Ash Ock

by Christopher Hinz

  The Lion scowled. “You bugged his bedroom?”

  “Hell, yes.” The midget fished a tiny transceiver out of his pocket. “Audio and video. Which highlights another one of his shortcomings: He didn’t even think to check his room for surveillance devices.”

  Nick shook his head. “Day by day, he’s getting worse. Gillian’s abilities are disintegrating. And I still believe that it’s because he’s engaged in an inner war with his monarch. Empedocles is forcing Gillian to use more and more of his energies to fight off the whelm—the forced interlace. It’s simple: Empedocles is trying to take control and Gillian is struggling to prevent it. And that inner struggle is transforming a lightning-fast assassin into an unstable neurotic.”

  “Have you talked to Gillian about this?”

  “I tried, I really did. But he doesn’t trust me these days.” The midget hesitated. “To be honest, I can’t blame him for not confiding in me anymore.

  “But the reality remains that Gillian is like that child’s top after it’s slowed down. It’s unbalanced, ready to fall over at the slightest breeze. Right now, whether he realizes it or not, he’s easy prey. He needs a shock to his system. He needs to be jolted back into his old warrior patterns.”

  “So we throw him into the water and see if he swims,” muttered the Lion.

  Nick grinned. “That’s a real nice twentieth-century analogy. You must be reading up on your history texts.”

  “This isn’t funny, Nick. You could get him killed. If this Venus Cluster vice president is, as you and Adam suspect, directly involved with the Birch killings—”

  “Then maybe Gillian will find that out. Right now, this is the only real lead we have in the Birch massacres.”

  The Lion stared grimly. “But what if this Cochise is actually a tway, one of the Birch killers? What if he identifies Gillian?”

  Nick’s wide lips failed to hide a smile. “If this Mr. Cochise does turn out to be a yuppie from hell, then we’re certainly going to shake things up a bit, now, aren’t we.”

  The Lion tried to make some sense out of the midget’s true intentions. Plans within plans. Rome Franco was right about you. You’re a ruthless manipulator.

  “We gotta pop a few lids, Jerem. If the Ash Ock are behind all this, then the Colonies are in a lot more trouble than they imagine. It’s time to send in the offensive team.”

  The Lion’s anger focused. “And maybe get Gillian—and Martha and Buff—killed in the bargain.”

  Nick rubbed his hands together and stared grimly at the Lion. “I’ve risked Gillian’s life before and I’ll risk it again. That’s what I do. And if you, Jerem Marth, can look past Gillian for a moment and see him as something other than some lost surrogate daddy—”

  “You bastard!” The Lion felt a fury rise up inside him the likes of which he had not experienced in many years. “Don’t tell me about my obsession! I’ve dealt with those feelings.”

  “Maybe.”

  He aimed a quivering finger at the midget. “We’re talking about your obsession, now: your blind hatred of the Paratwa!”

  Nick was quiet for a moment. Then he shrugged. “You’re right, I do hate them. I hate them for what they did to my world. I despise the Paratwa.”

  “And you’ll send Gillian to his death to destroy them.”

  “If necessary.” The midget sighed. “If you feel so strongly about this, then why don’t you go and tell Gillian how things really are. Go ahead. Warn him that this Venus Cluster exec could very well be a killer tway.” A fierce grin settled on Nick’s face. “But if you do that, then you just remember that whatever happens is on your head, not mine.”

  The Lion drew a deep breath, tried to force his anger into perspective, tried to act like a councilor of Irrya rather than a Costeau.

  Nick read his hesitation. “Look, I know how you feel. But no matter how insensitive and ruthless I sound, I’m still looking out for Gillian’s welfare. And I’m telling you, he’s in bad shape. This is not the Ash Ock tway that I went into stasis with. Physiologically and psychologically, Gillian’s coming apart at the seams.” Nick sighed. “I’m not trying to hurt him, Jerem. I’m just trying to put him into a situation where his natural reactions might enable him to overcome this inner struggle. I’m giving him a chance to wake up.”

  The Lion stared out into the woods, watched the hesitant Irryan dawn creep across the top of the pines. “And what about Empedocles? What if he wakes up instead?”

  Nick had no reply.

  O}o{O

  Ghandi, weightless, eased along the main corridor, his friction boots crackling softly on the grated deck. He passed the closed bedroom door assuming that, by this hour, Colette certainly would have yielded to a dormant condition.

  At one time, he had referred to her rest periods as sleep, but over the years, that word had developed the quality of a misnomer, failing to encompass the weirdly alert state that she entered when her body needed recharging. Only in surface details did Colette imitate the human sleep process: she lay on her back with eyelids closed. But a gentle nudge at four in the morning would provoke an instant response. Eyes would open, full awareness would shine through; no drowsiness, no emerging through layers of expanding consciousness, no time wasted on intermediary steps. A part of her never slept.

  He used to wonder if she dreamed. In his younger days, he had often quizzed her on such mundane matters, wanting to know what it was like being a Paratwa, being an Ash Ock tway. She would respond to his eager questions, his intellectual lusts, and often she would speak at length about what it felt like being one half of Sappho. But her descriptions always produced in him a kind of frustration.

  Eventually, he had come to understand that her long talks rarely contained much substance. Numerous speculative texts were available on the Paratwa phenomenon—Ghandi had read a great many of them—and for the most part, Colette’s self-descriptive disclosures seemed mere variations of those texts, bubbling with data but revealing no clear gestalt of her Paratwa personality. On those rare occasions when she did seem to be divulging some facet of her true self, her words remained cloaked in thick metaphor, deliberately obscure.

  And if he prodded her too much, seeking to clarify those metaphors, she would become angry. “Penetrating orifices where you’re not welcome is a form of rape,” she had once responded, and the force of that particular phrase had stuck with him. Eventually, Ghandi had been forced to grudgingly accept her imposed boundaries of their relationship. Whether she dreamed or not, he would never know.

  At the end of the hallway, the thick air-seal leading to their combination study/dinette was open. Ghandi froze. Someone was speaking; dull whispers drifted from the room, echoing along the hard-surfaced walls of the corridor. It did not sound like Colette.

  Cautiously, he eased closer, a step at a time, trying to prevent the heels of his friction boots from making even the slightest noise as they contacted the floor’s perforated grates. At this hour, there should have been no one else in this section of the ship; the captain, crew members, and servants always remained on the upper decks, unless summoned. And Calvin had been sent back to Irrya; yesterday, Colette had ordered the maniac to return ahead of them on another of CPG’s private shuttles.

  The intensity of the whispers increased as Ghandi drew nearer. The voice was female, but it still did not sound like his wife, and some inner sense assured him that those particular tonal qualities were not of electronic origin. Servants, poking around where they were not permitted?

  Ten feet from the door, the hushed whispers began to melt into word-shapes.

  “ . . . adjust parameter see-one-ten . . . block sequence five-oh-five . . . climb one-eleven . . . mute line ratios . . . overall rejection on forty-four . . . see-two pressure . . .”

  He took a deep breath and stepped into the study. She was seated in front of the terminal, her back to the door, her attention riveted to the screen. It was Colette, or at least it was her physical body. If she had sensed his entrance, she
was not revealing it.

  “ . . . break seven-one-four-ee-B . . . climb one-six . . . lace four-core upside . . . negate see-two . . .”

  On the screen, Ghandi watched her verbal commands translate into swirling patterns. Pale streaks of orange light exploded into flaming red blisters and tiny graphic characters—Xs and Ys and Zs mostly—emitted comet tails as they haphazardly blazed across the volcanic display. Ghandi had seen Colette working with this particular program numerous times over the years. It was the sunsetter.

  “Sit down, Ghandi,” the woman ordered, pointing to a chair six feet away. Her attention never left the screen.

  “ . . . splice oh-eight-nine . . . reject see-two negation . . . oversplice six . . . oversplice eight-one-oh . . .”

  He tightened his robe and nervously pulled himself down into the chair, thankful for the lack of gravity, thankful that they were still in transit, hours away from CPG’s Irryan docking station. In the past twenty-five years, he had seen her on numerous occasions, but she had never, ever spoken to him. In some unfathomable way, he was glad that her first words had been uttered out here, in the blackness of space, far away from what was comfortable and familiar. If there had been gravity, he believed that he would have fallen over.

  “ . . . oversight z-three . . . condense all local fields . . . condense field one-six-six . . .”

  He waited, observing the hot screen over her shoulder, watching the mad dance of angry symbols across bubbling lava, and desperately hoping that she would not turn around, not even for an instant.

  “Reintegrate . . .” she abruptly ordered, and the monitor dissolved into darkness. Ghandi felt a muscle quivering behind his left knee. He locked his arms around the chair’s sway-bar, feeling like some kind of cylinder-bound colonist experiencing zero gravity for the first time.

  “Why are you up at this hour?” she quizzed. Her eyes remained affixed to the terminal.

  “Couldn’t sleep,” he answered quickly, hoping that she would order him to leave. “Thought a walk might help, so I went topside, looking for company, but everyone’s asleep but the pilot. I guess what I was really looking for was some gravity, so I could feel—”

  “Don’t prattle,” she instructed.

  Ghandi snapped his jaw shut.

  For a moment, she was silent. Then: “On occasion, I’ve heard you sing—when you’re alone with Colette. Costeau songs. From a long time ago, from when you were a child. Those songs . . . they bring you pleasure?”

  He wagged his head, confused by the odd question, then abruptly realized that she could not see his motion. “Yes, they bring me pleasure.” The back of his other knee began to pulsate, and he twined both ankles around the chair legs, trying to bring the spasms under control.

  “Would you sing for me?”

  “I can’t do that,” he mumbled, instantly concerned that this quick refusal might have offended her. “I can only sing if the mood is right,” he explained.

  She turned around. “What is it about me that frightens you?”

  He swallowed and riveted his attention to the three wands of a baking module projecting from the wall on the far side of the chamber.

  “Can you at least say my name?”

  He nodded, but said nothing.

  “Helpless halts my tongue,” she whispered, as if quoting from some obscure text.

  Ghandi drew a deep breath, restraining an urge to bolt from the room. “You’re Sappho.”

  “I am Sappho.”

  He forced himself to look upon her face, seeing the familiar lines and crevices, the minute alterations that Colette had performed upon herself in order to mimic the human aging process, make it appear that she too was growing old at the same rate as her contemporaries. He recognized the pale dimpled cheeks, the wave of golden curls, the immodest lips that could prance across his flesh with abandon. The creature that sat before him looked almost exactly like Colette.

  It was the eyes that betrayed her.

  Cold and distant. Not lifeless—something existed behind those aquamarine irises, some semblance of a consciousness shone through—but alien, like it had arisen from some other species, from some other space and time. A distant memory erupted: visiting a colonial preserve, seeing a magnificent striped tiger, poised on a rise, fifteen feet away, studying the limits of its terrain, filtering the world through perspectives that no human could ever totally understand.

  Ghandi remembered being scared of that tiger, even while being surrounded by older boys of his clan, even while knowing that no harm could befall them, that the preserve’s controllers were watching, ready to knock the animal unconscious via narcoleptic implants should it become violent.

  A chill raced up his spine. Here and now, he sat before a wild creature that had no controller. In many ways, Colette, too, displayed characteristics of the alien, yet his wife still maintained multiple references to the environment of the recognizably human. Sappho projected no such illusions. Her eyes exceeded human comprehension.

  “You have many questions,” she stated.

  “Your voice . . . it’s different from Colette’s.”

  “An alteration of timbre and pitch occurs naturally when my tways are interlaced. Tonal harmonics are introduced.” She paused. “The result is a distortion of what is proper?”

  “It doesn’t bother me,” Ghandi mumbled, feeling like she was trying to trap him into saying something he would regret.

  She smiled. “Next question?”

  “What were you doing . . . with the sunsetter?”

  “A special update. New instructions. After all these years, our data destroyer has finally made contact with an enemy. And this enemy has—inadvertently, I suspect—led our program to its real prey.” She hesitated. “Did Colette tell you about the IRS program that’s been trying to attack the sunsetter?”

  Ghandi nodded and tried to hide his surprise. Don’t you know everything that Colette knows? Wouldn’t you automatically be aware of anything she told me?

  Sappho smiled, as if she was reading his thoughts, as if she knew that she had just revealed some heretofore unknown aspect of her Ash Ock self.

  She doesn’t know everything that Colette knows.

  “As you’re aware, Ghandi, this IRS program showed up in the archives recently. Ostensibly, it’s been attempting to penetrate the boundaries of the sunsetter and halt the destruction of the data banks.”

  “Can it?” he wondered aloud.

  “No. It’s potent, but it’s no match for Theophrastus’s program.”

  Ghandi raised his eyebrows. So Theophrastus, the Ash Ock scientific genius, had created the sunsetter. Colette had never revealed that.

  “However,” she went on, “this attacking program does present some curious facets. First of all, it announces its name, IRS 1991. In the year 1991, there existed a real organization on the American continent, a real IRS, that enforced taxation laws. This program gleams with historical tidbits from that era.”

  “It’s that old?”

  “No. Its operational parameters suggest a twenty-first century lineage. But its creator has a working knowledge of twentieth century America; he could even have been alive back then. Furthermore, he’s sophisticated enough to realize that his IRS program has no chance of stopping the sunsetter.”

  Ghandi frowned. “Then why bother?”

  “First of all, the creator of IRS 1991 wants to let me know that he’s still around. You see, I recognize the handprint of this program. And after more than a quarter of a millennium, I believe I know for certain just who he is.”

  Sappho paused, as if debating whether to reveal this latest insight. Ghandi did not really care. He had an overriding question of his own. Why, Sappho, after more than a quarter of a century, have you decided to talk to me?

  “During the final days,” she went on, “E-Tech provided the greatest organized hindrance to the plans of the Ash Ock. And within E-Tech, there was a programmer who consistently thwarted our efforts. We never knew who he was. In
fact, until much later, we were never even certain whether he was an individual entity or a consortium of sophisticated programmers. Nevertheless, the Ash Ock gave him a name: the Czar.

  “Fifty-six years ago, Codrus warned us about a little man, a midget, who, the Colonies later learned, was the companion of Gillian. Codrus, in what we now must acknowledge as one of his rare moments of insight, suspected that this man Nick and the Czar could be one and the same.

  “We now believe that Codrus was correct. Nick is the Czar. And he has again been brought from stasis. IRS 1991 is his calling card.”

  Ghandi betrayed surprise. “Then Gillian is also awake?”

  For just an instant, Sappho broke eye contact, her gaze flashing to some point behind Ghandi. When she spoke, her words seemed more intense.

  “I believe that the traitor is awake.”

  Ghandi entertained a fleeting fantasy of Gillian the warrior coming after Calvin, destroying the maniac.

  “The Czar,” Sappho continued, “must have deduced that there is a connection between the sunsetter and the Ash Ock. And he wants Theophrastus and me to know that he is on to us. I am not completely clear on the Czar’s reasoning here; perhaps he hopes that his emergence from obscurity will provoke some response on our part.”

  “Something he could use to track you down.”

  “Perhaps. Naturally, we’ll take no action that could serve this purpose. But the real news is that the Czar’s program—IRS 1991—has somehow served to bring the sunsetter’s true target out into the open.”

  “Freebird?” wondered Ghandi.

  “Yes, Freebird. After twenty-two years, we’ve finally found our prey.”

  “Are you certain that this is the same program you’re after?”

  “All probabilities indicate that this is the one. Our sunsetter has ascertained that no other versions of that particular rescue program still survive within the E-Tech archives.”

  Ghandi found himself again wondering just what was so important about this Freebird program. Throughout the years, Colette had refused to divulge an answer to that question.