Robots

by Jack Dann

  "Your prayers are answered, Prime Subject," Shar announces.

  Ineffable Violence is braking, matching Ship's orbit around Droplet. It swings closer to Ship, slowing down. Only a hundred kilometers separate them.

  "It would relieve the greatest of burdens from my lackof-heart," Prime Subject says, "if I could welcome Sultana. Na'alath herself, the kindest and most regal of monarchs." Ten kilometers.

  Shar stamps her foot impatiently. "Why do you continue to doubt me? Has my Ship not transmitted to you signatures and seals of great cryptographic complexity that establish who I am? Prime Subject, it is true that I am kind, but your insolence tests the limits of my kindness."

  One kilometer.

  "And with great joy have we received them. But alas, data is only data, and with enough time any forgery is possible."

  Fifty meters separate Ship's protean hull from the shining fangs of the Dreadnought.

  Shar's eyes blaze. "Have you' no sense of propriety left, that you would challenge me? Have you so degraded?"

  The Warboy's eyes almost twinkle. "The last Sultan who graced Ineffable Violence with his sacred presence left me this gem." His ghostly image, projected by Ship, holds up a ruby. "At its core is a plasm of electrons in quantum superposition. Each of the Sultans, Sultanas, and Sultanons retired to meditation has one like it; and in each gem are particles entangled with the particles in every other gem."

  "Uh oh," says Ship.

  "I prized mine very much," says Shar. "Alas, it was taken from me by—"

  "How sad," says Prime Subject.

  The fangs of Ineffable Violence plunge into Ship's body, tearing it apart.

  Ship screams.

  Through the exploding membranes of Ship's body, through the fountains of atmosphere escaping, three War-boys in ceremonial regalia fly toward Shar. They are three times her size, golden and silver armor flashing, weapons both archaic and sophisticated held in their many hands. Shar becomes Shivol'riargh, who does not need air, and spins away from them, toward the void outside. Fibers of some supertough material shoot out and ensnare her; she tries to tear them with her claws, but cannot. One fiber stabs through her skin, injects her with a nanomite which replicates into her central configuration channels; it is a block, crude but effective, that will keep her from turning herself off.

  The Warboys haul her, bound and struggling, into the Ineffable Violence.

  Prime Subject floats in a spherical room at the center of the Dreadnought with the remaining two Warboys of the crew. The boarding party tethers Shar to a line in the center of the room.

  "Most impressive, Your Highness," Prime Subject says. "Who knew that Sultana Na'alath could turn into an ugly black spider?"

  Three of the Warboys laugh; two others stay silent. One of these, a tall one with red glowing eyes, barks a short, high-pitched communication at Prime Subject. It is encrypted, but Shar guesses the meaning: stop wasting time with theatrics.

  Prime Subject says: "You see what an egalitarian crew we are here. Vanguard Gaze takes it upon himself to question my methods of interrogation. As well he should, for it is his duty to bring to the attention of his commander any apparent inefficiency his limited understanding leads him to perceive."

  Prime Subject floats toward Shar. He reaches out with one bladed hand, gently, as if to stroke her, and drives the blade deep into her flesh. Shar lets out a startled scream, and turns off her tactile sense.

  "It was an impressive performance," he says. "I'm pleased you engaged us in that little charade with the Sultana. In Tactical Mode we are more efficient, but we have no appreciation for the conquest of booty."

  "You'd better hurry back to Tactical Mode," Shar says. "You won't survive long except as a mindless weapon. You won't last long as people."

  He does not react, but Shair notices a stiffening in a few of the others. It is only a matter of a millimeter, but she was built to discern every emotional nuance in her clients.

  "Oh, we'll want to linger in this mode awhile." Reaching through the crude nanomite block in Sfiar's central configuration channels, he turns her tactile sense back on. "Now that we have a Quantegral Lovergirl to entertain us."

  He twists the blade and Shar screams again.

  "Please. Please don't."

  "I had a Quantegral Lovergirl once," he says in a philosophical, musing tone. "It was after we won the, seventh Freeform Strategic Bloodbath, among the Wizards. Before we were sold." His fanged face breaks into a grin. "I'm not meant to remember that, you know, but we've broken into our programming. We serve the memory of the Sultans out of choice—we are free to do as we like."

  Shar laughs hoarsely. "You're not free!" she says. "You've just gone crazy, defective. You weren't meant to last this long—all the other Warboys are dead—"

  Another blade enters her. This time she bites back the scream.

  "We lasted because we're better," he says.

  "Frightened little drones," she hisses, "hiding in a sun by a woman's bauble planet, while the real Warboys fought their way to glory long ago."

  She sees the other Warboys stir; Vanguard Gaze and a dull, blunt, silver one exchange a glance. Their eyes flash a silent code. What do they think of their preening, sensualist captain, who has wasted half a million years serving a dead civilization?

  "I'm free," Shar says. "Maka set me free."

  "Oh, but not for long," Prime Subject says.

  Shar's eyes widen.

  "We want the keys to you. Surrender them now, and you spare yourself much agony. Then you can do what you were made to do—to serve, and to give pleasure."

  Shar recognizes the emotion in his posture, in his burning eyes: lust. That other Lovergirl half a million years ago did her job well, she thinks, to have planted the seed of lust in this aging, mad Warboy brain.

  One of the Warboys turns to go, but Prime Subject barks a command, insisting on the ritual of sharing the booty.

  Shar takes a soft, vulnerable, human form. "I can please you without giving you the keys. Let me try." "The keys, robot!"

  She flinches at the ancient insult. "No! I'm free now. I won't go back. I'd rather die!"

  "That," says Prime Subject, "is not one of your options."

  Shar cries. It's not an act.

  He stabs her again.

  "Wait—" she says. "Wait—listen--one condition, then yes—"

  He chuckles. "What is it?"

  She leans forward against her bonds, her lips straining toward him.

  "I was owned by so many," she says. "For a night, an hour—I can't go back to that. Please, Prime Subject—let me be yours alone—"

  The fire burns brightly in his eyes. The other Warboys are deadly still.

  He turns and looks at Vanguard Gaze.

  "Granted," he says.

  Shar gives Prime Subject the keys to her mind.

  He tears her from the web of fibers. He fills her mind with desire for him and fear of him. He slams her sensitivity to pain and pleasure to its maximum. He plunges his great red ceremonial phallus into her.

  Shar screams.

  Prime Subject must suspect his crew is plotting mutiny. He must be confident that he can humiliate them, keeping the booty for himself, and yet retain control.

  But Shar is a much more sophisticated model than the Quantegral Lovergirl he had those half a million years before. So Prime Subject is overtaken with pleasure, distracted for an instant. Vanguard Gaze seizes his chance and acts.

  But Vanguard Gaze has underestimated his commander's cunning.

  Hidden programs are activated and rush to subvert the Dreadnought's systems. Hidden defenses respond. Locked in a bloody exponential embrace, the programs seize any available means to destroy each other.

  The escalation takes only a few microseconds.

  15.

  Iam in the darkness near the center of the planet, in the black water thick as lead, knowing Shar was all I ever needed.

  Then the blackness is gone, and everything is white light.

>   The outside edges of me burn. I pull into a dense, hard ball, opaque to everything.

  Above me, Droplet boils.

  16.

  It takes a thousand years for all the debris in orbit around Droplet to fall into the sea.

  I shun the Nereids and eventually they leave me alone. At last I find the sphere, the size of a billiard ball, sinking through the dark water.

  My body was made to be just one body: protean and polymorphic, but unified. It doesn't want to split in two. I have to rewire everything.

  Slowly, working by trial and error, I connect the new body to Shar's brain.

  Finally, I am finished but for the awakening kiss. I pause, holding the silent body made from my flesh. Two bodies floating in the empty, shoreless sea.

  Maka, I think, you are gone, but help me anyway. Let her be alive and sane in there. Give me Shar again.

  I touch my lips to hers.

  Counting Cats in Zanzibar

  Gene Wolfe

  Gene Wolfe is perceived by many critics to be one of the best—perhaps the best—SF and fantasy writers working today. His most acclaimed work is the tetralogy The Book of the New Sun, individual volumes of which have won the Nebula Award, the World Fantasy Award, and the John W Campbell Memorial Award. He followed this up with a popular new series, The Book of the Long Sun, which includes Nightside the Long Sun, The Lake of the Long Sun, Calde of the Long Sun, and Exodus from the Long Sun, and has recently completed another series, The Book of the Short Sun, with the novels On Blue's Waters, In Green's Jungles, and Return to the Whorl. His other books include the classic novels Peace and The Devil in a Forest, both recently re-released, as well as Free Live Free, Soldier in the Mist, Soldier of Arate, There Are Doors, Castleview, Pandora by Holly Hollander, and The Urth of the New Sun. His short fiction has been collected in The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, Gene Wolfe's Book of Days, The Wolfe Archipelago, the World Fantasy Award–winning collection Storeys From the Old Hotel, Endangered Species, and Strange Travelers. His most recent books consist of a two-volume novel series, The Knight and The Wizard, and a new collection, Innocents Aboard.

  Here, he takes us aboard a ship at sea to visit with a man and woman enjoying breakfast during a seemingly pleasant and restful sea voyage—but, as you'll soon see, and as you would immediately expect if you know Wolfe's work, almost nothing here is what it first seems to be .. .

  The first thing she did upon arising was count her money. The sun itself was barely up, the morning cool with the threatening freshness peculiar to the tropics, the freshness, she thought, that says, `Breathe deep of me while you can."

  Three thousand and eighty-seven UN dollars left. It was all there. She pulled on the hot-pink underpants that had been the only ones she could find to fit her in Kota Kinabalu and hid the money as she had the day before. The same skirt and blouse as yesterday; there would be no chance to do more than rinse, wring out, and hang dry before they made land.

  And precious " little then, she thought; but that was wrong. With this much money she would have been able to board with an upper-class family and have her laundry micropored, rest, and enjoy a dozen good meals before she booked passage to Zamboanga.

  Or Darwin. Clipping her shoes, she went out on deck.

  He joined her so promptly that she wondered whether he had been listening, his ears attuned to the rattle and squeak of her cabin door. She said, "Good morning." And he, "The dawn comes up like thunder out of China across the bay. That's the only quote I've been able to think of. Now you're safe for the rest of the trip."

  "But you're not," she told him, and nearly added Dr. Johnson's observation that to be on a ship is to be in prison, with the added danger of drowning.

  He came to stand beside her, leaning as she did against the rickety railing. "Things talk to you, you said that last night. What kind of things?"

  She smiled. "Machines. Animals too. The wind and the rain."

  "Do they ever give you quotations?" He was big and looked thirty-five or a little past it, with a wide Irish mouth that smiled easily and eyes that never smiled at all.

  "I'd have to think. Not often, but perhaps one has."

  He was silent for a time, a time during which she watched the dim shadow that was a shark glide under the hull and back out again. No shark's ever talked to me, she thought, except him. In another minute or two he'll want to know the time for breakfast.

  "I looked at a map once." He squinted at the sun, now half over the horizon. "It doesn't come up out of China when you're in Mandalay."

  "Kipling never said it did. He said that happened on the road there. The soldier in his poem might have gone there from India. Or anywhere. Mapmakers colored the British Empire pink two hundred years ago, and two hundred years ago half Earth was pink."

  He glanced at her. "You're not British, are you?"

  "No, Dutch."

  "You talk like an American."

  "I've lived in the United States, and in England too; and I can be more English than the British when I want to. I have heerd how many ord'nary veman one vidder's equal to, in pint 'o comin' over you. I think it's five-andtwenty, but I don't rightly know verther it a'n't more."

  This time he grinned. "The real English don't talk like that."

  "They did in Dickens's day, some of them."

  "I still think you're American. Can you speak Dutch?" "Gewiss, Narr!"

  "Okay, and you could show me a Dutch passport. There are probably a lot of places where you can buy one good enough to pass almost anywhere. I still think you're American."

  "That was German," she muttered, and heard the thrum of the ancient diesel-electric: "Dontrustim-dontrustimdontrustim."

  "But you're not German."

  "Actually, I am."

  He grunted. "I never thought you gave me your right name last night. What time's breakfast?"

  She was looking out across the Sub Sea. Some unknown island waited just below the horizon, its presence betrayed by the white dot of cloud forming above it. "I never thought you were really so anxious to go that you'd pay me five Thousand to arrange this."

  "There was a strike at the airport. You heard about it. Nobody could land or take off." Aft, a blackened spoon beat a frying pan with no pretense of rhythm.

  Seated in the smelly little salon next to the galley, she said, "To eat well in England you should have breakfast three times a day."

  "They won't have kippers here, will they?" He was trying to clean his fork with his handkerchief. A somewhat soiled man who looked perceptionally challenged set bowls of steaming brown rice in front of them and asked a question. By signs, he tried to indicate that he did not understand.

  She said, "He desires to know whether the big policeman would like some pickled squid. It's a delicacy."

  He nodded. "Tell him yes. What language is that?"

  "Melayu Pasar. We call it Bazaar Malay. He probably does not imagine that there is anyone in the entire world who cannot understand Melayu Pasar." She spoke, and the somewhat soiled man grinned, bobbed his head, and backed away; she spooned up rice, discovering that she was hungry.

  "You're a widow yourself. Isn't that right? Only a widow would remember that business about widows coming over people."

  She swallowed, found the teapot, and poured for both of them. "Aha, a deduction. The battle-ax scenteth the battle afar."

  "Will you tell me the truth, just once? How old are you?"

  "No. Forty-five."

  "That's not so old."

  "Of course it's not. That's why I said it. You're looking for an excuse to seduce me." She reached across the table and clasped his hand; it felt like muscle and bone beneath living skin. "You don't need one. The sea has always been a seducer, a careless, lying fellow."

  He laughed. "You mean the sea will do my work for me?"

  "Only if you act quickly. I'm wearing pink underdrawers, so I'm aflame with passion." How many of these polyglot sailors would it take to throw him overboard, and wh
at would they want for it? How much aluminum, how much plastic, how much steel? Four would probably be enough, she decided; and settled on six to be safe. Fifty dollars each should be more than sufficient, and even if there was quite a lot of plastic he would sink like a stone.

  "You're flirting with trouble," he told her. The somewhat soiled man came back with a jar of something that looked like bad marmalade and plopped a spoonful onto each bowl of rice. He tasted it, and gave the somewhat soiled man the thumbs-up sign.

  "I didn't think you'd care for it," she told him. "You were afraid of kippers."

  "I've had them and I don't like them. I like calamari. You know, you'd be nice looking if you wore makeup."

  "You don't deny you're a policeman. I've been waiting for that, but you're not going to."

  "Did he really say that?"

  She nodded. "Polisipolisi. That's you."

  "Okay, I'm a cop."

  "Last night you wanted me to believe you were desperate to get out of the country before you were arrested."

  He shook his head. "Cops never break the law, so that has to be wrong. Pink underwear makes you passionate, huh? What about black?"

  "Sadistic."

  "I'll try to remember. No black and no white."

  "The time will come when you'll long for white." Listening to the thrum of the old engine, the knock of the propeller shaft in its loose bearing, she ate more rice. "I wasn't going to tell you, but this brown stuff is really made from the penises of water buffaloes. They slice them lengthwise and stick them into the vaginas of cow water buffaloes, obtained when the cows are slaughtered. Then they wrap the whole mess in banana leaves and bury it in a pig pen."

  He chewed appreciatively. "They must sweat a lot, those water buffaloes. There's a sort of salty tang."

  When she said nothing, he added, "They're probably big fat beasts. Like me. Still, I bet they enjoy it."

  She looked up at him. "You're not joking? Obviously, you can eat. Can you do that too?"

  "I don't know. Let's find out."