“Oh, wow!” she gasped. “Are you talking about the cavemen?”
Phrygia didn’t say what she meant by that. She couldn’t. She was contorted and screaming from the nerve whip that followed her injudicious remark.
But Orbis realized what she was talking about. The—what did you call them? The australopithecines. The soulless animals that, unbelievers claimed, were somehow the great grandparents of the human race.
It was for them that Wan was keeping Orbis McClune in this damnable state of life in death.
Beyond that Orbis couldn’t think, because while Phrygia’s screaming was still going on the woman, grim-faced, turned them both off—
—And back on, but this time in a place different still, and with a man he had never seen before. “Tell me why you hate the Heechee,” he demanded…
And that was another awakening of very, very many of them, and nearly every one repeating something that had been done before.
First to last, Orbis McClune was in Wan’s employ for, as nearly as he could calculate, somewhere between two and two thousand eternities. He didn’t have many opportunities to brood about it. When he was turned off he was off. Completely. The length of such periods could have been microseconds or centuries—in the time of the real world outside—but to Orbis they were no time at all. It was the “waking” times that were both tedious and exhausting. Exhausting because most of them were sessions of intensive questioning, sometimes by that woman or that man, sometimes by some other of Wan’s flunkies. Tedious because they went over and over the same ground. Did he really hate the Heechee? Did he hate them a lot? Would he be willing to do them some serious harm, even if that meant that some human beings should get harmed at the same time?
Always the same questions, or minor variations on them. Always the same answers from Orbis, too. Which meant, he thought, one of two possible things: either he was being vetted for some supremely important task. Or they were all loons.
He didn’t have much time to think such thoughts, much less to speculate on what was going on. When he did have a moment—when, for instance, his interrogator paused in the questioning to confer with her screen—it was other thoughts that first crossed his mind. They were brief flashes of memory, fleeting, sometimes almost painful. Memories of the humans he had shared his last days with, up on the hills that bordered Waveland. Of the members of his old Rantoul congregation, a few of whom he hadn’t really disliked very much. Of his childhood, some of which had been reasonably pleasant. Of his wife.
Of his wife, deceased and machine-stored and thus finally lost to him forever. Or at least lost for what had seemed forever to Orbis McClune, in those days before he had become machine-stored himself.
The next time Orbis awoke it was to a place that resembled a conference room, a fumed-oak table that was long enough for a score of people though only half that were seated at it.
One was Wan himself, relaxed and almost calm, elbows on the table and chin in his hands as he studied a data screen without looking at Orbis. The other person Orbis recognized was Phrygia Todd; the others were equally elderly, shabby, unprepossessing. (Not unlike Orbis himself, he thought.) They sat in uneasy silence while Roz Borraly pointed at things on the screen and whispered in Wan’s ear.
Finally Wan peevishly pushed her aside. He looked around the table, making eye contact with each person, one by one. He didn’t speak until he had completed the circle. Then he gave them all a great, heartwarming smile and said, “Welcome to you all! From now on you aren’t my purchased employees anymore. Now you’re gonna be my trusted allies, companions in my struggle against the damned dirty Heechee and their damned dirty Gateway accomplices. We’re all in this together, and we’ll all win!”
He went on from there, painting rosy pictures of the great rewards they would earn for helping in his crusade for justice, but Orbis had stopped listening. He didn’t need to hear more. He knew it all ahead of time, had known what was coming ever since the moment that he saw that great, practiced-before-the-mirror smile that he himself had smiled at so many loathed human beings so many times before.
Most of Wan’s oratory was denunciation of the Heechee. He hated them, Wan said. He blamed them for their vile gift of spaceflight, and blamed them for rotting the fiber of human spirit by their horrid Food Factories that ended hunger for all, even the unworthy. He blamed them, in short, for everything that was wrong with the age they lived in, of which, in both his view and Orbis’s, there was plenty.
Nearly every word Wan spoke was one Orbis could have said himself. But how to ignore the fact that the man was obviously crazy? Now he was saying, “The individuals who make up my property are very dear to me. They took care of me when I was little, so I want to care for them now. Anyway, they’re mine and I want them back.”
Orbis stared at him. That really was Wan’s stolen treasure? Some kind of creatures from the remote past, before God’s gift of salvation? Orbis thought it extremely unlikely that they possessed souls, nearly certain that these might-be ancestors were not included in the general amnesty that followed Calvary.
Which meant that they were not really worth bothering about.
Orbis was shocked. It was one thing to hate the Heechee because they had profaned God’s human world. It was another to work condign vengeance on them because they had kidnaped a handful of house pets.
As Wan, sweating and triumphant, concluded his lesson and turned back to his data screen, Orbis decided, he had been right in the first place. The man was a loon.
Even the looniest loco may ultimately wend toward a point. Wan finally reached his. “So here’s where we come right down to it. You people aren’t the only ones I’ve been recruiting, all this time. No. There were others, many, many others, but none that were worth more than being, like, house servants. You were the ones with the fire!” Orbis stole a look at the others. They did not seem afire to him. “Anyway, here are your assignments. Horace Packer!” A white-haired little man, looking as though he had long been homeless, raised one finger. “Sindi Gas—Gas—What is it, Sindi?”
A dark-skinned woman with a scarf over her head said, “Gaslakhpard. It’s a perfectly normal name.”
Wan shrugged. “If you say so. When we land you and Horace will supervise freeing of the Old Ones, along with—what is it, Raffy something or other? You Arab fellow?”
A small, muscular, Middle Eastern-looking man stood up. “I am Egyptian, not Arab. My name is Raafat Gerges.”
“Whatever. You guys get the Old Ones onto the ship, right? You might have to knock them around a little bit, but that’s all right. They’re tough.” The people at the foot of the table all responded with some sort of nod or hand movement, and then the only ones left were Orbis himself and the woman with the Dutch-girl braids.
On them Wan now turned one of those effulgent and meaningless smiles. “Now we come to our star players, the ones who are going to make sure nobody tries to interfere with saving the Old Ones. See,” he said, so pleased with himself that he was almost doing a little dance, “we got them where they can’t do a thing to stop us. If they try, well—” He paused to glance at Roz Borraly. “Is he on time?” he demanded.
“He’s just waiting in orbit,” she reported. “Here, I’ll put it on the screen.” In a moment the screen was displaying a rather unattractive ice-blue planet, circled by a largish moon. They all watched in silence for a moment. “It ought to be happening right about now,” said Borraly, beginning to sound worried. “Any minute. Pretty soon… Wow! There it is!”
On the screen that big moon had suddenly swelled, bloated, exploded in all directions. It was no longer a solid object, just an expanding sphere of particles.
Wan was grinning. “We did that,” he bragged. “You wouldn’t believe how much trouble it was to find the gadgets that did it, but it looks like they work. We blew that sucker up just to teach them a lesson because if anybody gives us any trouble when we do the rescue, why, we’ll just blow up a whole big star and kill a few
gazillion of them off.”
He gave them a real grin this time, as he waited for applause. After a moment, Roz Borraly leading, he got some and returned to his subject. “You, Phrygia Todd! You’re going to pilot this ship. You’ve been trained, right? You think you can do it?”
The woman with the braids shrugged. “Guess so.”
Wan scowled at her. “You better more than just guess. So you, Phrygia, after we rescue the Old Ones you pilot us to where Orbis can take his little torpedo to what they call, let me see. Planetless Very Large White Very Hot Star. That’s the one we’re going to blow up—I mean threaten to.” He paused for a moment, then went on. “All right. Then you take us to where we’re going that they’ll never find us, Phrygia. Then, Orbis, you orbit that star, close up, in your little ship, and you wait for orders from me. If I order it, zap, you blow the sucker up.” He took a moment to applaud himself vigorously, his example followed at once by Roz Borraly and, a little more slowly and a lot less vigorously, by most of the others. “Any questions?”
Orbis was about to ask one, but Phrygia Todd was ahead of him. “Why am I going to be the pilot? What happened to the guy that blew up the moon?”
Wan’s face contorted in the direction of a frown. Orbis could see Todd’s body involuntarily tensing up, ready for what might be coming. But Wan relaxed and gave them another of those overripe smiles. “That was Will Barendt,” he said. “Too bad. His heart wasn’t in it, you know, so I told him after he did this one job for me I’d release him from his contract.” He shrugged modestly. “People say I’m too soft, but that’s the way I saw it. So he put this torpedo on course and took off in the other one with one of the gadgets. Probably he’s on his way to the saloons on Peggys Planet by now.” Wan looked around to see if anyone was going to challenge what he said.
“He did the same thing with Ferdie Grossmutter after they blew up that Fomalhaut star,” Roz Borraly put in loyally.
He scowled again. Then, “Anyway,” he added, “what you want to remember, Orbis, is we really probably aren’t going to need to detonate it, on account of once they see what happened to that moon nobody’s going to take the chance of interfering. Got it? Everybody know their part?”
Orbis raised his hand. “I don’t. How do I blow this star up?”
Wan gave him a leer. “Oh, Roz’ll show you that. Probably she’ll show you a few other things, too. I guess we’re through here, so you can all go do what, you know, you now have the privilege to do. So long.” And when he clapped his hand the shapes of Orbis’s surroundings melted and flowed, the harsh white light softened, the table and chairs shrank into themselves and disappeared.
Orbis was in the garden again. He was standing before a table loaded with food and drink, and by his side was a wide, soft couch on which a woman sat. It was the same woman as always, Roz Borraly, but now differently dressed. She wore a nearly transparent gown. Her hair was down, and she was quite beautiful. “There you are, Orbis,” she said. “I’m what you might call your pay in advance. What would you like to do with me?”
Inviting she was, but what she offered was not what interested Orbis McClune. “What about this bomb?” he demanded.
She gave him a winsome smile. “See,” she said, “I’ll show you all that, all right. But wouldn’t you like to have some fun first?”
Artificial intelligences do not require food, drink, rest or sleep, and they certainly don’t have to have sex. This is not to say, however, that they aren’t capable of enjoying any of them when offered.
It wasn’t the sex that appealed to Orbis, it was the food. He could not remember when he had last eaten—or simulated eating, to be more accurate, but either way it was something he missed and it hadn’t happened for quite a while. He wasted no time before ravaging the loaded table, while the woman poured beverages for him. He waved the wine away but eagerly accepted the fruit juices, the cold, sweet milk, then the steaming coffee. They were delicious. It was by any measure the best experience he had had since the confounded statue had fallen on his head, but there was one troubling aspect to it, and that was the woman herself.
She hadn’t contented herself with pouring his drinks and heaping his plate with goodies. She seemed always to be very close to him, always touching him—and not just with her hands, either, as she leaned over him her firm, perfectly shaped breast stroked his shoulder, her long hair caressed his face, and he was nearly sure she was breathing into his ear. “Please don’t do that, Ms. Borraly” he said, moving half a meter away. “You’re a very pretty girl, but—”
Orbis was not without residual courtesy, and he didn’t know what to say after the “but” that wouldn’t call her a whore. But she made that moot very quickly. “Thank you for saying that,” she said in his ear. In fact she wasn’t just breathing into his ear, he was now quite sure that she was nibbling at it with her soft, full lips. “I’m glad you think I’m pretty, but that’s not all I am. I’m your little present from Wan. For the next 200 milliseconds you can do anything to me you like, for as long as you like.” And while she was talking—whispering, really—she was changing position so that at the end they were face to face, lips to lips, and he broke away just as he felt the first warm, wet thrust of her tongue.
“Stop it!” he said sharply. “I am not a fornicator!”
She pulled her head a few centimeters away, regarding him. Her breath was warm and sweet on his face and her eyes puzzled. “Not ever?” she asked. “I mean, nobody’s watching us, as far as I know.”
“My God is watching us!” he said, voice as stern as the look on his face.
She leaned back, studying him. She sighed. “It’s just too damn bad that the interesting ones are all gay,” she said.
“I am not—” he began, but then stopped himself. Her opinion meant nothing to him, and there was no point in denying what he knew to be untrue. “Let’s just get on with it,” he said. “Tell me about the bomb.”
She sighed, then waved a hand. The flower garden disappeared, and they were in what, Orbis realized, had to be the control room of a spaceship.
“All right,” the woman said, sounding resigned. “You see that kind of gearshift thing there? Push it to one side, your torpedo turns that way. Push it the other and—right, you’ve got it. Now, you see that button by the screen?” Orbis did, all right; it was the size of his fist, red and labeled “button.” “It isn’t a real button. The toggle wasn’t real either, because if they were how could you touch it? It’s all what they call a servomodule, but if you press the button it’ll work like it was real, all right. It’ll blow up that star. Only—now pay attention to this part—don’t press it unless Wan personally gives you the order, all right? You understand that?”
It didn’t seem to be a rhetorical question, so Orbis said, “I do.”
“Well, you damn better. Okay. So long…”
And that was all she said. Her voice was getting tinny, and her body swelled and bloated, while the laden table rose and swirled around him; and then he was in the pilot chamber of a different spacecraft, and the only person with him was the blonde-braids woman, Phrygia Todd. She sat uncomfortably on one of those Heechee perches, and she didn’t speak.
Orbis made the effort. Holding out a hand to be shaken, he said, “Hi. I’m the Reverend Orbis McClune.”
She looked up, ignoring the hand. “I know what your damn name is. Listen. Did you understand what will happen if you push that button?”
He frowned at her. “I just said I did. It’ll destroy that star. Is that what you mean?”
“Yeah. That’s what I mean. It will neutralize its gravity, which means——can you guess?”
“Make it explode?” he hazarded.
“Damn straight it will explode,” she told him contemptuously. “Like the kind of explosion that will make everybody anywhere near it dead. Like it did Will Barendt when he blew up that moon—you didn’t believe Wan was going to let him go free, did you? Like the two of us.”
He was puzzled. “
But we’re dead already, really.”
“Idiot. That’s just our bodies. Remember, our works are going to be with us, and if this ship gets destroyed, as it will, what do you suppose is going to happen to them?” She nodded somberly. “So then we’ll be really, really dead, Mr. Reverend McClune. So no matter what he says, unless you want to be permanently dead, don’t push that button!”
He blinked at her. “You mean dead dead?”
“That’s exactly what I mean. Totally dead. No more alive in any form dead. Meet your Maker dead. Past this mortal coil dead.”
He gazed at her in silence for a moment. Then, “Oh,” he said. “I see.”
17
* * *
In Achiever’s Ship
I
The spaceport on Forested Planet hadn’t changed in the time—what was it? A month or two, anyway—since Estrella and Stan landed there, but that wasn’t true of the spaceship that was waiting for them. It surely had. It was metallic, all right, but neither human silver nor Heechee blue. The front part of it was a shiny raspberry red. The middle was the pale green of a honeydew melon, and the rear—well, that was hard to describe because it kept changing. And the spacecraft was shaped like nothing so much as some weird species of squid, with little finlets up near the nose and tentacle shapes squirming around on the flickering tail. And it was big.
Achiever was waiting for them on the landing deck, almost hopping with pleasure. “Welcome!” he cried. “To each of you I say, jointly and severally, welcome! As you see, I fortunately have excellent ship now at my disposal. Very new! Very speedy! Also very agile because, as you see, is interstellar spacecraft but is quite capable of transportation within planetary atmosphere as well. Now come, please, come aboard.” He led the way, walking dexterously backward the better to carry on a conversation with them. “Is this not quite excellent?” he asked with pride. “Of course it is a completely new ship entirely, this is going without saying. And—” he gave an explosive little titter—“is entirely mine. Now I ask a question of you: Have you comprehended how it is that spacecraft have become so technologically splendid? It is because Outside of Core, in recent centuries of Outside time, spacecraft of this kind have newly been invented—invented, that is to say, by inventors of my kind, not yours, of course. This particular spacecraft is provided to me for me, copilot and two of you being passengers. Reason for which,” he added, “relates to requirement that I am to spend much time in proximity with, or to, persons of your ethnicity. This requirement caused by previous errors in my apprehension, of which you know.”
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