The Cyborg and the Sorcerers

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  "Stop it! Damn it! I know our release code!"

  "Release code can be accepted over onboard audio."

  "It's my name!"

  The computer said nothing. Slant reached for the direct-control cable but then remembered that he couldn't use it.

  "My name, damn it, repeated three times!"

  He knew what it was; he twisted his neck, ignoring the pain, and glanced at the pile of books, tumbled haphazardly against the curving wall. He did know what it was; he only had to remember it. Slat … Satta … San …

  "Sam!" His name was Sam, he could remember hearing it many times; a girl had whispered it in his ear, his father had called him that. Samuel.

  "My name's Samuel Turner!"

  That was it!

  The computer said nothing.

  He remembered that he had to repeat it three times.

  "Samuel Turner, Samuel Turner, Samuel Turner!" he shouted. "I'm Samuel Turner!"

  The computer clicked and whirred, and answered, "Affirmative. Release code accepted. Awaiting orders."

  He barely heard it; his mind felt as if it were tearing itself apart and being rammed back together. He felt himself to be eighteen people, each distinct, all jammed into a single body and being forced to merge with each other.

  The pilot was gone, and Slant himself realized he knew astronomy and navigation; cover personalities were fading into nothingness, leaving him their skills and memories. He remembered his seduction of Ahnao—or her seduction of him, whichever it had been—and knew why he had made each move, what each of the proper responses had been. The memories of the warrior persona mingled with his own as it faded, last of all, and he was revolted by the knowledge that he had killed and maimed with his own hands—though he had had the ability to do worse, and would still have it, if he survived; he could mangle other human beings in ways he found hard to believe. He had been aware that he had done these things, or that they had been done with his body, but now he felt them himself, knew what bones breaking under his hands felt like.

  He did not want to know everything he had done and thought in all his guises, but as he reabsorbed each schizoid personality that knowledge ran through him and into his own memories, leaving no distinction between himself and the person who had done it.

  It had been he, Samuel Turner, who had decapitated an innocent old man and dissected his brain; it had been he who killed Teyzhan guards with his bare hands, he who cut off a beggar's hand, he who seduced a foolish young woman, he who had made sense of a synesthetic mess of data in order to steer the ship, he who had spent fourteen years wandering in space killing any who interfered with him. He knew how he had done all these things, and he remembered committing each act.

  Then the memories were blanked out by a wall of pain. The back of his head was a mass of raw flesh and exposed nerves, and the mechanisms that kept him in control of the pain from those wounds had just shut down.

  He struggled to reconstruct them, to somehow block out the agony; his vision was bathed in red haze. He was unsure he could remain conscious much longer, and he had to stop the computer from destroying the planet's civilization. "Don't attack!" he called feebly. "Stop!"

  "Affirmative. Cessation of all computer activity in five seconds."

  "What? He remembered the computer's death wish, and that one of the ways it could die was a shut-down order following its release code; it was misinterpreting his command. It would shut itself off if he didn't countermand himself in the five-second grace period, and without the computer he could not control the ship. It would crash, or drift off into space if it had reached escape velocity, or possibly fall into orbit around the planet. He would die.

  No! He would not let himself die! Not after surviving fourteen years of drifting through space, fourteen years in which he had killed dozens, hundreds of innocent people so that he could survive. After living through all that, he would not die now because the computer chose to suicide; he would not let the machine take him with it. He would not give in to it this final time.

  He struggled against the pain, trying to phrase a command; his communication circuit was dead, so it would have to be spoken aloud. He sat up, so that the computer would hear him more clearly.

  That proved a disastrous mistake; a new wave of pain swept over him as he moved, and he blacked out for an instant.

  That was enough. There was a click, and the computer was gone. The ship was dead, running entirely on its simple fail-safe systems, coasting along its set course.

  He could not restart the computer; he had absorbed the personality in charge of ship's maintenance, and he knew that it was gone, that it could only be revived by slow, step-by-step reprogramming. If he was to survive he would have to land the ship himself—or else boost it clear of the planet, to drift on until the life-support systems failed. That wouldn't take long, without the computer to regulate them, and he didn't want to die, alone in the void, when food or air or water slowly gave out.

  He had to land the ship, any way he could. Any landing he could survive would do; keeping the ship intact was of relatively little importance.

  There were no manual controls; the ship had been designed for the use of a cyborg and computer. It had intentionally been made so that it was impossible for an ordinary human to pilot, to prevent capture and use by the enemy. The closest he could come would be to rip out the control leads to the engines and short-circuit them into jury-rigged switches.

  He didn't have time for that. He didn't have time for anything at all, without the computer or the direct-control cable. The ship might crash at any time; he had no idea what its trajectory was. He wished he could see where he was.

  The cabin seemed to flicker around him in a reddish haze; his eyes were playing tricks again.

  Perhaps the socket in his neck was not beyond hope, he thought. He snatched up the direct-control cable and tried to shove it into place.

  It wouldn't fit. He felt an eerie whining sensation as a put contact brushed against the side of the socket, where insulation had burned off and left bare metal; that was not where the contact was intended to go, but a signal of some sort was coming through.

  That was something. He pushed the cable in harder, trying to ignore what that did to the raw tissue of his neck; there was a faint scrape of metal on bone as he drove the socket up against his spine.

  There seemed to be some sensation, a faint electric tingle. He strained to feel the contact, to tap into the ship's sensors and see the data he needed.

  He could sense, vaguely, that something was coming through; he closed his eyes. The cabin did not vanish; an after-image, etched in vivid spectral colors, lingered and seemed to brighten. He did not want that; he wanted contact with the ship's sensors. He concentrated, and the image of the cabin distorted, shrank, and vanished, and he saw where he was.

  The ship was traveling a long, shallow curve; it had already passed over Awlmei, its first target, without strafing, and was sailing eastward across the forested hills. It would crash somewhere northwest of Praunce. He took that in in a single quick glimpse, then lost contact again.

  Something was wrong, though; the information had not been in the right form. He had seen it, rather than having to interpret coded data; it was as if the ship had suddenly turned transparent around him. His skin was tingling strangely, most particularly on his forehead and the backs of his hands.

  Could it have something to do with his use of the release code? Did he see things differently now, because Samuel Turner rather than the pilot was seeing them?

  He had no time to consider such things. He had to get the ship down in one piece—or at least, in few enough pieces to ensure his survival.

  Nothing was wrong with his present course, but the speed was too great; the ship would be splattered over several square kilometers. What the computer had considered a slow strafing speed was still more than a thousand meters a second. If he braked and did nothing else, though, the ship would drop steeply, and again he would have no chance o
f survival. He had to slow the ship and bring its nose up simultaneously and gradually, and drop it down to a belly landing, using the trees to cushion the impact.

  He had to manage somehow. He thought his orders into the cable, or tried to; nothing happened.

  He concentrated, eyes tight shut, his right fist clenched around the plug, his left hand clamped on the edge of the acceleration couch. His head ached, and his scalp tingled; he wondered if current were seeping into his skin from a faulty contact.

  Suddenly he made a connection again and saw the ground below, coming up at him; he tried to order the ship to brake.

  There was a response; the ship veered suddenly as one braking jet fired. He had to correct that, he knew, or he could wind up in a spin; he shoved harder at the plug.

  That motion, combined with the sudden sideways acceleration from his uneven braking, bent several contacts and snapped a piece from the edge of the socket, sending his right hand, still holding the plug, scraping across the side of his neck. His skin crawled, pain surged through him, and he almost screamed; he had to hold the image of the ground, to keep control of the ship! If he lost it now he was dead.

  He did keep it; the other braking jets fired, and he watched as the ship leveled off, then slowed and began to drop smoothly toward the woods beneath.

  The plug, though, was nowhere near the socket. His skin felt as if it was rippling across his body, and his hair seemed to be standing on end, as if his body were charged with electricity.

  He opened his eyes and brought the plug around to where he could see it. It was ruined, its contacts bent or broken, yet he was in control of the ship through it. He saw it clearly, and at the same time saw an intricate web of red and yellow light woven through it; his image of the. approaching ground was also in that light, somehow, and the meads of controlling the ship as well. It was wizardry of some kind, he was sure.

  He had no time to wonder what was happening; he had to land the ship. He saw the trees coming up, corrected the ship's angle, corrected again, braked—and hit.

  It was a bad landing, a very bad landing; Slant could hear and feel the ship coming apart around him in roaring, splintering fragments as it smashed its way through the trees. He knew, though, that he shouldn't have been able to land at all. The only thing that had enabled him to was magic.

  That was his last conscious thought before the ship hit the ground.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  HE AWOKE TO THE SMELL OF BURNING INSULATION AND the sound of crackling flames and spitting sparks. He opened his eyes and saw nothing but smoke. Acting from conditioned response, he moved immediately trying to escape the smoke; it could be more deadly than fire itself.

  Blinking, his eyes watering, he managed to make out his surroundings. He was still in the control cabin, lying on a pile of battered books; the impact had thrown him off the acceleration couch, but the books had broken his fall. He felt no new injuries beyond a few minor bruises. Some mechanism in the couch had apparently overloaded; it was the base, near where the direct-control cable emerged, that was afire. He noticed for the first time that he still held the plug from the cable; he must have ripped it free without intending to when flung aside.

  The swirling smoke reached him again, and he coughed. He had to get out immediately, he knew; the ventilation systems had shut down or been destroyed in the crash, he guessed, since their hum could not be heard and the only movement in the air was the convection caused by the fire's heat. He scrambled across the room and found that the corridor outside was tilted at an almost unmanageably steep angle. His lungs ached, and the back of his battered head and neck still roared with agony, but the lingering headache that had plagued him seemed to have faded, and he was able to think with some semblance of clarity.

  He struggled his way up the passage on all fours, keeping low where the air would be better, though in fact most of the smoke was still in the control cabin. Storage lockers had been ripped open by the impact, their contents strewn about, and he found himself picking his way over scattered tools and broken machinery.

  The inner door of the airlock was also open, and twisted hopelessly out of shape; he squeezed past it

  The airlock itself was a shambles; shorted connections sputtered, warning lights flashed, and a ruptured supply line was spraying hydroponic nutrient solution across the chamber. The outer door was still halfway open; the computer had been unable to reclose it with the hydraulics uncoupled, and had flown with it as it was. That might have contributed to his poor control of the landing, he thought, by interfering with the ship's trim. He clambered across the sloping floor toward it, ducking under a buckled ceiling plate, and began to climb through.

  He stopped himself suddenly. His leading foot had not met resistance where he expected. He looked down and discovered that the entire wing had been sheared off and lay in pieces a dozen meters away.

  Cautiously, then, he eased himself through, taking a deep gulp of the fresh forest air, and lowered himself' down as far as he could before letting himself drop.

  Again he landed badly; he had not seen a twisted hull plate, still very hot, beneath him. His knee struck it hard and gave under him, and he rolled forward.

  That was nothing, really, he told himself. The pain in his burned and bruised knee and the hands that had unexpectedly had to absorb the shock of the fall was nothing compared to the continuing agony of his neck. He ignored it all as he staggered away from the ship.

  The main drive was probably down again, he told himself, and wouldn't blow; if the nuclear warheads hadn't gone already, nothing would set them off now. Therefore, any explosion would be caused by the conventional armaments or the various chemicals stored on board, set off by the electrical fires that were obviously burning all over the ship. Those could make some fairly spectacular little explosions, all right, but nothing that would kill him if he could put a few hundred meters behind him first.

  Of course, if the main drive hadn't shut down and was still running unregulated, the plasma might eventually find a way out of its containment vessel and, if there was enough of it, melt down the entire ship. He had no idea what that would do to the warheads, or whether it would happen fast enough to be an explosion in its own right. He hoped the drive was down.

  It should be; the impact should have smashed the lasers, or at least thrown them out of alignment, in which case they might burn holes out through the sides of the ship eventually. He would watch for that.

  For now, he had limped his way out beyond the last smoldering scraps of metal and splintered fragments of trees, into the undamaged part of the forest. He was at the limit of his endurance and knew it. Once he was safe from explosions, he would settle down and rest, he told himself. Another few meters would do it.

  That thought was the last thing he remembered.

  When he was aware again, the first thing he was aware of was a voice. Someone was speaking, saying something in a language he knew he should know, but he was still too drowsy to make sense of it.

  He rested a moment longer, then tried again. This time he could follow it. He was still on Dest, and the voice was speaking that world's barbaric language. It was commenting on someone's strength of will and potential for the future.

  As well as the voice he could hear a breeze making its way through trees, and a set of footsteps somewhere not too far away; he smelled green growing things and rich earth and smoldering plastic, and other odors as well.

  He was also aware, in a way he couldn't quite explain, of the presence of four people besides himself, and of the subtle tug of the planet's pull upon him, and of the flowing of the air around him.

  Reluctantly, he opened his eyes.

  "Hello, Slant," someone said. "It's good to see you awake again."

  "Hello," he replied. "Where am I?"

  Even as he asked, he knew part of the answer; he was lying comfortably on a patch of grass, in the shade of an oak tree, not far from where his ship had crashed. He did not, however, know where the ship had
come down. His final maneuvers had gotten him quite lost.

  "Oh, we're in the forest somewhere about two days' ride west of Praunce."

  It was one of the wizards he had met in Praunce, one who had carried him, who spoke; he thought that man's name was Dekert. He was young, and wore a golden robe.

  Two other wizards sat nearby; he recognized one as another member of the group that had carried him but was unsure of the other. The footsteps he had heard belonged to Arzadel, who was approaching at a casual pace. He had apparently been investigating the wreckage.

  "Would you like something to eat?" The wizard he couldn't identify held out a crockery vessel and lifted the lid; a savory smell of meat and vegetables emerged. Slant felt his stomach knot itself in response to the odor; he was ravenous.

  "Yes, please," he answered.

  The wizard handed him the pot, full of hot stew, and a wooden spoon. While he ate the four gathered about him. waiting politely until he had eased his hunger.

  When he felt that he could survive awhile longer without stuffing more food into his belly, Slant put aside the stewpot and spoon and asked, "What are you doing here? How did you get here?"

  "We came seeking you," Arzadel answered. "We flew."

  He considered that for a moment; then Dekert asked a question of his own. "Is the demon dead?"

  Slant looked at the wreckage, visible through the trees. There had apparently been no explosion, but there could be little doubt, nonetheless. "Yes, it's dead."

  "That's good."

  "How long was I unconscious?"

  "Your ship flew here the day before yesterday," Arzadel answered. "You might have awoken sooner, had we let you, but we kept you asleep so that you might heal better, with our aid."

  He sat for a moment, considering that, and remembering how his ship had come to crash here. "You people helped me control the ship, didn't you?" he asked.

  The wizards looked at one another in confusion. Arzadel replied, "We did nothing to aid you while the ship flew. We knew of nothing we could do, once you were aboard the vessel."