Forever Free

  The personnel carrier came mincing up, accompanied by a small robot with flashing blue lights. It had PARKING POLICE stenciled on front and back.

  ‘You are under arrest,’ it said, in a huge stentorian voice. ‘Surrender control to me.’ That was followed by some almost ultrasonic warbling. ‘Surrender control to me.’

  ‘Sure.’ I chambered a rocket, which the heads-up thing called MHE. That’s not an acronym we used to have. I assumed ‘medium high explosive’ and squeezed it off. It did vaporize the parking robot and leave a crater two meters in diameter, in the process knocking the personnel carrier on its back.

  It righted itself by rocking back and forth until it tipped onto its spidery feet. ‘You didn’t have to do that,’ it said. ‘You could have explained your situation. You must have a reason for this arbitrary destruction of property.’

  ‘Target practice,’ I said. ‘This fighting suit is very old, and I had to know how well it works.’

  ‘Very well. Are you finished?’

  ‘Not really.’ I hadn’t tried the nukes. ‘But I’ll hold off with the other systems until I have more real estate to work with.’

  ‘Real estate outside of Spaceport?’

  ‘Absolutely. There’s nothing in here small enough to destroy.’

  It actually seemed to pause, integrating that statement into its world view. ‘Very well, I will not call the police again. Unless you destroy something here.’

  ‘Scout’s honor.’

  ‘Please rephrase that.’

  ‘I won’t hurt anything here without telling you ahead of time.’

  It sort of threw a mechanical tantrum, stamping its many feet. I supposed it was generating conflicting orders. I left it there to sort things out.

  The sheriff came back to the group the same time I did.

  ‘The Whole Tree gives no warning,’ he said. ‘There’s no sense that anything was going wrong.’

  ‘Just like home?’ Marygay said.

  He nodded. ‘More complex things are going on,’ he said, ‘and the Tree is still trying to make sense of what has happened.’

  ‘But it hasn’t,’ Po said.

  ‘Well, now it has new information. What happened to us, out in space, and to Middle Finger. And Tsoget. It may be able to piece something together.’

  ‘It thinks by itself?’ I said. ‘Without people connected to it?’

  ‘It’s not like thinking, exactly. It just sifts things; makes things more simple for itself. Sometimes the result is like thought.’

  Antres 906 had returned. ‘I have nothing to add,’ it said.

  Maybe we should have turned around and gone home. Begin to rebuild from what we had. Both the sheriff and the Tauran would have been in favor of that, I think, but we didn’t ask them.

  ‘Guess we ought to try a city,’ Marygay said.

  ‘We’re right next door to what used to be the biggest one in the country,’ Cat said, ‘at least in terms of acreage.’

  Marygay cocked her head. ‘Spaceport?’

  ‘No, I mean big. Disney!’

  Twenty-nine

  Marygay and I had been to Disneyworld, as it was still called, in the early twenty-first, and it had been large then. The one we’d gone to was now just one element in a patchwork of ‘lands’ – Waltland, where you visited in groups, and a simulacrum of the place’s founder took you around and explained the wonders.

  The carrier had amiably agreed to produce wheels, and it got us to the outskirts of Disney in about twenty minutes.

  The perimeter of Disney was a huge ring, where parking lots for the patrons alternated with clustered living areas for the people who worked there.

  You were supposed to park, evidently, and wait for a Disney bus to take you inside. When we tried to drive through an entrance, a big jolly cartoon robot blocked it off, explaining in a loud kiddy voice that we had to be nice and park like everyone else. It alternated Standard and English. I told it to fuck off, and after that all the machines spoke to us in English.

  Goofy was the robot on the third one we tried. I got out in my fighting suit. It said, ‘Ah-hyuh – what have we here?’ and I kicked it over and pulled off its arms and legs and tossed them in four directions. It started repeating ‘Hyuh … that’s a good ’un … Hyuh … that’s a good ’un,’ and I pulled off the meter-wide head and threw it as high and far as I could.

  The living areas for the staff were blocked off by holograms that were only partly successful now. On one side we had a jungle where cute baby monkeys played; on the other, a sea of Dalmatian puppies running through a giant’s house. But you could see dimly through them, and sometimes they would disappear for a fraction of a second, revealing identical rows of warren housing.

  We came out in Westernland, a big dusty old town from a pre-mechanized West that once existed in movies and novels. It wasn’t like the spaceport, with clothing scattered all around. It was very neat, and had a sort of dreamlike ordinariness, with people walking about in period costume. They were robots, of course, and their costumes showed unusual fading and wear, plastic knees and elbows showing through frayed holes.

  ‘Maybe the park was closed when it happened,’ I said, though it would be hard to reconcile that with the thousands of vehicles in ranks and files outside.

  ‘The local time was 13:10 on April 1,’ the sheriff said. ‘It was a Wednesday. Is that significant?’

  ‘April Fool’s Day,’ I said. ‘What a trick.’

  ‘Maybe everybody came naked,’ Marygay suggested.

  ‘I know what happened to the clothes,’ Cat said. ‘Watch this.’ She opened the door and threw out a crumpled piece of paper.

  A knee-high Mickey Mouse came rolling out of a trap door in the side of a saloon. It speared the paper with a stick and addressed us, finger wagging, in a scolding squeaky voice: ‘Less mess! Don’t be a pest!’

  ‘We used to throw stuff all around it and get it confused,’ she said.

  The carrier was up on its toes again, to maneuver more easily through the narrow streets, and it tiptoed through this strange land of saloons, dance halls, general stores, and quaint Victorian houses, each with its retinue of shabby busy robots. Where there were wooden boardwalks, the robots had worn a light-colored trail a couple of centimeters deep.

  There were broken robots frozen in mid-gesture, and twice we came upon piles of several helpless robots, their legs sawing air, where evidently one had stopped and the others tripped over it. So they weren’t true robots, but just mechanical models. Marygay remembered the term ‘audio-animatronic,’ and Cat confirmed that two hundred years after we’d been there, the old-fashioned technology had been re-introduced for nostalgia and humor.

  One universal anachronism was on the buildings’ roofs, with solar cells covering the south side. (A more prosaic anachronism was that every building, even the churches, had something for sale.)

  At least it made the business of food and shelter simple. There was enough frozen and irradiated food to last us several lifetimes, most of it more interesting than our survival rations, if less nutritious.

  We decided to spend the night at Molly Malone’s Wayside Inn. Marygay and I were surprised to see, behind the registration desk, a price list for sexual services. Cat said all you got was robots. Clean robots.

  But then our own robot, the carrier, delivered its own larger surprise. We went back out of Molly Malone’s to get our bags, and there they were, lined up neatly on the boardwalk.

  And behind them, instead of a machine, stood a ruggedly handsome cowboy. He didn’t look like the worn-out robots, but he didn’t look quite human, either. He was too big, over seven feet tall. He left deep footprints in the dust, and when he stepped onto the boardwalk, it creaked alarmingly.

  ‘I’m not really a carrier,’ he said. ‘Not any kind of machine. It was just handy to look and act like one, down at the spaceport.’

  He talked in a slow drawl that I recognized vaguely from childhood, and then it clicked: he looked like t
he actor John Wayne. My father had loved his movies and my mother despised him.

  While he talked, he rolled a fat joint of tobacco. ‘I can be the carrier again, or whatever thing or organism we need about that size.’

  The Tauran spoke up. ‘Please demonstrate?’

  He shrugged and produced a large wooden match, and scratched it alight on the sole of his boot. Sulfur dioxide and, when he puffed the joint into life, the acrid tang of tobacco. I hadn’t smelled it in thirty years, or thirteen hundred. Cigarettes, they used to be called.

  He stepped back three giant strides and blurred and flowed into the shape of the carrier. But he kept the colors of blue jeans and leather and held the smoldering cigarette in a human hand that grew out of the top.

  Then he changed again, into an oversized Tauran, still holding the cigarette. He said something to Antres 906 in rapid Tauran, and then changed back into John Wayne. He took a last puff and pinched the cigarette out between thumb and forefinger.

  None of us could come up with anything intelligent to say, so I opted for the obvious: ‘You’re some kind of alien.’

  ‘Actually, no; nothing of the kind. I was born on Earth, about nine thousand years ago. It’s you guys who are creatures from another planet.’

  ‘A shape-changer,’ Marygay whispered.

  ‘Like you’re a clothes-changer. To me, I’m always the same shape.’ He twisted his leg around to a break-bone angle and looked at the boot sole. ‘You don’t have a name for us, but you could call us Omnis. The Omni.’

  ‘How many are you?’ Po asked.

  ‘How many you need? A hundred, a thousand? I could turn into a troop of Campfire Girls, as long as they didn’t mass more than twosome tonnes. Maybe a horde of locusts. But it’s hell to get them all back together in one bunch.’

  ‘You people have been on Earth for nine thousand years …’ Max began.

  ‘Try a hundred fifty thousand, and we aren’t people. We don’t even look like people, most of the time. I was a Rodin sculpture in a museum for more than a century. They never could figure out how the thieves got me through the door.’ He laughed, and John Wayne split down the middle, and re-formed as two museum guards in uniform, a petite young woman and a fat old man.

  They spoke in absolute unison: ‘When I do something like this, I’m an actual ‘‘group mind,’’ like Taurans and Man aspire to being. It can be useful, but confusing, too.’ The two figures collapsed into a pile of hundreds of scuttling cockroaches. Two Mickey Mouse robots rolled toward them, and they quickly re-formed into John Wayne, who kicked one of the robots onto the roof of Molly Malone’s.

  ‘How do you do that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a matter of practice. Eye-foot coordination.’

  ‘No, I mean how do you change back and forth? You can’t take molecules of metal and turn them into organic material.’

  ‘I suppose you can,’ he said. ‘I do it all the time.’

  ‘What I mean is, it’s inconsistent with physical law.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Your version of physics is inconsistent with reality.’

  I was starting to get an Alice-in-Wonderland dizziness. Maybe Lewis Carroll had been one of them.

  ‘Let me turn it around,’ he continued. ‘How do you turn food into flesh? Eating.’

  I thought for a second. ‘Your body breaks down the food into simpler compounds. Amino acids, fats, carbohydrates. Components that aren’t burned for energy may turn into flesh.’

  ‘That’s your opinion,’ he said. ‘I had a friend a few thousand years ago, not far from here, who said that you took part of the spirit of the animal or plant that you ate, and it became part of your own spirit. Explains all kinds of sickness.’

  ‘Very poetic,’ I said, ‘but wrong.’

  ‘You likewise. You just have different ideas about what poetry is, and what ‘‘right’’ is.’

  ‘Okay. So tell me how you do it.’

  ‘I don’t have the faintest idea. I was born being able to do it, just as you were born able to metabolize. My Timucuan friend was able to metabolize as well as you, even if he described it differently.’

  ‘In nine thousand years, you haven’t tried to find out how your body works?’

  ‘Not everybody’s a scientist.’ He changed from John Wayne to a man I vaguely recognized from the kids’ schoolwork, an artist whose medium was body sculpture. He had four and six fingers, and a heat-sensing eye installed in his forehead. ‘I’m a kind of historian.’

  ‘You’ve lived alongside humans since prehistory,’ Cat said, ‘and no one ever suspected?’

  ‘We don’t keep real good records,’ he said, ‘but I think that at first, we were open about what we were, and co-existed. Somewhere along the line, I think when you got language and society, we started to hide out.’

  ‘So you became myths,’ Diane said.

  ‘Yeah; I can do a great werewolf,’ he said. ‘And I think we were taken for angels and gods sometimes. Every now and then I’d be a plain human for a lifetime, appearing to age. But that’s kind of boring and sad.’

  ‘You’ve been Man as well?’ the sheriff asked. ‘You’ve tapped into the Tree?’

  ‘Not as tricky as you might think. I have a lot of control over my neural organization. The Tree can’t tell me from a human – and you guys are just humans, with a hole in your skull and some odd ideas.’ He turned into Wayne again, and said with the actor’s drawl, ‘Buncha god-damn Commies, if ya ask me.’

  ‘Did you do it?’ The sheriff and the Omni made an odd tableau in the middle of us: the two biggest men standing there, both with guns holstered on their hips. ‘Did you make them disappear?’

  John Wayne didn’t invite him to slap leather, a challenge I don’t think he would have understood. He just shook his head sadly. ‘I don’t know what happened. I was in an elevator with two people, two Men, and they just plain disappeared. There was a little ‘‘pop’’ and their clothes fell to the floor. The elevator doors opened and I rolled out – I was in the shape of a food-dispensing robot – and the whole office building was empty, except for clothes.

  ‘There was a huge racket outside, thousands of traffic accidents. A floater crashed through a picture window; I took human shape and ran down the stairs to the basement until things calmed down.’

  ‘Where were you at the time?’ I asked.

  ‘Titusville sector. It’s part of Spaceport Administration. We went near it on our way here.’ He took the shape of an oversized statue of Albert Einstein, and sat in the dust, cross-legged, his eyes at our level. ‘It was a convenient coincidence, since I would have headed for a spaceport no matter where I’d been at the time. Waiting for someone to come explain what has happened.’

  ‘I don’t think we know any more than you,’ Marygay said.

  ‘You know your own circumstances. Maybe together we can come up with something.’ He looked off to the east. ‘Your ship is an old-fashioned fighter, Sumi class, and its communication system has safeguards that prevented it from telling me much. I know you came from Middle Finger via the Aleph-10 collapsar. The ship also knows you, and it, were somewhere else before, but it can’t say where.’

  ‘We were in the middle of nowhere,’ I said, ‘a tenth of a light-year from Middle Finger. We’d taken a converted cruiser and were headed out twenty thousand light-years—’

  ‘I remember that from the Tree. I thought the request was denied.’

  ‘We sort of highjacked it,’ Marygay said.

  Einstein nodded. ‘Some people suggested you might. That they should have let you go ahead with it, to prevent violence.’

  ‘One of me was killed,’ said the Tauran.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. The Omni said something in Tauran, and Antres replied, ‘True.’

  ‘We’d gone about a tenth of a light-year, when the antimatter fueling the cruiser suddenly evaporated.’

  ‘Evaporated? Do you have a scientific explanation for that?’ Einstein grew a third eye and blinked
it.

  ‘No. The ship suggested ‘‘transient-barrier virtual particle substitution,’’ but as far as I could find out; it doesn’t apply. Anyhow, we limped back to Middle Finger in these converted Sumi fighters, and found everybody gone. It turns out that if you make corrections for relativistic simultaneity, they disappeared the same time our antimatter did.

  ‘We assumed that our being off Middle Finger had saved us. But it happened here, too.’

  He stroked his huge moustache. ‘Perhaps you caused it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You just posited the argument yourself. If two improbable things happen simultaneously, they must be related. Maybe one caused the other.’

  ‘No. If putting a bunch of people in a starship and accelerating caused impossible things to happen, we would have noticed long ago.’

  ‘But you weren’t going anywhere. Except the future.’

  ‘I don’t think the universe cares about our intent.’

  Einstein laughed. ‘That’s your belief system again. You just used the word ‘‘impossible’’ to describe events you know did happen.’

  Cat was amused. ‘You have to admit he has a point.’

  ‘Okay. But the other anomaly is that you guys are still here, when all the humans and Taurans disappeared. So maybe you caused it.’

  He changed into a huge Indian brave, I suppose a Timucuan, scarred with elaborate tattoos, impressively naked, smelling like a wet goat. ‘That’s more like it. Though I’ll ask the others about virtual particle transient barrier, whatever. Some of them know science.’

  ‘Can you talk to them now, like telepathy?’ Cat asked.

  ‘No, not unless they’re in my line of sight. The way I talked to your ship. We used to just call each other up, but most of the systems are failing. We leave messages on the Tree now.’

  ‘We ought to check the Tree again ourselves,’ the sheriff said, ‘Antres and I.’