The old man’s face sunk into even more wrinkles than was normally its wont. “Khan,” he said, “hides nowhere. Who here says that Khan hides?” And despite the fact that he was armed only with a bamboo bow and arrows, none of the young men present would meet his eyes.
“Father, we have the greatest respect for your age, and none of us would dare to strike a weak and defenseless old man. We simply wish to know when, if at all, our Operator intends to discharge his duty.”
The old man nodded.
“Weak and defenseless, you say.”
He slung out the bow at the spokesman of the group, who the boy believed was called Lokman. It whirled in the air and struck Lokman in the jaw. Lokman rubbed the side of his face, complaining bitterly; but still his manners were too correct to allow him to attack his elders.
“Pick the bow up,” said the old man. He grubbed in the dirt for the arrow, and tossed it to Lokman. “Now notch the arrow, and pull the bow back as hard as you like.” He did not rise from his sitting position.
Lokman shrugged, and heaved hard on the bow. It was an effort even for him, the boy noticed. The bow was almost as stiff as a roof-tie.
“Point the bow at me,” said the old man, grinning. “You purulent stream of cat excrement.”
Lokman’s hands were shaking on the bow too now. It rotated round to point at the old man.
“Now fire!” said the old man. “I said FIRE, you worthless spawn of a mining company executive—”
“No, DON’T—” said the boy.
The string twanged free. The boy did not even see the arrow move. Nor did he see the old man’s hand move. But when both hand and arrow blurred back into position, the one was in the other; and the hand held the arrow, rather than the arrow being embedded in the hand.
Lokman stared at the old man’s hand for a second; then he snorted.
“A useful parlor trick,” he said. “Can you do it against missiles?”
He threw down the bow and walked away.
“Khan is a coward who will not fight,” he said, over his shoulder. “Besides, he could not get to the Guardian even if he wished. The assassins have the access ladder under guard. Pack up your things and leave, old man. The Councilors are leaving. We are all leaving. We are finished.”
The old man watched the visitors leave. Then, he reached into the bundle, where a battered oblong of black plastic lay alongside the picture of the boy’s grandmother. In the plastic were embossed the letters KHAN 63007248.
“It is good,” said the old man. “You have made sure Khan has everything he needs.”
The old man hung the oblong round his neck on a chain that pierced it, and felt his throat to make sure it was not visible as it hung.
“What time did they say the ultimatum expired tomorrow?” he asked, without looking at the boy.
“Sunup,” said the boy.
“It is good,” said the old man, nodding. “There is time. Run back to the village with these things, and return quickly. Then you shall accompany me while I deliver these troublemakers an ultimatum of our own.”
“Why am I going with you?” said the boy.
“Because no man will shoot an old man,” said the old man, “unless he is a wicked man indeed. But even a wicked man will not shoot an old man accompanied by a small boy—unless, of course, he is a very wicked man indeed.” He grinned, and his grin was more gaps than teeth. “This, I must admit, is the only flaw in my plan.”
Then he returned to his meditation, as if nothing had either happened or was about to. The boy seriously suspected he was sleeping.
The sun had set, and the reg had ceased to be its accustomed thousand shades of khaki. Now, it was the color of a world plunged underwater to a depth where every shade of anything became a democratic twilight blue.
The boy followed the old man uncertainly across the regolith towards a group of Persuasion Consultants lounging around an alcohol burner in the shadow of an APC. Even the burner’s flame was blue, as if carefully coordinated to fit in with the night. The Consultants noticed the old man long before he began to jump up and down and wave his arms to get their attention, but the boy noticed that it was only at this point that they relaxed and began the laborious process of putting the safeties back on their weapons.
“Hey! Ugly Boy! Take me to your ugly leader!”
None of the Persuasion Consultants answered. Evidently none of them was willing to own up to the name of Ugly Boy.
“Suit yourselves, physically unprepossessing persons, but be informed that I bear a message from Khan.”
The men began to fidget indecisively in their dapper uniforms. Eventually, one spoke up and said:
“If you are in communication with Khan, you must give us information on his whereabouts, citizen, or it will go poorly with you.”
The old man scoffed. The boy was not entirely sure it was prudent to scoff in the presence of so much firepower. “You still do not know Khan’s whereabouts? With the man right under your nose, and so many complex tracking systems in that khaki jalopy you are leaning against? For shame! Khan has a message for you. You must vacate the environs of this village, or as the appointed operator of the Guardian of this colony he will be obliged to make you quit by main force.”
The spokesman crossed both hands over his rifle and said: “Your Guardian’s operator is taking sides unjustifiedly in a purely civil matter, citizen. This is not a military matter. For this reason, Beauchef and Grisnez Incorporated regrets that, on behalf of its clients, it is forced to take action to eliminate this unruly operator, and that this action will continue until he himself quits the village. We are also making initial seismic surveys preliminary to placing charges underneath the Guardian’s foundations, destroying the underground geegaws that charge it. Beauchef and Grisnez of course regret the damage to Commonwealth property concomitant to this strategy, but final blame for this unfortunate state of affairs must lie at the head of the operator concerned. That is our message, which you may convey to Khan.”
The old man stood facing the line of soldiers silently for several seconds.
“Very well,” he said. “Despite the fact that you behave like barbarians, you continue to describe yourselves as Commonwealth citizens and hence merit a warning in law; you have received that warning. Whatever consequences follow, Khan will not be answerable.”
He said nothing more, but turned and trudged back in the direction of the village. There were sniggers from the line of riflemen.
In the morning, the boy’s mother woke him well before dawn. She had already prepared sleeping gear for all of them, together with food she had irradiated that same morning. It would keep for a month, as well as making the boy’s stomach turn when he ate it. This was the sort of food City people had to eat.
“But aren’t we staying to defend the village?”
He got a slap for that one. Mother was in no mood to talk. She was crying softly as she walked round the rooms of the habitat, picking things up, putting things down, and the boy realized suddenly that she was deciding which of the pieces of her life she was going to take with her and which she was going to leave behind forever. He threw his arms around her, and this time she did not slap him.
“Go out and fetch the old one,” she said. “Where is he? I’ve prepared the conveyor. We have to leave.”
The boy told his mother that the old man had said he was going to do his exercises, and that, on this particular morning, the boy was not allowed to accompany him.
The boy’s mother’s eyes flew open in horror. She looked out of the window, which showed sand billowing down a dusty street.
She stood still a moment, as though paralyzed. Then she grabbed his arm.
“Come with me.”
They walked out to the edge of the village. The village was small. It was not a long walk. Out there at the very edge of the sun farms, beyond a hectare or so of jet-black solar collectors, the wrecked battle machines of the Barbarians sat rusting in the sand.
Wh
at are Barbarians? the boy had asked his teacher once in class. And the answer had been quick and pat. Why, people from outside the Commonwealth, of course. Any people from outside the Commonwealth.
The machines sat at what the boy knew to have been the extreme limit of the Guardian’s target acquisition range, sixty years ago.
Of the old man, there was no sign.
“Stupid old fool,” said mother, and pulled the boy off down the village streets again. She seemed to know where she was going. Only two streets, two rows of gleaming aluminum habitats, and the old man came into view. Standing in the square at the Guardian’s habitat-sized feet, he was arguing with a pair of Consultancy men, armored troopers holding guns that could track the electrical emissions of a man’s heartbeat in the dark and shoot him dead through steel. He was carrying a sword.
“But I always do my exercises in the square at this time,” the old man was saying, which was a lie.
“You are carrying a weapon, grandfather,” said one of the Consultants gently, “which I am forced to regard as a potential threat, despite your advanced years.”
The old man looked from hand to hand, then finally held up the sword as if he had only just realized it was there. “This? Why, but this is only an old sword-shaped piece of aluminum It cannot even be made to take an edge.”
“All the same,” said the Consultant persuasively, “out of deference to the tense situation in which we find ourselves, it would be safer if—”
“HOI!”
The shout broke the polite silence in the town square. Five heads turned towards it. As the sun heaved its head over the southern horizon, a figure staggered into town out of the desert. It waved its arms.
“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 once 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, far above, the old coot pulling an battered slab of black plastic from his tunic and sliding 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 spraypainted 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 by now unable to prevent the boy’s mother from standing with her head in the air gawping like a new-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 after-images 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, the boy knew; and despite the fact that the dry season wind howled down from the mountains here like a katabatic banshee, it had never 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, swinging 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 who needed them 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, meanwhile, 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 armour. 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 began to back away, and pulling at his mother’s robe. He knew what was coming next.
Men ran out of the buildings with light anti-armour 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, the boy knew, was actually in the main chassis, and 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, shouting at the sky and pointing 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, the boy pondered, 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.
Then the sunlight returned to the sand, though the sand was 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.
Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 91 Page 13
