In a tiny, strangled voice, the robot said: ‘Permission to speak, Sire?’ The confused crashing from the midst of the trees had not ceased; I could hear more trees crumpling.
‘Of course, my dear, but keep it cogent. My guest is thirsty, and seems quite faint from the heat of the day.’
‘Guest?’ muttered Smith, ‘I see no guest, only a ghost, a disturbance in the vacuum. Still, I guess you’re the boss.’ I perceived in the robot a family resemblance to my Liss. All machines are adept at dumb insolence. ‘Sire, the barbarians are coming. The Empire is on the verge of collapse.’
‘Oh, that. The Empire has been on the verge of collapse for five hundred years. Bowsprit, why don’t you take that damned shaggy suit off and come inside. I have a euphoriant potation you’ll like, distilled from the ichor of a certain native bush leech.’
‘Gospodin! Mein Liebling!’ cried a hoarse excited voice. Rearing and careening, a second robot thumped across the grass out of the trees. Half the height of Smith, chubby, propelled by four bald tyres, it accelerated toward its companion in a mad rush. Smith leaped to one side and sprinted away. ‘Your hole!’ shouted Marx. ‘Open to me your hole, my little mouse, for I am on fire!’ It executed a neat slalom turn, bright bronze shell blurring, and tripped the first robot to the ground. The shock of impact bruised my ankles, and I felt my knees buckle. Halfway between horror and hilarity, I saw the enormous rubber hose which extruded questingly from Marx’s undercarriage. It pulsed; a wave ran from its base to the glowing metal connecting jack at its tip. ‘I burn, dumpling!’
‘Get away from me, you loathsome brute,’ shrieked Smith, furrowing backwards through the soil with prodigious kicks. ‘Put that thing away. It’s the wrong time of the month.’
‘Stop screwing around, you bloody dolt,’ roared Marx. ‘Something’s brought me on early. Open up, or I’ll blow. You’ll take your virtue to kingdom come.’
‘Oh.’ Smith ceased its struggles. ‘I’m sorry, Karl, I figured you were just feeling saucy. Oh my God, Karl, your positron count is going up exponentially. Quick, my dearest, come to me.’ A plate cycled open in the cylindrical torso, and Marx jerked forward, thrusting home its throbbing rubber hose. For an instant, before the red-hot jack entered Smith’s socket, I saw the eye-searing corona of the power hole.
‘Jenny, my darling wife!’
‘Eve,’ cried Smith, acquiescent at last in a mythic rapture.
I picked up my telephone and dialed 0. ‘Did we have anything to do with that?’
‘This is Roger, your Life Support System. I think our arrival must have triggered the decay curve in Marx’s black hole.’
‘Explain.’
‘Well, these robots are fantastically primitive. To tell the truth, they’re peripatetic gigaton bombs. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Republic sent them here as sort of Trojan Horses. They run off quantum black holes, about fifty tonnes apiece I’d estimate, locked into a pinch effect. But the holes are grotesquely unstable. Any singularity that small tends to evaporate quick-smart, and if you can’t dispose of the radiation that it’s ripping out of the Dirac negative mass you have an annihilation vortex on your hands. Blooey.’
‘They’re not anchored to a wormhole?’ I asked in horror.
‘Not these early models. From the look of things, they’ve been jerryrigged to evaporate on a turn-and-turn-about basis. That tube’s a superconducting conduit. When Marx’s black hole gushes, as it’s doing now, it pumps about a gigawatt straight into Smith’s event horizon. That destabilizes Smith’s hole, but there’s a reasonable degree of compliance. Our flux stirred up the Negative Energy Ocean a bit and brought Marx on too soon, that’s all. Really nothing to fret about.’
‘Helen!’
‘Eve, Eve, sock it to me, baby.’
‘Friedrich!’ Marx yelped in a trembling voice.
Sobered, the taller robot jerked back to the full length of the rubber conduit. ‘That’s quite enough of that, Karl.’
Marx pounded its wheels on the ground. I couldn’t take my eyes off them, though I was aware that the Emperor had ambled off to the shade of the sail.
‘Baby, I need ya!’ screamed Marx. ‘Tussy!’ With a terminal spasm, it shook its battered old jelly-roll. The hose retracted, the jack cooled to a dull grey, and the socket plate snapped shut.
Smith drew back, trembling with fury. ‘Tussy?’ it moaned. ‘Tussy? You degenerate monster. You Commie filth. Your own daughter!’ And, sobbing and grinding its swivel legs, the robot rushed from the clearing with a terrible tearing of ruptured branches.
Vaguely, I heard the Emperor of the Galaxy calling to me. He stood at the entrance to his hut, two long cool drinks in his hands. ‘Can’t we be friends again?’ Marx was hollering from the clearing. ‘You’re not really mad at me, you know. It’s just post-quantal tristesse.’ But I had fallen on my backside in the dry, purple-green tufts, the teeth in the jaws of the bear’s skull over my brow chattering together; I was clutching my belly, my smalls, laughing uncontrollably, dizzy in the stinking heat, laughing fit to bust.
~ * ~
Both Lyric Music and I found the barbarians’ abhorrence of incest (actual and metaphorical) at once comical and offensive. One serious glance at the Galactic Emperor, with his bleached-out irises and his buckled legs, not to mention the magical tachyon haze furring his thaumaturge’s hands, yielded evidence enough of stringent inbreeding. The genome for effective psi-focus is a mess of recessives, alleles as slippery as spawning salmon. Oddly enough, though, none of Lyric’s wives stood in closer degree than second cousin—he took most of his puissance from his swarm of kids, coupling his genes through them to a social register refined in thirty thousand years of keeping it in the family. He’d potlatched his way to the top of the tree, building up an immense fortune black-marketing with the barbarians and disposing of it all in one monumental eleemosynary blowout which had left him drunk as a coot, creditor of half the ancient families in the galaxy, personally skint, and the husband of his predecessor’s mother-wife. In a tradition bereft of hard-core personal ambition, Lyric Music Stirs Too Fierce the Heart was a rarity.
As for me, had I not sprung from the loins of Dulcet, prettiest daughter of that redoubtable hunter, Bountiful, my father? My own dear wife was my cousin Lustrous, and the tusu-guru of our village, wizard and terrible master of our fetishes, was joint uncle to us both, brother to that kind woman whose breasts gave me suck, breasts heavy from her carrying of Lustrous. My future spouse and I, engaged in the week of our birth, had exchanged parents on that same day, and Dulcet was more to me an aunt than a mother. It is a fine way to grow a child up, though I would hate to have to try to explain it to the purse-mouthed puritans of the Glorious Republic. You can see why I warmed at once to chubby, addle-pated Marx.
~ * ~
Getting through the low bulging entrance to the palace hut was a bit tricky, bulked out as I was with Liss modules and my bear-voyager’s pelt. You can travel one of two ways: hypnotically geared for deference and accommodation to the reality structure of your destination, or as a spectre. I’ve never enjoyed finding myself embedded in a wall, or running my fist through someone’s head, so I was hampered by the dimensions of the hut doorway.
Finally I backed out again and took off the pelt. I bundled him up respectfully and left him outside. Under the pelt I’d been wearing my attush, the same cloak I’d had since my training began twenty years earlier. That was a garment to be proud of, my smalls: a gift from my true mother, woven by her in the old way from the cloth of the mountain elm, soft and supple from the delicate flesh of the inner bark. The rich blues of its blocky embroidery were faded, it’s true, but every stitch had been laid in by Dulcet’s hand. I felt sorry for Lyric Music: maybe his body scars held something of the same meaning to him, but I judged it a depressing loss to go through life naked as a savage.
The Emperor was waiting inside for me, sipping his drink. Certainly it was cooler there. I had expected the inte
rior to be pitch dark, for there were no windows, but remarkably it glowed with earthlight from a barbarian luminator. Well, an old galactic with a brace of robots is hardly going to shrink from the elementary creature comforts of technology. I got my bear-engraved mustache lifter from my bag, dipped it ceremoniously into the glass Lyric held out to me, placed it on my upper lip, and took the glass. It slipped straight through my hand and shattered on the rammed-earth floor. Hard as rock, that floor, and wonderfully level; I imagine Smith had made it, thundering on the soil with fifty-tonne blows.
‘Oh shit,’ I said, peering down at the shards over the mustache lifter beneath my nose. Lyric Music hadn’t turned a hair, though one would have expected him to be bellowing for exorcists.
‘Smith was right, then,’ he said, regarding my confusion placidly. ‘You are a ghost, though of the strangest kind. Did I not touch your arm, and tug your whiskers?’
‘Indeed you did, Sire, and it is a tribute to your magic. Here, let me clean this. . .’
Now he did look shocked. ‘Do not demean yourself, master Ghost. What else are my thousand lazy bundles to do with their time?’ A fat young Neanderthal girl was suddenly kneeling beside us, scooping up the broken fragments onto a platter of wood. It was obvious that she couldn’t see me, and her eyes rolled somewhat in their hooded sockets as the Emperor took his ease on a rush palliasse and motioned me down beside him. ‘They eat their heads off, Bowsprit, and swive one another from dusk to dawn, and not one of the brainless creatures stops for an instant to consider what will become of them when the barbarians arrive. Which, as the impetuous Smith is fond of telling me, will certainly happen any day now.’
Without a word, her task done, the servant was teleported out of the hut.
‘You interest me, sir Ghost,’ the Emperor said, draining his drink. ‘I have seen barbarians in my day, and done business with the rogues, but I have never witnessed your like among them. But you’re not a citizen, still less a servant. And I doubt somehow that you’re from the Further World.’ He left questions implied, and hanging.
‘Sire ...’ I hesitated, pondering paradox. To my knowledge this sort of thing had never come up before. If it did, the mathematics indicated that a voyager would loop straight out. At any given instant, in Superspace, every elementary particle subsists in a condition of absolute ubiquity, an infinite fog of all possible virtual states. A temporal paradox is impossible, because when effect precedes cause, to vitiate that same effect a damping oscillation brings the whole segment back to its ground state, but at a dreadful cost in energy. The Archives people disapprove mightily of historians who go over budget, and it didn’t take an accountant to see how much a paradox loop would cost.
All this went through my mind in a flash, of course. But how do you explain such a thing to an old galactic? You don’t, naturally.
‘Sire,’ I said again, ‘forgive me, but there are certain facts I must not disclose, even to you, and certain matters of politics I am forbidden to discuss.’
Lyric Music looked at me steadily for an interval. Then, ‘Quite right,’ he cried, slapping my knee. ‘Only the vulgar and the shiftless waste their worry on politics, sir palpable Ghost, and I do not believe in pushing a man where he will not go.’ He considered me craftily. ‘Still, you pique my curiosity. What was that stick you held so oddly beneath your nostrils? And may you not throw me some small tidbit about your people? How are your tribe known, Bowsprit Bear’s Stead?’
I’d been glancing surreptitiously around the long, bare hut, expecting someone to interrupt us and get the pressure off me. All my training was as an observer, an interpreter of the lost and the alien, a witness; I was no diplomat. To my astonishment, we were completely alone. Apart from the arrival and vanishing of the servant, there was no indication that Lyric Music had not all his life lived incarcerated, or as a hermit. The psychic, I reminded myself earnestly, are different to us. On some waveband of the mind, the Galactic Emperor was plugged into a universe of bustle more frenzied than a termite’s hill.
I compromised, showed him the mustache lifter my father had carved for me when my beard was a laughable wisp. ‘My people, Sire, are known as the Men—in our tongue, the Ainu. We pride ourselves for our hirsuteness, and the ancestors of the barbarians made mock of this, naming us the “Hairy” Ainu. The most blessed among us, such as my fortunate self, are scholars, voyagers, messengers of the bears.’ His short, thick fingers ran admiringly across the embossed bears on my lifter. ‘Like your mighty nation, Sire, the first seed of my people was nurtured in the soil of the world Earth.’
‘The latest seed of that world,’ said Lyric Music gloomily, ‘is on its way with its damned bloody engines of death to fertilize our gardens with our blood.’ He rose, handing back my lifter. ‘It is a topic which much exercises my principal wife. I suppose I’ll have to see the harridan. I have enjoyed our chat, sir Mystery, but I must leave you now to your own devices. Even an Emperor must work on occasion.’
The hut was crammed with bodies, rank with their own effluvia and the short-chain aliphatic pheromones the Neanderthals favour for perfume. All of them were women, short and broad, with heavy broad noses and immense gleaming teeth, breasts jaunty and sagging according to age but all scarred with initiatory symbols; slender collarbones, to be sure, but arms and legs like wrestlers; pubic beards to put an Ainu warrior to shame. I confess it: excitement jolted in me, despite the shock to my nostrils. Quickly, I withdrew to a corner of the palace hut, and watched with more than the delight of the historian as the serving women of the Empress sorted themselves into a kind of order, and the ancient woman herself stepped forward haughtily to greet her liege.
~ * ~
As a boy I was randy as a beagle, which befits a healthy child, but I was never noticeably Oedipal with it. Certainly I was a rogue with the village girls, and the boys, too, more than once, tugging at their skirts and wraparounds, quick to pull another child’s hair or tickle her armpits, all the better to cop a delicious feel. Surely it was the bane and gory tragedy of the pinched, trap-lipped hordes of the Glorious Republic that they locked their tender places up in bands of prohibition. All their buried heritage cried out in repudiation of this madness—their Taoists, their Shinto saints, their rubber-limbed Tantric athletes—and went unheard, smothered by the colder joys of mechanism and lock-step marching. I’ve seen their rigid bodies, clad in their dull uniforms: as inveterate a tribe of brain-softened masturbators as the species ever spawned. Not that we failed to twang our own nice places, in my youth, when the need was hot upon us and no fellow creature close by, but that was not often. I speak of yesterday, of course, my smalls; today I am a husband and a father, a grandfather, as I was when I stood in Lyric Music’s crowded hut. I have never fancied the faithless husband’s fate, toe-dancing on the ground, suspended by the shrieking hairs of the shame-heaped scalp.
Such matters are seldom all-or-nothing, but for the wretched subjects of the Glorious Republic it came a long chalk too close to nothing. What other nation could have conceived so gross a travesty as the rutting robots of their abandoned Hegemonies? There, at least, their fundamental equation spelled out its formula without disguise: that spasm yoking sex and power, raw crude power, the energy of implosion, the fusion of self with self in endless self-containment, and the burning violence of its only seed?
I have said that I was not overly Oedipal, yet the truth is that I find my highest pitch in the womanly pelt of a lustrous pubic beard. An epithalamic allusion, my sproggies, but my fixation was pre-nuptial. Many the winter evening, in the shadows of the flickering hearth, before my manhood was fully upon me, had I wriggled in the mandala of an inverted kiss, licking and snorting at the apricot cleft of a friendly girl-child (and sniffed in, more than I cared to, the odour of dried urine), but my heart’s delight was the prospect of snuffling a nether beard.
There are great mysteries, my children, in our people’s ancient ways. That tattoo, on the upper lip of a wedded woman—does
it say that, secretly, she is a man, with all the powers over life of a man? Or does she tell us that a man is the budded form of a woman, with his pubic thatch the wrong way up and over-boastfully paraded from his chin? To the men of the Glorious Republic such speculations would have seemed obscene; their bellies would have shrunk to berries, and their manly parts (too often self-handled, unless I miss my mark) have contracted like snails. For them, the making of a baby was no more than a momentary convulsion. All the burden went upon their women, those grim devotees of duty. Is it any wonder that their children lacked souls? A woman cares for the tiny growing thing within her, but it is a man’s place to fill its wrinkled red head with intellect. Lustrous, when our first child was due, went about without complaint, I recall, until the day the mid-wives took her off to squat in the dark. I, though, like a good father, responsive to the fish kicking in her lumpy womb, lay for weeks with the fetishes before the fire, morose, my spirit straining at its fecundating task, in couvade.
The Dark Between the Stars: Speculative Fiction Page 12
