I wondered if Ylva was trying to find us. Were armies of ERSIE security men even now bursting through the hyperdoor onto Other Venus, seizing the little men in the compound, making them tell where we'd gone? Maybe they'd be bringing an ERSIE warship with a field modulus device through bit by bit and assembling it. I had a feeling there'd be nothing in this universe that could stand up to even the smallest of my light cruisers.
We'd snuggled as best we could, and talked a little bit about ourselves, about my worn out and refurbished life after life, about Oddny's ... no. Not the real her slowly emerging from the shadows. Just about the joys of being a Body Double, about how much she missed Ylva's presence.
She asked me to continue the story of Orm and Toke, and of the men who'd rowed for My Lord Almansur, and I did, until finally we slept, awakening to the gleam of a strange vermilion dawn. No idea how long the night, but surely we hadn't slept for days, while this moon swung round Jupiter to face the sun again.
Not long after sunrise, there was a muffled commotion outside, a gabble of singsong voices, a rattle of keys in the lock of a small personnel door beside the large one through which we'd been delivered. When it swung open, we could see a leather-clad little man with a notebook divesting himself of sword and baldric. He came in, and they locked the door behind him.
I said, “Buddy, I guess you've got balls, however small."
He looked confused, then, in an odd, melodious accent, said, “I be Teng kai Kal, Machine Era's chiefest student. You be Machine Man and...” A puzzled look at Oddny, a long, deeply admiring look, but puzzled nonetheless, “not Machine Man, not Immortal, not Dream Time primitive be surely! What?"
I grinned and said, “Piss poor grammar, but I'm glad you speak even a little English. Neither one of us knows a real word of Greek."
Puzzled. He opened his notebook to somewhere in the middle, leafed around a bit, looked irritated, and said, “English? Greek?"
It dawned on me the notebook might be a handmade dictionary. “English is the language we're speaking now. Greek is the one...” I gestured to him, and to the door.
It got a blank look of amazement. “This Machine Man Speech. I ... we ... Zei.” He turned toward Oddny again, walked toward her, walked around her, looking upward, then looked away, shaking his head. When he got back to me, he said, “Find Machine Man on Aphrodite be nonsense. Machine Men not transcendent. Machine Man with Dream woman?” An angry look, a threatening shake of the notebook. “Agent of Deep Time? Tell me or...” Or else.
I sat down so my face was at his level, and looked him in the eye, which seemed to make him uneasy, though my eyes are the most human thing about me. “Listen carefully, Mr. Teng kai Kal. I have no idea what you're talking about. What the hell is a machine man?"
He tucked the notebook under his arm and stared at me for quite a while, eyes trying to drill into my head, then he said, “Machine Men emerge from Dream Time, travel to stars, see all wonders, come home to die, and leave all knowledge to Immortals. All gone. Long time gone."
Oddny whispered, “He's saying he thinks we came through time?” You could hear the word impossible in her voice.
His head snapped around to look at her, eyes wide, then back at me. “Dream woman smell is ... penetrating. Distracting."
I snorted faintly. The poor bastard has no idea how much Ylva Johanssen pumped up the pheromones of her Body Double corps, in the interests of making scaly old me hot to trot. “Is she right?"
A troubled look. A shrug. “Machine Men no transcendent. Immortals no transcendent. Surely not Dream People! Deep Time souls on Ares? Maybe so. Titanides say...” Then a return of the angry look, a narrowing of his eyes, as of suspicion, of tricking me!
I said, “Can you see all this doesn't mean a damned thing to either of us?"
But Oddny said, “The sequence ... Dream Time, Machine Era, Immortals, Deep Time..."
A grudging look of understanding, “What you know else? After Deep Time?"
She said, “Here and now?"
He said, “Where you think people of Zeios come from? Who made we?"
I said, “I bet the answer's not along the lines of God, is it?"
"And who are the Deep Time souls? On Mars, you said. Martians?"
Sirens began wailing far away, just as a pearly light began twinkling in the slice of sky visible through the high windows of our warehouse. There was a banging from the door, and our interrogator looked frightened, turned away and ran, shouting something in that godawful rendition of Greek. The door opened to let him out and banged shut, bolts crunching in the locks.
More shouting. More sirens, and louder now. “Now what?” When I stood on tippy-toe at the window, I could see a molten star dripping high in the sky, throwing off a milky radiance bright enough to cast shadows through the orange light of Jupiter and the Sun. From the spaceport, a roar, and, one, two, three, things like missiles lifted off. Not missiles, no. They looked more like mid-twentieth-century jet fighters, like F-104 Starfighters propelled off their pads by solid fuel rockets, turning, dropping the boosters to continue onward, spewing bright jets of brilliant blue flame, turning toward the molten star, which ripped open, expanding into a black patch of sky through which I could see stars. One of the Starfighters fired a small missile toward it, a speeding fleck of white light, but before it got there, a squadron of flying saucers came whirling through.
I looked away, looked at Oddny, and said, “You know, if Godzilla comes trampling over that cityscape some time in the next five minutes, I won't be a bit surprised."
She nodded, and said, “I wonder if it's possible for a Body Double to lose her mind and have hallucinations."
When I looked back at the scene in the sky it was in time to see a green ray, straight as a laser beam, spring from one of the saucers and pick off the speeding missile, which ended in a misty globe of light. Then it took out the rocket ships, one, two, three.
The sirens were still wailing and I could see crowds of little people, running through the streets. That sound? Screaming. The saucers descended, formation breaking apart, going in different directions, swooping over the rooftops, firing their rays down into the city. Wherever the rays touched, there would be a misty explosion.
Oddny said, “You'd better get away from the window, Mr. Zed. Flying glass could put your eyes out."
But ... I want to watch ... The was an explosion nearby, making the building shudder, putting a long sinuous crack across the window in front of me. I backed away toward a solid wall. A patch on the big door through which we'd been delivered turned hazy green, shimmered, shivered, and dissipated away into a hole with glowing edges. A little man dressed in a plain leather harness and close-fitting silver helmet, holding an obvious ray gun in one hand, stepped carefully over the hot metal.
Spying me, he shouted something over his shoulder, then ran bright eyed to stand before me. “By Hera, the spies were right!” It was an accent would do Ronald Colman proud. “The Jovians did find a Machine Man on Venus.” Then, he turned a stunned look at Oddny, who smiled and struck a pose.
The Titanides in their plain leather harnesses managed to get the warehouse door open so we could step through to the loading dock, once they'd rayed off our chains, down to the crater-pocked parking lot where a ten-meter-across flying saucer was parked. Here and there were gaily feathered and brilliantly bejeweled Zeian fighting men, sprawled dead among their weapons, hacked bloody with swords or with limbs burnt away, presumably by fiery green rays.
I dismissed them, trying hard not to think, “got what they deserved,” and looked instead at the landed saucer. It was a flat, grayish metal disk with a matte finish, clear dome cockpit lifted open on a hinge. There was a control panel inside, and several other seats, which little men were working quickly to dismount.
The Titanide who'd rescued us gabbled with his crew, then turned to us, and said, “Honored Machine Man,” a sidewise look at Oddny, “Machine Man and companion, it will take us a short while to make room for you
, then we can be away."
I gauged the space would be there with the seats gone and the dome shut, and said, “What about your people?"
He seemed to smile. “As soon as we are away, other ships will land and pick them up."
"Good. I wouldn't want any harm..."
He said, “The life of a transcendent Machine Man is more important than any number of Titanides. Even if I..."
Oddny muttered, “He knows who matters..."
I rolled my eyes. “That's silly. He has no idea who we are.” As if who we really are could possibly matter, wherever/whenever the hell we may be!
She said, “He thinks he does."
A gabble from the now stripped saucer, mass of crewmen spilling away, and the little man gestured us up under the dome, where we lay down, carefully curled inside the gasket seal, heads down. We were joined by a slim, beautiful woman, hair as shiny and black as an obsidian blade, who sat in the remaining seat, hands on the controls.
The little man worked a lever that brought down the dome with a soft hiss, pressure differential popping in our ears, then he banged a little fist on the plastic and gestured to his pilot, up, up and away.
The saucer lifted without any sense of movement, other than the sight of ground dropping away, tilting as it fell, gravity rock-steady toward the keel. Oddny said, “No field modulus exhaust light. Maybe better than what the firefoxes left us?"
The little man stood and came to stand inside the curve of our two bodies, while we sat up as best we could, half reclining, heads brushing against the hard plasticky stuff of the dome. “I,” he said, “am Kam-Ren Vaad, commander of the First Titanide Space Fleet, commodore of the Jovian Emergency Intervention Squadron. This,” a gesture to the pilot, “is my most beloved companion, Princess Tah-Ren Aruae of the Sanhejazi Lineage."
He went on, “Titanide scholars have learned the names of many great historical figures from that long ago age, Honored Machine Man. Perhaps they will know of yours?"
Who might you be? he asks. Anyone that matters? That fabulous Man Who Counts? And what to tell him? Burke the Jerk, little boy everyone scorned? Alan Burke, who one fine day, with a few of his very good friends, Changed Everything, and then was destroyed because he trusted the world a little too much? Or...
I said, “They call me Mr. Zed. And this is my most beloved companion, uh ... Oddny. Oddny, who was once a Body Double of..."
Who are you now? Not the Body Double of Ylva anymore, surely? Who do I want you to be? Ylva Herself ? No. I want ... an image of lost Sarah's face came and went like a fleeting ghost.
Oddny, with some mixture of horror and joy, said, “Mr. Zed! I am not..."
You could see the two Titanides react as though struck, faces filling with strained incredulity. Kam-Ren Vaad gasped audibly, looking at the woman, then back at me. “Mr. Zed.” Disbelief.
The woman, Tah-Ren Aruae, white as a cartoon ghost beneath her sparkling black hair, said, “The first Machine Man!?"
Vaad said, “Who would have expected such a...” then he turned to face Oddny, face filling with wonder. “And you. You would be an avatar of the Goddess Ylva?"
Goddess Ylva. Oh, great bleeding Christ.
Oddny said, “I am one of her Body Doubles, yes. One of many."
"Imagine,” said Aruae from her pilot's chair.
"No need to imagine anymore,” said Vaad, standing stunned between us. “Now we can know!"
Up we rose, away from the little world of the Zeians, up to that starry rip in the sky, rip already beginning to contract back into a bright, dripping star, other saucers rising, pursued by missile-firing rocket starfighters, until we flew through the hole in joined formation, sky suturing itself behind us.
In this new sky, this starry sky, yellow Saturn hung like yet another Chinese lantern lit from within, rings and all, in the distance the substantial marble of a smoky red world, quite obviously Titan. I said, “The rings..."
Vaad looked up at Saturn, and said, “When the Deep Time souls on Mars made men, and made all the worlds fit for us, they recreated the rings of Saturn as well, for reasons of their own."
The souls who made men, for reasons of their own. Gods of myth? Somehow, I found myself doubting that. And doubting it, I simply asked.
Human beings, he said, began as if in a dream, and they dreamt on until they made machines that could dream as well. The men and their dreaming machines escaped from Earth, and, in time, learned what was real and what was not. Mighty in their self-confidence, arrogant in their sense of power, they went out into the larger universe, where they were torn asunder and destroyed, until the few survivors limped home like whipped dogs.
Home where they became pale, genderless, Immortal beings, afraid to venture forth ever again, afraid to do anything but live forever. Almost forever. Some died by mistake, others from boredom, and still others lay down to sleep, never to waken again, while the engines of the Earth grumbled to a halt and the sun guttered for want of refueling.
As we rode down through the swirling cloud formations of smoky red Titan, I was struck by memories of my own real Titan, from that first landing I made in the Benthodyne I prototype, when ... Ah. Real? If what this Titanide says is really so, this is the real Titan as well, changed by those so-called souls on Mars. Terraformed? Not really possible. And yet...
Kam-Ren Vaad said, “We were surprised to the point of disbelief when our agents among the Zeians told us a Machine Man had been found on Venus. A Machine Man and a Dream Woman, still incredible even when they transmitted images. I ... how did you come here, Mr. Zed? You of all possible Machine Men?"
I told him about the derelict ship floating in the atmosphere of Uranus, and about the mysterious hyperdoor. “Something of yours? Like the door in the sky between Jupiter and Saturn?"
Vaad and Aruae exchanged a long look, then he said, “Not one of ours, no. Something we tried to steal."
In a wistful voice, Aruae said, “More successfully than we thought."
When we burst from the lowermost cloud deck, the surface of Titan was a breathtaking vista, sprawled below in rust-colored light, mountains and plains, hills, fields, rivers and valleys and sparkling gray seas. Not like the real Titan, so cold, so dead ... but the Titan in my memory had all those things too, more of a world than anywhere else in the solar system other than Earth itself.
I always dreamed of seeing another world, a real world, before I died, dreamed that dream all my life, dreamed it with such an intensity it was the thing kept me alive, long past the day I should have slipped under the sod forever. I worked for the day we would build a ship that could slide across the gulf between the stars, to the dead old earthlike world astronomers told me circled Alpha Centauri B, to the tantalizingly “habitable” world our instruments said was way out at Delta Pavonis.
As the saucer squadron swept down toward a gleaming marble city, a city of spires and domes and step pyramids, much like the ones the Zeians had, but cleaner in form, Vaad asked me a series of questions that boiled down to, How did you become the first Machine Man?
I thought about it, then told him a simplified version, about those unexpected side-effects of the antirad drugs, and then about my discovery of the lost firefox ship on Hector. “You told me the Machine Men went out to the stars and came home beaten. Was it the firefoxes did us in?"
"We only know a little about the end of the Machine Man Era. The Immortals didn't care to remember what happened, and consequently didn't pass it on. But no, it wasn't what you call firefoxes that did it. They were merely the servants of larger masters, as I understand it, and all that happened is, humanity got caught by an unfortunate crossfire in the war between the Starfish and the Spinfellows. We don't know anything about them other than their names, and that they fought for a long time, for unknown reasons. The galaxy is theirs. Maybe the universe beyond."
Hubris, they say, invites the wrath of the gods.
As with their spacecraft, the Titanides had better technology on the ground than thei
r Zeian counterparts, and rode us through their capital city on something like a flatbed truck, but one that floated a meter or so above the pavement, drifting along in silence, taking us along avenues lined with staring, whispering throngs on the way to one of their marble palaces.
When I asked, Vaad admitted the technology wasn't theirs to be proud of, merely found, sometimes stolen. “I should have guessed,” he said, “the start of the Machine Man Era might be something similar. So long ago, though, I thought surely..."
"And yet,” said Aruae, “we knew from our history the Spinfellow-Starfish war had been going on since before primordial slime came to life on Earth."
Here, unlike before, more of the attention was on me, on what I was, than on Oddny's lovely pieces and parts. More serious, these people? No. Merely more worshipful of the past. And me, the First Machine Man, the Wonderful Mr. Zed? A little bit, I gathered from Vaad and Aruae, as though I were Jesus Christ resurrected to a cavalcade through the streets of twenty-first century Rome.
Imagine the atheists equivalent among them, shivering and wondering what to believe and what to repent.
The place they took us was like a vast banquet hall, with doors so tall we only had to stoop to enter, a ceiling so high we could stand erect. They'd pulled the furniture aside to the walls and spread layers of blankets on the middle of the floor, each blanket no larger than what you'd give a baby, but soft, and enough of them in aggregate made a decent place for us to rest.
Aruae said, “I suppose you're both hungry? The Zeians aren't known for the quality of their hospitality."
I laughed, and so did Oddny. She's getting better at it, better at everything human, with the passage of days. That flat affect, that obedient affect ... It's easy to imagine you'll be content with a woman who does what you want, until you meet one who knows what she wants, does that, and it turns out to be what you wanted, after all.
I was beginning to remember what that had been like in the long, long ago.
Dinner turned out to be platters of steaming steaks, meat sort of halfway between beef and chicken, maybe a little bit like ostrich, though it'd been so long since I had that I couldn't really remember, steaks smothered in some kind of spicy green relish. Among the vegetables were marble-sized things like some improbable cross between baked potatoes and Brussels sprouts, suspended in a hot clear gel that tasted something like cheap margarine and a little more like K-Y Jelly.
Asimov's SF, October-November 2009 Page 29