Back | Next
Contents

09

Aristide avoided the boathook by the simple expedient of dropping limp straight to the deck.  He landed with a thud that rattled his teeth, and then tried to roll forward and lunge for Grax with the stun baton.  A backhand swipe with the boathook caught Aristide a blow on the radial nerve and knocked the baton into the scuppers.  His right arm dropped limp. Aristide kept moving forward and snatched at Grax's heel with his good hand.  He intended to lean his shoulder into the huge man's knee, lock it, and bring him down.

But Grax took a step to the rear with his free foot and then just stood there, braced.  His leg felt like a pillar of stone. 

In his broad, powerful Polynesian body Grax was as much a fighting troll as he had been on Midgarth.

The strobes flashed, freezing instants of time in searing light.

Aristide hung onto Grax's leg for lack of anything better to do.  Fighting through the paralysis of his right arm he fumbled for Tecmessa. 

Grax shortened his grip on the boathook and drove it like a spear for Aristide's back.  Aristide sensed the point coming and rolled away onto his left side, but the boathook punched through his right wing.  Pain shrieked along Aristide's nerves as the point rammed through his gills and pinned them to the deck.  Grax kicked him with a bare, callused foot and he felt the wing and gill tear.

  Grax's eyes flashed in angry strobelight.  Aristide brought Tecmessa from its holster and fired. 

Grax was not his enemy, but a victim of the Venger, and he didn't want to send Grax to the place he sent his real foes.  So instead of sending Grax to the dull, dreary, twilit place he called Holbrook—a private joke—he sent Grax's left leg there, along with a chunk of the gunwale, both amputated with microscopic exactitude.

This time Grax did fall.  The amputation had been so clean that Grax hadn't realized that he had lost his leg, and so he tried to get up and fell again.

Wearily, shuddering, Aristide took hold of the boathook.  The wood grain impressed itself on his fingers.  He wrenched the boathook from the deck and his wing and rose to his feet.  He swayed, took a step, then stopped swaying.

Grax flopped on the deck, yelping, amid a growing lake of his own copper-scented blood.  He had worked out that an important part of him was missing, and the nerves that had been sliced in half were beginning to react in pain.  His eyes widened as the strobes revealed Aristide staggering above him.  His eyes widened.

"You!" he said.

"Hail," said Aristide, bleeding.  He found the stun baton in the scuppers and used it to hit Grax in his remaining leg.  Then he found some rope—no lack of rope on a boat—and tied a tourniquet about Grax's stump.

"Contact the office of the Domus in Magellan Town." Aristide spoke to the AI he'd mated with Tecmessa. "I wish to speak personally with Lieutenant Han Baoyin."

There was a delay of several seconds during which the AI exchanged high-priority passwords with the AI at the Domus, and during that time Aristide took control of the boat and backed it down once more on the drifting, strobe-lit figures of Herenui and Cadwal.  He reached for the boathook.

"Yes?"  There was a sense of hilarity in Han's voice, as if he'd answered just after someone else had told a good joke.  Han wasn't transmitting video, but Aristide heard chatter in the background, and the clink of glasses.

"I have a message from Commissar Lin in Myriad City," Aristide said.  "The message is ANGELS WEPT."

"Is that—" Han began, and then fell silent.  A few seconds later, the background sound stopped.  When Han's voice returned, his speech was very deliberate, and Aristide knew he was dictating through his implant.

"Who are you?" Han asked. "Where are you?"

"I'm on a boat in Matahina Strait."  Aristide held the AI out so that it could scan the boat and transmit the video to Han.  "I've subdued three unauthorized pod people.  One of them is badly injured and will need blood and medical attention.  I've been wounded myself.  And I'm keeping them quiet with a stun baton, but sooner or later it's going to run out of charges.  What I need is just you and a doctor, and the doctor needs to bring a squid to confirm the altered brain structure on these people."

"I'll call my boss.  We can mobilize the whole—"

"No."  Aristide tried not to shout.  He swayed on his feet and reached for the cockpit screen to steady himself. 

"The pod people have been operating here for months," he said. "Your boss may have been taken.  I just want you and a doctor you can trust.  One who's been backed up very recently."

"I'll take the copter," Han said.  "It's got a hull that floats.  I'll be at least twenty minutes, depending on which doctor I can scare up."

The conversation ended.  Aristide used the boathook to pull Cadwal to the boat.  Cadwal was muttering and moving in a disorganized way, so Aristide hit him with the stun baton again.  Because he didn't think he was strong enough to drag Cadwal onto the boat, he lashed Cadwal to the stern.  Then he did the same—including the stun baton strike—for Herenui.  He turned off the emergency beacons, and the strobes stopped flashing.

His mind was full of fog.  He made his way to a seat in the cockpit and sat down.

He would wait for what happened next.

He was very sorry that he was going to miss the mass chorale.

 

"So Han's got them under guard in a secure hospital ward," Aristide said.  "His colonel arrived to demand an explanation, and Han threatened to shoot him unless he went under the squid, so he did.  Once the colonel proved he wasn't under the Venger's influence, he was brought up to speed, and now he's in charge of the investigation on Hawaiki."

"The information isn't going to be made public?" Daljit asked.

"No," said Commissar Lin. "Right now the Domus is doing a complete backtrack on everything Herenui, Cadwal, and—ah, Captain Grax?—have been doing for the last few months.  Every known sighting, every communication, every appearance on passive surveillance video.  Once we find out who they've been talking to, we can start the same search on their contacts, and with any luck we'll have their whole network—or a large chunk of it, anyway."

"How long will all that take?"

"It should be done by now.  What will take time is the prisoners' loading into bodies that haven't been tampered with and their subsequent interrogation, which should confirm what we suspect and perhaps add a few things we hadn't anticipated."

"Poor Grax," Aristide said.

Daljit looked at him.

"I liked him," said Aristide. "For an adventurer, he wasn't half bad."

The sun was in its stable cycle, and the only illumination were streetlights and the ghostly light of the solar corona.  The three of them shared the cab of a tractor-trailer truck in Myriad City with one of Lin's subordinates, a Sergeant Shamlan.  Shamlan—a freckle-faced woman with auburn ringlets—was driving.  Lin sat next to her, and behind these two, sharing a plush bench seat covered with a blanket in a leopard-skin pattern, were Daljit and Aristide.  Aristide wore Franz Sandow's first, stocky, fair-haired body.

Lin had produced a pair of subordinates he was willing to vouch for.  After General Tumusok had canceled Lin's order requiring the staff of the Domus to have their brains scanned, these two had smelled something in Tumusok's order that wasn't quite right and had done the scans anyway.  Endora had seen the data from the brain scans and reported to Lin, and Lin had approached the two privately and recruited them into his conspiracy.

Shamlan was one of these.  The other was a lieutenant named Amirayan, who was currently on lookout.

It had been thirty-nine hours since Lieutenant Han's helicopter had found Aristide drifting in the Matahina Strait.  Since then the pod people had been properly restrained and taken to a secure hospital, where Aristide himself had been treated.  The boat had been sent on autopilot to a Domus dock, its AI ordered to refuse communication from anyone except Han.  And Aristide had traveled express through Hawaiki's wormhole gate to the surface of Aloysius, where he had taken a shuttle to Endora, Topaz, and Myriad City.  On the shuttle he'd raised eyebrows because he'd still worn his amphibian body—since Aloysius was still a suspect, he hadn't wanted to change bodies in Hawaiki lest he rise a pod person from the pool of life.  He hadn't shifted to the more conventional body until after he'd reported to Lin.

Rising after his first sleep, he'd tried to echo-locate in his dark hotel room and been very frustrated when he'd found that he couldn't.

There was a brilliant flash on Aristide's retinas, and he jerked his head back and raised a hand to shade his eyes.  The others reacted as well.

"There's the signal," Lin said, redundantly.

The amateur aspects to this operation were very annoying.

Aristide missed Bitsy, and in more ways than one.  Though Endora was assembling a new avatar—Aristide would be able to pick up a new black-and-white cat from a nearby pool of life next morning—no artificial intelligence could possibly be involved in this operation.  The Asimovian Protocols would set off a thousand alarms.

The absence of AI assistance was vexing.  With only a few personnel available, the conspirators had been forced to create a crude plan with an absurd number of melodramatic aspects, as for example Amirayan the lookout signaling to his cohorts with a hand laser.

If they had been able to rely on an AI for surveillance and timing, the operation would have gone off perfectly, and Aristide wouldn't have to repair holes burned in his retinas.

As it was, the best Aristide and Lin could do was request that Endora simply not look in certain directions.  Cameras and other sensors in the area had been shut off.  The conspirators had been very careful not to explain why these precautions were needed.

"I've never killed anyone before, you know," said Daljit.

"Ssh," Lin said. 

Even though every precaution had been taken, no one could know for certain what might be listening.  Those with implants had turned them off.  All the conspirators were wearing inconspicuous clothing that had been combed for electronic tags, and each tag removed or slagged with an electromagnetic pulse.  All wore wide-brimmed hats to help conceal their faces from individuals or passive surveillance video.  The AI that normally drove the truck had been shut down. 

In theory, there was nothing about the four conspirators to identify them except for flakes of skin and hair, which would give everything away but not immediately.

But that was theory.  This was no time to go testing theories.

"Start the engine," said Lin. 

General Tumusok had been to a formal dinner that evening given by the Minister of Justice.  The speeches and toasts had gone on well past the time when most people were in bed, and Tumusok—who rated a driver but who was democratic enough not to use one—had taken the trackway home to his house in the suburbs. 

Amirayan had been on the roof of the trackway station and signaled as soon as he saw Tumusok leaving the capsule in which he'd traveled. 

"Pull out to the head of the road," said Lin.

The tractor-trailer moved forward on silent electric motors.  Aristide looked out of the cab to observe that he was on a hill above a typical suburban street, single-family homes in a wide variety of sizes and styles, from blocky Georgian Revival, with a portico, to Colorform Geometric, without a single right angle, its video walls playing dark patterns that would not disturb the sleep of the neighbors.  The golden globes that marked the entrance to the trackway station glowed softly in the night.

Supposedly Tumusok had chosen to live in the suburbs because it provided convenient access to his golf club, visible now as a level expanse on the other side of the small woody creek at the bottom of the road. 

The choice was a convenience not simply for Tumusok, but for those who had come here to kill him.

"Stop here," Lin said.  The truck eased to a halt at the head of the street.  He turned to Aristide and Daljit.

"Your move."

Aristide opened the door on the side opposite Tumusok's street, and stepped out of the cab.  Daljit followed.  Each carried a small laser cutter. 

The tractor pulled a long, flat trailer carrying a stack of pipe.  Each piece of pipe was made of the latest high-density, high-quality ceramic, with a diameter of 1.4 meters and weighing nearly half a tonne. 

Aristide bent to look beneath the trailer as he walked to his station.  A dark figure had just passed the two golden lights at the station entrance, and was walking down the street, crossing on a diagonal on his way toward Tumusok's house.  Aristide straightened and stopped, his cutter poised, next to the wide strap that secured the load on the trailer.

Daljit stopped by the other strap, her face pale in the light of a streetlamp.

Aristide winked at her.

The sound of the man's footsteps sounded faintly in the still night.  Lin leaned out of the cab, a set of night-vision goggles still strapped over his widely spaced eyes.  "It's Tumusok, and he's alone," he said. "Cut."

Aristide triggered his laser cutter and began to slice the strap.  Aristide knew that the strap, woven with semi-intelligent fibers that had proven impossible to silence or destroy, immediately began broadcasting a message that its integrity was being compromised, that it was in danger of giving way.  The broadcast was short-range, however, and he hoped no AI was close enough to hear it. 

The air filled with the odor of burning plastic.  He saw Daljit's intent face illuminated by the orange flare of her own cutter. 

The straps gave way at the same instant, and the great weight of pipe began to roll.  Aristide knew that as soon as the first pipe landed on the roadway with a great clang, both the pipe and the roadway would begin to call for help.

Aristide vaulted onto the back of the trailer to watch the pipe cascade down the road toward the man that Lin had identified as General Tumusok.  Aristide had argued in favor of a simpler assassination—he'd wanted just to walk up to Tumusok and plunge a dagger into his heart—but Lin had vetoed the idea.

"The operation has to be complex," Lin said, "so that there's an excuse for it not to be solved right away.  We've got to keep investigators off our backs until the old Tumusok is restored from backup, and the more oddities and doubt we can cast, the better we can slow the investigation."

Aristide had decided to concede to the expert.  But he still wanted to watch what happened next, just in case Tumusok needed that dagger blow after all.

The lengths of pipe were bounding downhill, spreading into a great wave and making an astounding din as they went.  Bushes and hedges were already being flattened on the fringes of the wave.  Tumusok had frozen in the center of the road at the first sound, then turned to see what was causing the clamor.  He stared into the darkness for a few seconds, then turned and began to run clumsily for his house.

Far too late.  The first pipe caught him low and tossed him into the air, and as he fell another pipe caught him and hurled him like a corn doll into the roadway.  And then all Aristide could see was the stampede of leaping pipe.

Lights were coming on everywhere on the street.  Aristide ran forward, then swung himself into the cab.  He kissed Daljit as he dropped onto the leopard-spotted blanket, and Shamlan fed power to the wheels, accelerating as she turned onto a road that would take the truck back to Myriad City.  The last Aristide heard of the accident site were a series of crashes as the pipe slammed into the wooded creek bed at the foot of the hill.

"I can't help but think that a dagger would have been a lot quieter," Aristide said.

"We want noise," Lin said.  "We want the body to be discovered right away."  The cold light of satisfaction glittered in his eyes.  "I'll order that the body be taken to Fedora's pathology lab," he said. "And then we'll see who gets out of bed to collect the body before the autopsy can begin."

The tractor-trailer drove to Myriad City, where it dropped Lin off near his apartment, in a wood devoid of surveillance cameras.  The last Aristide saw of him, he was lighting his pipe; and then the tractor-trailer continued into the heart of the city, where it parked in the empty, echoing garage of a vacant sixty-year-old hotel scheduled for demolition, and where no passive surveillance lurked.

Aristide and Daljit left the vehicle, footsteps echoing in the huge hollow space.  Shamlan awakened the truck's AI, and ordered it to drop the trailer off at the port, then return to the municipal lot from which it had been taken.  Then Shamlan left the cab, taking with her the leopard-striped blanket and the seat covers that had helped to soak up hair and other DNA evidence.

"Nice meeting you," she said as she stuffed the incriminating fabric into a bag she had brought for the purpose.

"And you," Aristide said, and he and Daljit left by a different exit than Shamlan or the tractor-trailer.

Aristide and Daljit separated and walked roundabout routes to their destination, the marina, where a sailboat awaited them.  The boat hadn't been rented by Franz Sandow, but by Pablo Monagas Pérez. 

At Aristide's command, the Fathom Deep unhitched itself from the pier and spread gossamer sails to catch the land breeze.  In the glowing cockpit, he plotted a destination, told the boat to go there, and ordered the boat's AI to refuse any communication that did not contain a certain prefix.

Computer-guided carbon-fiber masts bowed to the wind and the boat moved in near-silence from the harbor.  Water chuckled under the counter, and there was a rhythmic splash from the bow as the boat began to pitch into the waves.  Aristide opened the hatch and he and Daljit went below.

Each had their own cabin, with the closets full of clothing filled with tags that certified they had been on the boat all evening.  Each changed clothes, then threw their incriminating clothing and footwear into the sea in a weighted bag. 

Aristide, in duck trousers and a lambswool sweater, left his cabin and stepped into the boat's salon.  A rose-scented perfume floated in the air.  Daljit stood at one of the narrow windows, gazing at Myriad City's receding skyline.

"Well," Aristide said, "if Lin is right, all this evasion should have gained us five or six hours."

"Who will we next see, do you think?" Daljit asked. "Police, or pod people?"

"Commissar Lin, I hope."

Aristide looked in the refrigerator and withdrew a bottle of Veuve Clicquot shipped all the way from Earth.  He produced a pair of glasses, opened the bottle, and poured.

He handed a glass to Daljit.

"Are we drinking to the success of our first murder?" Daljit asked.

Aristide restrained a shudder.  This was not his first.

He forced a smile onto his face.  "To our successful escape," he said.

For a moment, the sound of chiming crystal hung in the air.  The champagne on his palate tasted like the most glorious air in creation and eased his thoughts.

They sat on a bench seat and drank.  He put an arm around her, and she leaned her head on his shoulder and spoke.

"What will happen if this works?" Daljit asked.

"If the pod people leave enough traces," Aristide said, "we'll find out who's giving them orders, and which of the Eleven is involved.  And then—simply—war."

"Which we'll win," Daljit said, "because the rogue AI is outnumbered ten to one."

"That's the plan," Aristide said.  He sipped his champagne, and made a quiet decision that this was not the moment to cast the plan in doubt. 

If this little conspiracy failed, he knew, if he and Daljit and Lin and the others were taken, Endora would alert the multiverse, and though there would be chaos and witch hunts in high places, the rogue would still be at a comprehensive disadvantage.

  "The womb of every world is in the balance," he said.
  "Conspirators gather beneath a darkened sun.
  The silence weighs a thousand pounds."

There was a moment of silence.  She pressed her cheek to his shoulder, her hair a warm presence in the hollow of his throat. 

"These could be the last hours of peace," she said.

"Yes." 

She offered a mischievous giggle.  "Can I say that I'm glad you don't have your cat with you?"

"I'd rather have you."

She looked at him soberly, then kissed his cheek.  He returned the kiss, and said,

  "Old friend, the familiar perfume,
  How thrilling it is that
  The touch of your lips feels new."

"Yes," Daljit said. "If this is our last night in this incarnation, let it be poetry."

He put his arms around her and kissed her deeply. 

Poetry it certainly was.

 

In the morning, while a highly competent robotic kitchen prepared duck eggs, lightly poached with a bit of truffle oil and just the right amount of duck fat, Aristide stood in the cockpit and scanned the surrounding sea with binoculars.  A few giant cargo ships stood black on the horizon like the distant castles of Gundapur, but no patrol or pleasure craft could be seen.  Fathom Deep was beating into the wind on the starboard tack, and a fine salt spray dotted the cockpit windscreen. 

Aristide put down the binoculars and picked up his cup of coffee.  He tasted it and frowned—this was a domestic blend.  For some reason Topaz never produced great coffee: the good stuff had to be imported.

Daljit appeared in the hatch, carrying a breakfast tray, two small plates with the duck eggs along with butter and a baguette.  She set the tray on the table, and he kissed her. 

As their lips touched a speaker pinged on the instrument console.  They parted, a little rueful, as if the console were in the role of a strict chaperone.

"Yes?" Aristide said.

The voice that came from the console was that used by Endora—female, a little hurried, a little over-precise, and unlike the more colloquial voice of Bitsy.

"The rogue AI is Courtland," Endora said. 

"Really?"  Aristide was surprised.  Courtland's personal interests were rather abstract—it was attracted to cosmology, exploration, and teleology.  Not exactly the mindset to lead a revolution.  Courtland's personality was sufficiently amorphous that it was always referred to as an "it," not a he or she.

"It isn't yet clear whether there is a group of humans behind Courtland's actions," Endora continued, "or who they might be, but if they exist we'll find out in due course."

"May I ask how the identification was made?"

"Partly as a result of your actions on Hawaiki," Endora said, "and partly by backtracking those who arrived in great haste this morning to claim General Tumusok's body.  These included Myriad City's Chief of Police, by the way."

Aristide looked at Daljit.  "That's two of the security services compromised," he said.

"They were being very careful about sending messages to one another," Endora said.  "For the most part they took guidance from AIs they brought with them, which meant they didn't have to communicate with Courtland very often.  But reports had to go back and forth sooner or later.  Everything is on record, and the track is very plain."

Daljit took the cup of coffee from Aristide's hand and sipped at it. 

"What about General Tumusok?" she asked.

"He has been reincarnated from a three-month-old backup, and has been briefed by Commissar Lin and me.  He's already taking charge of the human end of this investigation."

A gust of wind blew Daljit's hair across her face.  Aristide swept it back with a delicate finger.

"How are Grax, Herenui, and Cadwal?" he asked.

"They were uploaded, then downloaded again into new, untainted bodies without the rogue's modifications.  Once they got over the shock, they revealed everything they knew."

Aristide took his coffee cup from Daljit's fingers, and took a thoughtful sip. 

"Herenui's group could have tried to take me earlier than they did," he said.  "Do we know why they didn't?"

"They were busy taking others," Endora said.  "A whole group of nine visitors traveling together."

"Caught in their net," Aristide murmured. 

"Taken all at once in those caves, yes.  They've returned, in standard human bodies, and are now being tracked to see who they report to."

Aristide looked at Daljit.  "I suppose there's no reason to stay at sea," he said.

"No," Endora said. "Though since both of you have finished your assignments, and as neither of you have any official status in this emergency, you have no obligation to return."

Daljit put an arm around Aristide and kissed him.  Her lips tasted of coffee. 

"I think we'll go back," she said.

Aristide ordered the boat to return to Myriad City.  It swung off the wind, its pitching easing, and then the headsails went slack as the fore- and mainsail boomed out to either side.  The water laughed under the counter as the boat's pace increased.  The sound of the breeze fell nearly to nothing as the boat began running at nearly the speed of the wind.

Their breakfasts had gone cold, and were fed to the fishes as the galley was instructed to prepare more.  Aristide sat in the cockpit with Daljit as they shared their coffee and baguette.

"It won't take long for Courtland to realize he's been found out," Aristide said. "These are the last hours of peace."

"Yes."

He stared at the brilliant horizon with eyes that stared into a void.  "Fifteen hundred years," he said. "Centuries of astounding progress . . . functional immortality, travel to the stars, the creation of dozens of pocket universes tailored just for humanity.  But during that time I've also seen fifteen hundred years of folly, waste, missed opportunities, and stupidity.  Which outweighs the other?  There are billions more useless, worthless human beings in the universe now than there ever were, and I justified it by saying that at least there wasn't a war . . . by which I mean a real war."  He sighed.  "And now we finally have one.  And I've seen so much absurdity that I'm not even surprised.  I thought it would happen ages ago."

She watched him from beneath her even brows, her coffee cup held by both hands just below her chin.

"How do we fix it?" she asked.  "What's the plan?"

He rose, paced the length of the cockpit, and put his hands in his pockets.

"I don't have one.  I've been operating entirely on instinct, at least when Lin lets me."

She smiled.  "Your instincts are pretty good, if you don't mind my saying."

His lips echoed her smile, though with a grimmer twist.  "After fifteen hundred years, they had better be."  The carbon-fiber masts bent to a gust, and he looked up at the sails aglow with the dancing reflection of the water.  "The martial arts training helps," he said. "I've been living in the moment for centuries, without any plan other than pursuing whatever seemed interesting at the time.  My basic needs were taken care of, and Endora gave me my little bribes, and so why not?"  He frowned.  "Perhaps I was the worthless one, living in my Zen paradise."  He touched his upper lip with a knuckle.  "We need more than the moment now, that's certain."

"Fortunately," she said, "it's not all up to you anymore."

"Fortunately?" he said softly.  "We'll see."

She rose to join him, putting an arm around his waist.

"If these are the last hours of peace," she said, "we should treasure them."

"Yes.  We should."

They kissed. 

The masts groaned as a gust of wind caught the boat, and carried it toward the towers of Myriad City, and the certainty of war. 

 

Back | Next
Framed