For a moment she paused. She stood alone in a breathing stillness. How fared the brain between her shoulders? She could give him a word or two, a reassurance, a kindness.
No. Not yet. She began climbing.
* * * *
28
T
he screen showed new Guthrie in a new body. A different one, at any rate. It surely gave him less than half the capabilities he might have, as humanoid as it was. He could almost have been a medieval knight outfitted for tourney. Not much was lacking but plumes on the helmet and a surcoat adorned with a lion. Sayre wondered if he had adopted it to make himself seem closer to his employees and associates, make them more confident in his leadership on this dubious and troubled day. The imagery might well actually work to that end, not in anyone’s conscious mind but down among emotions, archetypes, the infantile and the animal.
Nevertheless, the tone from that bright visor was chillingly matter-of-fact. “Not a new word so far. Rinndalir’s agents went off with Davis. That’s all.”
Sayre forced the same manner into his response. “Can you guess where?”
“Maybe. I haven’t dealt with him personally, repeatedly, like the other me, remember. I’ve only got updates to go on. But they tell me what a tricky bastard he is. Knowing his location, Davis’, wouldn’t do us a hell of a lot of good. What counts is what he’s doing with her.”
“Two days— She’s certainly told him. Why hasn’t he made it public?”
“I expect he wants to verify, as far as possible. And quite likely sit back a while, collect what more information he can, see what develops and how he can turn it to his advantage. Listen, I’ve put feelers out in his direction. He’ll know I want secret contact with him. I’ll be surprised if he doesn’t oblige. But when, I can’t say, nor what he’ll want. Maybe only to laugh at us.”
Sayre gripped the edge of his desk. “What ... do you think . . . you can offer him?”
Robot shoulders shrugged. The audio carried the faint metal slither of it. “I’ll have to play whatever cards I’m dealt. Bribes, of course. Quid pro quo.”
“Threats? Hinted at, naturally. It would not be impossible to arrange a major accident.”
“Like an unmanned spacecraft crashing where it’d hurt? Not easy. Nor an idea I like. Economic reprisals—likewise. The Moon depends on Fireball, but it’s mutual. Also, do I have to remind you again? My consortes aren’t your trained-dog officers or your castrato taxpayers. They think for themselves. I can’t order them into actions they’ll wonder about, I have to maneuver them into it, and that takes time.”
Insolent swine. Sayre denied himself anger. It wasn’t rational. “Bueno,” he snapped, “what have your people learned from the spaceship Davis stole?” His men had simply reported finding nothing special aboard. Then Guthrie made a personal call, reclaiming her, and the Lunarians acquiesced.
“Very interesting, that.” The generated voice grew entirely human; Sayre could hear the sarcasm. “Yours did pretty well. Oh, it was up to me to learn that Wash Packer had ordered a launcher loaded in, but your experts didn’t delay matters at Port Bowen by more than about forty hours. My boys didn’t accomplish much except observe what the dog did in the night time.”
“What?”
“The dog did nothing in the, night time. Never mind. There was no launcher in the ship. They ran some tests and found that one had been fired off within the past few days.”
Chill walked along Sayre’s spine. “This means—”
“Yeah. What we suspected he might try. If I hadn’t been so goddamn busy fast-talking people and covering my ass here in Quito, I’d’ve acted on it sooner. Now we’ve both got to. Davis sent the other me off in space. The destination can hardly have been anywhere but L-5. He’ll have covered the distance by now.”
Sayre swallowed. “I’ve had no word about that. You know I’ve had potential conspirators in the colony detained and all space-related activities watched.”
“Uh-huh. Maybe he’s still in orbit. I’ll go look. Personally, in my torch, as soon as I can plausibly get away. Meanwhile, though, you’d better send reinforcements to L-5 and instigate a ransacking. Pronto. Somebody may have him stashed, waiting for a chance to make him known.”
Hope dazzled. “If we can catch him, quietly—”
The basso grew parched. “That’d be nice. However, it wouldn’t take us out of the woods. Packer and his family are at large. They know. How many more? We’ll prepare for the worst-case scenario, that alter-Guthrie pops out of his closet before we can touch him; but our plan needs to provide against whatever may happen whether he does or not.”
Sayre nodded. “The Synod is fully informed and ready. We can declare a state of national emergency at any moment we choose, and mobilize the militia reserves within twenty-four hours. The Federation Assembly will scream, but our delegation can keep it tied in knots for several days. After that, we’ll see what can be done about damage control.” He drew breath. “Fireball will be enormously helpful, both during the crisis and afterward.”
“Within limits, as I’ve tried and tried to explain to you. Christ, but humans are inefficient! I sometimes wonder if I really would like to be one again.”
Startled, Sayre blurted, “Would you?”
A whisper: “Yes and yes, always—” Immediately, harshly: “Well, get off your duff and make those arrangements. Then you can be farting at that end instead of out your mouth. I’ve got my own work to do. If I haven’t called you before, check back with me at this time tomorrow, but otherwise don’t pester me about anything less than Fenris breaking his chain. Savvy? Out.” The screen blanked.
For a span Sayre continued staring into it. Rage went acrid up his gullet. He should have put that malvado in a quiviran hell while he was able and had his technicians make him one more docile!
He mastered his feelings. Wishful fantasy. The ape in him, gibbering. Done was done, and the consequences not to be lamented but to be used rationally. He’d had no way of foreseeing that this Guthrie would turn out so vicious. Nor had there been time to keep trying. Besides, the basic personality must be preserved, or Fireball would never accept it as genuine; nor, probably, would it be able to steer Fireball. And it was indeed doing what it was programmed for, as well as could be expected. What hurt, Sayre admitted, was that he’d thought it would be his friend.
He sighed, rose, paced to the viewscreen and looked at the scene outside. Rain fell gray on Futuro. The buildings seemed hueless, hunched, as if in decay. Many were, he knew, two decades after his government proudly, symbolically created this new capital for the Union. They were all fundamentally alike, too, in spite of every computer-generated architectural variation. It was not a style that inspired a school; nobody else built like this. Ottawa or poor burnt-out Washington had more character, more meaning.
No. Sayre straightened. Avantism made its mistakes, but it would go on. In the end, perhaps after a hiatus, perhaps under a different name and in different hands, it would prevail: because that was the nature of the universe.
A line drifted through his head.Oh, that this too, too solid flesh would melt— What was it, where and when had he heard it? . . . Yes. Shakespeare. Vera doted on Shakespeare, was forever quoting him, and certainly he’d had a majestic way with words, trivial though the content was. But not to think about Vera. Not to let old pains awaken. The divorce was—nine years?—in the past. Sometimes he dreamed about her, but that was the primitive in him. He had his satisfactions, his hygienic accommodations of the needs of the body. He had his work, his duty, his vision.
The melting away of the flesh. Liberation, transcendence, Transfiguration. Millions or billions of years hence, the cosmic Oneness. How could Guthrie conceivably regret being what he was?
Sayre smiled, recognized malice, and indulged it for a few seconds. Guthrie had no choice, except oblivion.
Fantasy: Imprint memories in a biological body, whether this was cloned or grown according to an original, rational design. Then
discard the worn-out one, new life for old. He had gathered that that was among the dreams of those persons a couple of centuries ago who had gotten themselves frozen after clinical death. It hadn’t worked, of course; it ignored the fact that every cell type requires a special freeze-thaw profile.
Nowadays you could go into suspended animation if you were near the end of your span, and wait for science to devise the means of a glorious technoresurrection. Couldn’t you? True, a suspend didn’t last more than a few decades. After that, the accumulated unrepaired damage from such factors as background radiation was too much. But you might expect biotechnics to advance exponentially while you waited.
Forget it. Nobody would ever make anything ageless that was recognizably human; the genome said otherwise. Evolution had selected for parents who got out of the way of their adult children. Whatever else you might synthesize would be too alien to contain your mind.
Then why not clone yourself, in a series of copies, lifetime after lifetime? Why, that had already been done. It didn’t even require a seed cell. The individual genome map was a part of every up-to-date medical database. That had become standard practice when Guthrie was still alive.
But this did not get you away from carbon chemistry and quantum mechanics. An organic brain could not accept a download as a piece of network software could. The process took too long. The brain was too labilely active. It would not recognize those separate bytes creeping in, it would reject them or distort them or go unrecoverably crazy in the torment of them.
So if Guthrie wished to be flesh again, he was trapped.
But why did he think of it thus? Why did he not strive forward to the perfection of robot existence, beyond anything possible to organic molecules? He could fund a research program that would in a few years advance psychonetics by an order of magnitude. He did not, he would not. Instead he obstructed, connived, compromised, fought delaying actions, to keep as many of his workers humans for as long as might be.
Old Guthrie did. New Guthrie had been shown the truth. Give him time to assimilate it.
He had time. The bastard. How good it would be to outlast him, or at least to match the centuries before him.
Not absolutely impossible. Given Avantist victory, surely Enrique Sayre could claim a well-earned reward, his own downloading.
But that would create another Sayre, a machine Sayre. Still this flesh must die, and never know what came afterward.
Unless the Ultimate recreated it as a line within a program you might call Paradise—
Sayre stiffened his back, wheeled about, and got busy.
* * * *
29
E
arth waxed as the sun trudged west. Kyra spied it just above the northeastern horizon when she had scaled the mountain down which she earlier scrambled. Not quite three-quarters full, it hung blue-and-white marbled, a cabochon gem on a raven’s breast, sigil of serenity. But—impatience flamed—it wasn’t that really, it was a clock, it had already swept out four of its days and nights while she lay captive. God, how many more?
And yet, what wonders here were hers!
The thought made her turn about, expectant. Faceplate darkening itself against the glare in that direction, she now saw the heights as a confusion of broken rock, scarred ashen slopes, and shadows. Airless, to her it was not silent; she breathed, her heart beat, and likewise for her spacesuit, ventilating, thermostatting, purifying, absorbing, recycling, well-nigh another organism. Barren, to her it was not lifeless; Rinndalir bounded from below, up into her view.
The motion made his cloak swirl, a ripple and sheen of gray. He unfolded the membranes that reached through slits in it, and iridescence quivered from his shoulders, two slender lengths matching his height, dragonfly wings. But it was cat-lithe that he moved toward her, lapis lazuli-hued save for his face that laughed within the cowl. A star sparkled at the tip of the wand he bore.
“You climbed like a spider, my lady,” his radio voice sang. She gulped. Having seen the spiders he kept, mutated, bred, and drugged in the castle, that they might spin marvelous webs never twice the same for his pleasure, she realized she had been complimented. Few accolades could have meant more. “I did not know you would prove so able.”
“G-gracias,” she stammered. “I’ve done it some on Earth.”
Angrily, she told herself that there was no excuse for thus deferring to him. He wasn’t a sorcerer or elf or outlaw god, magically free of mortal frailties. His suit fitted him like an athlete’s garment because it was state of the art, created for him personally and the Lunar surface exclusively, most of its structure bionic; similarly the almost invisible helmet. The cloak was insulation and radiation shielding; it covered small prosaic pieces of equipment on his back. The wings were partly solar energy collectors, partly cooling surfaces. The wand was a communication antenna and, she guessed, informant. That was all.
Yes, beside it the standard adjustable model lent to her showed as ugly and clumsy. Even her own gear aboard her torchcraft would have. But they were more versatile and far more sturdy, she felt sure. Rinndalir was loco to caper around in that flimsy thing.
Though the thought stripped away none of the glamour, it was steadying. “And you have ample experience with low-gravity environments,” she heard him observe. “I see. If you have rested enough, we should proceed home.”
“I wasn’t tired,” she said. “I was waiting for you to catch up.”
He smiled and waved an arm, spread-fingered. The muscle equivalents in sleeve and glove made the gesture virtually as graceful as within his stronghold. “Believing you would need a pause at the summit, I indulged in a little crag-leaping.”
In the gloom of the gorge below them? The reflection flitted through her that if he’d come to grief, she, alone, mapless, unacquainted with landmarks, ill-equipped to send a long-range call, would have been in serious trouble. Had he cared? She found she couldn’t resent it. His nature was such—she supposed.
“I hope you have enjoyed our excursion,” he went on.
Whatever pique she felt vaporized in splendor. “Oh, yes! Mil gracias! You’ve been hyper kind.”
These hours afoot had been a marvel. Often she quite forgot her troubles. Past sightseeing had brought her to things that were superb, amidst expanses of dreariness, but none compared with what he showed her. Freakish, eerily beautiful formations; mineral colors subtle or startling; tremendous vistas; the remnant of an old exploration camp; enigmatic stones that must have come from beyond the Solar System; the bas-reliefs decorating one scaur; at last the descent into this ravine and the cave near the bottom, where flashbeams awakened an Aladdin’s hoard of crystals— Some of it was recorded in early photographs, but most the Lunarians had discovered or made and kept known to none but themselves. Why had Rinndalir revealed it to her, who would surely tell others? Bueno, this was his demesne, he could refuse admission and grin at indignation.
“When you’re so busy, too,” Kyra said.
Foreboding stirred. Why, indeed, would he spare the time? Why wasn’t he at work organizing Guthrie’s rescue? He’d been out of her sight plenty at the castle, on his screened communication lines or perhaps more than once flying elsewhere to conspire in person. He sidestepped her questions with an evasion or a jest, assuring her nothing bad had happened thus far and that she ought to take her ease, relax, recuperate. No multi available to her would bring in a newscast; he said he spared his staff and himself those stupidities, and she decided against pursuing the matter.
Hm, his lady Niolente had been equally occupied, and lately had remarked in her aloof fashion that she must make a trip. Maybe she was handling everything that at this moment could be handled. But the sense of confinement would have become unendurable to Kyra if... if they had allowed it to grow in her.
“Best I get back into connection, then,” Rinndalir said lightly. “We will return by the shortest route, as quickly as you are able.”
Despite all wonders, that was a relief. No normal spacer wou
ld have stayed out this long or gone this far without a vehicle. True, the danger wasn’t great, the sun wasn’t in a flare period, but as they two crossed a valley floor, dust had spurted three meters to their left and fallen back onto a new pockmark. The bullet-sized meteoroid would have killed either of them. His laughter rang. By the time her nerves had settled, it was too late to ask him if he had been delighted.
He took the lead, soaring down the mountainside. More dust puffed from every footfall. It dropped off the repellent surfaces of his outfit, as it did off hers, and left him darkly shining. From time to time he must pause for her. It wasn’t due a difference in physical strength. In that regard they were probably equal. The modifications that enabled his people to stay healthy and carry babies to term under one-sixth Earth weight were more in the cardiovascular system and the cellular chemistry than in bone or muscle. His spacesuit gave him his advantage. Hers was a responsive machine, his was garb. Panting, sweating, picking her way rock by rock, Kyra wondered whether she too wouldn’t opt for one such and to hell with hazards, were she a Lunarian.
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