TREMORS
“I know,” he said. And he was completely calm about it. “Are they on you?”
I was already feeling my arms, my body, my head under my hair. As soon as I’d jumped away, I’d started a pat down. I suspect it was instinctive. But I felt no movement anywhere, and shaking my head didn’t make anything fall out onto the floor.
I looked back up at Jarl, then stepped back, until I was as far away from him as I could be. “I’m clean,” I said, even as my mind processed the fact that we’d both been naked and unconscious in this room, probably for a good dozen hours. Why had they infested him and not me? It couldn’t be attraction to body heat, or they’d be on both of us. “Are they all over you?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Mostly my head, though some fall to my shoulders.”
It couldn’t even be attraction to the very weak electrical field that human brains generated. They’d be on me too. It had to be the genetics, but if it was the genetics, why would they concentrate on his head? His genes were the same all over his body, right?
No, I wasn’t an unlettered savage. I knew that some individuals were chimeras who had different genetics all over their bodies, but Jarl had been a designed individual and Kit was his clone, and I didn’t think that kind of makeup would be practical or acceptable. So, Kit was the same all over his body…The machines should be interested in his whole body.
I looked up and met with a very weird expression on Jarl’s face. It was a smile, I suppose, but it was the sort of smile you’d expect in someone who not only knew he was going to die in an atrocious way, but knew that he would endure the tortures of the damned on the way there, and that there was absolutely nothing he could do to avoid either.
“Don’t you understand?” he said. “The nanocytes are still active, and the nanocytes communicate with each other by a method that is used by computers. Electromagnetic communication. They…these things are attracted to it, they’re possibly trying to communicate with my brain directly. I don’t know. I feel…very odd. But I’ve felt very odd since I woke up in the Hopper. So I’m not sure they’re doing something, but it’s entirely possible they are.”
“If you think,” I told him, my voice more shrill than I intended, “that I’m going to be locked in here with three of you, you have another think coming. It’s bad enough that there’s you and Kit, but if your computer self is going to join the party, I’m going to do something we’ll both regret.”
He sighed. “I don’t know what you imagine we can do. We’re at the mercy of the computer and the peripherals. It’s possible it will realize we need to drink and eat if my vital signals go down. Or it’s possible it won’t. But whether it does or not is not under our control, and there’s nothing we can use to escape here. They took everything we had, every weapon.”
He was right on that, I thought. But then I looked around at the debris of the robot arm. I was being an idiot. My ability to assemble and create machinery had not only kept me relatively unscathed through my hell-raising childhood and youth, it had made me ultimately welcome in Eden and made it possible for me to travel with Kit. It was instinctive, meaning I could never put it into words. I just knew what worked together. And what didn’t.
And here I was in a room full of machinery and parts. Okay, so the light wasn’t the best in the world—it was low enough not to hurt Kit’s eyes. But there might be a solution for that in this room too. A lot of these server robots had lights, so people who saw them in deserted corridors, late at night, in hotels, didn’t just see a dark column moving towards them. Lighting them up tended to avoid collisions with guests who were much the worse for the wear.
At any rate, my throat hurt with dryness, and I was starting to feel distinctly peckish. Which meant that I needed something to distract me. And machines could usually distract me even in the worst circumstances.
I found a light first, in the front of one of the server robots. Extracting it and attaching a battery to it took a little longer, particularly when it came to finding a still-functioning battery.
After a while, Jarl seemed to take an interest in what I was doing, and stood up, as though to walk towards me, but I yelled, “Don’t. I don’t think those things will transfer to me, not if they are attracted to the nanocyte signals as you say, but I don’t want to try it out.”
He glowered a little, but as I turned the light on, even if it was aimed at the space in front of me, he seemed to lose any wish to help, and retreated to sit back down again. He rubbed the middle of his forehead with his fingertips, and I thought his head must hurt. Then I wondered if the little machines were causing that pain.
And if they were, what could I do?
I could get out of here.
First of all, I needed to figure out some sort of burner from these components. This was definitely easier said than done. For some reason it didn’t seem customary to equip cleaning and serving machinery commonly used in the hospitality industry three hundred years ago with lethal-force lasers. Who knew why? You’d think that one could find all sorts of useful things to do with killing lasers when it came to a resort hotel. Loud guest…zap. Rude customer…zap. Insufficiently clean lodger…zap.
Apparently though and much to my surprise, people who ran hotels were not like me, and weren’t interested in eliminating nuisances. Or at least not permanently.
I grumbled a bit at their failure of imagination, mostly because this place was starting to feel like a tomb, with Jarl sitting up against the wall, looking boneless and odd like a broken doll. I wondered if he was asleep or perhaps passed out, but frankly I didn’t even want to think about what would happen if the computer took control of him.
He might be emotionally twelve years old, but his personality enshrined in the computer definitely was. And it probably made sense, because not only didn’t the machine have human emotions—or at least I didn’t think so. No nerves, no instincts, nothing—but it hadn’t even been in touch with human behavior for three hundred years. So even if, once upon a time, it had had the memory of Jarl’s thoughts and emotions, now the only thing it would have would be very, very attenuated memories, most of them probably not even in that present and obvious part of itself that would be the equivalent of consciousness.
Meaning, once upon a time, since Jarl’s personality had been uploaded to it, it might have been able to fake human. Or at least to almost fake human. But now? Now it wouldn’t even know in which direction to point to find “human.” At best it would manage the more intellectual and detached sort of emotions, like boredom. But it had no gonads and no interest in women, beyond a remembered interest via Jarl. So, a twelve year old trying to make me do interesting stuff.
Think how much more interesting it could get, if he could control Jarl’s/Kit’s body and get a reaction from me?
I shuddered and I returned my attention to the machinery.
No lasers were no lasers. Again, reality is what it is, and after a certain point one can’t change it. One can adapt to reality and use it, or die. I could get some sharp bits of the machines to make passable knives, and bits of wire to make sheaths and straps for my ankles and arms. I wished very much I could make clothes too, but I was aware that this was silly.
Clothes have many uses, from bedazzling the members of the opposite—or same, depending on your preference—sex, to protecting the body in case of collision or abrasion…or of course, the vacuum of space. In this case, given that all I had at hand was wire, and little scraps of fabric that were designed as thermal insulation, and that at best they could be made into three tiny triangles to cover the more usually covered parts of the female body, none of those functions would be served. No, leave clothes alone.
Then I realized that my spectacular barbarian princess knives in their sheaths were quite useless. I couldn’t, after all, use them to stab machines. Even the smaller ones would do nothing but break, and let me dull the knife tip on floor or wall.
So I was magnificently equipped to fight off who
ever opened our door—and why would they open our door?—provided they were living, breathing creatures, who probably couldn’t get in here, unless they had Jarl’s genetics, anyway. Right.
Did I ever say I was intelligent? No, I believe I’ve admitted that, like my late, very unlamented sire, I was cunning. I usually could find my way out of trouble because I could read other people, or know how to scare them. But here, the computer wasn’t people. And the chances of its—his?—sending people against us were slim to none. Actually the chances of its sending anything at all to open this door were slim to none, and I still had no idea how to get out of here.
I looked at Jarl again. Right. At least I could fashion something that would get rid of the spiders if they should open the door. Or at least something that would kill enough of them to make them stay away from me.
So I set about adding to my fabulous prehistoric weapons with a selection of hammers. Hammers are actually more useful than knives, if you must fight.
Unless you’re good at throwing the knives with unerring accuracy, you probably won’t get much joy out of them. But a hammer? If you can throw a hammer in the general direction of your foe, it doesn’t matter exactly where it hits, nor if the right bit is uppermost. If you hit someone with a heavy enough flung hammer, they will be at the very least distracted. If you manage accuracy of aiming, then you can kill someone.
You can kill someone with knives too, of course, but it’s a much more exact craft, and it must be performed up close and personal.
I had just fashioned a belt from wires, and hung it with hammers all around, when I heard Jarl speak.
His voice sounded very young and very scared, and the words echoed, forlorn, in this locked chamber, “Mother, I’m frightened.”
MOTHER I’M FRIGHTENED
My hair did stand on end, and I was, for a moment, frozen in place.
I didn’t think anything about it. Thinking didn’t come into it. Two instincts warred in me, the first being to console the creature speaking in that little voice and demanding comfort. The second was to kill it.
I’m not going to justify myself. I don’t think I could. I think fear of the mentally ill, like the uncanny valley effect that makes people afraid of things that are almost human but not quite, is one of the oldest instincts of humanity. It was what had made humans create the server bots shaped like columns with extrudable arms, instead of the humanoid creatures of ancient dreams. It was also probably responsible for the survival of the species.
No? Think about it. When a mentally ill proto-human was aggressive to others and large, how hard would it be to exterminate an entire band of hominids? Its own tribe, its own people?
I was sure that most of the legends of possession and were-animals came from incidents like that and were designed to allow people to do what must be done—kill the loved one who had become a danger—and go on living with themselves.
Compassion to the mentally ill and attempts at treatment were much more recent instincts, from a time when population had become so large and science so advanced, that killing those who might become irrationally dangerous was no longer a matter of life and death.
But now I was in a small room with someone who could easily overpower me, and he had clearly gone around the bend.
How did I know he had gone crazy? Easy. The voice that spoke was Jarl’s, but Jarl had never had a mother.
I swallowed hard, then said, in a whisper, as though attempting to communicate with a co-conspirator, “Kit?”
There was a little whimper, as Jarl tried to pick himself up off the floor, and seemed to be having trouble controlling his arms and legs. “Mother? Where are we?” And then in a completely different voice, “Irena, is that you?”
Uh uh. I was locked in a small room with six feet plus of crazy. Forget that we didn’t have food or drink. Forget that we didn’t have any way to get out of here, and that if we managed it, we would have to contend with the devil-machines created by a computer that had also gone around the bend, probably centuries ago, I was locked in a room with someone who could easily take me out for whatever irrational reason it conjured.
Normally it would be a great opportunity to hit him on the head and render him unconscious. No, even I wouldn’t have killed someone for going crazy. What can I say? Despite the barbarian princess weapons, I had grown up in a relatively safe and prosperous society. I had the prejudices of the civilized.
Besides, hitting this particular crazy on the head might simply eliminate what remained of my husband. If he wasn’t gone already, under the double onslaught of the nanocytes trying to turn him into Jarl and whatever these electronic spiders were telling the nanocytes to turn him into.
I wouldn’t think of that, though. I would simply somehow reach the computer and turn it off. But there was that reality thing again. How was I going to reach the computer that these machines were designed to keep safe? More than that, how was I going to get out of this room?
I realized light was decreasing and looked towards the window, and then it hit me. The window!
“Jarl, what are the windows in this compound made of?”
“No one helped me get out,” he said, sounding defensive. “You have no reason to punish everyone. It was my doing. No, I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to look at the area around here. I didn’t…No. Please don’t.” The last was a scream, and when I looked over, Jarl’s eyes were blank, and he seemed to be lost in some dreadful memory. His voice sounded young, but not like a child’s, and it didn’t take much imagination to picture him defending himself before one of the managers of the home he’d grown up in. I didn’t want or need to know any more than that.
I did, however, need to know if that window was breakable.
At some point between the twentieth and the twenty-fifth century, windows had changed from being made of clear transparent glass to being made of ceramite or, in the case of high-tech or high-security applications, of transparent dimatough. Mind you, lots of windows were still made of glass even in my time, because it was so much cheaper than ceramite, but this had been a high-end recreational compound. More than that, it had been taken over by a high-end paranoid, which meant that I could count myself very lucky if the windows weren’t made of dimatough.
Here was how things stacked up, though—while glass would be relatively easy to break, ceramite was almost impossible. And dimatough…well, you could melt dimatough with very specialized torches, but I didn’t have even a laser at hand.
I wished I could remember when transparent ceramite had become viable for windows. I knew the first type of ceramite created had been a sort of gingivitis-pink and smooth. It had been used to create rounded houses which were known as mushrooms. But I didn’t know how much longer it had taken for it to replace glass, or for it to become cheap enough to be used for windows.
If I had known how much I’d need it, I’d probably have devoted my misspent adolescence to learning the history of materials science, instead of learning about and exploring new ways to ride an antigrav wand in defiance of the law.
But that was all beside the point, and what did I intend to do about it, right then? I could improvise a way to climb to that window from the shells of machines scattered around me. But what if I got up there and there was nothing doing? What if Jarl, just before leaving in the Je Reviens, had replaced the windows with transparent dimatough?
And what if he hadn’t? What was I doing sitting around here, besides thinking that I’d really like some steak, anyway?
I forgot the imaginary steak, and the desired bottle of water which for some reason seemed even more attractive. Instead, I started piling up the broken machinery so I could reach the window.
Jarl talked to himself, his voice ranging through his life, from child to adult, his mind seemingly wandering at random through memories—his and Kit’s both.
“And if they mean to tell me how to pilot when none of them is a Cat, I’ll tell them where to shove it,” Kit’s voice said, followed by Ja
rl’s. “I was out…I was just…I was out, you see, and now they’re rounding up…they said something about escaped Mules. Lady, I’m not a Mule, please, save me. If the police catch me—”
It made my hair rise on end, that voice, the words that didn’t refer to anything in this room, anything in reality on Earth for the last few hundred years. I didn’t want to hear this, and I didn’t want to think about it, but the only way out was through that window, which frankly might be too small for me.
As I managed to reach the top, I decided to try the easiest method first. I took one of the larger hammers, drew back and banged the window hard.
I never expected it to work. Glass seemed the least likely thing for that window to be made of.
The thing is, it wasn’t. The window didn’t shatter like glass, not even safety glass. Instead, when the hammer first hit it, it seemed completely intact. And then within less than the time it took me to draw breath, it cracked and crazed, and it seemed to…splinter. Like wood under the action of acid, it seemed to disintegrate into its component fibers, until only a few threads of it were attached to the frame.
I felt the threads, which were like steel wool. Ceramite. Ceramite must become fragile with age. At least this type of early, transparent ceramite spun this thin.
I wouldn’t know. Again, I didn’t spend my adolescence studying materials science. A failure of the imagination, just like the people who had designed hotel machinery and had never thought that killing-force lasers might come in handy. Absent time-travel, neither were remediable.
I knew that the mushrooms made in the twenty-first century still stood. At least those with historical significance still stood. So, I was going to assume that some ceramite didn’t disintegrate with age. But this one had, and it was no use complaining about it.
“Sinistra!”
The voice made me jump and turn, but it was Jarl, who remained slumped as he’d been, though he still seemed to be making efforts to get up. It was like his legs didn’t both belong to the same person. Hell for all I knew, even a single one of his legs might not belong wholly to the one person. It must be getting crowded in Kit’s skull.
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