Erkatchian followed him into a great hall whose ceiling and farthest wall were lost in gloom. The mood of the place was austere, with furniture of heavy dark wood – massive tables, high-backed seats, chests and sideboards – all roughly hewn and held together by studs of black iron. The walls were hung with heavy cloths in which images were woven: men heroically posed in fanciful armor, afoot or riding caparisoned warbeasts or at the controls of combat machines, against backgrounds of serried ranks or surging hordes. Everywhere were points and blades and beams of coruscating energies, amid gallant charges and dauntless stands around the battle colors of legendary regiments.
“Do you note that the faces are always the same?” Erkatchian commented.
Conn had. “These, I take it, are the Flagits.”
“Aye, the long nosed one was Ermin. The one with a face like a stale pudding was Blathe.”
“Were any of these scenes taken from actual events?”
Erkatchian snorted. “Only vicariously. The Flagits thought of themselves as breach stormers and wall scalers, but they were born to be staff officers, seated comfortably around their maps and figurines well away from the hurly burly. I believe that they could link themselves to the perceptions of their playthings. Not to experience the pain, of course, nor even the smells of fear-sweat nor of spilled intestines – the sights and sounds of battle, remotely channeled to them as they lay upon their dream couches, were as much as they cared to experience.”
Conn looked about him. “I have no memory of this place,” he said, “not even a child’s recollections. Yet this must be where my life began. Were my parents servants here?”
Erkatchian put a hand to his forehead as if rubbing it could improve the function of the organ behind the bone. “I never heard of any servants. If they’d existed, they’d have long since been found and questioned regarding the whereabouts of this place.”
“Perhaps they were abandoned here, marooned.”
“Perhaps. The Flagits were not renowned for treating their staff particularly well. Though nor had they a reputation for abuse, except of each other.”
As they moved farther into the hall increased illumination accompanied them, new lumens lighting up and dispelling some of the gloom. Conn saw the outline of a metal door in the back wall and went toward it, the other man following. As he approached, a beam of light illuminated a spot on the floor beside the door. Out of the illuminated circle of floor rose a narrow column that stopped when its top was waist high.
When Conn reached it he saw that in the center of its top was an armature much like the one he had seen at the Registry of Off-world Properties. He produced the bead from where he kept it and held it ready in his hand. But before he could place it in the hollowed-out space there was a soft hum from somewhere then a projected simulacrum of a man wavered into existence beside the column.
“Hallis Tharp,” said Conn. Just as the voice that had warned them of the defenses had been a younger version of the old man’s, so were the face and form of the image before them.
“So here you are,” said the projection. “Which means that I am dead. With luck, I expired from natural causes after a long life and you yourself are now well on in years and at ease in the life I built around you. You’ll have come to this dismal place to find out who you are.
“If luck has not been with us,” the image continued, “then I am dead because the Flagits and their minions caught up with us and you are here against your will to be pressed back into the horror of the half life from which I released you. Though, to be fair, only after I put you in it to begin with.
“If the first set of conditions pertain, then you may place the bead in its receptacle and go through this door if you feel you must learn the sad truth of where you came from. I have suborned the house’s integrator. It will show and tell you all.”
Now the simulacrum turned its sightless gaze as if hoping to lock its eyes with Conn’s. “But if you are here against your will, then fight them now with whatever strength you can muster have and do not stop fighting them until you are either free or dead. Do not let them take you beyond this door.”
The projection flickered then winked out. Conn saw that Erkatchian was looking at him with a peculiar expression. He remembered receiving a similar look from Jenore Mordene and responded as he had to her. “What?” he said.
The captain rubbed his face again and appeared to be weighing up alternative means of answering the question. After a moment he said, “Neither of the conditions Hallis Tharp mentioned apply in this situation. But I think it would be wise for you to come back to the Martichor and deliver that bead into the hands of my lord Vullamir. Then we will buy a ship together and wander the Ten Thousand Worlds without your ever having stepped beyond that door.”
“You know something?” Conn said. “Tell me.”
“I know any number of things that I regret ever having learned,” Erkatchian said. “I suspect that behind that door is another unwelcome learning experience. But much worse for you than for me.”
Conn felt the bead, solid and warm in his hand. He examined his feelings, felt confusion mingled with curiosity. He had settled his views on Hallis Tharp, at least temporarily: the man had done him harm, though for what gain he still could not fathom. But here was Tharp speaking to him, the recording surely made just before or just after he had seized Conn and was about to take him away, and there was no hint of ill will – indeed, completely to the contrary.
“I am a mystery,” he said to the spacer, “and my answer is in there.”
“Some mysteries are best left unsolved,” Erkatchian said.
“How could I go from here with my questions unanswered?” Conn said. “What could lie beyond the door that I should fear it? Heaps of moldered corpses? Dungeons and chains, bespeaking the dark side of the Flagits’ appetites? I am not afraid of what I might find.”
“Are you ever afraid?” the captain asked, watching him as if Conn was some newly encountered species of ultraterrene whose dos and don’ts were not recorded in Hobey’s Compleat Guide to the Settled Planets.
“Of course. Who isn’t?”
“How does it feel?”
Conn opened his palm and looked at the bead. “We could have this conversation later,” he said. He took the sphere between thumb and finger extended it toward the aperture.
Erkatchian gently put a hand over the armature. “Humor me,” he said. “How does it feel to be afraid?”
“If I answer, can we then get on with this?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.” Conn thought for a moment. “When I am afraid, my senses sharpen, my circulation alters so that more blood reaches my brain and skeletal muscles but not my skin, and my adrenaline rises, sharpening my reflexes.”
“Would you call it an exhilarating sensation?”
“Yes, and very useful since it allows me the better to deal with whatever is making me afraid.”
“Has it ever occurred to you that what you call ‘afraid’ might not be what I call ‘afraid?”
“I don’t really have time for a philosophical discussion just now,” Conn said. “Please remove your hand.”
Erkatchian did not budge. “I don’t think you should do this. I think you should walk away.”
Conn felt a flash of irritation, automatically suppressed it. “If we were to become partners,” he said, “you would have to resist the impulse to tell me what to do. I am coming to realize that others have determined almost the entire course of my life and I believe I am growing tired of it.”
He placed the bead in the receptacle. There was a whir and a click and the door slid up into the wall. Conn stepped through, Erkatchian at his heels.
Beyond was a long hallway, softly lit from sources in sconces on the walls and interrupted by several doors along its length. All were closed. Conn spoke to the air, “Integrator?”
“What do you require?” said a neutral voice.
“Do you know who I am?”
�
�You are Conn Labro. Cooblor Tonn left instructions that you are to be shown a series of scenes. If you would care to enter the viewing room to your left, I will accommodate you.”
One of the nearby doors opened inward on darkness then light glowed in the oblong. Conn entered, again followed by the captain. The room was spacious: two armchairs faced a broad and deep dais with a handful of less inviting chairs in a row behind the two plush seats.
“You may be seated,” the integrator said.
Erkatchian shook his head but went and settled himself in one of the two foremost chairs. Conn sat in the other. It subtly conformed to his shape and adjusted its temperature.
“This is obscenely comfortable,” Erkatchian said. “Not even my lord Vullamir indulges himself so voluptuously.”
Conn paid the chair no attention. “What have you to show me?” he asked the integrator.
A scene appeared on the dais, full-figured. It showed two young boys, one with a pasty complexion and the other with a face that almost seemed to have been artificially elongated to accompany a long, thin nose.
“Blathe and Ermin Flagit,” said Hallis Tharp’s recorded voice. “From early years, they lived to counter each other.”
Conn watched as the boys engaged in games: contests first played on boards or through boyhood integrators, then moving into larger and larger virtual arenas, the scenes tracking the two competitors through their developing years. The conflicts grew more savage though the skills of Ermin and Blathe never advanced beyond dufferhood. Conn also saw each cheat whenever he thought his brother was not looking.
“Here they are at the end of adolescence,” said Tharp’s voice. The scene showed a rural estate, lawns and tree dotted parkland on which ditches had been dug and palisades erected. Banners flew from atop a squat stone tower surrounded by a muddy moat. A horn blew somewhere and a mass of man-sized figures, all in black armor, came out of a stand of trees. Bearing scaling ladders and edged weapons they rushed across the open ground toward the tower. Halfway there they were met by a hail of missiles, fist sized lumps of metal that rang as they struck helms and breastplates. Those that were hit hard fell sprawling and twitching to the grass while their fellow attackers charged on without a backwards glance. They made no sound.
“These are artificial,” Conn said. “Mechanisms.”
“They are,” said the integrator.
Now the angle of view shifted and Conn could see white armored figures atop the tower. They were operating a trio of primitive war engines made of wooden beams and swinging arms that threw the heavy shots out over the lawn like a child throwing gravel into a pond.
More of the black horde fell, then the leading rank ran under the range of the catapults and reached the moat. They laid the ladders they carried horizontally across the water, making narrow bridges across which they streamed while the whites above hurled down spears and blocks of stone, or shot metal bolts from shoulder-aimed weapons.
The assault wavered at the base of the tower, the blacks falling under the rain of missiles as they struggled to position some of the ladders against the wall and ascend. Then a second rank of blacks arrived at the outer rim of the moat and began to shoot up at the defenders with their own bolt throwers, sending coordinated volleys that swept the crenelations clear. The blacks at the base of the tower used the respite to anchor their siege ladders and swarm up. The black bolt throwers dropped their weapons, drew swords and axes and threw down more ladders to cross the moat.
The first few scalers to reach the top of the tower were flung back, falling silently to crash among their fellows. Then, with a clang and a spray of sparks, an ax-swinging black took the head off a white who leaned too far out to strike at him. The ax wielder climbed over the headless body and the first toe hold was gained. The whirling ax held the whites at bay while other blacks gained the top of the tower behind him. The attacking force spread themselves into a line and more of their fellows appeared behind them. They began to push the defenders back, step by step.
It seemed that the black assault must carry the day, but now Conn saw a double file of whites, each carrying a repeating action bolt thrower, emerge from a stairwell that led down into the tower. They arrayed themselves in two ranks, one standing, one kneeling, facing the backs of their beleaguered comrades whose faltering defense must soon give way to the swelling black presence.
Conn expected a signal that would tell the defending line to break off and clear the way. Instead the two firing lines began shooting volleys into the melee, cutting down friend or foe without discrimination. He saw the ax wielder take a bolt through the helmet and drop clattering to the stone floor, while blacks and whites fell all around him. In a few moments, the space before the shooters was heaped with writhing, jerking figures and no more blacks were coming up the ladders.
The view shifted and Conn saw that two white sally parties had come out of the doors on opposite sides of the tower’s ground floor to make a pincer attack on the blacks who were bunched around the base of the ladders. The battle was now clearly won and lost, and Conn expected the action to end. Instead it went on until the last black armored mechanism was laid low, at a cost of several dozen whites.
“That was unnecessary,” Conn said.
“A waste of good machinery,” Erkatchian agreed.
“It was ever the Flagits’ way,” the integrator said as the scene showed Blathe holding a white standard and standing atop a heap of battered black limbs and torsos to have his image recorded. Ermin sulked in the background.
“Regard,” said the integrator and a new scene appeared, a wide and muddy plain sweeping up to a range of low hills. Scores of regiments, great solid masses of black or white, were drawn up in formations and echelons. This time the blacks held the heights and the whites were surging into an attack across the open ground.
“They love the frontal assault,” Hallis Tharp’s voice said. “Not for Ermin and Blathe the niceties of feint and maneuver. They go at each other in the oldest possible way, grinding and battering to the last man. The mechanical armies grew bigger and they purchased vast tracts land on which to conduct their campaigns, but the weaponry remained basic and the tactics dull. Until even the Flagits grew bored.”
The battle faded out and an image of the younger Tharp appeared on the dais. “That is when they came to me.”
Tharp’s simulacrum stood with downcast eyes and hands folded before him. The house integrator had positioned the image so that when Tharp looked up his sightless gaze met Conn’s eyes. Conn saw a mingling of emotions: regret, shame, resolution.
“I will not spare myself with excuses,” Tharp’s voice said. “I was as proud in my own way, as wrong-headedly self indulgent, as the Flagit brothers. We deserved each other.”
He sighed. “I had a flair for the lost art of making simulated people,” he said then smiled ruefully. “Did I say ‘lost?’ Let me be straight: the art was not lost; it was forbidden. All decent humankind had long ago agreed that it was an immoral practice and no civilized society would tolerate its return.
“But I was fascinated by what I had achieved in my little laboratory on the remote farm I had inherited soon after I graduated from the Institute. And I was entranced by the notion of how much more I might be able to do, had I the resources and no one to tell me that I was plunging myself into evil.”
Tharp pinched his nostrils together between thumb and forefinger – it was a habitual gesture, Conn remembered – as if he wished to block the ingress of a foul odor. Then he sighed again. “I don’t know how the Flagits found out what I was doing – perhaps through the places where I quietly purchased materials – though I thought I had covered my tracks by spreading my acquisitions around.
“In any case, one day they arrived and told me a tale. They had a world of their own, far out in the Back of Beyond, where they could do what they liked. What they liked was to fight battles, but mechanical warriors had ceased to slake their appetites for mayhem and people would not die for their pl
easure, so their thoughts had turned to simulants. And that had led them to me. They were very persuasive. Very flattering. Only I could make them creatures of deep pathos and epic glory, and only I deserved the rewards my work would bring.”
Tharp’s image flourished his hands like a prestidigitator who was about to make something startling appear from beneath a tented cloth. “And suddenly here I was on Forlor, surrounded by the laboratory of my dreams. I could make sylphs and florigards and the most delicate and fleeting of human ephemera, true works of a recondite discipline that, in a year or two of the full application of my talents, I so mastered that my artist’s pride swelled to a skin-splitting tumescence.”
Now the hands spread in a show of acquiescence. “And the price of all my overweening happiness? Merely that I fashion some basic types for Ermin and Blathe, some light and heavy infantry, some agile scouts, some engineers and weaponsmen, a few captains and bannermen to direct the action, and some rough beasts to be their cavalry.
“And that is what I did. I made a template from my own plasm, edited it in ways that would suit its intended purpose: more closely packed retinal cells for enhanced vision; a reordered neural net that conferred excellence in some analytical faculties while discarding others – metaphor, artistic subtlety – that are of scant use in combat; a multichambered heart and a more efficient circulatory system to let them fight on after true men would be pallidly dead of exsanguination; enlarged adrenal glands and a redesigned limbic system to diminish fear and allow for the sustained rage that would carry them through a full day of battle without loss of elan. I gave them the capacity for satisfaction in victory, resignation in defeat, loyalty to their comrades.”
Conn’s armchair no longer seemed so comfortable. He looked over at Erkatchian but the spacer would not meet his eyes.
The projection of Hallis Tharp continued to talk, although he now looked out into the middle distance and seemed to be speaking only to himself. “I installed the template in a generative cradle and brought it to the precise stage of development. Next, I truncated the gestative process and connected the cradle to a serial array of production cauldrons – the vats, to use the vernacular – and created a few simple minded attendants to carry out the routine tasks of installing feedstock, tending its development, and decanting the products.
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