Still, when she reached the doors, they opened for her, and she found herself in a darkened hall going in both directions with no clue as to where.
Turn left, walk to the end, turn right, and go into the third room on the right. This was a whisper of sorts, not actually spoken aloud, but rather, heard inside her head.
And she found herself walking as directed even as she continued to ponder the directive’s origin. It wasn’t that she’d decided to do it; her body was obeying without her having to consider it.
The room she entered was vast, and on a scale of opulence she’d never imagined. She almost sank into the lush carpet with its intricate designs, and all about there were what appeared to be exhibits, more than simple art objects.
Part museum, part great room, it was designed to awe, and it did.
Along the walls were paintings, apparently great works by great masters, all in gorgeous frames and with their own special lighting. She knew nothing of art, nor could she understand why so many of those were probably coveted, but there was some religious art that was clearly ancient and stunning.
There was a kind of artificial hallway created by the carpeting and the cases, which were lined up in a row about four meters from the walls but facing the “corridor.” They went around the room, forming a square, with breaks so that someone could enter beyond them and into the center of the room. The cases contained jewelry. Monstrous jewels, encrusted settings, fabulous arrangements. Some of it had religious settings and was clearly originally intended for some church or faith, but only maybe half of it was Terran in origin, and the kinds of minds, and eyes, that saw some of those settings before making them were never inside a human.
She was fascinated in spite of herself, although there was no way to know what they were. You were supposed to already know that, she supposed, or perhaps the only one who needed to know didn’t need little notes and plaques.
There were ancient books as well. She’d seen a few like them in retreats and seminaries, but they were old and prized, or ceremonial, and never opened save by the Minister of the Service. She couldn’t read them, of course; reading had been a lost art since people could hook into a computer for anything they wanted or needed. Still, she knew that some of them were ancient religious texts by their decoration, possibly Bibles.
How odd that a man such as this would have such a love of religious art, religious settings for the gems, and religious books.
She was still uncomfortable, though. She knew she wasn’t here to see this collection, and as much as she was pleased to once again be able to walk around and feel almost human again, it wasn’t the time or place for admiration.
Angel walked around a case and into the center area, which proved to be a statuary garden. She felt uneasy at discovering this, remembering Wallinchky’s comments about “living statues,” but these did seem to be pretty much what they seemed. Again, the accent was on ancient, but many of these sculptures, the Terran ones anyway, had erotic poses or themes. It was hard to tell with the non-Terran ones, but there was a definite theme. Men in erotic poses with women, in erotic poses with other men, women in erotic poses with other women, and with unfamiliar but clearly animal creatures.
She knew she should look away and pray, but she couldn’t stop looking at the sculptures, nor could she explain the odd gut-level reaction she had to them.
In the middle was a round area of especially deep, thick, furlike carpet with erotic designs visible in the middle. Ming was lying there, in a pose not unlike some of the statuary.
As expected, Ming looked very much like she did—the artificial arms and legs. The artificial look and fluidity of movement of a person also had the same fluidity as her own movements.
“Ming? Are you all right?” she asked.
“Just put your mind in some other place and don’t think,” Ming replied, her voice not sounding right. It sounded… well, sultry, even deeper than it had been. She was moaning and breathing funny, and yet she managed, “They got us all wired up. You can’t fight it. Just try to think of other things.”
But Angel couldn’t think of other things, and as she knelt down to see to her friend, she felt—strange. Not unpleasant, not like the artificial limbs, but like she’d never felt before, except perhaps once, in a fit of religious ecstasy at her ordination. But this was much more physically intense, though mentally confusing, since she could keep a little of herself apart and could not understand it.
And after a while Jules Wallinchky got into it with them; she remembered that much, and she tried with what little corner of her was left to push him away, to get him out of there, but her body kept doing what he wanted no matter what she tried. Ming had been wrong. Wallinchky had the ultimate power trip in mind, and he went at it with gusto.
“Angel, you have to talk.”
“Go away! I just want to die, but they will not even let me do that!”
Ming shook her head. “Poor kid,” she breathed, then realized that in fact Angel was just a kid. Not only a young woman barely past whatever girlhood that order allowed, but with lifelong religious indoctrination and sequestering from most men in the retreats and religious schools, and even from the mission, where Angel had said there were only two Terran males on the whole planet, which was otherwise inhabited by an agrarian race of some kind of small lizard folk.
Evil was something you saw in videos and interlinks, or heard about second- or thirdhand or from religious instructors. When evil did appear, it was the unforeseen injury or death, the horrible storm that wipes out the crops, that kind of thing. And when you were out in company pretending to be just another citizen, the martial arts and mind control tricks were generally enough to save you. Otherwise, somebody shot you and you went to Heaven or whatever. Many trillions knew evil firsthand, of course, although a large percentage didn’t recognize it as quite that, but Ming knew it took a cop like her to know the names and addresses of the chief perpetrators.
Angel had come face-to-face with more of the real stuff in the past two waking weeks of her life than she’d ever imagined confronting before, and it wasn’t like the easy answers of her ivory tower theology teachers or show business hysterics. Few people, even clerical types, really believed in evil anymore, which was one reason evil kept winning.
For Angel, it was a matter of simply not understanding how God could allow her to sink to this. What had she done to deserve such a fate, or was she a new Job, punished simply to show piety to the devil? If that was the case, it wasn’t a good bet. She felt—dirty, abused, and for the first time she knew the glimmerings of real hatred. With that came some wisdom, at least; now, at last, she could taste what Jeremiah Wong Kincaid must feel. But Wallinchky was as evil as she could imagine, and he had been in Kincaid’s power, as it were, and was instead used merely as a tool. If Wallinchky wasn’t evil enough to be an end object in himself, then what must that Hadun creature be like?
She didn’t get over it, but began to learn to cope with it, much to Ming’s relief.
Finally, Angel had to ask, “How did he do what he did? How can it be possible to do that to someone?”
“He’s got us hooked into the neural net running this entire complex,” Ming guessed. “We’re like any of the automated stuff here, from the cleaning machines to the medlab stuff to the rest of the automated place. I have tried to walk down certain hallways here, or enter certain rooms, and I simply cannot. It’s not willpower—my legs just will not do it. Just after that time you tried harming yourself. You couldn’t. We’re a part of this place now, just like the furniture. There was a lot done to us internally, as well as giving us these limbs and eyes.”
“But—I can understand how it stops us, but how did it get me to do—that? I mean, I had never even done it before.”
“Programming. We were ordered to go in there, ordered on the bed, and then a routine was run that not only gave us exactly what we were to do, but provided the proper hormones and other brain chemicals to trigger it all.”
> “Is this what he does to the others who work for him?”
Ming shrugged. “Probably he has ones like us in all his dwellings, but we’re not real portable this way. We’re not just prisoners in this place, we’ve literally become a part of it. It is, I suspect, what he does to people he wants to keep around but who are too ‘hot’ to travel. My people will be looking for me, yours for you. Our genetic codes are on file. So, as he said, we’ve become part of his collection.”
It was not the most pleasant of thoughts.
It also became clear that whatever the medical program was doing, there was no sign of regeneration procedures— requiring either sequestering in a tank or removal of each artificial limb one at a time and giving it intensive treatment—and transplanting specially grown limbs from living tissue also didn’t seem to be in the cards. Instead, the artificial limbs appeared to be integrating into their nervous systems, so that they now felt almost normal, even if they still looked very strange. They exercised in an elaborate exercise room at least a couple of hours a day; this was not a choice. It obviously wasn’t to build up leg and arm muscles, but it got the heart pumping and made them tight in the stomach and very firm in the breasts. They were also growing hair; for Angel, it was a strange sensation, since apparently there was a genetic trait against it in her sect. It itched at first, but then began to come in at a rate much faster than normal growth. It was straight, thick, wiry, and jet-black.
What was most odd, although to them a relief, was that they rarely saw anyone else. There was little sign that Wallinchky, or Ari, or the others, were anywhere nearby. It was like being trapped in a public building. Of course, they couldn’t go into many areas, so it was unclear if they were alone or not. Certainly the central computer was running things.
They did go wherever they could, studying and almost memorizing much of the great art and sculpture the place contained. It was some time before Angel could bring herself to go into the sculpture garden again, but after a while they went farther, to an unnoticed anteroom of the great hall that looked out upon the vast dead world beyond.
It was a beautiful if daunting landscape, all oranges and purples and filled with twisted rocks. The sky was never normal looking, but always dark, a very pale blue through which nearby stars could be seen in the daytime and was jet-black at night.
They sat there and looked out and tried to imagine they were beyond this prison, and you could almost completely clear your mind and believe it now and again. Of particular dreamy speculation was a formation well off toward the horizon that seemed to be almost by itself, but framed by twisted mountains and untouched by craters big and small, or at least apparently so from this distance.
It looked like some dark, mysterious alien city, abandoned in the eons but clinging on, refusing to crumble to dust.
Was this a place where angels and powers greater and lesser once convened before the creation of Adam? Was this once a garden as Earth had been in those most ancient of days? And was the serpent now returned to look upon the desolation it had created?
“That’s quite poetic,” Ming commented dreamily. The worst part of this wasn’t the anticipation of more horrors, it was the sheer boredom.
“Huh? What’s poetic?”
“About the places where angels met before the Creation, and how this was all that was left of the devil’s lair.”
Angel shook her head slowly in wonder. “I didn’t think I spoke aloud.”
Ming was startled. Am I going nuts or what? I’m not sure she said it aloud, either.
I didn’t. What s happening here?
“I think,” Ming answered thoughtfully, “we’re reading each other’s thoughts. Telepathy. Never had it in my family. You?”
“I—We can sometimes tell what someone is going to do a split second before they do it. It was thought that it might be a kind of very limited telepathy. It saved me from Tann Nakitt’s fangs. But not—this.”
It’s the neural net connection, I think, Ming guessed. We’re both using identical transmitters and receivers implanted in us. Just as it can send and receive, so can we between ourselves. I doubt if it works with anyone but us. Keep your thoughts open. Do not speak of this again aloud. It is possible that our master never suspected this, and if we can keep it from him, it might work to our advantage.
Once this new channel of communication was open, it remained open no matter what, and seemed to extend itself. All thoughts, knowledge, feelings, and fantasies of the one were open to the other. It was quite strange, but stranger still because there still was no true meeting of minds. The two had backgrounds too different, and knowledge, experience, and beliefs so different that there was a point beyond which each could not go without losing perspective entirely.
But there was an underlying suspicion that somehow this was another computer subroutine; that in some way the computer itself was causing this, and it was a new stage in whatever their ultimate fate was to be. This suspicion was reinforced by the mandated routines they were forced to follow, but also by the times during each waking period when they would lose control of their emotions. It might be crying jags, or sexual arousals, love, hate, or fear; clearly, something was playing them like an instrument and recording the results. Thus, it seemed likely that this telepathy was merely a by-product, and that perhaps their memories, their personalities, were really in storage inside the larger computers, and that they were as much operating as inhabiting their bodies.
Ming was particularly concerned about this, since she knew a lot about the usual techniques of mind control. What worried her, and through her both of them, was whether they would know they were being remade according to someone else’s direction. There were periods, even now, some of apparent length, that were totally blacked out. There were other times when they were fully conscious, but essentially passengers in their own bodies, doing things and going places without any control on their part.
The only time that seemed genuinely theirs, with no manipulation, was the time they reserved when they were not being ordered to the infirmary or exercise hall, and just sat together, staring out at the ever-fascinating alien landscape with the unchanging stars all around.
And then there was the one time when they both were simply staring outward and it seemed suddenly as if something was alive out there. It wasn’t a shape, but more a sense of something else beyond the compound, beyond the dome and superinsulated windows, something centered in that strange citylike place way out there but wasn’t just there. Some kind of—energy. That was the only way to explain it. In many ways it seemed like they had a sudden awareness of a second, much larger and more powerful neural network. The compound had a centralized computer and a series of thousands of smaller units with more specialized interests, all tied together at the speed of thought, combining their power to make a unified whole that could in some ways think, make basic decisions, and run all that needed to be run; even them. They could feel their master, could sense the connections, but could not reach it as it could reach them.
That night, though, they sensed another, very different— entity—which nonetheless performed the same sort of functions. But the neural net that they were somewhat a part of was in many ways the entire compound, all that was within it, and all of the functions of maintenance and preservation as well. The whole place was alive, but the whole made logical sense and was for a specific purpose.
So what was this other far stronger but more alien net? What was it doing, and for whom? Did it run the city out there, ancient and dead as it was? What could be run there, for whom, and to what purpose?
There was no way to actually contact it, touch it, ask it. The speed, the internal language, the whole way of operation was beyond them or anything they were connected to. Nonetheless, it was there. It existed.
They could almost sense the compound’s computers musing on the same thing. This was old hat to the Many in One, and they had longed for contact since first sensing this power and obvious systematic intelligence
, but had never had a way in.
I would like to go to that city, if that is what it is, they both thought. I would like to find out, at least, if it truly is a place where the Ancient Ones once dwelled, and if this power is their mark of Creation or, perhaps, still a place of their power awaiting their return as I await the return of the master of this place.
That was not far off. There was no announcement, no broadcast, but the next time they awoke from sleep they knew, courtesy of their own hookup, that company was coming.
Wallinchky Compound, Grabant 4
There wasn’t anything in the realm that couldn’t be done or controlled by computer, and for all but the lowest classes and the newest and poorest worlds, that was generally the case. Still, the use of living assistants as everything from secretaries to bodyguards, butlers, and maids was considered a status thing. Any common dolt could have power over a machine; only the elite had the same power over people.
The two captives in the satin prison only guessed that was why they were in a place where they had never been allowed before, and which turned out to be the master bedroom. It was sumptuous, with priceless ancient tapestries on the walls, a plush natural hair rug, and a huge revolving bed. Why was it that now they made it up expertly, and checked for dust and fingerprints, and polished, and then found and laid out a pair of satin lounging pajamas and soft slippers from the vast walk-in closet? It was a mystery, since nobody was yet there to see their handiwork. And then, with almost gut-level understanding, they figured it out.
The master computer was doing the job. They were simply the instruments, the same as the tentacles that could emerge from the ceilings and the various dedicated devices small and large that were used to maintain the whole place.
They also found themselves working in concert with the other machines, never once getting in the way of one another, or even concerned about the small vacuum unit doing a pattern on the rug, for instance, or the spidery things that emerged and checked everything from the humidor to the freshness of the toiletries. In fact, they were as much in contact with the small artificial creatures as they were with each other. It was impossible to describe, even to one another; it just was. They were Angel, to be sure, and Ming, but they were also all the other things in the house, and the other things in the house were to some extent them.
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