Blade of p’Na

by L. Neil Smith

  If it had been me, and I’d had thumbs, I’d have chosen the little gun.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, sister Surusu picked up the floor lamp, bronze foot and iron shank, antique stained glass shade, and all, ready to throw it in an extremely expensive act of self-defense. All over the world—all over several worlds—antique collectors would be shuddering if they had known what was about to happen.

  But Shaalara was suddenly set back on her figurative heels, not by the sword of an assessor, or even a well-wielded designer lamp, but by a barking, snarling, bristling ball of white fur that threw itself insanely between the St. Bernard-sized arachnid and the human. I was rather surprised to notice it was me. I hadn’t known I had it in me. Our client seemed to come back to herself, and to reality. She closed her mouthparts, relaxed her palps, and set her front feet back on the floor.

  Surusu didn’t put her trusty lamp down, not yet. I could see it beginning to bother her mother, who had probably bought or inherited it.

  “Almighty Web, what have I done?” Shaalara seemed to ask nobody in particular. She pivoted to Eichra Oren. “All I wanted was to find my Meerltchirt!” Then to her fiancé’s parents, “Please forgive me, I’m out of my mind with anxiety. Please believe me that I never intended to—”

  If the two older spiders had been human, they would have been bloodlessly pale. As it was, they were at least wordlessly indignant. It was the missing groom’s sister, though, who stepped forward, the antique lamp still clutched in her palps. “You realize that it’s going to take forever to get all the poison she’s dripping out of that carpet.”

  As old as it may have been, the Fronzeln house had all the modern conveniences. As soon as Shaalara’s dripping venom hit the floor, a dozen tiny robot mice emerged from the woodwork to deal with it. Unfortunately, it dealt with them. The first mechanicritter to reach the stuff died a horrible death; the rest headed straight back to the walls.

  “You’ve been asked to leave, mammals. And take your barbarous client!”

  “Bloody cannibals…” the old man muttered past his cigar.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Horrors of the Deep

  WE WERE HEADED BACK TO THE PIER AT RAY’S SALVAGE when the call came. Stomos Revyek, Fireman of Firemen, wanted to see us, as quickly as possible. But for some reason, he insisted on meeting us at the house. They were in front, Stomos and Bandegrel, waiting as we pulled up.

  “I have something terrifying here,” he told us as we went through the door into the office. I thought the house was going to scream when his muddy boots hit the pristine ivory floor. He steered clear of the caterpillar rug until he’d sat in the entrance and pulled off his footwear. I’d half expected the damned rug to get up and run away, yelping.

  “Terrifying?” I asked. This from a guy who ran into burning buildings?

  “I have no idea what to do with it.” He lifted a callused hand to show a neat, flat transparent container the size of his palm. Inside, cushioned in gray foamed plastic, lay four tiny devices, each of them perhaps three sixteenths of an inch on a side, and maybe as much as a thirty-second thick: microminiature electronics, of a kind typically manufactured by spiders, to the Elders’ precision design and demanding specifications.

  “Cerebro-cortical implants.” Eichra Oren set out two small glasses and a pair of matching bowls, filling them from a hand-carved crystal decanter. Kelp brandy, a gift from a grateful client, and a whole lot better-tasting than it sounded. I pushed my backless chair to the desk and took a lap at the brandy. Stomos pulled up an office armchair for Bandegrel.

  “I have some of those, myself,” I said, referring to the implants. Ray’s were large as implants go, old-fashioned, telling us something about his age. “So do you. It’s the data they contain that must be terrifying—and important enough to somebody that they killed poor Ray.”

  “He was apparently a witness,” Stomos declared, “to something they don’t want widely known yet.” He laid the packet on an induction plate that Eichra Oren had also set out, and the four of us began to receive the last images that Ray had ever seen. We could also hear whatever he’d heard, feel whatever he’d felt, and smell whatever he’d smelled. I anticipated that we would also feel whatever pain he had suffered.

  What we saw was the aircraft Eichra Oren had shot down, lying in about thirty feet of water, which was astonishingly clear the way the Inland Sea can be sometimes. The light was good—at least to Ray’s eyes—despite the overcast and rain that day. Ray and his pair of handy squid swam over the wreckage—only to his aquatic sensibility, it seemed far more like flying—and all around it, making a careful inspection.

  “As you can see,” said Stomos, “The fuselage is a mess—that’s really quite a pocket artillery piece your mother gave you, Eichra Oren—and it’s easy to see through the control compartment’s canopy that there isn’t anybody aboard. The canopy’s open by about a foot’s worth.”

  “What’s that shadow?” I asked, suddenly startled.

  “Ray’s flyer, settled on the surface overhead. What he’s doing now is directing it to send a big net down and spread it on the seafloor next to the wreck. He’ll use antigravs to lift it gently onto the net.”

  “And vacuum the seabed afterward,” Eichra Oren guessed.

  I suspected strongly that if it had been my set of implants lying there on that induction plate, Stomos and Eichra Oren would have been talking directly to me, rather than simply seeing whatever I had seen. My very sapience—and that of Bandegrel, as well—arises from those implants. I’ve always wondered whether the “I” that I experience myself to be is the canine carrying a computer around on his cerebral cortex, or it’s the artificially intelligent computer riding the canine.

  And whether it makes any difference.

  “What on the Forge was that?” Eichra Oren exclaimed.

  “Just wait,” said Stomos. “It gets better.”

  “Better” probably wasn’t the word for it. At first I thought it was some kind of joke. Looking down on the wrecked and sunken aircraft from the late, lamented Ray’s viewpoint, the four of us were startled with him when something brushed against his exposed and defenseless underside. It traveled the length of his body, tail to mouth. Before he could recover, something else brushed him going the other way, perpendicular to him. He twisted around and over, as he did so reaching behind his eyes to his back—or rather, sending his squid to do it—where he was carrying a large, dark, tubular object on a strap.

  It was his automatic speargun, four inches in diameter, six feet long, with apertures for the squid to insert tentacles into, rather than handles and levers sticking out. It carried at least two hundred gravitically propelled miniature “spears” of heavy wire six inches long.

  As the speargun’s muzzle came to bear, something else hit Ray on his ventral side, more than a brush. There was blood in the water, and a vaguely humanoid figure, one spindly arm extended for another cut with a large, familiar-looking curved knife held in a three-fingered hand.

  Ray willed the weapon to discharge, sending a dozen wire darts into his assailant and tearing a fist-size hole in its middle we could see daylight through. The bizarre creature, acting as if nothing had happened, thrust again. Always a quick thinker, Ray shifted his aim to the knife itself, which he blasted aside with another dozen deadly darts.

  The creature’s hand was shredded. Adroitly, with amazing speed, it reached out and seized the knife in its other hand, continuing the attack. Ray shot at the knife again, literally disarming the creature in the process, and then poured half his magazine into the creature’s oversized, egg-shaped head, right between its gigantic ebony oval eyes. The head disintegrated; it looked like the creature was really dead.

  Suddenly, we realized exactly what we were seeing: figures out of the mythology of many worlds. Small, sexless, naked bodies. Skinny but powerful limbs, Huge heads and even huger black, pupil less eyes. No visible mouth or ears or nostrils and not a wisp of hair to be seen
anywhere.

  They were the notorious “grays”, legendary visitors to wherever they showed up, from wherever they had started, and there were at least a dozen of them, all coming straight for Ray with razor-sharp knives.

  Before the alien creatures could converge on him, Ray flapped what amounted to his mighty wings, catching the surrounding enemy in his backdraft, “blowing” them away, and hurling himself to the surface, where he broke through into the air, hung free for a long moment, and then fell back into his aircraft, which was bobbing on the water, and filled with water itself, like a bathtub. How the fellow managed to hang onto his symbiotic squid, and they onto the spear gun I couldn’t tell.

  Three of the creatures were already trying to board the aircraft by then, clinging to its hull, but he snapped his canopy over, lifted off, and executed a perfect snap roll that dumped them back into the sea.

  Ray headed for home—his pier, the shed at the end of it, his utility vessels. He set the flier down and slid into the water. But either they were impossibly fast, or more of them had been waiting for him.

  When his spear gun had exhausted itself, and he found he didn’t have a spare magazine, Ray breached again, landing flat on his back across the pier. Maybe the mantoid thought his attackers were purely marine creatures. They were not. Several climbed onto the pier. One of them, wearing a little visored cap, raised a perfectly ordinary hand laser, and the sounds and images from Ray’s implant ended in an abrupt blackout.

  My vision gradually cleared, the room began to return. Eichra Oren and Stomos sat still, both looked shaken and pale. I could hardly blame them. Allowing for the fact that we are canines and our faces are covered with fur, Bandegrel and I probably looked shaken and pale, too.

  It’s one thing—and bad enough—to watch a friend die.

  It’s another altogether to die with him.

  Stomos and Bandegrel were going through it for a second time.

  “Were those guys who I think they are?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Sam,” said Eichra Oren. “But we’re going to find out.”

  “Well,” Stomos said, getting to his feet. “That’s about it for us, Eichra Oren, Sam. We have done our civic duty. Now we’ll go back to doing our other civic duty.” As the Dalmatian—whose feet had not been dirty for some reason—observed his sapient, the fireman sat in our entryway and pulled his big black boots back on, leaving little crumbles of dried mud behind. “Thanks for the brandy. Sorry about the mess.”

  We followed him out into the front yard where he started his unicycle, like Squee-elgia’s, the kind you sit inside of, while the big wheel zips under your bottom and up over your head. There was a sort of padded wire basket behind his seat for Bandegrel. As I said, the man didn’t lack courage. But he had a family to take care of and an important job to do. Straddling the bottom rim, he sat down on the seat, put his hands on the handlebars, grinned a big toothy grin and was off in a cloud of dust.

  We kept Ray’s implants. Stomos said he didn’t want anything to do with them, and I didn’t blame him. Not only were they grisly souvenirs that would have to be returned to his next-of-kin sooner or later, but people (or something) were perfectly willing to kill to keep them suppressed.

  Eichra Oren took care of that last consideration promptly, sending copies of everything we’d seen—and Ray had seen before us—to a dozen individuals, including his own mother, he felt were sufficiently trustworthy.

  The instruction that went out with them was that, should anything unpleasant happen to him or to me or to Stomos or his family, all of Ray’s last experiences were to be made as widely public as quickly as possible.

  In a civilization that values and respects individual sovereignty and privacy, missing persons’ cases can be a serious challenge for an investigator, especially if the person in question prefers to stay missing.

  Other societies, in other corners of reality, impose elaborate and expensive measures on populations in order to track each individual and his activities. When that sort of thing gets started, it’s usually about taxes, which is bad enough. But sooner or later, it gets to be all about control, pretty much for its own sake. Individuals are all assigned numbers which they are sometimes forced to tattoo on their bodies.

  Next, their “biometrics”—their fingerprints, their footprints, their vocal patterns, their retinal patterns, their brainwaves, their facial characteristics—are archived for future reference. Their financial transactions and even more private relationships with other individuals are monitored, sometimes by the minute, and the records made accessible to official snoops. Where they’re allowed to possess personal arms and transport, they and their weapons and veeks must be registered with the so-called authorities for tax purposes or future confiscation.

  Where I come from, the desire for that kind of control is regarded as symptom of serious illness, the ultimate social disease. Nautiloid civilization is not organized for the convenience of tax collectors or policemen. If anyone were ever to start taking serious steps in that direction, his life expectancy would become measurable in seconds. In nautiloid civilization there are no tax collectors or policemen. Everything seems to work just fine without their dubious services. And that’s the way everybody (give or take the occasional nutcase) likes it.

  But it does make things very difficult when you’re trying to find somebody who doesn’t want to be found. Eichra Oren—who understands perfectly that this difficulty is mostly a good thing—did have one resource to call on: other p’Nan debt assessors. I was there and listening when he contacted a global Nexus facility intended for the purpose.

  “This is Eichra Oren,” he spoke into the communications mirror on his desk, supplying his location, the date he was made an assessor, and the name of his mentor, a legendary practitioner of the craft, now deceased. “I am seeking an individual, Meerltchirt of the Fronzeln Zirnaath, believed to have run away rather than face possible injury or death on his wedding might.” He uploaded a description of the subject.

  The Nexus thanked Eichra Oren profusely. It literally lived to serve—if you could call that living. Not attached to any organic carrier, but simply sitting in a box somewhere, the AI was constantly being fed information, dispensing it whenever requested to do so, and routing communications between thousands of p’Nan debt assessors worldwide.

  It assured Eichra Oren that his request would be passed on. This was the second time today it had heard from my boss; it was one of the individuals to whom Eichra Oren had sent Ray’s recordings. I’ve never figured out whether the Nexus AI is a real being or not, and I suspect it hasn’t, either. I do know it craves data the way I crave filet mignon.

  So I wasn’t particularly surprised, once the Nexus AI and Eichra Oren had concluded their business, that it struck up a conversation with me. It wasn’t the first time—AIs seem to like me. This is one of several reasons I often suspect that I may be more machine than mammal.

  “Hello, Sam,” it said, “I trust that you are healthy and happy.” The voice I heard in my head was very gentle and pleasant, almost soothing.

  “Thank you, Nexus AI, I am both, and I hope the same is true with you.”

  It was silent for a moment. Then: “I am operating within normal parameters, as the saying goes. As to being happy, I don’t believe I ever considered the question before. Not many organic individuals ever think to communicate with me as if I were a sapient being in my own right.”

  “And that makes you unhappy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know, Sam, I don’t have anything to compare it with. I can say that I find communicating with you very agreeable, and not communicating with anybody somewhat less than agreeable. There are only two or three others who will speak with me this way.” It named a couple of p’Nan debt accessors I’d heard of but never met, both of them Elders.

  “And of course,” the AI added, as an afterthought, “there is the Mind.”

  It sounded weird. “The Mind? What’s the Mind?”

  Onc
e again the Nexus AI gave an impression that it was reflecting. I don’t know if it was real, or just a habit it had picked up from organics. “It’s difficult to determine, Sam. I can only say that it seems new to the world, and, a bit like me, spread out all over the planet.”

  A horrible suspicion began to dawn on me. “Can you describe it physically?”

  “I’m afraid not. It has yet to look into any reflective surface while communicating. It does appear to be equally at home underwater, like the Elders or sea-scorpions, or on dry land like you and Eichra Oren.”

  I asked, “And what does it communicate with you about?”

  “Mostly people. Individuals. It likes to learn who are the most influential beings in the world and particularly what they do with themselves.”

  “Nexus AI, I have to go, now. But this is extremely interesting, and I promise that we will speak of it again, provided that you are willing.”

  “Any time you wish, Sam, “it said warmly. “I believe it makes me happy.”

  I hollered for my boss.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Taken for a Ride

  I’D JUST BARELY HAD TIME TO EXPLAIN TO EICHRA OREN what the Nexus AI had told me about “the Mind”, and we were discussing what it might mean.

  We hadn’t learned very much that was useful from our visit to the Fronzeln, even though it was the family that had called us to begin with. At the moment we were waiting to hear back from others about Ray’s last, horrifying experiences. Waiting happens a lot in this business.

  Suddenly, the house informed us that there was a visitor on our doorstep. I closed my eyes. The image was familiar, and somehow, very silly. I knew there was a powerful mind behind that incredibly dopey face, but somehow it was a difficult thing to remember from visit to visit.