The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, Vol. 2

by George Mann

  “HOI! It’s me, Khan! Khan, the man you’re looking for! Catch me if you can!”

  Guns rose instantaneously to shoulders. Khan dived for cover. How useful that cover was was debatable, as a line of projectile explosions stitched its way across the wall of the nearest habitat like a finger tearing through tinfoil. When the guns had finished tracking across the building, the building was two buildings, one balanced precariously on top of the other, radiator coolant gushing from the walls and electrical connections sparking. Hopefully no one was sitting headless at breakfast within it. The Consultancy men were already spreading out round the habitat, hoping to outflank their target if he had somehow survived the first attack. The boy’s mother looked on, appalled.

  Some caprice, however, drew the boy’s attention upward.

  The old man was on the inside leg of the metal colossus, on the access ladder, moving with dinosaurian slowness towards the Guardian’s bumward access hatch.

  The boy’s jaw dropped.

  Meanwhile, the men who were guarding the Guardian seemed on the point of following Khan and finishing him, until one of them remembered his orders, waved his comrade back to the square, pulled a communicator from one of his ammunition pouches, opened it, spoke into it, and flipped it shut again. Someone Else, he told his comrade, Could Do The Running.

  Up above, the old man was still moving, but with the speed of evolution, at the speed glass flowed down windowpanes, at the speed boys grew up doorposts. He had not even reached the knee. Surely, before the old fool reached the top of his climb, somebody in the village underneath had to notice? And what did he think he’d accomplish if he got up the ladder?

  The two Consultants reassumed their positions underneath the Guardian’s treads. They stood on the square of concrete, reaching all the way down through the regolith to the bedrock that had been put there solely as a foundation for the vehicle to stand on. They faced outwards, willing to bleed good red blood to stop anyone who tried to get past them. One of them even remarked on the old man’s sword discarded in the sand, saying that they Must Have Frit The Old Coot Away.

  Meanwhile, by pretending to scratch his eye against the dust, the boy was able to see the old coot pull a battered slab of black plastic from his tunic and slide it into what the boy knew - from the climb he had been dared to do a year ago - to be a recess in the circular ass-end access hatch about the same size as the slab. The hatch was also spray-painted with the letters AUGMENTED INFANTRY UNIT MK 73 (1 OFF), and only members of the privileged club of boys who had taken the dare and made the climb knew it.

  Something glittered like a rack of unsheathed blades in the Guardian’s normally dull and pitted skin; the old man skimmed his fingers over the glitter rapidly and the boy saw blood ooze out of his fingers onto the hatch cover momentarily, before the surface drank it like a vampire.

  The key was tuned to the operator’s genetic code. The vehicle had to have a part of him to know who he was.

  The hatch slid into the structure silently. The old man began to slip into the hole it had opened. But for all the wondrous silence of the mechanism, the old man was unable to prevent the boy’s mother from standing with her head in the air gawping like a newly-hatched chick waiting to be fed worms. And as she gawped, the guards gawped with her.

  Luckily for the old man, the guards also took a couple of moments to do helpless baby chick impersonations before remembering they had weapons and were supposed to use them. The hatch had slid shut before they could get their guns to their shoulders, take aim, and fire. They were not used to firing their weapons in that position and the recoil, coming from an unaccustomed direction, blew them about on the spot like unattended pneumatic drills. The boy saw stars twinkle on the Guardian’s hide. He was not sure whether they had inflicted any damage or not; the detonations left a mass of afterimages on his retinas.

  The two men could not have inflicted too much damage, however, as they thought better of continuing to shoot and instead stood back and contemplated the crotch of the colossus.

  For one long minute, nothing happened. The lead Consultant spoke quietly but urgently into his communicator, saying that he Wasn’t Quite Sure Whether Or Not The Shit Indicator Had Just Risen To Nostril Deep.

  Then the dust under the left tread of the Guardian moaned like a man being put to the press. The boy looked up to see the great pipe legs of the Augmented Infantry Unit buckling and twisting, as if the wind were blowing it off its base. But Guardians weighed so much they smashed themselves if they fell over, and despite the fact that the dry season wind howled down from the mountains here like a katabatic banshee, it had never before stirred the Guardian as much as a millimeter from its post.

  The Guardian was moving under its own power.

  Huge alloy arms the weight of bridge spans swung over the boy’s head. Knee joints that could have acted as railway turntables flexed arthritically in the legs. And at that point, the boy knew exactly who was at the controls of the Guardian.

  The whole colossal thousand-tonne weapon was doing the old man’s morning exercises.

  Moving gently at first, it swung its arms and legs under their own weight, cautiously bending and unbending its ancient joints. Some of those joints screamed with the pressure of the merest movement. The boy suddenly, oddly, appreciated what the old man meant when he talked of rheumatism, arthritis, and sciatica.

  The old man’s exercises were good for a man with rheumatic joints that needed oiling in the morning. But they were just as good for a village-sized automaton that had not moved for sixty standard years.

  The men sent to guard the Guardian were backing away. From somewhere in the village on the other side of the buildings, someone else decided to fire at the machine. A pretty colored show of lights sprayed out of the ground and cascaded off the metal mountain’s armor. Habitats that the cascade hit on the way back down became colanders full of flying swarf. The Guardian carried on its warm-up regardless.

  Eight times for the leg-stretching exercise, eight times for the arm-swinging, eight times for the two-handed push-up above the head.

  The boy backed away, pulling at his mother’s robe. He knew what was coming next.

  Men ran out of the buildings with light anti-armor weapons. Many of the weapons were recoilless, and some argument ensued about whether they should really be pointed up into the sky or not. Some of them were loosed off at point blank range at the Guardian’s treads, leaving big black stains of burnt hydrocarbon. But a Guardian’s feet were among its most heavily armored parts. Every old person in town would tell you that. They were heavily armored because they were used to crush infantry.

  The Guardian lowered its massive head to stare at the situation on the ground. The operator was actually in the main chassis; the head was only used to affix target acquisition systems and armament. That small movement of the head was in itself enough to make the Consultants back away and run.

  One of the Consultants, thinking smarter than his colleagues, grabbed hold of the boy’s mother. He shouted at the sky and pointed a pistol shakily at her head. He might as well have threatened a mountain.

  The Guardian turned its head to look directly at him.

  The boy screamed to his mother to drop down.

  The Guardian’s hand came down like the Red Sea on an Egyptian. Or like a sword upon a melon. Unlike a human hand it had three fingers, which might be more properly described as claws. Exactly the same disposition of fingers a man might have, in fact, if a man held his middle finger and forefinger, and his little and ring finger together and spread the two groups of fingers apart. A roof of steel slammed down from heaven. The boy felt warm blood spray over his back.

  The sunlight returned to the sand, now red rather than brown, and the gunman’s headless body toppled to the ground in front of him. The man had not simply been decapitated. His head no longer existed. It had been squashed flat.

  Beside him, his mother was trembling. Looking at the front of her skirts, the boy realized sudde
nly that she had wet herself.

  One of the Guardian’s massive treads rose from the ground and whined over his head. For some reason the sole of its left foot was stenciled with LEFT LEG, and its right foot was labelled RIGHT LEG. Arms fire both small and large whined and caromed off its carapace; the Guardian ignored it. It was moving out of the village, eastward, in the direction of the mining company army camped beyond the outskirts. Soon it was out of shooting range, but the boy could still hear guns going off around him. Single shot firearms! The villagers had brought out their antique home defence weapons and were using them on their oppressors. The boy swelled with pride.

  Despite the fact that she had wet herself, the boy’s mother hauled herself to her feet. “The old fool! What does he think he’s doing? At his age!”

  The boy hopped up onto a ladder fixed to the main water tower. The Guardian was striding eastward like a force of nature, silhouetted by things exploding against it. The boy saw it pick a thing up from the ground and hurl it like a discus. The thing was a light armored vehicle. He saw men tumble from it as it flew.

  The mining company men were now flocking round a larger vehicle that was evidently their Big Gun. Most probably it had been brought in specially to deal with the possibility that the villagers might be able to revive their Guardian. It appeared to be a form of missile launcher, and the missile it fired looked frighteningly large. The turret on the top of the vehicle was being rotated round to bear on the approaching threat, and men were clearing from the danger space behind it.

  The Guardian stopped. Its hand was held before it, the elbow crooked, extended out towards the launcher. If had it been human, the boy would have described the posture as a defensive stance.

  The boy blinked.

  No. Surely not -

  The missile blazed from its mounting and became invisible, and the Guardian’s arm blurred with it.

  Then the missile was tumbling away into the sky, its gyros trying frantically to put it back on course, wobbling unsteadily overhead, and the Guardian was standing in exactly the same position as before. A streak of rocket exhaust licked up its arm and blackened its fingers.

  The Guardian had brushed aside the missile in mid-air so softly as not to detonate its fuse.

  Men in the mining company launcher stood, staring motionless, as if their own operators had left them via their back entrances. The boy, however, suspected that other substances were currently leaving them by that exit. As soon as the Guardian cranked into a forward stride again, the men began to run. By the time the Guardian arrived at the launcher and methodically and thoroughly destroyed it, the boy was quite certain there were no human beings inside. To the east of the village he heard the terrific impact of the anti-armor missile reaching its maximum range and aborting.

  Then there was nothing on the face of the desert but running men and smoking metal. The gigantic figure of the Guardian cast a long, long shadow in the dawn.

  The old man climbed down slowly, with painstaking exactness, just as he did in all things. He was breathing quite heavily by the time he swung off the last rung and into a crowd of cheering children.

  “I knew Khan would not let us down,” said Mother Tho.

  “Khan Senior is a terrible fruit farmer,” observed Father Magnusson, “but a Guardian operator without equal.”

  “His oranges are scabby-skinned and dry inside,” agreed Mother Dingiswayo.

  “All the same, I knew,” opined Mother Jayaraman, “that he would eventually come in useful for something.”

  The old man shook his fist at the boy’s father in mock rage. “Khan Junior! What a fool to expose yourself so! Do you want your family to grow up without a father?”

  Khan grinned. “I am sorry, father. I have no idea what came over me.”

  “Maybe it is a hereditary condition,” muttered the boy’s mother.

  “Well,” said the old man, “at least it has turned out for the best. Had you not jumped out when you did, I might not have made it to the access ladder. One might almost imagine that that was your deliberate intention.”

  “I apologize if I did badly, father,” said Khan. “I am more of a farmer by trade.”

  The old man walked across the square to a handcart one of the younger boys had led out. In a fit of patriotic Commonwealther fervour, Father Magnusson had donated a hundred kilos of potatoes for a celebration. They had been stacked in a neat pile ready for baking.

  The old man picked one up, raw, and bit into it.

  “Never apologize for being a farmer,” said the old man, chewing gamely for a man with few remaining teeth. “After all, a gun will protect your family’s life only once in a lifetime. But a potato,” he said, gesturing with the tuber to illustrate his point, “is useful every day.”

  Book, Theatre, and Wheel

  Karl Schroeder

  Neville Dumoutier drank in the smell of pigs and the rattling sound of the nearby mill wheel. He smiled easily at the woman seated opposite him.

  “This is not a formal investigation,” he said. “Not yet.”

  The Lady Genevieve Romanal straightened in her chair and lifted her chin as she looked at him. “Of course not. What would we have to hide?”

  “Nothing, nothing at all,” chuckled Neville’s companion. Brother Jacques was an agent of the Inquisition, but not so humorless as most. He aimed his usual puzzled-appearing smile at the lady and, clasping his crossed knees, leaned forward to peer at a book he had laid open on a low table.

  “Your local priest, he was born and raised here?” asked Jacques.

  “Yes.” She glanced at Neville. That sort of look signaled a guilty mind in city-bred people; he wanted to think she was merely guileless.

  “So you know him well, and he knows you,” continued Jacques.

  She nodded.

  “He swears he has never tutored your people in reading and writing. It is, after all, forbidden for the commoners of your estate to learn letters, according to the edict of the Duke.”

  “I am not a commoner,” said Lady Romanal.

  Jacques chuckled. “I know; even if I didn’t, it would be obvious in your bearing. Reading changes the eyes and broadens the brow. Those who can read know each other.”

  “Where is this leading?” she asked.

  Neville knew Jacques would take forever to get to the point. “Have you taught any of your people to read?” he asked.

  She shook her head.

  Jacques pursed his lips. “Your priest swears he hasn’t either. Strange.”

  “Why?” she asked. Her fingers twisted in her lap.

  Neville grimaced. “I shouldn’t have to point out, Madam, that yours is a tremendously wealthy household. Especially in the past five years, you have made a great deal of money in trade. Your agents…”

  “They are very good,” she said with the hint of a smile.

  “Uncanny, actually,” corrected Jacques. “The shrewdness of their dealings and the thoroughness of their knowledge are nothing short of astonishing.”

  Romanal blinked, as if coming to a sudden understanding. “Have we made someone envious? Is that what this is about?”

  Now it was Neville’s turn to glance at Jacques. The inquisitor smiled and shook his head. “Of course not. It’s just that wealth flowing so freely through untutored hands is unusual, and the unusual is, sad to say, the first and best hint that the devil has been at work.”

  “Not here,” she said seriously. Neville hid a smile; he was beginning to think she was far from guileless.

  Jacques scratched his tonsured head. “We found this on one of your people.” He slid a cloth-covered package onto the table, and slowly unwove the covering to reveal what looked like a book missing its binding.

  Neville stared at the loose pages in annoyance. Jacques had not mentioned this to Neville, not even hinted at it during their long journey to this remote valley. What else had the inquisitor kept from him?

  “What is that?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,�
�� said Jacques. He looked from the spilled pages to the lady. “The man was desperate to protect it, though.”

  “Who? Is he all right? Have you hurt him?” Lady Romanal reached out suddenly and flipped up the edge of one velum page. “Rodrigo. Oh, he’s our best! Tell me he’s all right.”

  “He’s fine.” Jacques made a soothing gesture with both hands. “He is safe within Mother Church, and he has his life and health. As soon as we learn what we need to know, he will have his freedom as well.”

  She looked skeptical. Neville had known about the merchant they’d arrested in Milan. He also knew the man had been tortured, but this was not the time to bring that up. Gingerly, he reached to touch the burst book. The pages were loose, about palm-sized, and innocent of writing. Each had a single image painted on it, very strange images from what he could see. The whole collection was bound by a beaded thread that pierced each page’s upper left corner. Under the pile of pages Neville could see a number of other threads, and some loose beads as well.

  “So what is this?”

  Genevieve smiled. “But it’s nothing! This is a child’s game. We call it the wheel of books. See, you loose the pages and match them.” She unwound the beaded thread and fanned the pages into an arc.

  “A game.” Jacques’s expression was completely neutral. “I see.” He gathered the pages together again and wound the cloth around them again. “Then you won’t mind my keeping it.”

  “Of course, if it amuses you.” She smiled at both of them. “Was there anything else?”

  “Not now.” Jacques smiled and raised his hand for her to kiss. “I believe Sir Neville and I are quartered above this room?”

  “Yes. Please, settle yourselves and then join us for dinner.” Genevieve laughed. “If you pay the usual traveler’s price, that is.”

  Neville had been about to stand. “Price? What price?”