Benny tossed the Social Harmony man across the room into the corner of a desk. He bounced off it and crashed to the floor, unconscious or dead. Arturo couldn’t bring himself to care.
Benny knelt before Arturo. “Climb on, please,” it said. Arturo saw that Natalie was already pig-a-back on Lenny. He climbed aboard.
* * * *
They moved even faster than the black robots had, but the bitter cold was offset by the warmth radiating from Benny’s metal hide, not hot, but warm. Arturo’s stomach reeled and he held Ada tight, squeezing his eyes shut and clamping his jaw.
But Ada’s gasp made him look around, and he saw that they had cleared the city limits, and were vaulting over rolling farmlands now, jumping in long flat arcs whose zenith was just high enough for him to see the highway—the 401, they were headed east—in the distance.
And then he saw what had made Ada gasp: boiling out of the hills and ditches, out of the trees and from under the cars: an army of headless, eight-armed black robots, arachnoid and sinister in the moonlight. They scuttled on the ground behind them, before them, and to both sides. Social Harmony had built a secret army of these robots and secreted them across the land, and now they were all chasing after them.
* * * *
The ride got bumpy then, as Benny beat back the tentacles that reached for them, smashing the black robots with mighty one-handed blows, his other hand supporting Arturo and Ada. Ada screamed as a black robot reared up before them, and Benny vaulted it smoothly, kicking it hard as he went, while Arturo clung on for dear life.
Another scream made him look over toward Lenny and Natalie. Lenny was slightly ahead and to the left of them, and so he was the vanguard, encountering twice as many robots as they.
A black spider-robot clung to his leg, dragging behind him with each lope, and one of its spare arms was tugging at Natalie.
As Arturo watched—as Ada watched—the black robot ripped Natalie off of Lenny’s back and tossed her into the arms of one of its cohort behind it, which skewered her on one of its arms, a black spear protruding from her belly as she cried once more and then fell silent. Lenny was overwhelmed a moment later, buried under writhing black arms.
Benny charged forward even faster, so that Arturo nearly lost his grip, and then he steadied himself. “We have to go back for them—”
“They’re dead,” Benny said. “There’s nothing to go back for.” It’s warm voice was sorrowful as it raced across the countryside, and the wind filled Arturo’s throat when he opened his mouth, and he could say no more.
* * * *
Ada wept on the jet, and Arturo wept with her, and Benny stood over them, a minatory presence against the other robots crewing the fast little plane, who left them alone all the way to Paris, where they changed jets again for the long trip to Beijing.
They slept on that trip, and when they landed, Benny helped them off the plane and onto the runway, and they got their first good look at Eurasia.
It was tall. Vertical. Beijing loomed over them with curvilinear towers that twisted and bent and jigged and jagged so high they disappeared at the tops. It smelled like barbeque and flowers, and around them skittered fast armies of robots of every shape and size, wheeling in lockstep like schools of exotic fish. They gawped at it for a long moment, and someone came up behind them and then warm arms encircled their necks.
Arturo knew that smell, knew that skin. He could never have forgotten it.
He turned slowly, the blood draining from his face.
“Natty?” he said, not believing his eyes as he confronted his dead, ex-wife. There were tears in her eyes.
“Artie,” she said. “Ada,” she said. She kissed them both on the cheeks.
Benny said, “You died in UNATS. Killed by modified Eurasian Social Harmony robots. Lenny, too. Ironic,” he said.
She shook her head. “He means that we probably co-designed the robots that Social Harmony sent after you.”
“Natty?” Arturo said again. Ada was white and shaking.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Oh, God. You didn’t know—”
“He didn’t give you a chance to explain,” Benny said.
“Oh, God, Jesus, you must have thought—”
“I didn’t think it was my place to tell them, either,” Benny said, sounding embarrassed, a curious emotion for a robot.
“Oh, God. Artie, Ada. There are—there are lots of me. One of the first things I did here was help them debug the uploading process. You just put a copy of yourself into a positronic brain, and then when you need a body, you grow one or build one or both and decant yourself into it. I’m like Lenny and Benny now—there are many of me. There’s too much work to do otherwise.”
“I told you that our development helped humans understand themselves,” Benny said.
Arturo pulled back. “You’re a robot?”
“No,” Natalie said. “No, of course not. Well, a little. Parts of me. Growing a body is slow. Parts of it, you build. But I’m mostly made of person.”
Ada clung tight to Arturo now, and they both stepped back toward the jet.
“Dad?” Ada said.
He held her tight.
“Please, Arturo,” Natalie, his dead, multiplicitous ex-wife said. “I know it’s a lot to understand, but it’s different here in Eurasia. Better, too. I don’t expect you to come rushing back to my arms after all this time, but I’ll help you if you’ll let me. I owe you that much, no matter what happens between us. You too, Ada, I owe you a lifetime.”
“How many are there of you?” he asked, not wanting to know the answer.
“I don’t know exactly,” she said.
“3,422,” Benny said. “This morning it was 3,423.”
Arturo rocked back in his boots and bit his lip hard enough to draw blood.
“Um,” Natalie said. “More of me to love?”
He barked a laugh, and Natalie smiled and reached for him. He leaned back toward the jet, then stopped, defeated. Where would he go? He let her warm hand take his, and a moment later, Ada took her other hand and they stood facing each other, breathing in their smells.
“I’ve gotten you your own place,” she said as she led them across the tarmac. “It’s close to where I live, but far enough for you to have privacy.”
“What will I do here?” he said. “Do they have coppers in Eurasia?”
“Not really,” Natalie said.
“It’s all robots?”
“No, there’s not any crime.”
“Oh.”
Arturo put one foot in front of the other, not sure if the ground was actually spongy or if that was jetlag. Around him, the alien smells of Beijing and the robots that were a million times smarter than he. To his right, his wife, one of 3,422 versions of her.
To his left, his daughter, who would inherit this world.
He reached into his pocket and took out the tin soldiers there. They were old and their glaze was cracked like an oil painting, but they were little people that a real human had made, little people in human image, and they were older than robots. How long had humans been making people, striving to bring them to life? He looked at Ada—a little person he’d brought to life.
He gave her the tin soldiers.
“For you,” he said. “Daddy-daughter present.” She held them tightly, their tiny bayonets sticking out from between her fingers.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said. She held them tightly and looked around, wide-eyed, at the schools of robots and the corkscrew towers.
A flock of Bennys and Lennys appeared before them, joined by their Benny.
“There are half a billion of them,” she said. “And 3,422 of them,” she said, pointing with a small bayonet at Natalie.
“But there’s only one of you,” Arturo said.
She craned her neck.
“Not for long!” she said and broke away, skipping forward and whirling around to take it all in.
ALL RIGHTS, by Pamela Sargent
Darcy Langton dreaded her da
ily journey to the post office. She knew only too well what her mailbox would yield—bills she could not pay, along with more rejections.
Lately, no one wanted to buy her stories; she wondered why editors kept encouraging her to submit them. Maybe they just wanted to keep her on tap in case the hot new writers they were buying now either priced themselves out of the market or self-destructed. Maybe they just wanted to pretend they were good guys after all, sensitive caretakers of writing talent instead of stripminers and exploiters of it. Maybe it was part of a vast conspiracy, in which editors regularly got together and cackled about all the suckers to whom they were giving false encouragement. Maybe—
Going to the post office often provoked such musings. Darcy’s agent would have told her that it was simply a matter of too many stories chasing too few markets. Agents were supposed to think that way, and Leonard McDermott Lowell was more hardheaded than most, which was one of the reasons she had asked him to represent her work ten years ago. Still, he hadn’t been doing much for her lately. Maybe he was too busy hyping his hot new clients to publishers to tend to her paltry business affairs.
Her post office box was empty, except for a suspiciously thin envelope from Leonard McDermott Lowell & Associates. Darcy clenched her teeth, suspecting it was a letter telling her that Canyon Books had rejected her proposal for a new novel. She locked her box, crossed the room, and leaned against a table as she prepared to read of her doom. Disaster it would be, after six months of waiting to hear from an editor who had encouraged the submission only to lapse into a lengthy silence. Darcy would have to go back to her old job at Burns and Royal to make ends meet, assuming the bookstore still had an opening. Leonard might at least have called to tell her about the rejection, and to commiserate with her, instead of heartlessly notifying her in a letter.
She tore open the envelope. A statement from her agent fell out, along with a check. She stared at the check for a long time, not daring to believe it. Twenty thousand dollars for a new edition of her first novel, The Silent Shriek, and this was apparently only the first part of the advance. Leonard’s statement revealed that more would be forthcoming on publication, six months from now.
Ecstasy and an overpowering feeling of relief flooded through her. She had been reprieved from the torment of having to go back to working in a bookstore where her own books were conspicuously absent from the shelves and always had to be special-ordered by the one or two customers who wanted to buy them during their brief duration in print.
Then she looked more closely at her agent’s statement.
“Alt. Rights3,” the statement said cryptically; the same notation was on the check. What the hell were alt. rights? She knew about foreign rights, book club rights, reprint rights of various kinds, but she had never heard of anything called alt. rights. And what was that 3 doing in there, anyway?
Not that she really cared where this unforeseen but welcome wad had come from—Leonard was supposed to worry about that—but it was probably in her interest to find out.
* * * *
Darcy placed a call to Leonard McDermott Lowell and Associates as soon as she got home; his assistant said that he would call her later. Darcy suspected that her agent was occupied with negotiations involving one of his hot young writers, probably Desirée Thorne, that Danielle Steel clone who had just had her latest piece of banal and basic prose picked up by the Literary Guild as a Main Selection. Leonard would be too busy with Desirée’s business to call her any time soon.
To her surprise, Leonard got back to her in less than five minutes.
“How about that check?” he said jovially. “What about them apples? Hope that cheers you up. Anyway, now I can tell you that Canyon turned down your Terror Is My Middle Name proposal two days ago.”
“Uh, Leonard,” Darcy murmured, “where did that check come from? Why didn’t you tell me it was on the way sooner? You could have saved me a lot of worry.”
“I would have told you,” he said, “if I was sure I’d get the money. Frankly, I wasn’t. It’s for alternate rights, you see, and that’s a whole new ball game.”
Alternate rights? What the hell were alternate rights? But then that was one reason she had an agent, so she wouldn’t have to know things like that. A clause covering alternate rights and granting them to her agent was probably in her original book contract somewhere among the twenty-five pages of tiny type. She had stopped reading her contracts, whose prose was either indecipherable or ominous, a while ago. All the clauses and riders seemed to boil down to one assertion: Anything bad that happens to you as a result of signing this contract is your fault and not our responsibility, even if we screw up.
“What are alternate rights?” Darcy asked.
“I’ll give you the short version of the story,” Leonard replied, “but keep it under your hat, at least until it breaks in Publishers Weekly and the Times, which should be any day now.” He lowered his voice. “See, a couple of months ago, this query came in on my E-mail. Never heard of this editor, or the publisher, but she wanted to publish The Silent Shriek. Well, I checked around with some other agents, and they were getting the same kinds of queries. Couldn’t track down any of these publishers and editors, even though they all had New York addresses. So, on a lark, I finally E-mailed back to this mysterious editor and told her to make me an offer. She did, along with a contract that I printed out. One page, that’s how long the contract was.”
“One page?” Darcy said. “Why didn’t she mail it to you?”
“I asked her that myself. She insisted it was valid, that if I E-mailed back my approval, money would be on the way. I figured it had to be a joke, somebody fooling around on line. I mean, who’s going to offer forty-four thousand, including my percentage, to do a hardcover of a novel that took a bath as a paperback original? Not that your book wasn’t wonderful, but this deal just didn’t make sense. And who’s going to send the best goddamned contract I’ve ever seen? At least it’s good in terms of the writer’s interests. As far as the publisher goes, they’re practically giving everything away.”
“I still don’t see—” Darcy began.
“Well, I let her know we had a deal,” her agent interrupted. “My reply was pretty sarcastic, just so this joker would know I wasn’t fooled. And then, last week, a week after I said okay, the money came—twenty-two thousand for the first part of the advance.”
“A week?” Darcy could hardly believe her ears. “A publisher sent you a check in a week?” That seemed as unbelievable as the size of the advance.
“They didn’t actually send it,” Leonard said. “The money showed up in my account electronically. My bank checked and double-checked, and there’s no question the money was drawn on an account in another New York bank and deposited in mine, so my bank will honor it. They’re just not sure exactly how it got into the other bank. Anyway, by then a few other agents had some idea of what this was all about. Alternate rights—that’s what we’d sold. These editors in some parallel universe had somehow managed to contact this one to buy books published here. Maybe I should say parallel universes, because it looks like there’s more than one. I compared the contract I got with one Scott Fontaney received for a client of his, and then we both talked to Mary Thalberg. It was a popular-science writer client of hers who figured out that we had to be dealing with parallel worlds.”
Leonard sighed and fell silent. Darcy had to believe him; Leonard’s skepticism about most matters was deeply rooted in cynicism and pessimism, essential qualities for any literary agent. He was not a man to fall prey to wild delusions.
“Parallel worlds?” she said at last. “But how?”
“It’s the goddamn electronic highway, or whatever you want to call it. That’s this science writer’s explanation, and a few physicists are backing him up. The computer networks and everything connected to them are so complicated now that messages between different universes are leaking into the system. At least some messages are. Right now, it just seems to be E-mail from editor
s wanting to buy books, their contracts, and their dough coming through electronic transfers into banks here. Don’t ask me why we haven’t heard from anybody else.”
“My God,” Darcy murmured.
“And that number 3 on your check and statement is a way of keeping things straight. Half the agents in New York got together for a pow-wow a couple of days ago, and decided that none of us was going to question a good thing. Mary Thalberg and her client worked out a rough system for us to use, based on differences in the language of each contract, names of publishing firms, and what little we’ve learned from editors about their particular parallel worlds so we can keep it straight which contract came from which universe. I mean, we wouldn’t want to sell alternate rights in Continuum 5 to a book that’s already contracted for there.”
“No, you certainly wouldn’t,” Darcy said.
Leonard went on to discuss what an inside source had told him about a meeting several New York banking executives had held with some prominent physicists hastily called in as consultants. The bankers had talked about prohibiting deposits from alternate worlds, but with the economy the way it was, they had a need for new cash flow. A physicist named Sterling Blake had apparently given the bankers the rationalization they needed by assuring them, with appropriate equations, that all alternate universes were only aspects of one reality. When the bankers looked at it that way, a deposit from a publisher in Parallel World 2 was just as sound as one from a European publisher. Actually, deposits from alternate worlds were even easier to handle, since they involved no currency conversions; everyone, so far, was dealing in dollars. The physicist’s explanation might seem drawn as much from theology as from physics, but the banks would take the leap of faith. They could not ignore the situation, and might as well use it; profit was profit, whatever the source. If enough business started coming in from other universes—really important business, not just book deals—a lot of deficits could be redeemed.
“Who knows?” Leonard finished. “Get enough alternate moola rolling in, and the government might collect enough in taxes to make a dent in the national debt. Doesn’t look like the IRS is going to make a stink—in fact, I heard that this physicist Blake was called down to Washington last night, right after the meeting with the bankers.”
The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack Page 14
