The Iron Maiden

by Piers Anthony

  “What you call reason, I’d call piracy,” Phist said.

  It continued in this vein, with Gerald Phist alertly countering each Big Iron claim. Then there came a garbage unit, trundling along unattended. It was a household robot that had somehow been activated at the wrong time.

  The disposer rolled slowly around the table, outside the ring of chairs, working its way toward Hope. Spirit saw Shelia wheeling to intercept it, simultaneously murmuring into her mike. She was summoning the kitchen staff to come and recover their errant equipment, but meanwhile she would deactivate it herself.

  Then several things happened in rapid order. The disposer suddenly clanked and lurched at Hope, its incinerative laser coming into play. “It’s remote-controlled!” an exec cried. “Assassination!” another exclaimed.

  Coral leapt toward it, her arm moving. “No!” Shelia screamed, jamming her chair right at Hope. But Coral’s grenade was already in the air, bound accurately for the disposer. But the disposer, it turned out, was a holo projection. The grenade, which was quite real, was coming at Hope. Still seated in his chair, he could not get away from it in time.

  Spirit screamed, but could do nothing. She wasn’t physically there. But Shelia was.

  Shelia’s chair crossed before Hope, crashing into the table. Her right hand reached up and plucked the grenade from the air. She hauled it down to her bosom and hunched over it.

  The grenade detonated. Pieces of Shelia and her chair flew outward. Blood spattered floor, table, chairs, ceiling, and Hope. He was half stunned by the concussion, and half blinded by blood, but he was alive. Shelia ...

  Coral was standing there, totally appalled. It had been a fiendishly clever trap that Coral and the others had fallen for. Big Iron had arranged for the Tyrant to be killed by his own bodyguard. Only Shelia had caught on—and taken the grenade for herself. She had foiled the plot.

  The assassination had failed, and that of course meant the destruction of Big Iron. The process would take some time, but that industry was effectively dead from that moment. Spirit’s immediate concern was Shelia—and Hope. Hope was delirious, and Ebony was caring for him, the only one free and close who could be absolutely trusted. She was putting him through a shower and changing his blood-spattered clothing. She was directing the medics as they treated him. That left Spirit free to focus on Coral.

  Coral was in her chamber, laying out a clean mat. She was setting up for seppuku, the Saturnian ritual suicide of the warrior class.

  “Don’t do it!” Spirit pleaded. “We need you!”

  But she was adamant. “Had I fathomed the plot, I would not have hurled that grenade,” she said. “I failed Hope—and killed my friend.”

  Spirit could not dissuade her. Only Hope could do that— if he would. She hurried to fetch him.

  He was clean and dressed now, walking dazedly with Ebony as she led him by the hand. There was a look in his eye that Spirit recognized: it was the madness. But it was not yet complete. “Hope, it isn’t done yet,” Spirit said. “We must cut our losses.”

  “Losses?”

  “Coral.” She led him to Coral, then backed off with Ebony. It was now Hope’s business.

  He caught on immediately, for he knew her well. “This is not warranted,” he said. “We were all deceived.”

  “It is not your business to foil plots. It is mine.” She gazed at the short sword she had laid out before her. She was kneeling, bare-breasted, on a tarpaulin; she intended to have no blood soil the floor of her room.

  “It is your business to safeguard my life. You have not failed.”

  She turned to him. “Sir, I love you, as she did.

  Please do me the great honor of acting as my second in this.”

  That would mean taking the large sword she had, waiting while she used the short sword to disembowel herself, then severing her neck with one swing. This was the honorable and less agonizing way to go, once the guts had been spilled.

  “But your job is unfinished,” he said. “If you do this now, you leave me undefended.”

  “There are other bodyguards.”

  “You are the one I require.”

  “Sir, I ask you to release me.”

  “I refuse.”

  Again she turned to him. “Sir, do you not see the pain I am in? I failed in my duty and I killed my friend.”

  He knelt before her, straddling her sword. “Woman, do you not see the pain I am in?” He gazed into her eyes and let his feeling show. Spirit knew it was the north-northwest wind.

  And such was his extraordinary power over Coral that she yielded, even in this extreme of honor. “I apologize for my selfishness. What would you have me do?”

  “I would have you join me in vengeance.”

  She nodded. “We shall wash their bodies.”

  “We shall wash their bodies,” he repeated.

  Then he opened his arms to her. She leaned into him, and they hugged each other, sharing their agonies.

  And, indeed, the bodies of all the top executives of Big Iron were washed in blood. It was the most brutal vengeance Spirit had seen since the days of the pirates. She was normally the tougher one, but the madness was something else.

  Yet it wasn’t enough. Spirit, Coral, and Ebony mourned Shelia, and so did many others, but Hope’s grief was madness. Only when Spirit read Hope’s own account of it, years later, did she appreciate the full extent of it, but the essence was immediately clear. He was mourning Shelia as he once had mourned Helse. In his mind he went to heaven and brought her spirit back, and it occupied the bodies of other women in wheelchairs. He sought them and brought them to the White Bubble and made love to them and released them. They were glad to cooperate; madness it might be, but few woman could deny him ordinarily, and none when he was like this.

  He also had a memorial erected in her name, and allocated one billion dollars for the treatment of all who were crippled in the legs. The Shelia Foundation was instituted, dedicated to the study of nerve and limb regeneration, that the crippled of the future might walk again. That was perhaps the single enduring good to come of Shelia’s brutal death.

  Hope’s alternate guise as Jose Garcia continued, and Jose was not mad. He also had the solace of Amber, and that must have helped, though by this time Amber was twenty three and the bloom of her devotion had been well tempered by experience. She had loved Shelia too, but knew that the vengeance taken was out of proportion. She still loved Hope— that never ended for any of his women—but understood that he did have human fallibilities. In short, she could probably live without him, if she had to. Orbits could be distant as well as close.

  Meanwhile the Tyrant’s evident madness was eroding the heart of the Tyrancy. Jupiter was prospering, but the citizens were increasingly restive. As the behavior of the Tyrant became more bizarre, the Resistance gained strength. It was not that Jupiter chafed under the policies of the Tyrancy; it was that Jupiter feared that too many of the successful policies would be eroded or dismantled. The Tyrant was becoming a loose cannon: a thing without proper anchorage whose random blunderings were a threat to all around him. Yes, he was grief-stricken over the ugly death of his beloved secretary, but where would his pain end? Was there an alternative?

  The Resistance had an answer. It sponsored a general strike. It had been years since anything like this had been tried before, and it took some courage, because the Tyrant had acted swiftly and effectively in the past to squelch such efforts. But this one was extremely broadly based; in fact, nearly half of all the employed citizens of North Jupiter participated in it, and a quarter of those in the Latin provinces. Jose Garcia sympathized; he led Jupiter Bubble on strike, granting all workers a holiday for the duration.

  This was real mischief for Spirit. She hurt for Shelia’s loss in more than one way: no one else had such effective knowledge of the details of governmental management. Things were going wrong in little ways that were all too apt to become big ways. The Resistance strike was a major example: Shelia would have pi
cked up on the signals before it happened, and notified Spirit, and together they would ordinarily have defused it before it broke open. As it was, this was a significant surprise. The Resistance had developed so quietly and peacefully that few people realized the proportions to which it had grown. Probably not all the strikers were members, but this demonstration was enough to paralyze the vital planetary services and too widespread to be amenable to wholesale discipline. It was peaceful but impressive.

  Something had to be done, and because this demonstration was obviously well meant, Spirit concluded that it should be met with appropriate restraint. Violent methods, in this case, would alienate a far greater segment of the population than the Tyrancy could afford. What would be both gentle yet effective?

  Coral came up with what seemed to be a viable program: Hope would challenge the leader of the Resistance to a contest of some kind, winner take all. Little was known about the leader, except that it was female and savvy, garnering the support of so many women. If he won, the Resistance would be dismantled; if she won, he would retire from the Tyrancy. Spirit herself was against this, but did not object strenuously. She was wary of his madness and thought in her secret heart that it would be better if he did step down.

  So the Tyrant made the challenge, and amazingly the leader accepted: Yes, she would meet him in a contest. The terms were acceptable. To the winner would go the management of Jupiter, and to the loser, exile. No blood shed, in either case.

  It was necessary to have an intermediary, to arrange the details of the contest. The Resistance leader designated Jose Garcia.

  Spirit was elated. “They have played into our hands!” she exclaimed. “They don’t know who you are!”

  Hope didn’t seem so sure, but he agreed it made sense. Jose was well known and trusted, and this would be a direct avenue to discovery of the anonymous Resistance leader. If it turned out to be Reba Ward of QYV he might well have to kill her, for she would surely recognize him. But if she were someone else, they might indeed be able to negotiate a fair contest. So Jose traveled to Ston, named after a centuries-bygone center of resistance and dance called Charleston, to board a Resistance ship.

  And it turned out that the Resistance leader was Megan. She had recognized the madness and recognized Hope long before, and now was acting to take him out of power. She was the one person he could not oppose; the moment she revealed herself to him, Hope was lost. There was no contest; Jose simply returned, went to the White Bubble, was officially closeted privately with the Tyrant for an hour, and emerged to announce that the Tyrant was retiring forthwith. Then he entered a private ship and disappeared from public view.

  An hour later Hope Hubris emerged and announced that he was abdicating in favor of his wife, Megan Hubris. He and his sister Spirit would depart Jupiter in exile as soon as an orderly transfer of power could be accomplished.

  In the course of the following week, Jose Garcia announced his own retirement, feeling that after negotiating the conclusion of the Tyrancy he had no further need for public life, and he faded from view. Many were disappointed, for he had been an obvious candidate for high office in the new regime. Even Thorley remarked on the regrettable loss of such a fair minded man. He concluded “I must confess to suffering a certain guilty pang of regret for the loss of the Tyrant, also, for he was a marvelously newsworthy figure, and his sister remains a handsome woman.” Few understood how sincerely he meant that, or knew what Spirit was feeling as she faced the prospect of being forever separated from her secret lover. She could not show her tears.

  Others had to find other placements. Amber returned to New Wash, alone, where she worked as a translator of recorded transmissions, using the helmet to communicate her renditions. She never commented publicly on her private relationship with the Tyrant or Jose Garcia. She shared a residence with her virtual sister and friend Hopie, who was allowed to retain her post as head of the Department of Education. That was a bit of nepotism the public endorsed, for Hopie had done a decent if sometimes controversial job, and she was legally the daughter of both the former Tyrant and the new administrator, Megan. She represented a tangible bridge between administrations. Their eleven year old virtual brother Robertico joined them there.

  Coral, unable to join Hope in exile, accepted a position as a physical therapist with the Shelia Foundation. Ebony joined her there. It was generally known how close they both had been to the living Shelia; they were in this manner remaining as close to her as was possible.

  And so Shelia had been not only the central coordinator of the Tyrancy, and perhaps the inadvertent instrument of its demise; she was now the enduring symbol of some of the good the Tyrancy had accomplished. The mascot of the Shelia Foundation was an empty wheelchair, in its way also a symbol of the vacated Tyrancy. Hope in his madness had a vision of Shelia in a heaven populated by folk in wheelchairs; Spirit found that vision comforting, for if heaven existed, Shelia surely belonged there. She was always a good person, and all her associates loved her.

  CHAPTER 16

  SATURN

  Megan headed a brief caretaker government, setting up a framework for restored elections and public representation. She had no interest in power for herself and stepped down the moment the elections produced a new president and Congress. She was called a great woman. She was. Hope loved her, and so did Spirit.

  Actually, the Tyrancy had accomplished much of what it could. It had not only balanced the budget, it had paid down the planetary debt. It had instituted adequate medical care for all citizens. It had abolished the drug problem. Crime, both street and corporate, had dropped to record lows. And it had made the press, in all its forms, free; there was no censorship at all. Jupiter had become a beacon of good government, and many of its programs had been emulated elsewhere in the System. So perhaps it was time for the Tyrancy to end. Certainly Spirit was ready for less administration and more adventure in her life, and she liked the prospect of interacting closely with her brother again.

  It turned out that a number of planets were interested in providing sanctuary for the exiled former Tyrant of Jupiter. He accepted the most challenging offer. Thus it was that Hope and Spirit Hubris traveled to Saturn to commence what turned out to be perhaps the most remarkable stage of their careers.

  Hope was sixty-one and Spirit was fifty-eight, but they might as well have been children again. They faced the presentation screen and gawked at the magnificence of Planet Saturn. The rings were spectacular. Of course the image was enhanced by false color, making it more dramatic, but still it was a wonder. All the colors of the spectrum seemed to be there in the great splay of the rings, and in the roughly spherical body of the planet itself. “Beautiful!” he breathed. “Jupiter’s rings hardly compare!”

  Spirit murmured agreement. “But nevertheless a sterner environment than we knew on Jupiter,” she reminded him. “Their residential band has about eight and a half bars pressure, and their winds are up to quadruple Jupiter’s-almost five hundred meters a second.”

  “A thousand miles an hour,” he agreed. Of course such velocities were not directly experienced, because the city-bubbles floated in the wind currents. Survival would be impossible if relative wind velocity of that strength were felt; storms whose winds were only a tenth as strong had been called hurricanes back on ancient Earth, and had wreaked enormous damage.

  Hope had just one personal acquaintance at Saturn—but that one was Chairman Khukov, the highest political figure there. He had achieved his dominance at about the time Hope became the Tyrant of Jupiter, and they had worked tacitly together to buttress each other’s power and defuse interplanetary tension. Spirit did not really know Khukov, apart from two meetings, but she trusted her brother’s judgment.

  “Ship under attack,” the intercom said. “Secure—”

  The voice was cut off by the impact of a strike. The ship shook, and the power blinked. They were not under acceleration at the moment; the normal course was to achieve cruising velocity, then coast to the dest
ination, conserving fuel. The vessel was spinning to provide half gee in that interim.

  “Better take evasive action,” Spirit muttered. Their careers in space were three decades past, but the reflexes had not been lost.

  The ship did not. It drifted along on its original course, not cutting in the drive.

  They got out of their harnesses, acting as one. Obviously the ship’s captain was a noncombatant, uncertain what to do in battle. That would get them killed promptly enough. He didn’t realize that the first thing to do was to put the ship under acceleration, regardless of its course.

  They burst into the control chamber. “Get it moving!”

  Hope barked in Russian.

  “But the damage report is not yet in,” the pilot protested. He was young, obviously inexperienced: the kind normally used on what was called a milk run, a routine mission. “The captain has not—”

  Hope reached down and took the man’s laser pistol from his body. He gave it to Spirit. “Get out of that seat,” he said. There wasn’t time to educate the man in battle procedure.