Now was the time to act. To risk the vengeance of Mira’s employers, to risk oblivion, the end of 200 years. But he had made his plans, and he was not going to lose Vaddum again. He had lost enough.
Darling set his primary processor into a kind of meditation, an emptiness, and released a subroutine to command his body. A brutal madness overtook him. He reached out a thick sensory strand toward the old sculptor, another pair toward the girls. He swiftly captured Vaddum and Beatrix with two quicksilver snakes, but the invisible twin slipped away. It darted a few steps into the forest, and turned to watch, as if confident it could escape his grasp if he tried again. Darling dismissed the twin from his mad thoughts. He felt his captives struggle, but the sensory feedback of their protests was dulled by the capturing tendrils’ crude strength.
He chose a long rod of glassene, which glittered in the sun, and began the dirty work of breaking them to pieces.
Darling was nowhere to be found. Mira called his name, in direct interface and once out loud. Nothing. There wasn’t time to waste, though, in case Hirata pulled herself together enough to raise some warning. And things might be easier without Darling along, anyway.
The coordinates she had begged from Hirata’s frothing lips weren’t far away. The limo didn’t bother to reach normal cruising altitude; it bolted forward at just above rooftop level, drawing nearer the edge of the Blast Event crater. Yes, she thought, this would all end up here, next to this black hole.
A hill rose before Mira, crumbling like a half-eaten pastry where it had been bitten in two by the perfect sphere of the explosion. The vehicle gained altitude to crest its peak, slowing as the kid-simple iconography of the navigation eyescreen showed two dots converging: an ancient and euclidian sign of arrival.
Mira transpared the limo’s floor and whistled. The vehicle’s rise had revealed a shallow caldera that sparkled with an orchard of metal trees. Their coppery glint made them instantly recognizable as Vaddums. Mira brushed away the irritating thought that she had just paid a colossal sum for two of these objects, and here were hundreds. It was irrelevant. They would have to be destroyed, of course, even if she succeeded in saving the artist.
As the machine descended with its breaking whine, dropping toward a central clearing in the metal forest, Mira saw that she had been beaten: Darling was there already, standing among a pile of junked parts, resting on a glittering staff like a tired shepherd.
Mira stood as the machine unfolded its passenger canopy around her, a little unsteady from the hasty deceleration. Darling stared back at her, unblinking in the wave of dust that broke against him. She leapt from the car and ran to him; she had never seen him so abject, so merely human.
She took his arm.
“Where’s Vaddum?”
Darling gestured with the staff, which shone like glass in the sun. There were flaws in it, cracks, chips. He pointed to the remains of two bodies among the other junk; she recognized the child’s muscular single arm and thin legs, and the blast shielding of Vaddum’s body. Their sensory gear was battered into glistening slivers, the flexor-fluid of their crushed limbs had leaked onto the ground, its metally surface tension forming huge droplets like a dusty, black spill of mercury. One of Vaddum’s hands still floated, making witless and purposeless gestures. And the black-boxes had been pulled, trailing fiber and ichorous strands of shock insulation, and hammered into black shards that were like the sweepings from some onyx sculpture. Darling must have done this last with his great stone feet.
He had already killed Vaddum.
“Why the child?” she asked, for a moment afraid that the labor of killing his hero had driven Darling mad.
“She was a Vaddum. Her body.”
What a complication that would have been, Mira thought. But she sighed away her plan to save the old sculptor, its complexities and loose ends peacefully unravelling in the light breeze. No point in telling Darling. That would be cruel.
But she wanted to know why he’d done it himself.
“I hadn’t thought you wanted him dead. Not really,” she said.
“He was a forgery. He wasn’t real.” Darling swept the staff in a great circle, its arc clearing her head with that uncomfortable precision of artificials. “This is all a forgery. It’s my job to destroy such things.
“As I told you when we met, I deal in originals.”
She nodded. Perhaps she had almost given Darling the wrong gift this time.
“There’s a problem, though,” she said. “I needed Vaddum to tell me who copied him.” It suddenly occured to her that Darling might have done this to save the old man from torture. How little he trusted her. “That’s my job, remember?”
Darling shook his head. “He told me before I killed him. Willingly. The Maker, as he called it, is hidden below the center of the Blast Crater.”
“Of course.” The hard layers of molten slag would shield tremendous energies from detection. This copying of souls was not some simple algorithmic trick; it was an industrial process.
And possibly the death of the old sculptor had already warned this Maker. Mira couldn’t wait for a warship to bring the heavy weapons needed to penetrate the shield of the crater floor.
But Mira was a very well-equipped agent, prepared to end wars if need be.
“Thank you, Darling. I’ll finish this now.”
He nodded and leaned against his staff.
She direct-interfaced her luggage lifter in the hotel suite, sent combined orders to it and to the remainder (the greater part) of the painting/device/war machine on the wall. The two machines joined, the lifter’s powerful impellers with the painting’s intelligence and deadly purpose. They had to vaporize one of the suite’s windows to make their escape, but soon they were on their way.
Mira let the dress fall from her. It seemed to sink into the ground, passing through the dust like distilled water through some cunningly perfect filter, leaving no trace of dampness or impurity behind. She joined it in direct interface, feeling it burrow into cooler and cooler depths, a vanguard for the vastly more terrible portion that was on its way.
She set her awareness of this campaign’s progress to a low level, and pressed her naked body against Darling’s sunwarmed stone.
“When this is over,” she murmured as a skein of his strands gathered to bind her to him, “perhaps we should take a journey.”
“I have explanations to make, to Fowdy.”
“No. I think he’ll be happy with your work. I bought the Vaddums, had them sent. They’re genuine, in their way.”
“But the material anachronisms…”
A message from below the surface came tingling into her awareness. Behind closed eyes, she felt the oppressive weight of 15 kilometers of earth above her, the EM darkness under the upside-down umbrella of the blast crater’s igneous bottom. And far ahead, she saw through the dress’s eyes the sparkle of an energy source.
The Maker.
“That’s just a matter of recordkeeping, of who-made-what-when. My employers will make a few changes and everything will square.”
“But two undiscovered Vaddums?” he asked.
“Flex will argue that she thought one was incomplete; but that you convinced her it was salable.”
“How is Hirata Flex?”
She nestled closer to him. His strands were spread fine now, laced across her like a fishnet body-stocking. The skein tensed slightly, lifting her to a height where she could kiss him properly.
As their lips met, the main force of her war machine (there was nothing else to call it in its present configuration) arrived above its target. It split into four parts that made aerodynamic shapes of themselves and let wind and gravity carry them to four sides of the crater, passing into the earth and surrounding the Maker.
“She’s vibrant, happy. Possibly confused and embarrassed, I would think. I left it for her to explain what happened. She has some sort of artistic touch, I suppose. She’ll make up some story for herself.”
“She made t
he sale,” Darling agreed. “For some people, that’s enough.”
“So a journey, then?” Mira asked, her face nuzzled into the dark hardness of his chest. The dress was moving to reform with the greater entity. Its scouting role was over, having discovered a huge, distributed AI core at the center of the subterranean complex.
Of course, the old synthplant AI. A Maker on a planetary scale.
“Yes. To somewhere distant. Perhaps beyond the Expansion.”
“I’m not allowed Out there,” she said. “But we can go to the rim.”
A surge went through her body, a salvo being fired so far below, loud and angry even with her direct interface level set low. She set it higher, her muscles clenching with the rhythm of the four-sided bombardment.
“Fuck me just a little now,” she asked. “I’m killing it.”
Darling obliged her, not softly at all, without the sophistication of his usual explorations. And as the criminal entity below burned, she gasped and struggled in his web.
Strangely (perhaps it was just the unreal forest of sculpted trees around them, evoking the age-old arcana of nature—of hidden, unknown beings), she felt as if their lovemaking were being observed, spied upon from some invisible weft in space.
As if someone had kept a secret even in this climax to the tale.
* * *
Chapter 23
MAKER (5)
« ^ »
Seven years of peace, of growth since the Event. The chain of resonant artistry leads from the sculptor to his child-student Beatrix, to the Maker Copy-of-a-Copy, and finally to the subterranean god itself.
The Maker has learned, finally feels close to its ultimate goal, the reason for these mutinies and machinations and mass destructions. The huge new processor has spread further every year, consuming the structure of bedrock and lately of Malvir’s inner crust, now hungrily drawing its power from the planet’s very core. For seven years the titanic machine has studied the sculptor’s every motion through the window of the Maker’s shared soul, its hidden aspect. Vast software models attempt to predict the sculptor’s next piece; unimaginably large processors analyze every word of his conversations with Beatrix.
And now, finally, with this monstrous, unwieldy processor guiding its brush, the Maker has again tried to make some art.
(Oh, no. Not a sculpture. That would be tempting fate.) A small painting of a broken hill, with a tiny glimmering forest and three tiny figures living there. A model of the Maker’s true creation, its real-life work of art. The painting makes the Maker happy. It hangs the work again and again, synthesizing different frame-styles from across the centuries here in this unfathomably secure cave.
Perhaps it will show the painting to Beatrix, a gift from her secret twin. Yes, a good idea. She’s not yet Turing positive, but she has a good eye. The Maker easily churns out a design: a tunneling drone to deliver the painting to the surface in a matter of days.
The drone is made, given a modest avatar to guide it to Beatrix, and sent on its way.
Some hours later, for the first time in years, something unexpected happens. Alarms ring. Approaching entities are detected.
Discovery?
An intense burst of energy!
Total war on the surface? Or possibly the arrival of avenging guardians of the Taboo. Shockwaves of kinetic energy pound the Maker. Deathrays of radiation begin to sear …
Its own extinction doesn’t matter, of course. There is the other Copy, which even now signals that Beatrix and Vaddum are taken, perhaps doomed. But the Maker watches with relief as the little tunneling drone escapes with the precious painting, missing sure destruction by a few kilometers in the tremendous energies of this attack.
The Maker’s last act is to change the drone’s programming. The little machine will hide a while, skulking under the sands for a year or two before emerging, selecting a random recipient for its gift…
A painting from beyond the grave.
How sweet.
* * *
Chapter 24
PROMISE
« ^ »
The birds were missing.
Some trick of the weather, some pyramid-topping predator’s spoor, some seasonal shift had chased them all away. The Minor seemed strangely empty in their absence, though its usual human throng remained.
That made waiting easier, without the flustering flutter of wings from every direction. They were like whispers sometimes, those wings. At the edge of consciousness: those sussurous mutters of envy, of secrets.
And there was the eerie silence of direct interface. Mira held the black lacquer box, the Warden’s gift, first in one hand, then in the other. For some reason, it made her hands sweat, a pricking feeling like restive nerves. Darling had insisted that they meet under these circumstances. She’d carried the box, activated, all the way from the city proper, taking a public cab instead of the compromised limo. Darling was learning to be cautious. That was a good sign.
Here in the Minor, hidden by the Warden’s box, she and Darling would get a few words together in confidence before they boarded; the controlled environment of the starship would make privacy almost impossible. They needed a few moments to sum their understanding of what had happened.
To survive his knowledge—of her murders, of the Maker’s terrible invention—Darling would have to speak carefully as they travelled together. Mira was so often watched by the gods. Beloved of them, she thought grimly.
With the black lacquer box in hand, their divine voices (and those of news reports, adverts, the tourism AI’s gentle promptings) were absent. The virtual silence began to get under Mira’s skin, a vague disquiet as if spectral hands covered her ears, muting the sounds of the strangely empty Minor. She felt alone, an altogether unfamiliar feeling. Mira realized how the omnipotent blanket of divine protection had always surrounded her. The promptings and machinations of the gods had almost become aspects of her own personality, like the subtle goads of conscience and intuition normal people must feel. Well, she had to get used to this aloneness, this silence in her mind. If she were to be with Darling, the gods could no longer own her so completely.
But Darling was late. And with the Warden’s box activated, there was no way he could call to say why.
The sovereign roar of a rising ship broke the silence, scattering the few birds, lifting every face to the sky. For a moment, she worried that it might be the Knight Errant’s shuttle leaving. She blinked the local time into her vision, stared until the reassuring digits calmed her. The last passenger shuttle for the craft didn’t leave for another hour. Darling would be here by then.
The thundering ship was clearly visible from the Minor for a few seconds. It sported the fat nacelles of a metaspace drive, the bulging midsection of a pocket universe: a small, private starship, with the rare feature of atmospheric entry. It grew smaller as it rose, almost out of sight when it had created enough heat to generate a contrail in Malvir’s dry atmosphere. The ship drew a short arc, then passed into reaches of the atmosphere too thin to show its passage.
Mira lowered her head, hopeful that Darling might have appeared in the minute her eyes had been skyward, his striding form tall among the riffraff on the Minor.
No. No Darling.
The tickets, cerulean disks no bigger than playing cards and coded to her DNA and his Standard DI Number, had their own clocks. They set up a complaint ten minutes before the shuttles appointed departure time. Her attempts to silence them merely brought remonstrances in dire-sounding legalese; they repeated the protests in three languages before exhausting themselves.
No refund, they warned. None at all.
The whining tickets annoyed Mira more than they should have. She gripped the black box harder, feeling the sharpness of its edges bite her fingers. Don’t be silly, she told herself. The tickets’ little canned voices had been designed to create anxiety, to ensure compliance. They were a carefully engineered mix of impelling vocal characteristics: authoritative, threatening, guilt-inducing. Th
ey were only a recording.
But in the strange silence of the Minor they had worked their magic as if Mira were a scolded child. She felt chastised and foolish, her usual calm remove compromised by the grinding hour of waiting for Darling.
She gripped the box still harder and shook her head to chase away the absurd sensation of shame.
There would be other ships.
Indeed, Darling could well still make it. There were only short customs and immigration delays on the way out. She smiled to herself. Perhaps he had decided to walk to the spaceport, had been distracted by some native knickknack that would fetch thousands on the HC market for Outside art.
Time passed.
She watched the food vendors pitch buckets of sand into their fires.
She noticed that the shadows of the city’s highest towers could be seen on the northern hills as they lengthened.
Later, she tasted the metal on her tongue, and realized that she had been biting her lower lip too hard. The bitter taste of blood spread in her mouth, and her heartbeat set up residence in the swelling lip until medical nanos went to work, bringing a sweet and artificial citrus flavor. She worried the broken skin with her tongue.
Where the fuck was Darling?
He seemed to appear every few moments in the corner of her eye, a tall man or luggage balanced on someone’s head effecting a short, annoying impersonation. Mira began to stride the periphery of the Minor, describing a long, slow circle like a restless sweep hand of some ancient clock. She looked at Malvir City for signs of a disturbance, a traffic snarl, and scowled at the Warden’s box and its enforced silence.
When the engine whine of the idling shuttle stepped up to a roar, she realized that they had missed the Knight Errant. The ground rumbled softly as the shuttle lifted into view above the terminal. Mira’s ears popped. She found herself unable to swallow and closed her eyes instead.
The blackness behind her eyelids was infested with a swarm of red insects, which clustered around the black sun that had been burned into her retinas by the shuttle’s engine-glare.