Guardian

by Thomas F Monteleone

  “And what do you think happened next?” he asked.

  “That’s easy,” answered Tessa. “She was overcome by her own curiosity and she opened the box.”

  Zeus threw up his index finger like a professor scoring a metaphysical point. “No! A common misconception, passed along through the ages. She did not open the box, although she attempted to. But by that time, Brother Number One had grown very suspicious of the warning and entered her chambers just as she was about to throw back the lid. He swept in, pulled the box from her grasp, and secreted it off in a far corner of the earth where he hoped that it would never be found. . . .”

  “But . . .” Tessa pointed to the box.

  “But, here it is!” said Zeus. “The fact is that the box was found quite soon after Brother Number One had hidden it, but it was kept in the possession of wise men and women throughout the ages and, in fact, it has never been opened. You might not be surprised to learn that it has been deemed a great honor to be whomever is selected as keeper of the box, when it is time to be passed along.”

  “Don’t tell me,” said Tessa. “It is now I who have been selected to accept responsibility for the box.”

  Zeus snapped his fingers. “How did you guess?”

  Tessa shrugged, growing suspicious at the glibness of the strange man. “It was easy. But, tell me, do you know what’s in the box?”

  “That’s against the rules. You can’t ask that.”

  “Why not?”

  Zeus shrugged. “I don’t know. No one else has ever asked before.”

  “And you want me to accept responsibility for the box, is that right?” Tessa eyed the object again. It was a compellingly beautiful piece of art, and she felt naturally attracted to it.

  Zeus smiled. “Ah . . . I’m afraid you have no choice in the matter.”

  What?”

  “I mean it’s yours,” he said, stepping back from the desktop. “Good-bye,” he said as he started to fade away like morning mist.

  Tessa was startled by the sudden display of magic, or whatever it was. She hesitated for a moment, fearful, before advancing to the place where the man had vanished. The air, she noticed, felt disturbingly warm where he had been, but other than that there was no trace.

  Except for the box.

  Turning she bent to examine it, being careful not to touch it. Her first thought was to leave it where it lay and seek out Varian, or even old Stoor. Perhaps their combined experiences would help determine what to do with the strange box.

  But then another thought occurred to her: that the entire thing might be an illusion, a trick of the mind, a dream, even. Although the box looked real, looked substantial, it might prove to be not so. After all, she thought, Zeus had seemed very real, but apparently he was not.

  There was only one thing to do, and that was to touch the box . . . for reasons of pure scientific curiosity, she told herself.

  And so Tessa extended a delicate hand and stroked the top of the ornately worked surface. She was almost shocked to feel its hardness, its realness, and yet a part of her was relieved that it was indeed real.

  Then another sensation came to her. It was the utter pleasure that she experienced in touching this object. It was as though the elements of the chest exuded a hypnotic influence that was passed along by tactile stimulation. There was a definite unwillingness to pull her hand away from its finely detailed lid. The details, she noticed almost in passing, were in the now-familiar five-sided motif.

  Suddenly she forced her hand away from the object, as if breaking the spell which seemingly had overtaken her. What was happening here? Tessa of Prend was not a person who could lightly accept any situation that was out of the ordinary. There was, she had learned, many marvels of technology, including the lost sciences of the First Age. In fact, it was nearly impossible to distinguish many of the Citadel’s services and operations from that of magic or plain trickery. Who was it who had said that for the common man science required as much faith as religion? She could not recall, but she knew now what he had meant.

  The man called Zeus. If he had been a real man, his presence could have been due to science or magic. If he was an illusion, his origin was probably the Citadel . . . but what did it all matter? What did it mean?

  There were no answers which made sense. She did not trust the words of Zeus, and she wished that Varian had been with her. Together, she felt confident they could have understood what the encounter had meant. Alone, Tessa struggled to know what to do, what to think.

  She looked cautiously about the room and saw nothing but the smooth, polished, and seamless lines of the machines, the consoles, the data screens. The illumination softened the harsh aesthetics, but failed to soothe her troubled mind. For the first time since their arrival, since their imprisonment, she realized how alien, how utterly different the Citadel and the Guardian were from anything she or her World had ever known. She wondered if perhaps this place had been better off buried and forgotten, never found by any man from the current age. Whoever the builders of places such as the Citadel had been, Tessa thought, they were surely a race of foreigners, a long-dead parallel species of strangelings. More than millennia, Tessa thought, separated her race from theirs.

  Her gaze drifted back to the artful chest, and she felt her pulse quicken. It was the only tangible proof of her experience, the bottom-line factor.

  What should she do with it? Why was it given to her? She knew the story of the gods and the brothers was nonsense, transparently so, in fact, but the question still remained . . . why?

  Tessa picked up the box, immediately feeling the odd, vaguely entrancing sensation come over her. The very touch of the chest gave her a pleasurable, indescribable, feeling. She wanted to touch the box, as if the attraction she felt for the object were organic.

  Looking at the ornate hinges, the unhasped latch, she recalled the warning instructions: that the box never be opened. Obviously this was the key, no pun intended, which would unlock the mystery, and perhaps the box, thought Tessa. Thinking it out, she arrived at the following conclusion: the man who called himself Zeus obviously wanted her to open the box, otherwise there would have been some kind of preventive measure, such as a catch or a lock, to keep it secure—the warning serving only to make the proposition more tempting.

  She now knew what she would do.

  Chapter Eight

  “Then they are not illusions,” said Stoor to the assembled group.

  “How can you say that?” asked Varian. “Just because of the box? That could have been planted in the Data Chamber; the rest could still be illusion. . . .”

  Raim nodded his head fiercely at this, obviously not wanting to believe that his own experience with Marise could have been real. To have been so close to having his beloved wife back, and failing, was more than he could bear.

  Tessa remained silent for a moment. She stood and walked behind their chairs. “I don’t know what to think . . . except that I’m sure I was supposed to open that box.”

  Varian nodded. “Oh, no question about that. We’ve already agreed that all of us have been somehow, for still unknown reasons, inserted into these damn . . . fables, or whatever you want to call them. Somebody is testing our reactions for some reason.”

  “Somebody,” said Tessa with obvious contempt. “It’s not somebody. . . . It’s the Guardian! It has to be!”

  “But why?” asked Varian. “And what do the fables mean?”

  “And what about the box?” asked Tessa. “What are we supposed to do with it?”

  Stoor laughed. “Well, we’re already doin’ somethin’ with it. . . . We’re not openin’ it!”

  “Which may be telling the Guardian, or whoever is staging this thing, exactly what it wants to know,” said Varian.

  Raim scribbled on his note pad: I think we should ask Guardian. He passed it about the group and waited upon their reaction.

  “He’s right,” said Stoor. “That damned machine’s got all the friggin’ answers. Why should we
sit here and fry our brains for nothin’? We could do this for days and never get to the bottom of things.”

  “I agree,” said Varian. “I think we should all go and find the . . . robot, or go down to the main level and use the consoles. We don’t have anything to lose.”

  “I wonder about that,” said Tessa.

  The three men stared at her.

  She smiled a nervous smile. “Oh come now, I’m not trying to be dramatic; I’m just getting a little frightened. Think for a moment: Don’t you believe Guardian would tell us what it was doing right away? . . . if it had any intention of doing so?”

  Stoor shrugged. “Who knows how a machine thinks?”

  Tessa brightened. “All right then, how do we know that Guardian is being run by machines? Suppose there are still men in here someplace?”

  “From the First Age!?” Varian shook his head. “Through all this time? I doubt it. They wouldn’t have sat still like this. They would have been out rebuilding, reclaiming the World they lost.”

  “Probably,” said Tessa. “I’m only trying to show us how little we know, how little we can be sure of.”

  Stoor sucked on his pipe, grimaced because it had gone out, and knocked it upon a dinner plate, dislodging the ashen plug. “Thanks a lot, ma’am!”

  “So . . .” said Varian, “we can open the box, ignore the box, or confront the Guardian. . . . What’s it going to be? I say we find Guardian.”

  Raim walked to Varian’s side and nodded his head.

  “All right with me,” said Stoor.

  “I can’t argue with all of you,” said Tessa. “Let’s go find our jailer. . . .”

  “That won’t be necessary,” said the familiar voice of the Guardian’s homolog.

  Turning in unison, as if choreographed, everyone greeted the robot who looked like a kindly philosopher-gentleman standing at the threshold to the room.

  “Good evening, everyone,” it said, walking into the chamber and selecting a chair. Its movements were so natural, so casual, Varian was still amazed that it was a machine and often had to remind himself of that fact. There was something hideous about the homolog, despite its disarming appearance. Nothing should seem so . . . human, thought Varian, when it indeed was not.

  “You’ve been listening to us,” said Varian.

  “Please excuse me, but it is difficult not to monitor your conversations. . . . The entire Citadel is connected by circuits and . . . well, you are, for all intents and purposes, living inside of me.”

  “What do you want?” Stoor refilled his pipe automatically, not taking his steady gaze from the homolog.

  “I thought it was you who wanted to see me . . . and so I am here.”

  “You have heard everything,” said Tessa. “Can you answer our questions?”

  The homolog smiled. “I would sincerely like to provide satisfactory answers, but I don’t know if I can.”

  “What’s that mean?” Stoor struck a match on his boot, lighted the pipe, and was engulfed in an acrid, blue cloud.

  “It means that there are some things which, were I to explain them at this early stage in the proceedings, you would doubtfully understand or, in the least, you would misinterpret them. I ask you to be patient with me, that is all I can tell you.”

  “Will you at least admit to being responsible for what has happened to all of us today?” Tessa remained standing behind a row of chairs, trying not to look at the robot. She felt that speaking directly to the machine gave in to its purpose, succumbing to the tendency to treat it as another human.

  The homolog smiled. “I suppose it would be foolish not to admit at least that much. Of course I am the author of the events. Who else could there be?”

  Varian smiled mockingly. “We don’t know. Why don’t you tell us?”

  The robot shrugged a very humanlike shrug. “Why there is no one else, of course.”

  “Of course,” said Stoor. “I tell you, it’s not right what you’re doin’ to us. . . . Why don’t you let us go?”

  “Under the circumstances, I think that would be quite impossible.” The robot turned and walked to the door, then faced the group again. “I suppose I should tell you . . . that the events you have witnessed are only the beginning. But I would think you have already guessed that. Good evening.”

  The homolog left the chamber and Stoor made a move for his sidearm but stopped himself, ashamed at his frustration.

  “What now?” asked Tessa.

  “I’m not sure,” said Varian. “We could wait it out, or we could make some plans.”

  “Plans?” Stoor almost laughed. “Like what?”

  “Like maybe how to rig up a way of talking that will keep Guardian from knowing that we are doing so. . . . It could be as simple as passing notes, like Raim. . . .”

  “Damn slow, don’t you think?” Stoor puffed on his pipe.

  “I think it’s safe to say we have plenty of time,” said Tessa. Raim laughed and nodded, holding up his note pad and pencil.

  “True,” said Stoor. “All right. We think up something that will work. What then?”

  Varian smiled. “Give me that paper,” he said.

  Chapter Nine

  The system of communication proved to be practical, but none of their other plans came to fruition.

  Rather, the group seemed to be an integral part in a far more elaborate plan, a plan which involved their unwitting cooperation in an apparently unending series of encounters with strange characters and demanding situations.

  Varian and Tessa awoke one morning to discover that they had been transported to an island, where they were held captive by a giant humanoid with one great eye in the center of his head. The illusion, if it was one, proved to be distressingly realistic, and the harassments and cruelties of the giant continued until Varian took deliberate action against the creature. Tessa had at first felt that non-cooperation would be the best solution. But ignoring some bad things does not make them go away; it simply makes them worse.

  The one-eyed creature grew increasingly more threatening until Varian devised a way of blinding it while it slept. After that, the entire scene dissolved and the pair were returned to their quarters, exhausted but unharmed.

  Stoor was banished to a strange landscape, where he met with an odd assortment of characters and creatures: something which identified itself, accommodatingly, as the Thespian Lion, which the old man skewered on his shortsword; another lion, from a place called Nemea, which old Stoor choked to death. He was then instructed to kill a hideous, plantlike creature called the Hydra, which he did by setting it afire, and a host of other unimaginative, tiresome confrontations, all of which involved the killing of some kind of beast: a stag, a bull, a flock of plaguelike birds, a three-headed dog which sounded very much like the one Raim had described, some rather vicious horses, and even a large, incredibly dull-witted giant who claimed to be carrying the World upon his back (it looked like nothing more than a fairly large boulder to Stoor, however).

  Raim, on the other hand, seemed to fall prey to a curious transformation syndrome. That is, in most of his hallucination-like adventures, he would always wind up, after reacting in some manner with humans dressed in tunics and robes, being changed into some object or animal. The list was almost endless: a flower, several kinds of shrubs and trees, a bull, a stag, a dog, and even an eagle. Each time, although with a steadily lessening degree as the act repeated itself, Raim concluded the sequence in the terror-borne thought that this time, it might be real.

  Yet each encounter would end in a blackout, with the mute Maaradin awakening in his bunk, feeling exhausted, confused, and, worst of all, abused.

  He shared his impressions with Tessa, who had been experiencing similar illusions—and they were indeed illusions, although they seemed so intensely real. It was difficult to imagine that a machine, even a machine such as Guardian, could orchestrate and sustain so convincing a spectacle.

  Especially when they concerned her body and her sexuality: Rape fantasies
abounded, accented by bizarre encounters with strange men and beasts such as a swan, a bull, a stag, and even a falcon.

  It was decided unanimously that they spend their days together so that any additional “dramas” in which the Guardian chose to involve them would be experienced by all. When they belatedly adopted this tactic, all illusions ceased.

  While they were awake, that is.

  When sleep overtook them each evening, the nightmarish dreams began. In some arcane fashion, the Artificial Intelligence had devised a way to manipulate their subconscious minds.

  Clearly, new strategies were required.

  Varian suggested that their waking hours should be spent in detailed reconnaissance of their prison world. By utilizing Stoor’s wealth of experience in picking about the ruins of First Age monuments, and Varian’s training and abilities as a navigator and cartographer, they might be able to construct a more comprehensible picture of their adversary.

  Each day, then, was spent exploring different levels and chambers of the Citadel, measuring, calculating, and then mapping out the physical confines of the place. The project was a large one and it became the obsession of their days. They were consumed with the task, taking time off only to eat the rations which the Guardian dutifully provided. Varian thought it was odd that no actions were taken against their efforts, and they were not impeded in any way from discovering the secrets of the Citadel.