creatures with orders to kill the prisoners. Geste stepped back and looked about warily.
“Not bad, Geste,” Thaddeus’ voice said, speaking from the wall behind him. “Not bad at all."
Geste turned, telling himself that it was just a machine, a recording or an artificial intelligence synthesizing its master's voice.
“A very nice effort,” the voice said. “But not enough. No, Geste, I'm not a recording, not a machine. I'm Thaddeus. The real Thaddeus."
Geste was trembling again, harder than ever.
“You see,” Thaddeus said, “you only got one of me."
Chapter Twenty-Three
“The Power called Leila of the Mountain of Fire lives inside a mountain, in the great jungles far to the southwest. The top of the mountain was blasted away long ago, and inside the hole that the blast left burn fires so hot that the rock itself melts and flows like water. Whether it was Leila who blasted the mountain and lit the fires, or whether that happened before she came to live there, no one now remembers.
"Whatever the cause, the mountain burns, but Leila lives in it unharmed. Her skin is darker in hue than any mortal's, even a southerner's—almost black. Some say this is due to the heat of the flames surrounding her home.
"There is a village at the foot of her mountain, a large and prosperous village, and Leila looks after the people there. When one falls ill she comes to his bedside and touches him, and five times out of six he is well again the next day. When the crops fail or the hunters return empty-handed, Leila's creatures bring baskets of strange food and leave them in the village square, for the Elders to distribute to those who need it most. Storms always pass by the village without harming it, yet there is never a drought.
"This might be paradise, save that Leila asks a price for her protection; once a year she chooses a handsome young man from the village who must come alone to her home atop the mountain. This man knows he has been chosen when a voice calls him by name, a voice that speaks from the air.
"If the chosen one refuses, then Leila's protection is withdrawn from the village; no baskets of food are brought when supplies run low, the ill are left to recover or die on their own,
storms no longer pass by, and a thousand lesser evils go unhindered. Leila takes no vengeance, she merely withdraws her aid.
"But that is enough; in all the memories of the villagers, and in all the tales going back many generations, no chosen one has held out against the summons for more than a season.
"And what becomes of the chosen ones, the sacrifices? No one knows. Some have returned alive, after a season or a year or ten years, but these fortunate ones never remember anything that happened after they passed the rim of the crater. Most never return at all. None have ever been found dead—if they return, they return alive and well, and usually live long, happy lives, troubled only by their inability to recall what befell them..."
—from the tales of
Atheron the Storyteller
* * * *
Bredon paused, hesitantly glancing up and down the slick grey walls of the passage. He had counted four doors in the left-hand wall of this corridor, two of the regular large ones, and two wide, low ones intended for service machines, so that the next would be the fifth. Aulden had said to take the fifth door on the left.
The door, of course, was closed. That was not the problem. Getting through doors was easy. All he had to do was yell, “Emergency override! Human in danger!” and the doors would slide out of his way. That was a safety feature that Aulden said had been built into every hold on Denner's Wreck, back when they were first erected by the automated equipment Mother—the mother ship—had provided.
Of course, some of the Powers had removed safety features, or altered them, or tampered with them in various ways. Thaddeus certainly had. However, he had apparently not known about this one. At least so far, the command had worked on every door Bredon had shouted at in Fortress Holding, allowing him to roam freely.
No, the problem was not that the door was closed, nor even that he was unsure whether it was the right door.
He was unsure, he admitted to himself. The Fortress was a maze, with rooms and corridors criss-crossing apparently at random, almost all of them a dismal, uniform grey. It made the colorful and variform chambers of Arcade, which had utterly baffled Bredon at first, seem simple.
Aulden had given him instructions for reaching Thaddeus’ war room, which Aulden had provided unwilling assistance in building, but the directions were hard to follow in the face of the endless corridors and the frequent encounters with patrolling machines. He could easily have miscounted somewhere, or turned the wrong way.
But it was not the chance that he faced the wrong door that worried him. It was the patrolling machines that caused him to hesitate. What if one was just behind the door? What if this one was not as cooperative as the others? After all, this would be the very heart of the Fortress, and it might be more carefully guarded than the corridors.
The first patrol machine had terrified him. A low, boxlike silver affair with several jointed appendages, it had stopped suddenly, pointed something at him, and demanded, “State your business."
Bredon had mouthed the meaningless syllables Aulden had taught him, hoping he pronounced them correctly.
“Acknowledged,” the machine replied.
“Abort all programming and await orders,” Bredon told it, his voice unsteady.
“Acknowledged,” the machine said again. It stood, silently waiting, completely harmless, while Bredon walked on.
That was no standard safety feature, of course; the universal password was something Aulden had done his best to infiltrate into every system in the fortress when he first began to distrust Thaddeus, decades earlier. He was unsure how successful he had been.
Bredon knew that it had not worked everywhere; the doors, for example, were too simple to be tampered with subtly, but those still had the original safety overrides. Other machines Thaddeus had programmed entirely by himself, in careful isolation, so Aulden had never gotten a chance at those. Those would be the most dangerous, should Bredon encounter any, even though they were generally stupid.
Even with the ones Aulden had tampered with, there were ways Thaddeus could overrule Aulden's gimmick, without necessarily even realizing the password existed. He had hit on one quite by accident. Thaddeus had programmed his machines to literally not hear Aulden's voice, either spoken or transmitted.
It was a simple enough procedure, really, but not something Aulden had ever thought of. He grudgingly admired Thaddeus for coming up with it.
Even when the other captives had told him what Thaddeus had said about it, Aulden had had trouble believing it could work completely. It was a simple concept, but Thaddeus was so technically inept that Aulden had hoped for some loophole.
Aulden had tried to use his secret password to force the machines to free him and the other prisoners, but without success. Monitor heard him, but simply didn't react to the password at all; Monitor was apparently an independent entity of Thaddeus's own creation, not linked in any vital way to the rest of the fortress, and not built to any of Aulden's own designs.
Most of the other machines did not acknowledge Aulden's existence at all.
Aulden had always thought that he would be safe, that his mastery of the machines would allow him to resist any sort of coercion Thaddeus—or Brenner, or any other potential troublemaker on Denner's Wreck—might apply. He knew that he, or his built-in equipment, could dominate almost any program.
He had to make himself heard, though, before he could affect an artificial intelligence. When the metal claws had reached out for him and he had shouted commands at them, both orally and through his skull-liner and other internal systems, it was as though he had simply stood silently. The claws had picked him up and carried him away.
He had puzzled it out during the hours he spent in chains. The machines had not heard him. That was the only explanation.
When Brenner and Sheila and Rawl and Lady Sunlight had been delivered to the prison they had confirmed his theory. Thaddeus had told them the machines could not hear them.
Aulden had tested that. He had had each of the other prisoners shout coded commands to the machines that brought food and water, and the commands had been ignored—not merely refused, but ignored, as if they were not heard at all.
And of course, Thaddeus would have made sure that his machines could not hear any of the other immortals, either. He did not have to worry about any sort of infiltration. Machines could very easily be instructed not to accept orders from anyone but a human being—in many cases that was standard default programming—so no machines or artificial creatures could deliver commands from his enemies. The other immortals would need to give orders personally, rather than through any sort of inhuman proxy, and Thaddeus had made sure that such orders would not be heard.
Bredon, though—Thaddeus had had no records of Bredon's voice, no reason to blank that voice out of the hearing of his machines. With Aulden's passwords, Bredon could override Thaddeus's control of any machine that Aulden had ever worked on.
Aulden was the only real technician on the planet, and Mother and all her subsidiaries had been built to his design. Most of Fortress Holding's machines would now obey Bredon, if he could get to them.
Fortress Holding had one unfortunate feature, from Bredon's point of view. It had no central controlling intelligence, no equivalent to the Skyland's mind, or Arcade's Gamesmaster, or the housekeeper at Autumn House. A single central intelligence susceptible to being overridden by Aulden's universal password would have been very convenient, but Thaddeus had not been obliging enough to provide one. Aulden said that Thaddeus had something called a “frankenstein complex” and refused to trust a single central intelligence. Instead, he used hundreds of separate intelligences.
All the major ones, however, could be commanded from a central control station. That was where Thaddeus spent most of his time, where he concocted his schemes, where he had directed the attack on the High Castle. He called it his war room. If Bredon, or any other mortal who knew Aulden's password, could get into that room he could cripple Thaddeus's entire fortress in a matter of
seconds.
Accordingly, that was where Bredon was headed, leaving a trail of open doors and blanked machines behind him, trying unsuccessfully to follow Aulden's hurried directions, unaware that he had miscounted doors in the corridor because of differences in terminology. Bredon, trained to be observant, had counted access panels. Aulden, trained in remembering details, knew quite well that the access panels were there, but did not consider them to be doors, and failed to realize just how spotty Bredon's grounding in the culture of the immortals was. To Bredon, anything a human or machine passed through in going from one chamber to another was a door; to Aulden, only openings intended to be used by humans were doors.
The correct door, the door Aulden had meant to direct him to, was a hundred meters further on.
Bredon hesitated. He was, he believed, nearing the war room now, with just two more chambers and a short passageway to pass through. What if, worse than a mere machine, Thaddeus himself waited on the other side of this door?
Well, he would just have to risk it. “Emergency override!” he called. “Human in danger! Open up!"
The door slid obediently open, and he found himself looking into an unlit storeroom lined with dusty, vacant shelves and smelling of ink. No doors led to the war room antechamber. No doors led anywhere.
“Oh, you stinking demons!” Bredon hissed, realizing he was lost.
Worse than lost, he was alone in the enemy's stronghold, unarmed and virtually defenseless, without even a symbiote to hold wounds closed or counteract poisons.
No, he corrected himself, he was not unarmed or defenseless. He had Aulden's password. He turned and looked back down the corridor.
No one was coming. His danger, though real, was not immediate.
He still had no idea why Aulden's directions had failed him, but that did not matter. He was a hunter; when one trap or strategem failed, he devised another instantly.
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