by Brian Daley
The fear and foreboding in the lieutenant’s face reassured him. Quailed, the officer scurried off to do the Command Program’s bidding. Sark returned to his contemplations in a more positive frame of mind.
Flynn studied the Sailer with great interest, reveling in her. He recognized her, now that he’d had the leisure to, as a simulation for a videogame, one drawn from NASA concepts but operating, here in the System, on different principles from a true Solar Sailer’s. At any rate, Flynn was inclined to wager that it wasn’t photons pushing her along.
The transmission beam entered the wide muzzle of the receiver in the afterbody far astern, to emerge from the ship’s bow projector. In between, as far as Flynn could make out, it filled the gleaming metallic sails and drove the vessel at amazing speed, all in some invisible manner. The details of her construction were as fascinating as the Solar Sailer’s motive power. What, for example, was he to make of the free-floating steps between catwalk and bridge, which stayed conscientiously in place, hanging in the air, without benefit of support or bracing? Only that they’re not the weirdest things I’ve seen, he concluded, which he couldn’t have said until recently.
He turned to Tron, who sat next to Yori as she piloted, his arm around her shoulders. He still looked strangely at Flynn, uncertain what to think or say about some of the things he’d heard, or even what questions to ask. “What about our friend Sark?” Flynn asked.
Tron ruminated on that. “Probably decided not to pursue us,” he concluded. The Carrier could never overtake the Sailer; Sark’s probable move, if he was still extant, would be to mount guard over the Central Computer Area. And Sark had failed the Master Control Program, not once but several times; it might have lost patience with him. “Programs have a way of just . . . disappearing, here.”
“Not us, I hope,” Flynn offered, seriocomedic.
Tron shook his head and held up his disk. “Not with this.” It was shining in his hand as if impatient to perform its office. Tron looked to his mate and pilot. “I’m going to check on the beam connection, Yori. You two can keep a watch out for grid bugs.”
Tron paced forward along the slender catwalk that still seemed awfully insubstantial to Flynn, though he knew it to be amazingly sturdy. He gazed after Tron, asking himself what in the world a grid bug was, and hoping that the beam connection—to which he’d given no thought whatsoever until this moment—was healthy and sound. He sure didn’t want to see the Solar Sailer jump her fails, or whatever the term might be.
He looked to Yori. “You know the territory?”
She nodded. “A little.”
Flynn, scanning the terrain below, pointed to a region that was unlit, apparently blighted, its features all two-dimensional and meaningless. He pointed to it. “What’s wrong with that area?”
She rose up a little in the pilot’s seat, saw, and replied with sadness: “The MCP blasted it. There are very few Domains left with any power at all.”
He searched in all directions over the Game Sea, the expanse of liquid coming beneath the Sailer. With the exception of the blasted area, the Sea now stretched in all directions, phosphorescent, before them. It was lustrous, with breaking swells of multiple colors, horsetails of light, spray that resembled myriad stars. A strange, beautiful, mysterious place; he recalled the flatlands, the Factory Domain, the System as he’d seen it from high overhead on his descent, the stupendous megastructure of the Training Complex. The Electronic World was grotesque and menacing at times, but he couldn’t deny that it was beautiful, enthralling at others.
No man had ever seen a more bizarre place, or had a more fantastic adventure. But if all went well, if the light was green at the Central Computer Area and Tron’s disk worked out, Flynn supposed he’d be redigitized right away. With a million questions unanswered and the bulk of this cosmos unvisited, he would go home. It surprised him how much he regretted that part of it.
“They say there are creatures out on this sea,” Yori was telling him. “Huge grid-eaters, and data pirates.”
“Terrific,” Flynn opined wryly; maybe going directly home wasn’t such a bad idea after all. “Can’t wait to meet them.”
Yori had returned to her piloting. “Well, in any case, this beam can outpace anything on the Sea, including Sark’s Carrier.”
Thinking about interception courses rather than an aerial drag race, Flynn refrained from comment. The Game Sea, opalescent currents pulling colors this way and that through it, slid by underneath.
Tron stood on the very edge of the Sailer’s forebody, straddling the bow and the beam-emission device itself, the vomiting of power. He held his disk before him, looking down at it, summoning to mind the words of Alan-One, trying to fathom the secrets of its modifications.
The transmission beam issued from the Solar Sailer, beyond the limits of Tron’s vision. At varying distances and angles, other beams intersected it or ran by it in skew fashion, an exotic web of power and speed. Satisfied that the vessel’s beam connection was secure, he drew back, putting all his concentration into the cast. He released, and the disk skimmed out from the ship, up and up, until it was nearly lost to sight.
The disk spun and flew, strobing its power, guided by his throw and will, rising. Tron followed the cast, studied it, evaluated every aspect of it. He hoped that it would serve the purpose for which Alan-One had refurbished it, and that his throw, when the time came, would be fast and accurate. All that Flynn had said, all this talk of Users, Tron knew, he must set aside. He could afford to harbor no doubts, no ambivalence, when time came to use the disk. There must be only Warrior, weapon, and target.
His disk had slowed now; it returned smoothly, as he’d intended. He watched it, squinting, evaluating. The disk picked up speed on its descent, as if keen to return to him. Tron reached out; it slammed into his hand with reassuring impact and a starburst of energy. He held it so for a moment, inspecting it once more, deciding at last that he’d found no fault in it or in his control. Tron was content; Flynn’s being or not being a User was unimportant in this regard. No doubt or revelation had impaired his ability to use the weapon given him by Alan-One.
The Carrier scouted over the Game Sea as it moved toward the Central Computer Area; Sark’s evaluation of the strategic situation was little different from Tron’s. Still, his crew attended their instruments closely and kept vigilant watch from posts on the bridge and elsewhere aboard.
In the craft’s interior, in a compartment reserved for Sark’s most dire work, Dumont was experiencing sensations he hadn’t known in a very long time: shock, fear, and, worst of all, pain. He was no longer the part-program, part-mechanism he had been in the Input/Output Tower. Bereft of his special status, his power drained, he’d reverted to a more conventional-looking sort of program, elderly, arrayed in flowing robes. But he was haggard, and spent from learning the torment of Sark’s inquisition.
Memory Guards’ staffs against his chest, he was imprisoned in two foot sockets that sizzled with punishing blasts, bringing pain that threatened his hold on sanity. But Dumont, face grooved and contorted with determination, denied them any added satisfaction, any show of surrender. It demanded every shred of willpower he could muster to keep from screaming, from begging them to stop, even though that would have done him no good. The ancient, seamed face was hardened with resolve. Another surge of excruciating power climbed from the boot sockets, bringing tortured convulsions; the guards kept him pinned to the wall with their staffs. And still there was no outcry from Dumont; that one thing, he’d sworn to deny them.
He was in a cell in the Carrier’s capacious brig. Above him, the old program knew, Sark gazed down with vast enjoyment, delighting in the spectacle of suffering. Dumont’s eyes, screwed tightly shut during the ordeal of the energy blasts, opened slowly, with great effort. He glanced up at the Command Program, knowing how Sark savored the scene. Cast down from his Guardianship, reduced to helplessness, Dumont vowed that Sark would not have the satisfaction of seeing him break.
; “Had enough?” asked the looming, helmeted figure above. The question had little meaning; there was only one way in which this process would end. Dumont lifted his pain-racked, infinitely tired eyes, nearly at the end of his resources.
He croaked upward, “What do you want? I’m busy.”
Anger flared from the hateful face; Dumont knew a fleeting, intense triumph. Sark’s win wasn’t complete so long as the old program refused to give in. The rage that crept into the response indicated that. “Busy dying, you worn-out excuse for a program!” The air seemed charged with Sark’s anger. Dumont took meager comfort from that.
“Yes, I’m old,” Dumont admitted, as much to himself as to Sark. Grown old in the service of the Users, grown weary in the ceaseless functioning of the System, grown disillusioned with the wrongs he’d seen. He’d thought he had acquired the necessary defenses to coexist with the MCP and Sark. But somehow Tron and Yori’s idealism, their hope, had stripped those away. The Guardian was surprised at how lightly this ultimate disaster, the storm of Sark’s vengeance, weighed on his sense of self-preservation. Dumont knew he would soon be de-rezzed, but felt that he had rescued a certain part of himself.
Now he looked up again. “Old enough to remember the MCP when he was just a chess program,” he added. His voice gathered certainty, though its volume rose only a little; Sark listened despite himself. “He started small and he’ll end up small,” finished Dumont.
Though Sark recovered almost instantly, there had been that moment’s doubt on his face that made it all worthwhile for Dumont. “That’s very funny, Dumont. Maybe I should keep you around, just to make me laugh.”
And with that, another piercing blast came from the foot sockets. Dumont threw his head back in anguish and, in the all-embracing torment, lost the contentment he’d drawn from goading Sark, regretted it, disavowed it, and wished only for the suffering to end. But when it ended, Dumont, fully aware that his inquisition had only begun, drew peace from the knowledge that he’d thrown his tormentor off stride, if only momentarily, with the truth.
Then the sockets hummed again; the agony returned. Dumont was disfigured with it, misshapen, weeping. He wished only for the nothingness of de-rezzing. But one side of him marked how peculiar it was to feel a sense of satisfaction at having helped Tron and Yori in their hopeless mission, a sense of pride in having done his best in a World gone mad.
THE HORIZON HAD broken; Flynn knew that expectation that comes near the end of a long journey.
“We’ll reach the end of the Game Sea soon,” Yori announced, still at the helm. Her endurance there, her calm control and expertise, had not surprised him so much as reminded him of Lora. Yori exhibited that same commitment to see a thing-through, to do what she was doing as well as it could be done, and leave no room for criticism. She had that same drive to settle for nothing less than excellence, and to settle for that only when perfection wasn’t possible. Flynn, watching her, recalled all that Lora had meant to him.
Then he turned and watched Tron, who strode aft down the catwalk. Flynn thought about his disk cast from the bow, the precision and exuberance of it. Despite all he’d learned, Flynn knew that Tron had an affinity for the disk which he, Flynn, could only guess at. Am I seeing Alan Bradley? Flynn asked himself, looking at the gleaming User Champion, other-worldly Warrior in electronic armor. I understand him. And Dillinger too, but in a different way, and Gibbs. And Lora; most of all, Lora.
Flynn looked to the horizon once more; they were nearing the Central Computer Area, the MCP, and some final resolution—victory or death. Flynn decided that he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He’d come to ENCOM to settle a score in the first place; now he grinned fiercely at the Central Computer Area, where the Master Control Program waited. C’mon out and fight!
The Sailer abruptly trembled under them, the first disturbance in her swift maiden voyage. The transmission beam was suddenly brighter, louder, more powerful. The Sailer fought her helm as if she’d come into a squall, her sails cracking. The transmission beam intensified.
Flynn heard running boots on the catwalk and saw Tron charge aft, his face transformed with concern for Yori. Tron didn’t bother with a second glance at the transmission beam; he’d seen that it was operating under some guidance. This was no malfunction, but a subversion of the beam; the MCP had taken control of it. Perhaps Master Control had devoted the staggering amount of time and attention necessary to monitor the entire webwork and locate the Sailer. Or—Tron had time for a single searing jolt of guilt—perhaps the MCP had detected his hurl of the disk.
Profitless to consider that now. Tron bounded past Flynn, who was regaining his balance, and was at Yori’s side. The transmission beam had risen to a terrifying pitch that nearly drowned out his voice as he shouted to ask her if she was all right. She was, but that was only an instant’s relief.
“What’s happening?” Flynn hollered over the tumult of the beam and the Sailer’s answering tossing and rocking. All of them clutched for handholds to keep from being pitched overboard.
“Power surge!” Yori yelled back. “From the MCP!” She was doing her best to bring the vessel under control. For a moment, Flynn was convinced that he was watching Lora, not an alter ego or simulacrum, but her.
Tron steadied her and took in their situation, the insane gyrations of bow and stern, the thrumming of the four lines and the undulations of the great sails. The vessel bucked again and he gripped Yori, shouting over the furor, “We have to get off this beam!”
She’d scanned the readouts, and told him without quaver, “I can’t! There’s no junction due for at least seven or eight nanoseconds!”
The word junction caught Flynn’s ear as he struggled aft to join them. The Sailer must get off the booby-trapped beam and onto another. He searched, then pointed. “There’s another beam!” It glittered in the distance, their salvation. They’d sailed the beam on which they now rode all the way from the Factory Domain, and he’d never seen what transferral entailed. Flynn hoped it was no big deal: Got a long way to fall, he reminded himseli..
“It’s too far!” Yori hollered back. Which means, Flynn surmised, that the Sailer’ll either drop out of the sky, explode, or be held fast until the Good Ship Sark shows up.
He knew a sudden hatred of a scheme of things that could end their mission so. But we won! he nearly cried aloud. Survived that coliseum, the tanks, the Recos, the Reds! Tron and Yori were close together, she gathered in by the long, muscular arm, both of them resigned.
The game was over, Flynn was concluding, just as an idea occurred to him and his mind finished, barring the unpredictable Kevin Flynn!
Tron saw Flynn drag himself upright and spring toward the Sailer’s bow, tossed from rail to rail as he ran. Something in his attitude stopped the User Champion from yelling to him to stay where he was and hold on. The assertion that Flynn was a User was something Tron found easy to doubt at times, but not now. He knew the sudden hope that had come to him in duels on the Game Grid, when he’d thought himself about to die but had found a means to live and win instead. Following Flynn’s progress forward, he felt what other User-Believers had felt when they’d watched Tron fight.
“Flynn!” he shouted, but the other kept moving. “What are you doing?” Flynn went on, giving no sign of having heard.
He came to the free-standing steps of the ship’s forebody, suppressing his conviction that things like steps had no business hanging in midair, ascending them three at a time. Racing up the companionway, he staggered between the masts and out onto the bow, nearly losing his balance and slipping overboard.
The sails strained and cracked as if before a gale. He teetered past one of the three long antennae that radiated from the hull, now swinging crazily. Through his mind passed all that he knew of his new phantasmagorical World, the behavior of energy there, and what passed for matter. He summoned up memories of his own amazing feats, the sensations when he’d stolen the aura of the downed Red and unconsciously liberated power in th
e dismantled Reco. He narrowed his concentration to those things; they must guide him now.
He made his way out onto the prow, stopping just short of jutting flanges that guarded the beam-emission aperture like teeth. Flynn readied his will, thought about power, and concentrated on the flow of energy beneath him.
Tron, watching from the helmsman’s station, arm around Yori, suddenly understood what Flynn had in mind. The insane audacity of it, and the remote possibility that Flynn might be able to bring it off, made him exclaim, “The beam connection!”
Flynn lay full length on the deck, angling his shoulder around to the gap between the bases of two flanges. The beam flared and sizzled, an outgushing of energy like the lurid mouth of Hell. He rummaged within himself for whatever dormant resource it had been that had permitted him to do the things he had. He extended an arm into the path of the beam. It was not disintegrated; he watched his own splayed fingers within the raging outpouring of power. And he found that he knew precisely what to do.
He thrust his entire arm into the transmission beam as if it were a medium no more dangerous than water. Tron and Yori hiked themselves higher in their seats, trying to see. Flynn pointed his free arm at the other transmission beam he’d spied in the distance. Knowledge came, and control.
From his arm a ray of intolerably bright light projected, nothing less than another transmission beam. It struck and melted with the one in the distance, an improvised link. Flynn felt as if he were about to blow apart, his electronic physiology barely able to cope with the tremendous forces. Tron, and Yori watched him, a figure out of a fable, doing a deed without precedent.
“He’s creating a junction!” shouted Tron over the din. “Quick; transfer to the other beam!”
