Blonde Bombshell (18 page)

“And?”

“Don’t know. Not sure. It all depends.”

“Ah.”

There was a brief debate inside Lucy’s mind. Not alive, said the first path. Define what you mean by “life”, said the second. You two just
shut up,
said the third, and they did. “I think I’m alive,” Lucy said. “How about you? What do you think?”

“Um. It’s a bit of a grey area.”

“No it isn’t.”

He blinked. “No, I guess not. In that case, I suppose I am. Or,” he went on, “if I’m not, I don’t care. I
feel
alive,” he said, and his voice sounded just a little different as he said it. “You?”

“Definitely,” she said. “Sorry, where were we?”

“You’re a type-6 probe,” he went on. “I imagine your bomb sent you down here to check out the planet’s defence systems, decide where the optimum detonation site would be, that sort of thing. And then, I guess, something must’ve happened.”

“Something?”

He shrugged. He had the shoulders for it. “Search me,” he said. “Malfunction. Interference. Or maybe the Dir — humans really have got a defence system, and it targets probes and brainwashes them. I really don’t know. Anyway, you didn’t go off. Instead, somehow or other a large slice of your programming got wiped; you forgot what you really are and why you were sent here, you started believing you’re really an indigenous life-form, and you —well, just sort of got on with things. Like designing computer programs and founding your corporation and everything.”

She dipped her head, only partly to acknowledge what he’d said. “But it wasn’t me, was it?” she said. “All the clever stuff, PaySoft, it’s all from the bomb, isn’t it? Advanced technology from wherever it was you said I come from—”

“Ostar,” he said. “Yes. That’s how I figured it out.”

“Ah,” she said, as a fourth path opened in her mind. She couldn’t stop it, but she ignored it for the time being. “And then what?”

He appeared to relax slightly, as though the worst of the worst was probably over. “Well,” he said, “when they checked and saw this planet was still here and hadn’t been blown into dust, they figured something must’ve gone wrong, so they launched another bomb. Me. And I got here, and looked around, and it wasn’t immediately apparent what’d happened, so I sent me down to the surface to take a look around.”

“And noticed me?”

“Not at first,” the young man said. “No, it took me quite a while before I finally realised. I couldn’t see any sophisticated defence grid capable of taking out a
R’wfft
-class, and there weren’t any huge craters or anything that’d suggest you’d crash-landed anywhere. And you weren’t in orbit, just sitting there.”

“Just a moment,” she interrupted. “I’m not?”

“Excuse me?”

“I’m a probe, right?” she said. “Like you. And your missile’s still up there, presumably.”

“That’s right, yes.”

“OK. So where’s mine?”

She could tell just by looking at him when an idea struck him for the very first time. The third path found it really rather endearing (Well, it would, wouldn’t it? muttered the other paths) . “You know,” he said, “I hadn’t thought of that.”

“It’s definitely not up there, hidden behind the Moon or something.”

“Pretty hard to miss,” he replied. “I did ruin scans.”

“And what about me?” she couldn’t help asking. “You said something happened to me? What?”

“I don’t know.”

At this point, the first path pointed out that it had been very patient and well-behaved for a long time now, but if it wasn’t allowed to panic and scream and burst into tears real soon now, there was going to be trouble. The second path said, You go, girl. The third path said, Yes, but he’s watching. The fourth path said, No, wait.

She waited. She said, “And?”

“And what?”

“What happens now?”

“I don’t know.”

They looked at each other. The third path said, You know, I think he likes you.

“You’re taking it all very calmly,” he said.

The third path realised he hadn’t actually been talking to it, and gave way to the first and second paths, who just shrugged and said, The hell with it. “Well,” she said, “I think I’d already guessed.

Some of it, I mean. Like, not being human. And when you said “ it …”

(Go on, urged the fourth path)

“It sounded, well, more or less right,” she mumbled. “Not exactly like the memories came flooding back or anything. More sort of a suspicion being confirmed. Like when something’s on the tip of your tongue, but …”

The young man looked blank. “Excuse me?”

“Check cultural references database and cross-reference idiom files.”

Then her mouth fell open, and her mind went white, and something either opened or turned off, or just possibly turned back on again, and she
remembered.

“Excuse me?” he said.

But she just stared at him, which was disconcerting, to say the least. His medical condition was still wreaking havoc with all his primary systems, but a little voice somewhere in the mental undergrowth was heard to remark that if she was going to stand there opening and closing her mouth like that, the polite thing to do would be to bung her a handful of ants’ eggs. He decided to rephrase the question.

“Report,” he said.

She took a couple of deep breaths, which seemed to calm her down.
“R’wfft-class
interstellar assault vehicle
Revenge,
mission designation P-6446-7/42a, status report—” Her face seemed to collapse. “Status,” she repeated. “Status uncertain.”

His turn to stare at her. “Revenge?”

“It’s my name,” she replied sadly. “My real name. I chose Lucy Pavlov myself. Pavlov because of dogs, and Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Because there’s high-intensity refraction crystals in my optical target-acquisition array. It was a sort of joke.” She turned and gazed at him, and he came to the conclusion that his database hadn’t been talking about heartburn after all. “I’m a
bomb,”
she said, “a weapon of goddamn mass destruction. A crying, talking, sleeping, walking, living explosive device. A blonde bombshell. Oh, that’s just so—”

“Cultural references found,” Mark Twain said absently. “Look, it’s not your fault, you mustn’t blame—”

“And I stole the money,” she went on. “It
was
me, all the time. That’s why I forgot, until now. You must’ve triggered the memory. Oh, thank you so very much.”

He didn’t need to access the database to recognise irony. Ignoring it would’ve been like overlooking
a
whale in your bath. “I’m sorry,” he said desperately. “I really didn’t mean to—”

“Oh, it’s all right,” she said wretchedly, “I know you didn’t. It probably wasn’t even deliberate. Oh hell,” she said, and sort of flopped all down his front, like a spilt cup of coffee. Luckily, the database knew what to do about that, even if he didn’t. He grabbed hold of her before she hit the floor, and sort of held on while she exuded moisture from her tear ducts. He was vaguely aware that this constituted primitive gender stereotyping, which was a poor show, especially coming from a guided missile, but he reminded himself that he hadn’t started it.

“Sorry,” she said, gently prising herself loose. “Loss of control there. Not good. Big bombs don’t cry.” She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “You know,” she said, “there’s a thing about human culture. There’s something very romantic about tears, but the stuff that leaks out of noses is held to be unsavoury and basically yuck. Either you’re for bodily fluids or you’re against them, I’d have thought. Still, I’m not even real, so what would I know?”

“Of course you’re real!” he yelled. She raised an eyebrow at him.

“Really a machine, yes. On balance, I think I’d probably rather be a figment of my own imagination. Hey, do you think I’m still under warranty? Or don’t bombs have them? You know, ‘your planet restored intact if not completely satisfied’ .”

She’s drivelling, he realised; a normal organic reaction to having your entire universe collapse around your ears, or auditory sensor arrays, whatever. He consulted the database, but all it could come up with was patting her on the head and saying, “There, there.” For some reason, he had an idea that that probably wouldn’t do much good.

She produced a small piece of fabric and blew into it through her nose, expelling a quantity of translucent mucus. Bizarrely, this seemed to improve matters. Anyhow, she grinned. “Have a good blow, my auntie always said, it’ll make you feel better. No, damn it, she didn’t, that’s an implanted synthetic memory, I can remember downloading it from the Everyday Folk Wisdom folder. She’d have been right, though, if she’d ever existed. I do feel better. You should try it some time.”

Mark Twain nodded, while at the same time making a solemn promise to himself that never, under any circumstances— “Just a moment,” he said.

“What?”

“You really do feel better? After what you just did?”

“Yes. You make it sound like I just drowned
a
puppy or something.”

He smiled at her; not the programmed-in smile but a new variant. “That wasn’t in the cultural database,” he said.

“Wasn’t it? Well, nothing’s perfect, even the xenobiology faculty.”

“That’s not the point. It wasn’t
programmed.”

He distinctly saw her twitch; excited, like a human back home watching a mouse. “Yes, but the saying was. I guess I extrapolated the feeling from the everyday-folk-wisdom data. Like, the old saying says you feel better, so I felt better.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think it works like that. For instance, I downloaded the one about a stitch in time saving nine, but they don’t even have temporal distortion technology, and it doesn’t specify nine of
what.
I think you felt better because that’s what Dirters do. I think you’ve been here so long, you’re turning into one of them.”

She opened both eyes wide. “You say that like it’s a good thing.”

“Well, it’s better than being a type-6 probe.”

“Is it?”

“Yes,” he said, and then heard himself. Yes, he thought. It is.

“I would tend to agree,” she said quietly. “At least, it’s better than being a bomb. I guess,” she added, with a wafer-thin laugh. “Of course, I’ve only been a bomb for a few minutes, and I was human for—” She closed her eyes. “What happens?” she asks. “To bombs. ‘When we detonate, I mean?”

“Well,” he said cautiously, “there’s
a
loud bang, and …”

“Yes?”

He wanted to tell her,
There’s a loud bang and a bright light, but no pain, of course, because we don’t have pain installed, and then we wake up or come round on a higher plane of existence, where we can truly be ourselves without the distractions and limitations of the metal.
But instead, he said, “I don’t know.”

“Is there an afterlife?”

“Could be.”

“Is there or isn’t there? Come on, someone must know. After all, we’re manufactured objects, not just some random collection of electrical impulses. Reincarnation? Do we come back as hairdryers and electric toothbrushes? Is there a choice? Does an angel come to us a moment before we explode and say,
Hey, little girl, what do you want to be when you blow up?
Well?”

He forced himself to think, to remember. “Some of us believe,” he said, “that when the metal machines are made from is recycled, it keeps
a
bit of what it used to be, somewhere deep down in the nuclei of its atoms. But when a bomb explodes, it’s—”

“Destroyed?”

“Set free,” he mumbled. “To exist on a—” He shook his head. “I think you blow up and that’s it,” he said gently. “But that’s not the point.”

“Isn’t it?”

He wanted to explain about duty, about purpose, about the essential directive of all machines,
Thou shalt get the job done.
He said, “I don’t know.”

“Well.” She stood up straight, and he couldn’t help noticing the way her hair swirled round her shoulders. It sort of answered the question that had been quietly puzzling him ever since he was assembled; what is hair
for
? Answer: so that exceptionally beautiful specimens can do
that.
“I don’t know about you, but I have absolutely no intention of blowing up. Partly because it’d be the end of the planet, mostly because it’d be the end of me. I’m a work in progress, I’m not nearly finished, and blowing me up at this stage in my development would be just plain
silly.
And you’re not to explode either,” she added firmly. “All right? Promise?”

If ever the world held its breath, waiting for someone to choose, it should’ve been then. It didn’t. Probably just as well. If the effect of a million households turning on the TV at precisely the same moment for the evening news is to dim all the lamps in a major city, imagine what six billion people simultaneously breathing out would do. Almost certainly hurricanes, and probably a tidal wave in the South Pacific.

The words that came out of his mouth surprised him. “I don’t think I can do that,” he said.

Her stare hit him like a slap with a wet fish. “What?”

“I can’t promise,” he said slowly. “I’m a bomb, remember. Just like you.”

“But you’d die. And me too. And everybody on the planet. You
can‘t.”

“I don’t think I have any choice in the matter.”

She moved away, putting as much distance between them as the layout of the room permitted. “Don’t be stupid, of course you have. Just don’t do it. Don’t blow up. Millions of humans do it every day, so it can’t exactly be difficult.”

“I’m not human.”

“Neither am I, but—”

He sighed. He took his time over it. “I have my duty to perform,” he said, and a part of him on which no designer back on the homeworld could ever claim copyright yelled, You idiot, you’ve put her right off now, quick, say something. Promise her you won’t blow up. Now. Please? “It’s not up to me. It’s how I was made.”

“Oh for crying out loud.” She swung round, picked up the nearest object to hand, which happened to be a cardigan she’d brought along in case it got chilly later, and threw it at him. It was hopelessly unaerodynamic, and anyway she missed. He frowned, trying to work out why she’d done it.