by Jack Dann
"Corporal Butsayev," he said, and Butsayev froze.
When he saw who had addressed him, though, a sly grin split his face, which was like his brother's only in coloration. "Robot Guy," he said. "Want in on the fun?"
Jimmy Guang brought the gun up and pointed it at Butsayev's nose. "You are a despicable man," he said, "and you do despicable things."
He pulled , the trigger, and the Colt went off with a tremendous bang. Jimmy Guang's arm leaped up, and his hand, numbed by the recoil, let go of the gun. The muzzle flash faded from his eyes, and he saw Slava Butsayev lying on his left side in the street. There was a hole punched in Butsayev's face, just to the left of his nose and below his eye. The eye was rolled back, showing only white.
His fall had pulled the girl to the ground beside him. She was streaked with blood. As if picking lice off herself, she removed the dead man's hand from her hair finger by finger. "You should go home," Jimmy Guang said, and she ran into the building whose porch she had been sweeping.
The sky in the east was pale blue. Jimmy Guang dropped the gun near Butsayev's head and squatted next to the corpse. He rummaged through Butsayev's pockets until he found a small drawstring bag. When he pulled it from Butsayev's coat, its seam split, and teeth fell to the stones of the street. He cupped the bag in his palm and replaced the teeth carefully, one at a time. Pinching the seam between his fingers, Jimmy Guang walked back toward Lenin Street as the first curious faces began to appear in the windows around him.
The angel said to Mohammed: God has knowledge of all the good you do. Jimmy Guang's father had often reminded his son of this. The verse comforted Jimmy Guang, made him feel as if he was important, noticed, his actions weighed fairly and with sympathy. That was a God he could believe in, take solace in. But as he walked slowly back to his office, the knowledge that God watched him filled Jimmy Guang with deep sadness and shame. He had killed a man. He had become part of the war, and something of him had been lost.
He went directly through the bazaar to Osh's ancient old quarter, the surviving Osh of Alexander the Great and Mohammed and, if you believed local traditions, King Solomon as well. And now Marta, who lived in a dusty stone building with her parents and sisters. All of her brothers were up in the mountains fighting the Russians.
Jimmy Guang stopped in the street before her house to straighten his tie and tighten his belt, which he had let out a notch to accommodate the gun. He ran his handkerchief quickly over his shoes, patted at his hair, and only then knocked on the front door of the Chu house.
Marta herself answered. Over her shoulder Jimmy Guang could see her parents. They were smaller than she was, and both beginning to be a bit hµnchbacked. She was tall, taller than Jimmy Guang, with strong hands.
"It's early, Jimmy," she said.
He took her arm and led her out, shutting the door behind her and waving quickly at her parents. "I have something to show you," he said when they were outside. Traffic was just beginning to appear on the narrow street, bicycles and an oxcart or two. It struck Jimmy Guang that the year could be 1930 instead of 2083. Somewhere the Russians had satellites that could tell the color of your eyes, and somewhere there were aircraft guided by robots smarter than the recently-departed Lokomotiv Lev, and in the mountains Uplinked Russian soldiers patrolled with inhuman precision; but here on this street Osh was as Osh had always been. There was something quietly defiant about it.
Jimmy Guang removed the bag of teeth from his pocket and held it out to Marta. She took it, and teeth spilled from the open seam. Jimmy Guang had a moment of irrational fear that Russian soldiers would rise from the teeth, as in a story his father had read to him once. Instead, Marta let out a scream and flung the bag to the ground. She covered her face and began to sob. The teeth rattled like dice on the street.
"Marta," he said, wanting to touch her but afraid.
"It took you after all," Marta said through her hands. "The war, it took you."
For a long while he didn't know what to say. It was true.
"I thought that's what you wanted," he said at last.
She rubbed at her eyes, then closed the distance between them with a step. "We have to get out of here," she said. "Now. Come with me."
"Where are we going?" he asked.
"It doesn't matter where we go. The war is here. It's claiming you, Jimmy." She looked at him. Saw him hesitating, and knew why.
An impulse seized Jimmy Guang. He took all of the evening's winnings from his inside coat pocket. "Here," he said, and closed one of Marta's hands around the thick wad of dollars and rubles and euros and rupees and God only knew what else. "Take this and go to Pavel. Wait for me."
Her face grew still.
"Just until sundown," Jimmy Guang pleaded. "Just wait until sundown."
When he got back to the office, Russian soldiers were waiting for him.
V V hat do you xpect of me?" Captain Vasily Butsayev asked Jimmy Guang Hamid.
They were standing in a field southwest of Osh. Distant thunder rolled down on them from a jet passing far overhead. Jimmy Guang listened, and he listened to the wind, and he watched the dry grass bend, and he smelled the mountains. Captain Butsayev was going to kill him, he was sure, and Jimmy Guang was saddened by this because it meant he had overestimated the captain from their first meeting.
About five hundred yards away stood the House of Gladmech. The wall facing them was patched with rusting rectangles of corrugated tin scavenged from other hangars destroyed in various assaults. One of the patches covered part of the sign on that wall, and Jimmy Guang pursed his lips in annoyance. If he survived the afternoon he would have that fixed.
Jimmy Guang realized that although he did not want to, he would have to speak. So he decided to speak truthfully.
"Your brother was an evil man who preyed on women," he said, looking Butsayev in the eye. "I am in love with one of those women, and because I love her I had to kill your brother. I had to try to heal her, and your brother's life was like an infection in her spirit. She could not live while he did, and I need her, Captain Butsayev. I need her very badly to live."
Butsayev looked toward the mountains. "You heal a woman by killing a man. You create an illusionary. peace among men by making a spectacle of destroying robots. If I were close to you, Mr. Hamid, I would fear your impulses to do good deeds." Still speaking softly, Butsayev quoted: " `Do not walk proudly on the earth. You cannot cleave the earth, nor can you rival the mountains in stature.' "
A Russian officer quoting from the Koran. Jimmy Guang could not decide whether this was a good omen or bad.
"My actions were not meant to be prideful," he said, and almost said more, but stopped himself. "Captain Butsayev. I will no longer defend myself. I have done what I have done, and you shall do what you shall do. Given the same situation again, a thousand times, I would kill your brother a thousand times."
Butsayev waved an arm over his head, a gesture of some sort to someone Jimmy Guang couldn't see. .A rocket tore through the air, and Jimmy Guang's House of Gladmech exploded in an expanding cloud of dirty smoke. Large pieces of its metal walls flew up into the air and came slanting crazily back down to embed themselves in the earth.
John Wayne was in there, Jimmy Guang thought.
"Nor do I do that out of pride, Mr. Hamid," said Butsayev. "Leave now. Go with your woman, go back where you came from. Leave war to those of us who have made it our profession. And remember: I am not a butcher like my brother. But neither am I a weak man. Go now."
Butsayev walked toward his waiting jeep, leaving Jimmy Guang alone in the field. A wave of sorrow overcame him. For the House of Gladmech, yes, but mostly for Vasily Butsayev, whose respect Jimmy Guang realized he had treasured.
When hegot to Pavel's, Marta was no longer there. "She said she was going to find her brothers," Pavel said. "You were to follow her."
"Where are her brothers?"
Pavel looked at Jimmy Guang, a small quirk at the corner of his mouth. "Do you understand what I am
telling you? She is going to the mountains. If she is going to the mountains, it is not up to me to tell you where to find her."
Another test, thought Jimmy Guang. He did not think she was leaving him, no. Pavel might smirk, but Jimmy Guang had been smirked at before. He knew what he knew. She feared the war in him, the way it had crept into the corners of his mind, and when he had followed her through the rocks and the snow and the privations of the Tien Shan, he would be purified again. She would see him and know that this was true, that what had drawn him to the war was gone in the blast of a rocket and that she herself had drawn him away from it again. Perhaps he would find her in the mountains, among the militias and the mujahideen. Perhaps she would have gone ahead of him to Shanghai, or Delhi, and he would find her waiting for him at his father's house with a cup of tea in her hand.
Droplet
Benjamin Rosenbaum
It's nice to have a purpose in life and to be able to fulfill that purpose—although, as the slyly entertaining story that follows will demonstrate, if you're a robot built to serve humans and you've survived into a future where there are no humans left, that may be a bit of a problem .. .
New writer Benjamin Rosenbaum has made sales to The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov's Science Fiction, Argosy, The Infinite Matrix, Strange Horizons, Harper's, McSweeney's, Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet, and elsewhere. Recently returned from a long stay in Switzerland, he now lives with his family in Falls Church, Virginia.
Visit his website at home.datacomm.ch/benrose.
1.
Today she is Marilyn Monroe. That's an erotic goddess from prehistoric cartoon mythology. She has golden curls, blue eyes, big breasts, and skin of a shocking pale pink. She stands with a wind blowing up from Hades beneath her, trying to control her skirt with her hands, forever showing and hiding her white silk underwear.
Today I am Shivol'riargh, a more recent archetype of feminine sexuality. My skin is hard, hairless, glistening black. Faint fractal patterns of darker black writhe across my surfaces. I have long claws. It suits my mood.
We have just awakened from a little nap of a thousand years, our time, during which the rest of the world aged even more.
She goes: "kama://01-nbX5-# ..."
I snap the channel shut. "Talk language if you want to seduce me."
Shar pouts. With those little red lips and those innocent, yet knowing, eyes, it's almost irresistible. I resist.
"Come on, Nana," she says. "Do we have to fight about this every time we wake up?"
"I just don't know why we have to keep flying around like this."
"You're not scared of Warboys again?" she asks.
Her fingertips slide down my black plastic front. The fractals dance around them.
"There aren't any more," she says.
"You don't know that, Shar."
"They've all killed each other. Or turned themselves off. Warboys don't last if there's nothing to fight."
Despite the cushiony-pink Marilyn Monroe skin, Shar is harder than I am. My heart races when I look at her, just as it did a hundred thousand years ago.
Her expression is cool. She wants me. But it's a game to her.
She's searching the surface of me with her hands. "What are you looking for?" I mean both in the Galaxy and on my skin, though I know the answers.
"Anything," she says, answering the broader question. "Anyone who's left. People to learn from. To play with." People to serve, I think nastily.
I'm lonely, too, of course, but I'm sick of looking. Let them come find us in the Core.
"It's so stupid," I groan. Her hands are affecting me. "We probably won't be able to talk to them anyway."
Her hands find what they've been searching for: the hidden opening to Shivol'riargh's sexual pocket. It's full of the right kind of nerve endings. Shivol'riargh is hard on the outside, but oh so soft on the inside. Sometimes I wish I had someone to wear that wasn't sexy.
"We'll figure it out," she says in a voice that's all breath.
Her fingers push at the opening of my sexual pocket. I hold it closed. She leans against me and wraps her other arm around me for leverage. She pushes. I resist.
Her lips are so red. I want them on my face.
She's cheating. She's a lot stronger than Marilyn Monroe.
"Shar, I don't want to screw," I say. "I'm still angry." But I'm lying.
"Hush," she says.
Her fist slides into me and I gasp. My claws go around her shoulders and I pull her to me.
2.
Later we burn the gravity off and float over Ship's bottom eye, looking down at the planet Shar had Ship find. It's blue like Marilyn Monroe's eyes.
"It's water," Shar says. Her arms are wrapped around my waist, her breasts pressed against my back. She rests her chin on my shoulder.
I grunt.
"It's water all the way down," she says. "You could swim right through the planet to the other side."
"Did anyone live here?"
"I think so. I don't remember. But it was a gift from a Sultan to his beloved."
Shar and I have an enormous amount of information stored in our brains. The brain is a sphere the size of a billiard ball somewhere in our bodies, and however much we change our bodies, we can't change that. Maka once told me that even if Ship ran into a star going nine-tenths lightspeed, my billiard-ball brain would come tumbling out the other side, none the worse for wear. I have no idea what kind of matter it is or how it works, but there's plenty of room in my memory for all the stories of all the worlds in the Galaxy, and most of them are probably in there.
But we're terrible at accessing the factual information. A fact will pop up inexplicably at random—the number of Quantegral Lovergirls ever manufactured, for instance, which is 362,476—and be gone a minute later, swimming away in the murky seas of thought. That's the way Maka built us, on purpose. He thought it was cute.
3.
eL In old argument about Maka:
"He loved us," I say. I know he did.
Shar rolls her eyes (she's a tigress at the moment).
"I could feel it," I say, feeling stupid.
"Now there's a surprise. Maka designed you from scratch, including your feelings, and you feel that he loved you. Amazing." She yawns, showing her fangs.
"He made us more flexible than any other Lovergirls. Our minds are almost Interpreter-level."
She snorts. "We were trade goods, Narra. Trade goods. Classy purchasable or rentable items."
I curl up around myself. (I'm a python.)
"He set us free," I say.
Shar doesn't say anything for a while, because that is, after all, the central holiness of our existence. Our catechism, if you like.
Then she says gently: "He didn't need us for anything anymore, when they went into the Core."
"He could have just turned us off. He set us free. He gave us Ship."
She doesn't say anything.
"He loved us," I say. I know it's true.
4.
Idon't tell Shar, but that's one reason I want us to go back to the Galactic Core: Maka's there.
I know it's stupid. There's nothing left of Maka that I would recognize. The Wizards got hungrier and hungrier for processing power, so they could think more and know more and play more complicated games. Eventually the only thing that could satisfy them was to rebuild their brains as a soup of black holes. Black hole brains are very fast.
I know what happens when a person doesn't have a body anymore, too. For a while they simulate the sensations and logic of a corporeal existence, only with everything perfect and running much faster than in the real world. But their interests drift. The simulation gets more and more abstract and eventually they're just thoughts, and after a while they give that up, too, and then they're just numbers. By now Maka is just some very big numbers turning into some even bigger numbers, racing toward infinity.
I know because he told me. He knew what he was becoming.
I still miss
him.
5.
Wego down to the surface of the planet, which we decide to call Droplet.
The sky is painterly blue with strings of white clouds drifting above great choppy waves. It's lovely. I'm glad Shar brought us here.
We're dolphins. We chase each other across the waves. We dive and hold our breaths, and shower each other with bubbles. We kiss with our funny dolphin noses.
I'm relaxing and floating when Shar slides her rubbery body over me and clamps her mouth onto my flesh. It's such a long time since I've been a cetacean that I don't notice that Shar is a boy dolphin until I feel her penis enter me. I buck with surprise, but Shar keeps her jaws clamped and rides me. Rides me and rides me, as I buck and swim, until she ejaculates. She makes it take extra long.
Afterward we race, and then I am floating, floating, exhausted and happy as the sunset blooms on the horizon.
It's a very impressive sunset, and I kick up on my tail to get a better look. I change my eyes and nose so I can see the whole spectrum and smell the entire wind.
It hits me first as fear, a powerful shudder that takes over my dolphin body, kicks me into the air and then into a racing dive, dodging and weaving. Then it hits me as knowledge, the signature written in the sunset: beryllium-10, mandelium, large-scale entanglement from muon dispersal. Nuclear and strange-matter weapons fallout. Warboys.
Ship dropped us a matter accelerator to get back up with, a series of rings floating in the water. I head for it.
Shar catches up and hangs on to me, changing into a human body and riding my back.
"Ssh, honey," she says, stroking me. "It's okay. There haven't been Warboys here for ten thousand years...." I buck her off, and this time I'm not flirting.
Shar changes her body below the waist back into a dolphin tail, and follows. As soon as she is in the first ring I tell Ship to bring us up, and one dolphin, one mermaid, and twelve metric tons of water shoot through the rings and up through the blue sky until it turns black and crowded with stars.