K-Machines

by Damien Broderick

  "Give me some music," she told a robot hanging like a scarlet spider from the wall. Instantly, hidden speakers bathed her in the Lacrimosa from Mozart's Requiem in D-Minor, K. 626, the version completed in a cognate Tegmark world where the composer had recovered from rheumatic fever but died two years later, still penniless, after a fall from a fractious horse. It seemed like a metaphor of some sort, Ruth decided, delving into the machinery. She murmured, "I'll go to Juni's T-party as Constanze Weber Mozart." Everyone had hated her, too. The thought made her smile.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  August

  Despite my satisfying leap at the age of twelve from a diving platform at mad Jamie Davenport's urging, I never grew to like heights. When there's hard-packed soil down below, rather than water, I'm even more reluctant to look over the edge. Even so, when I peered across the lip of the levitating metal coin carrying us up smoothly toward the dark opening in a darker starship built like a Tarot Tree of Life, I felt a powerful pressure to jump off immediately and take my chances. Minimize the damage. Annoyingly, we were already too high for that sort of theatrical getaway.

  "A little starship adventure, eh? Not on your bloody life, mate," I said. "Jan, take me back down. You idiot, if we start tearing around in this thing, we'll be marooned." I was thinking of the Xon star and its apparent inhibition of Vorpal abilities. Jan should be the last person to let that factor escape her attention; hadn't she been stuck inside this very spacecraft for decades of rest-frame time, her access to the Schwellen portals blocked, limping home at a substantial proportion of light speed?

  "Marooned?" Jan, though, elected to be blithe. "Nobody gets marooned in a starship. It's when they push you out the airlock and—"

  The metal surface under our feet bore us irresistibly into a shadowed cavern, slipped snugly into a prepared cavity. Lights glowed on, filling the space with glare-free illumination, as heavy doors to the hold slid noiselessly into place, shutting off our view of the surface below.

  I was in a curious frame of mind, some disturbed part of me noted. I knew with certainty that it was a very good idea to be here with Jan and Maybelline. Hadn't I been planning to join them from the outset? Our task—The details, admittedly, were a little unclear. That puzzled me, in a remote way, because it was obvious what we needed to do, or at least that we had to do something specific, pursue a path toward—

  I felt a buzzing sort of tingling in my right hand, then, and glanced down at the X-caliber implant. While it was not glowing white hot or flashing in rainbow colors, certainly it was trying to tell me something.

  A tickle in the back of my mind, a stirring in my chest: I was starting to get mad, but I didn't know why.

  I followed my two sisters through a circular doorway that sealed cozily behind us, along a companionway as bland and reassuring as a Tokyo high-rise corridor or, indeed, a similar passageway aboard the starship Enterprise. My god! A genuine starship. It was mind-boggling. Somehow just being here was more ferociously exciting than sampling the infinite variety of the Tegmark levels in my rite of passage with Toby and Lune a thousand years ago, or two weeks, or whatever.

  I tripped, tangled in my own clumsiness, caught myself, felt a burst of—felt something. Unaccountable anger. It seemed an odd emotion to be subject to at a moment like this. The women, up ahead, were arguing about politics of some kind, their dispute made incomprehensible by the tongue-twisting names they flung back and forth. Wait a minute, I'd heard one of those names the first time I stumbled upon Maybelline having her way with an alien from a flying saucer. Pjilfplox. No, wait a moment, her vegetable love had been Phlogkaalik. My baffled tensions increased. I was angry, could feel my anger surging but blocked, and I didn't know why. I wanted to discuss it with Lune, and she wasn't here. I stopped dead, and called after my sisters, "This is far enough. Take me back down to Earth. What the hell am I doing here?" I fell silent, frowning. Surely it was obvious why I was there. I knew perfectly well—

  "If you wish to get back down to Earth," Jan said, laughing, looking over her shoulder at me, "I'd strongly recommend staying aboard."

  I stared at her. "Now you're threatening me?"

  "Don't be ridiculous, you little prick," Maybelline said, looking ready to punch me. "Where do you think you are, anyway? Just down the street from the strip mall? That's not Earth down there, you idiot, it's Venus."

  Oh. I stood where I was, squeezed my eyes tightly, probably swayed back and forth a bit. A sort of memory from my Vorpal grammar clarified itself, not very much like a voice whispering in my ear, more as if I'd known this all along but clear recollection had managed to slip my mind. Yes, of course. Maybelline's Heimat, her comfortable quarters and home away from home, was not on one of the variant Earths but on some incredibly unlikely boutique Venus. I started to laugh, not happily, and the sound of it grated in my ears. Voyage to Venus. Easy travel to other planets. I joined the navy to see the sea, and what did I see? I saw the—

  "Take it easy, kiddo," Jan told me. She walked back toward me, held out the jug she was still clutching in her right hand. "Have a snort, you look as if you could use a heart-starter."

  The liquid burned the back of my throat, numbed my tongue, made my ears ring faintly. Or perhaps that was some sort of pressure change. An ambient, directionless machine voice told us, welcome back aboard, Commander. we are returning to venerastationary orbit. no enemy forces are apparent at this time. good afternoon, August Seebeck, i for one am pleased to make your acquaintance finally. i am The Hanged Man, and i'll be your starship transport today.

  Wonderful. A robot spaceship pilot with an impeccably dry sense of humor. And what the hell was "venerastationary"? Up popped the answer, like a remembered translation: stationary in relation to the surface of Venus. Oh—as in "geostationary," like a satellite in Clarke orbit, hanging above the same place on the Earth, except this time we really were talking about Venus. You might suppose I'd be beyond astonishment by this point, but that sent me reeling into a moment of dazed confusion. I really had been standing on another planet. Not the Venus of my own Solar System, obviously, as that was a poisonous, blazing wasteland ruined by its own runaway greenhouse effect. Or so I'd once read in Scientific American. Now the lunatics wanted to kidnap me for a flight to some unknown destination in the wrong universe. No. And again, no.

  "Ladies, obviously we're talking at cross-purposes. I don't even know what convinced me to come here. Some sort of bloody mental programming, that's what I think." I looked with disgust at the thing piercing my palm like a stigmata where they'd gone wrong and left the nail in. "I don't like being pushed around. And that's all any of you seem to be doing to me. In future, I'd recommend asking nicely." I addressed myself to the deixis operating system. "Take me back to Toby's."

  Nothing happened. I said it again, more sharply, and then once more, using Lune's name. Nothing happened.

  I looked angrily at the women. One of them was blocking me. I hadn't yet learned that trick, but obviously it was possible—Toby had shut out the rest of the clamoring pests the first time Lune and I visited his private universe.

  we are in direct line of sight to the Xon anomaly, the starship told me in its strange voice. normal service will resume when that object is occulted. regrettably on our current orbit this would not occur for seventy-nine hours. we will not still be here at that time.

  "Seventy-nine what? Take us back down to the surface, I'm not waiting here for—"

  the planet Venus in this cognate has a slower rotational period than the main-stem twenty-four-hour period of the planet Earth, but it is considerably faster than the standard retrograde Veneran diurnal period of 243 days.

  "The kid doesn't want to know that sort of tedious crap, Hanger," Jan said. "Bore-ring. C'mon, team, come through to the control deck and I'll show you around. And try to play nice—we're going to be here together for way longer than a Veneran day, so let's settle down, huh?" She started to put her arm through mine, and I pulled away sharply. That earned me a
hurt look.

  "I don't recall signing on to any mission, Commander. Put me down on the surface immediately. This is kidnapping. It's blackbirding."

  Now my sister the spaceship driver looked more baffled than hurt. Peering at me from the corners of her eyes, Jan frowned, shrugged, opened her lips as if to speak, thought better of it, shook her head, turned away, and started back along the corridor.

  Maybelline stayed put, blocking my way, said to me, "Shut the hell up, you idiot. This woman has brought us back the most significant information about the Xon star that we've ever... How do you think we managed to reprogram the vimana you somehow managed to bumble into saving from destruction, back on Ember's world? How do you think The Hanged Man got here? You just don't have a clue, do you?" She, too, shook her head. The curls bounced. I felt angry enough that I was tempted to grab her by the shoulders and give her such a shake that her teeth would bounce as well. Luckily, I'm the courteous type, plus I remembered that May was some sort of Warrior Princess, probably able to rip me into bleeding chunks. That realization just made me more cautious; I was not mollified.

  "I don't have a clue? Why should I give a flying fuck? I'm not part of your brainless game or contest or whatever it pleases you to call it. You and Lune and your robot pal Coop hijacked me. You pestered poor Tansy with your bloody corpses until the K-machines came down and destroyed everything she loved. You might as well have tapped the deformers on the shoulder and waved a Judas flag, then handed them a map marked with a big red X, you careless bitch."

  "I can't see you whining about this to your beloved Lune, somehow," Maybelline said. She flushed angrily. Jealousy and rejection, surely that was it, as I'd once suspected. I could not find it in me, at that moment, to feel sympathy for her. Truth be told, I was rather glad that Lune was millions of kilometers and several universes distant from us at that moment. I loved her wildly, but just now I had more than one bone to pick with her. She knew much more than she'd told me, and I felt like a manipulated fool whenever I stumbled into a gap of logic or family history that might have been filled by a sentence or two of considerate explanation, and be damned less with Septima's nonsense about knights in training.

  So, of course, "Leave Lune out of this," I said, equally angrily but rather feebly. "Ship, why are we not yet on the ground?"

  authorization has just been received from vimana control to break from orbit. we are now accelerating out of the solar equatorial plane toward the Xon manifestation at right ascension seventeen hours forty-six minutes, declination minus twenty-nine degrees. point 866 light velocity will be attained when gamma equals two within 144.7 hours. assuming no further attack, we should arrive at the star in—

  "What!" We entered a spacious elevator without elevator music. The doors opened almost immediately, and I followed the women into a huge space of comfortable chairs, consoles, large screens portraying data icons in vivid detail, several showing a black starfield. In one, Venus was the smallest shrinking half-orb almost lost in darkness. I blinked, and it was gone.

  "Cool it, dude," Jan told me, popping herself into a large, comfortably padded chair and pulled her legs up sideways under her. She had good legs, I couldn't help noticing. Sister or not. "What's with the attitude? You know what we've got to do. There's no point acting like a resentful, spoilt child." She gave me a gamine grin. "Hey, listen to me. Like some schoolmarm. Listen, August, stick your butt in one of these seats and lean back for the ride of a lifetime. Or do you want me to get back to the guided tour?"

  Diagrams formed in large three-dimensional displays, rotated, sketched lines presumably of trajectories, mapped celestial bodies. Labels appeared whenever my eye rested upon some portion of a display. A month ago, I would have found this astonishing technology. In fact, I still did, but in the meantime I'd met the Good Machine, blown a Deformer dreadnought out of the sky by sheer force of personality and the sunflame from my good right hand, visited my brother Decius in an environment bubble poised within an Omega Point cosmic collapse... I felt tired.

  "This is completely ridiculous," I said. "You can't just do this to someone. I mean, just drag me in off the street in a faster-than-light craft that looks like it was designed by someone with a Tarot fixation. I'm not going to put up with—"

  slower than the velocity of light, the spacecraft told me. it is dangerous for macroscopic objects to travel faster than our optimal velocity of under 0.9c. ablation due to impact with electrically neutral interstellar media has the potential to obliterate—

  I tried to take in what the machine was saying. Impossible. Grotesque. The Hanged Man seemed to be telling me that I was stuck inside a prison cell moving at relativistic speeds all the way to the bloody Xon star. I clawed at my memories of physics classes. As you got close to the speed of light, your local time slowed down in relation to the rest of the universe, wasn't that it? Shit. And the bloody spaceship had just said that it was aiming to haul its ass at 90 percent of the speed of light. For how long? Everyone I'd left behind—Lune! Lune!—would be sundered from me not just by the distance we covered but by a worse dislocation, a gulf of dilated time. In a strangled voice, I said, "How far... I mean, how long... goddamn it, how much time are you planning to steal from me?"

  Both women regarded my outburst with apparent surprise. They glanced back and forth, then at me. Maybelline said, "Pods above, you're a whining brat! You've been watching too much sci-fi. Time is a nonissue for us Players." With a conspicuous shudder, she added, "Luckily, we won't have to spend the next thirty years listening to your bellyaching." She crossed the control room to Jan, adopted a formal posture before her. "Commander, I request permission to withdraw into an Entertainment for the duration."

  "Aw, honey." It seemed to me that Jan made an effort to look crestfallen. "C'mon, we hardly ever get to hang out together. Let's at least have a meal together, two sisters and our new brother."

  "Frankly, I can't imagine anything more tedious. With your permission?"

  Jan's lips tightened. With a wave of one hand, she settled back into her padded chair. "Granted. Hanger can direct you to your quarters." Immediately, she turned her attention back to me. "You're not going to run off on me too, are you?" Her eyes danced with recovered merriment. "I mean, I know you'd love to, but you can't get there from here, sorry. August, get that ramrod out of your ass and sit down over here next to me, for Bar-Kokhba's sake."

  Gritting my teeth, I did so. "It's not a ramrod in my ass, it's a pain in my butt—which Maybelline gives me. She's the most self-centered cow I've ever met." I caught myself; what was I doing here, indulging in Stockholm syndrome, where the captive starts to identify with the captor? Could this be a deliberate ploy? Good cop/bad cop? Nice sister/nasty sister? I didn't think so. Jan really did seem a sweetie. And an astronaut—good god, my sister the spaceman. Even so, impressed as I was by Jan's merry, bohemian air and her possession of an enormous starship, I was still completely pissed off. I had been kidnapped, damn it. "I told you, I never signed up for this shit. What's this thirty years crap? You seriously expect me to sit still while I'm hauled off into the middle of nowhere and then come back to find Lune three decades older?"

  "Oh, no," Jan said. "Not three decades."

  Despite myself, I relaxed a little.

  "No, I thought you understood. I keep forgetting how little you—Once we get up to speed, we'll be running at a gamma of two, you know, root one minus v squared on c squared, so our rest-frame elapsed time will be a bit more than six decades, anyway it was the first time I did this run. Onboard time dilated to thirty-something solar years. I know, it's confusing, you'd think they'd say 'contracted' instead of 'dilated.' Hanger—"

  Sixty-seven point nine two years rest-frame elapsed time, the starship's control system told us. that's there and back, but does not allow for time spent at the Xon star.

  I felt a surge of anger so extreme that I wouldn't have been surprised if my nose had started bleeding. By brute force, I held my right hand clamped on the armrest of
my seat. My brain knew that the Vorpal implant in my palm was nullified by our exposure to the Xon star's radiation, or whatever the hell it emitted. My enraged nervous system did not know that. I wanted to kill her. Or burn a hole in the cabin, drain our air into naked space. An entire human lifetime, more or less, two generations of my history, lost to me. I would return to my own world with more than two-thirds of the twenty-first century already in the past, stolen, the wheel of change turned, accelerated, who knew what immensities of transformation worked upon everything I was familiar with... Perhaps Lune would wait for me, it wasn't impossible, I knew in the abstract that she was years, decades, maybe centuries older than I, although it was emotionally impossible to believe that. So many important things had been torn away from me already. In some sense, my world became forfeit the moment I was suckered into stepping through the mirror in Tansy's bathroom, drawn into the greater cosmos of the Contest and its Players. But just because a man has had his life savings pilfered by unscrupulous thieves, it doesn't mean he is anxious to turn out his pockets and fling away the last of his coin.

  The blood pounded in my temples, at my throat. The sinews of my arms tremored. I turned my face away from her, obliged myself to breathe in the calming cycles of my martial arts classes. After a time I had command of myself. It was not Jan's fault, not really. Indeed, it seemed even less likely that my kidnapping was Maybelline's doing. A strange conjecture flashed briefly into my mind: Could this be the doing of the starship computational system itself? Surely not. I put the idea aside for the moment instead of dismissing it outright. I pressed my head against the high-cushioned back of the seat and studied displays. If Jan said anything, I did not hear it in my focused wrath. I'm inclined to think she had the sense to remain silent. The beating of blood faded; the shiver in my muscles calmed to a wary tension. I was thinking as hard as I have ever done in my life. I shut my eyes, contemplating everything I knew about the Seebeck family, the Contest. It was not a great deal, but it was not nothing. Patterns emerged. Anomalies. Absurdities. And always, of course, danger and my love for Lune.