I let them shuffle me down the hall and through a gigantic doorway and into an immense office with a ceiling high enough to give an Entity all the room it would want. I didn’t say a word. There weren’t any Entities in the office, just a woman in a black robe, sitting behind a wide desk at the far end. It looked like a toy desk in that colossal room. She looked like a toy woman. The cops left me alone with her. Trussed up like that, I wasn’t any risk.
“Are you John Doe?” she asked.
I was halfway across the room, studying my shoes. “What do you think?” I said.
“That’s the name you gave upon entry to the city.”
“I give lots of names. John Smith, Richard Roe, Joe Blow. It doesn’t matter much to the gate software what name I give.”
“Because you’ve gimmicked the gate?” She paused. “I should tell you, this is a court of inquiry.”
“You already know everything I could tell you. Your borgmann hacker’s been swimming around in my brain.”
“Please,” she said. “This’ll be easier if you cooperate. The accusation is illegal entry, illegal seizure of a vehicle and illegal interfacing activity, specifically, selling pardons. Do you have a statement?”
“No.”
“You deny that you’re a pardoner?”
“I don’t deny, I don’t affirm. What’s the goddamned use?”
“Look up at me,” she said.
“That’s a lot of effort.”
“Look up,” she said. There was an odd edge on her voice. “Whether you’re a pardoner or not isn’t the issue. We know you’re a pardoner. I know you’re a pardoner.” And she called me by a name I hadn’t used in a very long time. Not since ’36, as a matter of fact.
I looked at her. Stared. Had trouble believing I was seeing what I saw. Felt a rush of memories come flooding up. Did some mental editing work on her face, taking out some lines here, subtracting a little flesh in a few places, adding some in others. Stripping away the years.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m who you think I am.”
I gaped. This was worse than what the hacker had done to me. But there was no way to run from it.
“You work for them?” I asked.
“The pardon you sold me wasn’t any good. You knew that, didn’t you? I had someone waiting for me in San Diego, but when I tried to get through the wall they stopped me just like that and dragged me away screaming. I could have killed you. I would have gone to San Diego and then we would have tried to make it to Hawaii in his boat.”
“I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego,” I said.
“Why should you? It wasn’t your business. You took my money, you were supposed to get me my pardon. That was the deal.”
Her eyes were gray with golden sparkles in them. I had trouble looking into them.
“You still want to kill me?” I asked. “Are you planning to kill me now?”
“No and no.” She used my old name again. “I can’t tell you how astounded I was when they brought you in here. A pardoner, they said. John Doe. Pardoners, that’s my department. They bring all of them to me. I used to wonder years ago if they’d ever bring you in, but after a while I figured, No, not a chance; he’s probably a million miles away, he’ll never come back this way again. And then they brought in this John Doe, and I saw your face.”
“Do you think you could manage to believe,” I said, “that I’ve felt guilty for what I did to you ever since? You don’t have to believe it. But it’s the truth.”
“I’m sure it’s been unending agony for you.”
“I mean it. Please. I’ve stiffed a lot of people, yes, and sometimes I’ve regretted it and sometimes I haven’t, but you were one that I regretted. You’re the one I’ve regretted most. This is the absolute truth.”
She considered that. I couldn’t tell whether she believed it even for a fraction of a second, but I could see that she was considering it.
“Why did you do it?” she asked after a bit.
“I stiff people because I don’t want to seem too perfect,” I told her. “You deliver a pardon every single time, word gets around, people start talking, you start to become legendary. And then you’re known everywhere and sooner or later the Entities get hold of you, and that’s that. So I always make sure to write a lot of stiffs. I tell people I’ll do my best, but there aren’t any guarantees, and sometimes it doesn’t work.”
“You deliberately cheated me.”
“Yes.”
“I thought you did. You seemed so cool, so professional. So perfect. I was sure the pardon would be valid. I couldn’t see how it would miss. And then I got to the wall and they grabbed me. So I thought, that bastard sold me out. He was too good just to have flubbed it up.” Her tone was calm, but the anger was still in her eyes. “Couldn’t you have stiffed the next one? Why did it have to be me?”
I looked at her for a long time.
“Because I loved you,” I said.
“Shit,” she said. “You didn’t even know me. I was just some stranger who had hired you.”
“That’s just it. There I was full of all kinds of crazy instant lunatic fantasies about you, all of a sudden ready to turn my nice, orderly life upside down for you, and all you could see was somebody you had hired to do a job. I didn’t know about the guy in San Diego. All I knew was I saw you and I wanted you. You don’t think that’s love? Well, call it something else, then, whatever you want. I never let myself feel it before. It isn’t smart, I thought; it ties you down, the risks are too big. And then I saw you and I talked to you a little and I thought something could be happening between us and things started to change inside me, and I thought, Yeah, yeah, go with it this time, let it happen, this may make everything different. And you stood there not seeing it, not even beginning to notice, just jabbering on and on about how important the pardon was for you. So I stiffed you. And afterwards I thought, Jesus, I ruined that girl’s life and it was just because I got myself into a snit, and that was a fucking petty thing to have done. So I’ve been sorry ever since. You don’t have to believe that. I didn’t know about San Diego. That makes it even worse for me.” She didn’t say anything all this time, and the silence felt enormous. So after a moment I said, “Tell me one thing, at least. That guy who wrecked me in Pershing Square: Who was he?”
“He wasn’t anybody,” she said.
“What does that mean?”
“He isn’t a who. He’s a what. It’s an android, a mobile antipardoner unit, plugged right into the big Entity mainframe in Culver City. Something new that we have going around town.”
“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”
“The report is that you gave it one hell of a workout.”
“It gave me one too. Turned my brain half to mush.”
“You were trying to drink the sea through a straw. For a while it looked like you were really going to do it, too. You’re one goddamned hacker, you know that?”
“Why did you go to work for them?” I said.
She shrugged. “Everybody works for them. Except people like you. You took everything I had and didn’t give me my pardon. So what was I supposed to do?”
“I see.”
“It’s not such a bad job. At least I’m not out there on the wall. Or being sent off for T.T.D.”
“No,” I said. “It’s probably not so bad. If you don’t mind working in a room with such a high ceiling. Is that what’s going to happen to me? Sent off for T.T.D.?”
“Don’t be stupid. You’re too valuable.”
“To whom?”
“The system always needs upgrading. You know it better than anyone alive. You’ll work for us.”
“You think I’m going to turn borgmann?” I said, amazed.
“It beats T.T.D.,” she said.
I fell silent again. I was thinking that she couldn’t possibly be serious, that they’d be fools to trust me in any kind of responsible position. And even bigger fools to let me near their computer.
“All right,” I said. ??
?I’ll do it. On one condition.”
“You really have balls, don’t you?”
“Let me have a rematch with that android of yours. I need to check something out. And afterward we can discuss what kind of work I’d be best suited for here. OK?”
“You know you aren’t in any position to lay down conditions.”
“Sure I am. What I do with computers is a unique art. You can’t make me do it against my will. You can’t make me do anything against my will.”
She thought about that. “What good is a rematch?”
“Nobody ever beat me before. I want a second try.”
“You know it’ll be worse for you than before.”
“Let me find that out.”
“But what’s the point?”
“Get me your android and I’ll show you the point,” I said.
She went along with it. Maybe it was curiosity, maybe it was something else, but she patched herself into the computer net and pretty soon they brought in the android I had encountered in the park, or maybe another one with the same face. It looked me over pleasantly, without the slightest sign of interest.
Someone came in and took the security lock off my wrist and left again. She gave the android its instructions and it held out its wrist to me and we made contact. And I jumped right in.
I was raw and wobbly and pretty damned battered, still, but I knew what I needed to do and I knew I had to do it fast. The thing was to ignore the android completely—it was just a terminal, it was just a unit—and go for what lay behind it. So I bypassed the android’s own identity program, which was clever but shallow. I went right around it while the android was still setting up its combinations, dived underneath, got myself instantly from the unit level to the mainframe level and gave the master Culver City computer a hearty handshake.
Jesus, that felt good!
All that power, all those millions of megabytes squatting there, and I was plugged right into it. Of course, I felt like a mouse hitchhiking on the back of an elephant. That was all right. I might be a mouse, but that mouse was getting a tremendous ride. I hung on tight and went soaring along on the hurricane winds of that colossal machine.
And as I soared, I ripped out chunks of it by the double handful and tossed them to the breeze.
It didn’t even notice for a good tenth of a second. That’s how big it was. There I was, tearing great blocks of data out of its gut, joyously ripping and rending. And it didn’t know it, because even the most magnificent computer ever assembled is still stuck with operating at the speed of light, and when the best you can do is 186,000 miles a second, it can take quite a while for the alarm to travel the full distance down all your neural channels. That thing was huge. Mouse riding on elephant, did I say? Amoeba piggybacking on Brontosaurus was more like it.
God knows how much damage I was able to do. But, of course, the alarm circuitry did cut in eventually. Internal gates came clanging down and all sensitive areas were sealed away and I was shrugged off with the greatest of ease. There was no sense staying around, waiting to get trapped, so I pulled myself free.
I had found out what I needed to know. Where the defenses were, how they worked. This time the computer had kicked me out, but it wouldn’t be able to the next. Whenever I wanted, I could go in there and smash whatever I felt like.
The android crumpled to the carpet. It was nothing but an empty husk now.
Lights were flashing on the office wall.
She looked at me, appalled. “What did you do?”
“I beat your android,” I said. “It wasn’t all that hard, once I knew the scoop.”
“You damaged the main computer.”
“Not really. Not much. I just gave it a little tickle. It was surprised seeing me get access in there, that’s all.”
“I think you really damaged it.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“The question ought to be why you haven’t done it already. Why you haven’t gone in there and crashed the hell out of their programs.”
“You think I could do something like that?”
She studied me. “I think maybe you could, yes.”
“Well, maybe so. Or maybe not. But I’m not a crusader, you know. I like my life the way it is. I move around; I do as I please. It’s a quiet life. I don’t start revolutions. When I need to gimmick things, I gimmick them just enough and no more. And the Entities don’t even know I exist. If I stick my finger in their eye, they’ll cut my finger off. So I haven’t done it.”
“But now you might,” she said.
I began to get uncomfortable. “I don’t follow you,” I said, although I was beginning to think that I did.
“You don’t like risk. You don’t like being conspicuous. But if we take your freedom away, if we tie you down in L.A. and put you to work, what the hell would you have to lose? You’d go right in there. You’d gimmick things but good.” She was silent for a time. “Yes,” she said. “You really would. I see it now, that you have the capability and that you could be put in a position where you’d be willing to use it. And then you’d screw everything up for all of us, wouldn’t you?”
“What?”
“You’d fix the Entities, sure. You’d do such a job on their computer that they’d have to scrap it and start all over again. Isn’t that so?”
She was on to me, all right.
“But I’m not going to give you the chance. I’m not crazy. There isn’t going to be any revolution and I’m not going to be its heroine and you aren’t the type to be a hero. I understand you now. It isn’t safe to fool around with you. Because if anybody did, you’d take your little revenge, and you wouldn’t care what you brought down on everybody else’s head. You could ruin their computer, but then they’d come down on us and they’d make things twice as hard for us as they already are, and you wouldn’t care. We’d all suffer, but you wouldn’t care. No. My life isn’t so terrible that I need you to turn it upside down for me. You’ve already done it to me once. I don’t need it again.”
She looked at me steadily, and all the anger seemed to be gone from her and there was only contempt left.
After a little while, she said, “Can you go in there again and gimmick things so that there’s no record of your arrest today?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I could do that.”
“Do it, then. And then get going. Get the hell out of here, fast.”
“Are you serious?”
“You think I’m not?”
I shook my head. I understood. And I knew that I had won and I had lost at the same time.
She made an impatient gesture, a shoo-fly gesture.
I nodded. I felt very, very small.
“I just want to say, all that stuff about how much I regretted the thing I did to you back then—it was true. Every word of it.”
“It probably was,” she said. “Look, do your gimmicking and edit yourself out, and then I want you to start moving. Out of the building. Out of the city. OK? Do it real fast.”
I hunted around for something else to say and couldn’t find it. Quit while you’re ahead, I thought. She gave me her wrist and I did the interface with her. As my implant access touched hers, she shuddered a little. It wasn’t much of a shudder, but I noticed it. I felt it, all right. I think I’m going to feel it every time I stiff anyone, ever again. Any time I even think of stiffing anyone.
I went in and found the John Doe arrest entry and got rid of it, and then I searched out her civil service file and promoted her up two grades and doubled her pay. Not much of an atonement. But what the hell, there wasn’t much I could do. Then I cleaned up my traces behind me and exited the program.
“All right,” I said. “It’s done.”
“Fine,” she said and rang for her cops.
They apologized for the case of mistaken identity and let me out of the building and turned me loose on Figueroa Street. It was late afternoon, and the street was getting dark and the air was cool. Even in Los Angeles, winter is winter,
of a sort. I went to a street access and summoned the Toshiba from wherever it had parked itself, and it came driving up five or ten minutes later, and I told it to take me north. The going was slow, rush-hour stuff, but that was OK. I went to the wall at the Sylmar gate, 50 miles or so out of town. The gatekeeper asked me my name. “Richard Roe,” I said. “Beta Pi Upsilon, ten-four-three-two-four-X. Destination San Francisco.”
It rains a lot in San Francisco in the winter. Still, it’s a pretty town. I would have preferred Los Angeles at that time of year, but what the hell. Nobody gets all his first choices all the time. The gate opened and the Toshiba went through. Easy as Beta Pi.
THE IRON STAR
A Byron Preiss project once again. The Planets had sold very nicely, and now Byron was casting his net a little wider: a book called The Universe. As before, astronomers were doing the scientific essays and s-f writers were providing stories to match. Byron showed me the list of themes—stars, pulsars, black holes, galaxies and clusters, and so forth—and I chose to write about supernovae and pulsars. The anthology was published late in 1987 and the story appeared just about simultaneously in the January, 1988 issue of the venerable Amazing Stories, oldest of the science-fiction magazines.
One incidental bit of pleasure came from this for me. In Byron’s book, the story was illustrated with a full-color plate by Bob Eggleton. Amazing Stories featured it with a cover painting by Terry Lee. By coincidence both Lee and Eggleton chose to illustrate the same scene, the one in which the narrator first gets a look at the Nine Sparg captain on his television screen. The two paintings are quite different in mood and technique, yet each depicts my alien critter in a distinctive and powerful way, while remaining faithful to my prose description. It’s one of science-fiction writing’s special treats to see your verbal inventions brought to visual life this way.
——————
The alien ship came drifting up from behind the far side of the neutron star just as I was going on watch. It looked a little like a miniature neutron star itself: a perfect sphere, metallic, dark. But neutron stars don’t have six perky little outthrust legs, and the alien craft did.