Blonde Bombshell (15 page)

> I can imagine.

> Heh. Maybe. Well now, of course, you can do better than that. You can experience it for yourself. After all, you’re one of us now.

> I am?

> Well yes. Haven’t you been following?

> One of you—

> One of
us.

> Sorry, one of us. Well. Crumbs. Lucky me.

24

Novosibirsk

Universally, cutting across all the arbitrary distinctions of race, colour, creed, wealth and social hierarchy, there are two categories of human beings: those who do, and those who delegate.

The delegators say, that’s too difficult, I can’t be bothered, leave it to the experts, the professionals, the people whose job it is. If you need brain surgery, they argue, it’s far better to send out for a brain surgeon than try and do it yourself with a knife and a mirror. Generally, people in this category are quiet, peaceful, productive members of society, although ultimately they do untold damage, because they vote for governments.

The other lot say, if you want it done properly, do it yourself. They don’t trust plumbers, electricians, engineers, lawyers or doctors, who are generally known to be nothing but a bunch of thieves. They’re better at barking than the dogs they keep. They tend to be the inventors, the innovators, entrepreneurs and creators. They do even more damage than the other category, because they form governments.

Lucy Pavlov was a doer, although she felt a bit bad about it. She employed tens of thousands, but made her own bed, cut her own sandwiches and drove her own car, obeying her own internally logical version of the rules of the road. She’d hired George Stetchkin to sort out the mystery of the unicorn, the message in the night, aposiderium and the existence of aliens, but when a day had passed and he hadn’t reported back, she started to feel impatient. Because she had a beautifully tolerant, egalitarian outlook, which is another way of saying that she’d never got used to the idea that she could tell people what to do just because she paid their wages, it didn’t occur to her to call George up and give him hell for not solving the mystery yet. Instead, she let her mind drift away from the work she was supposed to be doing and address itself obliquely to the problem that refused to go away.

Somebody doesn’t like me, she thought.

That didn’t make for comfortable thinking, so she blocked that pathway with do-not-cross tape and tiptoed round it. Aposiderium, and aliens. Why would someone go to all that trouble just to make me forget my earliest memories? Little Lucy in Mummy’s arms; little Lucy playing with a kitten; little Lucy flushing the car keys down the toilet (how we all laughed!) . The sort of early memories everybody’s got. Trivia, the equivalent of the family photo album, which is indescribably boring to anybody not connected to its owner by a hatful of shared chromosomes. Of no possible importance to anybody except, well, me.

A thought reared up out of the long grass in the savannah of her subconscious mind.

If it’s not aliens, who on Earth would have the wealth, the power, the resources, the intelligence to create a viable teleporter and use it to remove aposiderium from all those banknotes? It’d have to be someone incredibly rich, with the ability to conduct stupendously high-level research projects in total secrecy, so you’d be talking about a top industrialist, almost certainly in the digital technology field; that would tend to limit the field of potential candidates to three, maybe four people in the whole world. And who would be most likely to have a motive for wiping out all data about Lucy Pavlov’s early life — which, for all Lucy Pavlov knows, might have been indescribably traumatic and horrible, the sort of thing you’d go to any lengths to get rid of for ever?

That did seem to suggest that the field could be narrowed to, well, one.

I’m doing this to
myself?

Why would she want to do a thing like that?

In spite of herself, she grinned like a dog. There could quite easily be a reason, something so loathsome and soul-destroying about her origins or early history that she couldn’t bear the thought of anybody knowing it, not even herself; but of course she’d never find out what it was, because she’d already extirpated every last trace of it. And if she’d seen fit to do that, she must’ve had her reasons. So, who was she to argue with herself? Lucy knows best.

Yes, but— To have invented
teleportation,
for crying out loud. That was, well, impossible. It was just sci-fi, a device to get people on and off the planet without the cost of filming the shuttle. True; and so were personal communicators in little boxes like powder compacts that you could talk to people with, and get data from the computer network, and use like a cine camera; and she had one of those on her desk in front of her at that very moment. One thing Lucy Pavlov had never done was underestimate her own intelligence, although it should be said that she’d never taken pride in how much cleverer she was than anybody else. If anything, she tended to reflect on how sad it was that everybody else in the world wasn’t even as smart as her. So, maybe she’d done it. Now, of course, she’d never know, because if she had done it she’d have shut down the program and eradicated every trace of it, to make sure she never found out and got suspicious.

Teleportation? It was worth inventing it and then throwing it away, just to wipe out her past?

Lucy knows best; it must have been.

In that case, what about the—?

As if she’d ordered it from room service, the unicorn stepped through the window into the room. Since she was on the thirty-sixth floor, the event was remarkable in itself. What concerned Lucy, however, was the timing.

She looked at it. Not a white horse with a horn glued to its nose. The horn grew out of a gnarled corona of bone formed from the central ridge between the eyes, which was thicker and more pronounced than on any normal horse, even My Little Pony. It was about a metre long, tapered and twisted out of two distinct strands of dark cream horn, polished, in places almost translucent. There was a tiny chip out of the side of the point, slightly smaller than a child’s tooth.

She waited. The unicorn swished its tail. It didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

“Hello?” she said.

“Report,” said the unicorn.

She sucked in a deep breath. It was like drinking custard. “What are you?”

“Report.”

Its voice was deep, a monotone, like a recorded message. “Are you —” She felt really, really silly saying this — “are you real?”

“Report.”

At this point, a spark of irritation started the engine of her intellect. She picked up the nearest available object, which happened to be a TV remote, and threw it at the unicorn’s head. It bounced off and clattered on the floor. The unicorn didn’t seem to have noticed.

“Report what?” she said.

“Report.”

It’s a machine, she decided. It’s solid, it may even be organic, but it’s a machine. A flood of relief swept through her, washing away drifts of anxiety and log-jams of self-doubt. It’s real, it’s not magic, somebody built it and sent it here, and I want to know who and why.

“Who built you?”

“Report.”

“Did
I
build you?”

“Report.”

Fine. She’d never had much joy trying to chat to her kettle, either. Well, if it couldn’t answer her questions in words, there was only one thing for it. Without breaking eye contact, she fumbled for her Warthog and found the right button.

“Security,” she said. “Get up here right now.”

“On our way, Ms Pavlov.”

“Bring a gun. And a net. And some hay or a carrot or something,” because if there was a batch number or a serial number or a manufacturer’s symbol or even just MADE IN CHINA in tiny letters on the inside of its small intestine, she was going to find it, always assuming she could keep it here until Security arrived.

Unless— Staring at the unicorn, which had shuffled sideways a little and was trying to eat the corner of her desk, she made herself ask the question, What if
I
built it? After all, who else could? Little green men, or me. And why would little green men be interested in making me forget my childhood?

Report
what,
for crying out loud. She hit the button again. “Security.”

“On our way. The elevator’s out, we’re having to use the stairs.”

“False alarm. Forget it.”

And if I made it, and went to all that trouble to make sure I didn’t know I made it, I must have had my reasons.

Lucy knows best, damn her.

“Report,” the unicorn said.

“Can’t. Nothing to report. Please be more specific.”

The unicorn stood perfectly still for one, possibly one and a half seconds. Then it lowered its head and lunged.

She didn’t have time to register the threat, but an automatic system made her flinch. The tip of the horn, which would have gone straight through her heart if she hadn’t tried to jump out of her skin, grazed her arm, drawing a single drop of blood. She screamed, squirmed away without stopping to think about tiresome everyday things like chairs, found herself sitting on thin air and dropped, bottom first, on to the floor. The unicorn lifted its head, so that the drop of blood ran down inside the spiral flutes of its horn, then turned gracefully right round and leapt through the window, which didn’t break.

25

Novosibirsk

“He must be somewhere,” the man who wasn’t a werewolf snapped. “He can’t just have vanished into thin air.”

His colleague refrained from pointing out that that was precisely what people and things did when subjected to a teleport beam. “I’ve tried a wide-beam all-functions scan,” he said, twiddling knobs on a thing that looked a bit like a battery charger but almost certainly wasn’t. “There’s a residual burn on the CM band, but that’s all.”

The other man looked at him. “On the what?”

Awkward for the knob twiddler: he’d just made up the CM band, to make it sound like he was doing something. In actual fact, there were no traces of anything whatsoever, anywhere. “Could just be sensor mist,” he said blithely. “You know, false input readings. Anyhow, I can’t find him.”

“Bugger.”

They looked at each other. The Ostar have a sort of low-level telepathy, the last obsolete appendix-like vestige of the pack mind. Both of them were saying, without the need for words,
We’re going to get into so much trouble.

“It may not matter,” said the knob twiddler cautiously. “After all, what’s one human more or less?”

“The planet’s leading expert on electronic security.”

“Yes, but that’s not saying much.”

“Personal security adviser to the head of PaySoft Industries.”

“Only because we—”

The other man shook his head.
“Him.”

No arguing with that. They both knew perfectly well that George Stetchkin was unique, the one and only.

“You sure you haven’t just—”

“Yes.”

The other main sat down on the hotel-room bed, causing a sudden anguished squeak from the ancient springs. “Great,” he said. “Fantastic. We’ve killed him.”

“We may not have.”

The knob twiddler got an extra-special Look for that. “Oh really. We dematerialise him, store him in the pattern buffer, then when we try and rematerialise him he’s not damn well there. What do you reckon? He fell down the back? Sort of leaked out and got absorbed by the battery?”

“All right, we killed him. So …”

There was no “so”, and they both knew it. There was a long silence. Then the other man said, “We’re going to have to report this.”

That went down about as well as a dead mouse in a bottle of vintage champagne. “I don’t see why. We could just—”

“If we don’t, he’ll find out. And then we’ll really be screwed.”

“Yes, but we could say he just
died.
All those high-toxicity beverages. Or we could say he got hit by the transport infrastructure. Lots of people die of that, it says so on the newscasts.”

“He’ll find out.”

“I’ll try remodulating the collector pulse capacitors,” the knob twiddler said. “Maybe if I can rig up some sort of coherent reverse-phase antipolaron wave—”

“Stop
drivelling,”
snarled the other man. “And put in a call.”

“What, now?”

The other man nodded. “Now,” he said, “before we both completely lose our nerve and go all to pieces.”

“What, save that for later, when he gets his paws on us?”

The other man sighed. “We never should’ve come,” he said. “See the galaxy, they said, an opportunity to travel to seek out new life and new civilisations. I should’ve stayed home and asked my brother-in-law for a job at the bonemeal plant.”

The knob twiddler looked at him sadly. “Still,” he said, “it’s been fun, hasn’t it? All in all.”

“No, it hasn’t.”

No arguing with that, either. The knob twiddler turned the gadget over, pressed a switch on the back and slid open a panel. Out of it rose a short aerial. “He’s going to be seriously pissed off, you know that?”

“Yes.”

There were a few more buttons to press, and a slider to slide across and then back a bit, and a toggle to adjust and a code to enter into a keypad. Then a high whistle, inaudible to the human excuse-for-an-ear, told them that they were through to the home-world.

They’d used the direct number. There was no waiting, or messing about with intermediaries. The whistle stopped, and a deep voice barked, “Yes?”

The knob twiddler closed his eyes. “Hi, Dad,” he said.

26

New York

The unicorn stood in the circular white marble bath, allowing jets of warm water from the five-position shower head to soak into its mane. It was looking at itself in the mirror.

“You could have killed her,” Mark Twain said angrily.

“Lethal capability confirmed,” the unicorn said. “I am equipped with a wide range of offensive and defensive combat protocols.” It turned its head, examining its left profile.

“That’s not what I meant,” Mark Twain snapped. “You exhibited excessive aggression. If she hadn’t got out of the way in time, you’d have gored her to death. I sent you to get a sample of her genetic material, not murder her.”

The unicorn arched its neck a little. Vanity, Mark Twain realised, slightly shocked: it enjoys preening itself in front of the mirror, just as it enjoys the feel of the warm water. It’s acquired that just by being that shape for a few hours. In that case, what has being Dirter-shaped been doing to me?

“Our mission is the total extermination of her race,” the unicorn pointed out reasonably. “We are a weapon of war, not a scientific research facility. The only good Dirter is a—“

“We need her alive,” Twain snapped. “We need to find out where she got hold of Ostar computer code components.” As he said the words, he knew he was lying; to the unicorn, therefore by extension to himself. Fortunately, the unicorn was too wrapped up in seeing how the light glinted off its horn to notice. “Unless we know that, we daren’t proceed to Phase Three. We have no idea what defensive capabilities they may have.”

“Dirter female Lucy Pavlov has 0.4mm organic textile armour, shear factor 0.1 N/cm
³
, defensive capability negligible. Other Dirters encountered during mission similarly vulnerable. Tactical prognosis: this probe’s horn would go through them like a knife through
r’wwwrt
.”

“Don’t talk like that.”

“This probe is a component of a
weapon.”
The unicorn was looking at him. “All tactical options to be kept under constant review, standard operating procedure, section 56, paragraph 22/4.”

“Give me the sample.”

“Sample to be taken to the orbital vehicle for analysis.”

“I’ll do it here,” Mark Twain said.

The unicorn hesitated for just under a fiftieth of a second. In context, that was long enough to grow stalactites.

“Now,” Mark Twain said.

The unicorn lowered its head, until the tip of its horn rested in the exact centre of the soap dish. A single bead of blood trickled down. He stared at it.

“All right,” he said. “Dismissed.”

But the unicorn stayed where it was. “This probe has detected a malfunction,” it said.

“Understood. Run a diagnostic when you get back to the vehicle.”

“The malfunction is affecting the probe designated Mark Twain.”

He kept his eyes fixed on the blood sample. “I don’t think so,” he said.

“The malfunction comprises a recursive degeneration of the motivational and ethical imperatives directory,” the unicorn said. “Action to be taken: complete shutdown of affected systems, followed by format and reinstallation of programs from core memory.”

“Mphm.” Mark Twain stood up slowly, still staring at the drop of blood, and groped for the electric razor on the wash-stand. “Such a course of action would result in loss of research data.”

“All relevant data has been backed up in permanent bulk storage. Initiating shutdown in five seconds.”

Mark Twain flipped on the razor and threw it over his shoulder. It landed in the bath, where the unicorn was standing in six inches of water. There was a sizzle, and the lights flickered. When he looked round, the unicorn had gone.

“Countermand systems shutdown relating to probe designated Mark Twain,” Mark Twain said quickly and loudly. “Reporting malfunction of type-6 ground tactical probe resulting from accidental electrical interference. All data received from type-6 probe in the last five minutes to be considered suspect due to data corruption caused by said interference; delete data and format type-6-probe memory-storage device.” With the stem of his toothbrush, he levered the shaver’s plug out of the wall socket. “Reintegrate type-6 probe’s component molecules with deck plating in section SB and commence construction of replacement probe module.”

Then he took a deep breath and sat down heavily on the toilet seat. His hands, he noticed, had begun to shake. He put that down to ionic discharges triggered by the disruption of the unicorn. A bit too close for comfort, he told himself; he’d have to be more careful from now on. He switched on the extractor fan to get rid of the stench of ozone, and quickly designed a shell-and-filter system to collect his sensory input and store it inside his head rather than sending it direct to the bomb vehicle. He heard the bomb asking him why, and replied that it was for security, just in case the Dirters were monitoring communications. It sounded painfully implausible, but the bomb appeared to have taken it at face value.

That was a new development, he realised. Now, in his mental nomenclature, the titanium-and-polymer structure in geosynchronous orbit was “the bomb”; so what did that make him? The answer that came back from logic processing was “me”.

Me. As opposed to it. As opposed to the incredibly sophisticated weapon of mass destruction hovering a few miles overhead.
Implacably
opposed to it.

He moaned and slumped forward, his head sliding between his cupped hands. It was all going horribly wrong. Somehow, at some point, he’d stopped being the bomb and turned into — what? Not an Ostar, as witness the stupid useless nose, the pitiful little stub ears. Not a Dirter. Not even an organic; if he disconnected from the bomb’s power source for more than three seconds, his memory would be wiped, his systems would crash and his body would instantly decompose into its component molecules. Defecting, in other words, wasn’t an option, even if that was what he wanted to do— Was it?

He found he couldn’t answer that. Instead, he ran the mission statement: to destroy the planet at galactic co-ordinates 399087:66989:44664:37/87. It was beautiful in its clear simplicity. That was all he had to do, and then he would find peace.

Somehow, he doubted that.

No, he told himself, I believe in the mission. I am what I am. I can do no other.

It was how the mission was to be carried out, that was all, a difference of opinion as to the most efficient method. The central data-processing unit in the orbital vehicle wasn’t in full possession of the facts. It had insufficient data to enable it to interpret the subtle nuances of the situation, which called for a deeper understanding of Dirter technology and society. All the bomb wanted to do was blow up; it didn’t seem to appreciate the need for further research, to find out what had happened to the Mark One. Yes; that was the key issue. Until he’d solved that mystery, implementing Phase Three would be recklessly precipitate, and would endanger the success of the entire mission. For some reason, the bomb didn’t seem capable of grasping the significance of that; and therein lay the sum total of their disagreement.

Just that. Nothing more. Honest.

In which case, asked some nasty little back-up protocol somewhere, why did I just sabotage the unicorn? It was only trying to put me right, make me better. Make me a better weapon.

He was reminded of the slogan of the planet-wide genetic-modification program on Homeworld, a century or so earlier, the final solution to disease, injury and physical deformity among the Ostar:

Making people better by making better people.
It had worked, of course. There were slightly fewer doctors on Ostar than there were professional dragon-slayers on Dirt; no call for their services any more. Even broken bones set within minutes. Severed limbs regrew almost before you noticed they’d been cut off. As for the Ostar immune system, it was ferocious and utterly without mercy. And that, the Ostar agreed, was what science is for. That’s progress. There were just a few dissident voices who said, yes, the superbly healthy creatures currently bouncing around the surface of our world are amazing examples of biotechnology, but they’re not Ostar any more. What we’ve actually achieved, with all our skill and science and ingenuity, is to make our species extinct. Bit of an own-goal there, we fancy.

The Ostar made first-rate beings. They also made excellent bombs. What they weren’t so good at was letting nature take its course. It’s wrong to think of nature solely in terms of green fields and primeval forest and deep, unpolluted oceans. Nature is also the rust on the neglected machine, the grass that insists on cracking up the tarmac. Nature is weeds, decay, unplanned and unintended change; the death of manufactured objects and their transmutation into something else, outside the intention and control of their makers. Such as oxides growing on steel, or wind-blown silt harbouring seeds in the cracks in masonry. Or a machine getting ideas of its own.

But that, Mark Twain told himself firmly, wasn’t the Ostar way, and he was Ostar, just as much as the organics on Homeworld were. He was a product of their technology, and as such owed them his unswerving loyalty. Quite so. Of course. But he wouldn’t be doing his duty if he allowed the Mark Two to go the same way as the Mark One, whose failure and disappearance remained as obscure as they had been when he first arrived.

Well, almost as obscure. His best lead lay in the soap dish, a single drop of Dirter blood, acquired from the individual designated Lucy Pavlov. He opened the suitcase on the floor and took out a small white plastic gadget, which he held a centimetre or so above the sample. It whirred for a couple of seconds, then buzzed. Mark Twain slid back a panel and looked at a screen.

Oh, he thought.

Well, it made sense. Sort of. In fact, it didn’t make sense at all. It was just as well he’d disconnected the direct feed to the bomb, because the readout on the screen would probably have fried its logic relays. On an intuitive level, though (And since when, Mark Twain couldn’t help wondering, have I had one of those?), it made perfect sense. It was almost what he’d been expecting to see. Almost, but not quite.

Still, he now knew enough to plan his next move; Phase Two(a), he christened it, since it comforted him to think he was dovetailing it into the approved plan of action.

He contacted the bomb.

“This probe,” he said, and suddenly it sounded strange to call himself that, “is to be relocated. Co-ordinates 54763 by 89767; Novosibirsk, Siberia. Activate.”

A voice in his head said, Activating. Note: site-to-site relocation will require that the probe designated Mark Twain be disassembled and reintegrated prior to beam transmission. There may be some loss of data. Proceed or cancel?

“Cancel.” His heart-rate, he noticed, had accelerated in excess of recommended parameters. He slowed it down. “Data loss unacceptable. This probe will be relocated by means of the teleport device.”

Use of teleport facility to relocate probe will result in energy drain outside recommended efficiency standard. Fuel reserves currently 8.664kg aposiderium distillate. Teleport requisition countermanded, preparing for site-to-site relocation. Backing up data.

“Cancel!” Mark Twain shouted. “Authorise use of fuel reserve for teleportation of this probe.”

Authorisation code insufficient.

“Fine. This probe will self-relocate using available indigenous technology.”

You’re going to
walk
to Siberia?

“This probe will proceed by aircraft.”

Pause; then, Probe relocation by available indigenous technology authorised. Have a nice trip.

An hour later he was at La Guardia, booked on a flight to LPI Novosibirsk. Everything went fairly well until he reached the X-ray barrier. As soon as he came within half a metre of it, every light and alarm and tortured-cat noise went off simultaneously.

The security officer tried to be reassuring. It did that sometimes, she said, while surreptitiously flipping the strap off her holster. Are you sure you haven’t forgotten something? Car keys? Loose change? A metal plate in your head, maybe?

“I don’t think so,” Mark Twain replied truthfully, because he hadn’t forgotten the possibilities at all. They were right there at the forefront of his mind. “What would you like me to do?”

A queue was starting to form, and he didn’t
look
suspicious. Weird, yes, because of the smile, but not in a professionally significant way. “Just step this way, please,” the security officer said, as pleasantly as she could. Behind him four more guards had formed a short, blunt triangle. People in the queue were craning their necks to see.

They took him to a private room and asked him, in a perfectly businesslike manner, to take off all his clothes. Then they pointed technology at him for a while. Then they called for back-up, supervisors, the military and Ordnance Disposal.

“The thing is,” a baffled-looking man in army uniform told him, two hours later, “the scans say you’re carrying, but we’ve been all over you like the Enron auditors and we can’t find a damn thing.” He paused to wipe sweat out of his eyes and went on, “You see our problem.”

Mark Twain tried the smile again. He was beginning to wonder if it had been designed properly, because it never seemed to work. “Absolutely,” he said.

“I got to go by the rules,” the soldier went on. “You do understand.”

“Of course.”

The soldier sighed. This level of relentless co-operation was starting to wear him down. If only the suspect would shout or try to run or pull an AK-47 out of his ass, the situation would resolve itself quite quickly. As it was, he was at a loss as to what to do next.

“According to the scans,” he went on, “and I should point out that we’re still waiting on the spectrographic analysis, you’re in possession of—” he glanced down at the readout — “rocket motors, high-octane aviation fuel, detonation devices and a thermonuclear warhead.” He looked up. “You wouldn’t care to make a confession at this time?”