Blonde Bombshell (23 page)

On the other hand, she thought, he does have a nice smile. Well, not on his
hand.

“Of course,” Mark Twain said briskly. “Question is, did your system keep a copy, or was the upload signal primed to cover its tracks?”

“Where do you think we should look?” she asked. “In the incoming-calls data buffer, maybe?”

He was learning too, she was pleased to note. He nodded in just such as way as to claim the idea for his own. “I’ll access the stack and take a look. Won’t be a moment.”

He definitely looked extremely sweet when he was busy; a sort of tail-wagging eagerness, like a happy dog. Analyse: well, he’d been designed by Ostar, so maybe that was only to be expected. Even so, it was kind of cute.

“Caller ID withheld,” he read off the monitor. “Fuck.”

She could have told him that, of course. “Oh dear,” she said. “Whatever will we do now?”

He shot her a reassuring smile. She tried not to hold it against him, even though it was the medium-range non-tactile equivalent of a pat on the head. “Not the end of the world—”

“No pun intended.”

“What?”

“Forget it. You think you can do something else?”

“It’s just a matter” — he’d slid to the floor under the monitor; he was levering off an access panel and groping for a set of screwdrivers — “of examining the input-data jumper manifold relay port driver indexing nodes, which should tell us — yow,” he added, as a screwdriver blade skidded on a hard surface and buried itself in the web of his thumb. “Got to pull it apart and reset the points manually,” he went on. “That ought to give us a clue, if we can see where the tell-tale on the output-data-function escapement is pointing. Then it’s just a matter of calibrating and extrapolating using fractal tangential outsway.”

“Remembering to compensate for polaric decay.”

“Sorry?”

“Oh, ignore me,” she said, “I’m just burbling to myself.”

All she could see of him now was the soles of his feet, sticking out from under the bank of monitors. From time to time she heard a grunt, or a clunking noise, or the ping of a small spring-loaded component coming loose and whizzing through the air. Her archive researches prompted her to say, “Do be careful,” to which he replied, as anticipated, with a cheery non-verbal sort of snorting noise. “You did remember to turn off the mains power?”

“Of course I —
aaagh.”
His words were muffled by a loud zapping noise, and a puff of white smoke rose and formed a perfect miniature mushroom just below the ceiling.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes, fine. Would you mind just turning off the—?”

“Sure. Just a second.”

He was a bit more subdued after that, which was a relief. It occurred to her that he really had come a long way in a very short time: from a peripheral function of an Ostar artificial intelligence to a stereotypical human male in a matter of days. Was it that the human mindset was so fiercely dominant that it overrode the Ostar core elements, or was it perhaps that deep down he
wanted
to be human?

Like she had. Presumably.

“I think we’re nearly there,” said a muffled voice from ground level. “If you could just turn the power back on, and then we can —
yeoww!
Turn it off again, please. Ah right, didn’t see you there.”

(They talk to machinery, the database pointed out. This is considered normal.)

“Any luck?”

“Got it.”
He started to spring up, banged his head, swore and slithered out feet first. “I’ve got them,” he said. “The co-ordinates.”

Actually, she was forced to admit, that actually was quite clever. She’d assumed the tracking path would be too badly corrupted to trace. “Wonderful,” she said. “I knew you’d be able to do it.”

He glowed slightly as he tapped them into the nearest keyboard. “Now then,” he said (he had a bit of fluff caught in his hair), “let’s see where this lot’s come from.” He waited till a row of numbers appeared on the screen. Then he frowned.

“Well?” she asked.

He looked up at her, and his face was uncharacteristically hard to read. There were signs of anxiety, confusion, suspicion and quite possibly disappointment. Then he put his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a gun. It was the one she kept in her desk drawer, in case of autograph hunters. He thumbed off the safety catch and pointed it at her.

37

Reykjavik

George Stetchkin woke up.

He didn’t feel too good. His subject was agony, his verb was to hurt and his subordinate clause felt like it was full of malevolent dwarves hammering the pointed ends of commas like wedges into his syntax. His grammar was churning round like a sock in a spin dryer. At any moment he was going to recapitulate.

He opened his eyes. He thought, A sentence can’t do that.

He remembered.

Not a creature of pure text any more. Human again. On second thoughts, not entirely human, because the human body, and in particular the human head, couldn’t stand these levels of pain. He closed his eyes again, a necessary precaution with so much bright sunlight left carelessly lying around where vulnerable people might impale themselves on it.

Memories limped home like the survivors of a decimated army. He remembered teleporting, a curious sensation that had given him a vivid insight into what it must feel like to be a bird sucked into a jet engine. He remembered having a few quiet drinks at the Pink Elephant, followed by a lot of very noisy ones. He remembered dancing on a table, at which the barman smiled and the regulars cheered; throwing forks at the electric fan, which everybody thought was enormous fun; trying to pick a fight with a seven-foot-tall trawler captain called Thorfinn, who backed away and bought him a drink; telling the folks that he used to be a scientist but now he was a banker, whereupon they beat him up and threw him out into the street.

He opened his eyes again and whimpered. The national drink of Iceland is a mutant form of schnapps that goes by the name of Black Death — misleading, George remembered thinking, since it’s colourless. It hadn’t tasted all that wonderful, but he’d kept drinking it until he liked it, because he was that kind of a guy. Determined. Not a quitter. He found a wall, waited for it to hold still, lost patience and leaned against it anyway.

He remembered being a creature of pure text. Now that, he was prepared to concede, really had been a weird feeling, compared with which the current state of his digestion was practically normal. Weird as two dozen ferrets in a blender; but he knew it had happened, it had been real. He remembered escaping — hey, he’d actually been on an actual spaceship, and had actually been beamed back down to Earth by an actual teleport. Something to tell the grandchildren, just as soon as he was ready to be taken away in a van by kind men in white coats.

He remembered being given a job by Lucy Pavlov. He remembered two nondescript men in grey suits, who’d shot him. Twice. He sat down in a conveniently situated gutter and began to shake.

An hour later, he got up and wandered down to the seafront. He still wasn’t feeling his absolute best, but now at least he could endure the cry of a distant seagull without bursting into tears. He sat down on a low wall and tried to think.

At the moment of teleport, something had happened to him. It had been a while since he’d last checked out the latest developments in quantum mechanics, but he was moderately sure there’d been a split second when he’d been transformed from a short, fat, middle-aged inebriate into a wave, or possibly a four-dimensional sine curve, or maybe a form of subnucleonic pulse; anyway, a great weight had pressed down on him and he’d been squeezed out of ordinary 4D existence like toothpaste from a tube. In that moment, at which time he was still partly a creature of pure text, he’d experienced a total interface with the spaceship’s computer. His attention had been elsewhere for most of that very short time, and he’d been too preoccupied to look anything up or take notes. But the interface had nevertheless been total. For that split second, every last byte of data in the computer’s banks had passed through his brain and been copied there.

Then, of course, he’d fetched up in Iceland and had a few drinks, and all the stuff he’d acquired and involuntarily committed to memory had been sidelined, like letters left unopened on a table. Maybe alien data was soluble in alcohol; at any rate, nearly all of it was gone, washed away. Just a few bits and pieces remained, and it was those scraps of intellectual flotsam that had given him an hour’s worth of the shakes.

There was an alien bomb in orbit around the Earth. That much he could quite definitely remember. It was a very big bomb, capable of destroying the planet, and it was on board the spaceship he’d just left. The details of the mission statement had slipped his mind, but he had an unpleasant idea it hadn’t come all this way just to improve its English.

He groped in his flood-damaged skull for more fragments. Lucy Pavlov was involved; in fact, she was right at the centre of it all. He’d had no luck at all trying to piece together the bits of memory shrapnel that might possibly explain what her involvement was, because huge chunks were missing and the bits he had been able to recover made no sense whatsoever. There had, for example, been a whole bunch of stuff about a number of reports from Mark Twain. He’d done a quick Pavoogle search on his Warthog. Since the world-famous author of
Tom Sawyer
and
Huckleberry Finn
had died in 1910, either the bomb had been up there a very long time, or the data had been hopelessly corrupt. Also, when Lucy Pavlov was born, Twain had been dead for eighty years— Unless, of course, Lucy Pavlov wasn’t human.

Well, it was possible. What if the entity known as Lucy Pavlov was a long-term alien infiltrator, planted here a century or so ago to scout out the planet and plot its destruction? An alien could fake her own death, several times if needs be, and pop up again under a new identity. Maybe Mark Twain had found out what she was doing back in the 1860s, causing her to disappear and rebrand herself, delaying the execution of the plot?

He thought about the time lapse. It made sense. How long would it take an alien warship to cross the vast distance between Earth and the distant stars? It all depended, of course, on how far it had had to come and how fast it could travel, but it was by no means implausible that a missile launched in response to a report from an alien infiltrator on Earth in 1860 wouldn’t have arrived until now. Maybe Twain was the infiltrator. Maybe Twain and Pavlov were really the same alien spy, renamed and rebodied. That would fit in quite well with what he could remember of the computer data, which had, he was reasonably sure, referred to reports received
from
Mark Twain, mostly concerning his attempts to find out what sort of planetary defence system Earth had.

It really wasn’t the best day of his life to have a hangover. Undigested scraps of memory and the hydrochloric acid of doubt refluxing through the hiatus hernia of confusion (which reminded him; he checked his pockets, but his packet of indigestion pills hadn’t survived his various metamorphoses) had left his mind a quivering wreck, just when he needed it to be sharp and coherent. The only thing he could be sure of was that something had to be done; urgently, efficiently, and by him.

The last of these three was the worst. It’s proverbial in fiction that only a hobbit can go to Mount Doom, but George had always subconsciously trusted that in real life things would be better organised. In the unlikely event that the world really did need saving from imminent destruction, there had to be trained professionals somewhere who’d take care of it, rather than leaving it to adolescent orphans or small creatures with hairy feet, or what did you pay your taxes for? That, however, was no comfort to George Stetchkin. If there was a highly trained special forces outfit ready and waiting to deal with the problem, he knew he couldn’t simply call them up and leave them to it, because they wouldn’t believe him, not in a million years. He had no proof. He’d sound like a loon, the sort of person he personally would have locked up as soon as he opened his mouth. Sad irony: if anything was going to be done, it’d be George Stetchkin doing it.

A trawler siren made him look up. The sky was low and grey, with a sharp wind rising. The Earth, he thought; the human race. Worth saving? Worth all the effort, embarrassment and risk that involvement would necessarily bring? Wouldn’t it be simpler just to bury his head in a bottle and wait for the explosion? After all, he’d be bound to fail, since he was fundamentally useless at everything, always had been, and sooner or later he’d die anyway, probably alone and wretched, quite possibly in a bar somewhere. Why bother, when it really wouldn’t make all that much difference in the long run?

He tried massaging the sides of his head with his thumbs. Very occasionally, it helped. Not this time.

That argument cut both ways. If he was going to die anyway, what had he got to lose by trying? Question: would his attitude be different if he wasn’t feeling so monstrously hungover? Answer: probably yes. He decided to try an experiment.

It didn’t take long to find a chemist’s shop, where he bought aspirin and antacids, of which he gobbled a near-lethal dose. Then he found a bench to sit on, and waited. Half an hour later, he was prepared to admit that he was feeling a little better. He asked himself the question again. Worth it, or not?

He yawned. There was one factor he hadn’t considered.

He now knew for a fact that there were aliens. Aliens had stolen his dog. Maybe they weren’t the same aliens, but maybe they were; and if they were, he had unfinished business with them. Spying on people, stealing dogs, blowing up planets; what kind of a way was that for anyone to behave? True, his chances of success were catwalk-slim, but that wasn’t the point. There comes a time when a man, albeit a drunken and dissipated under-achiever, has to stand up, even if he has to sit down immediately afterwards.

So, Lucy Pavlov. He considered her, and a gleam of light broke through the clouds of his bewilderment. Why me? Because I have direct access to Lucy Pavlov, that’s why. Pavlov was involved, he knew that for sure. There were only a very limited number of things he could do, but getting to Lucy Pavlov and stopping her happened to be one of them. He still wasn’t entirely sure his hypothesis was correct, but if it was, he could save Earth; and if it was wrong and assassinating Lucy Pavlov made no difference, it really didn’t matter, since the Earth would be blown up anyway.

He reflected on his logic. It was a typical Stetchkin effort, sloppy and inefficient and not properly thought through, but it held together, just about. He made the decision.

Pavlov must die.

A chorus of inner voices told him he was out of his tiny mind. He ignored them. For the first time in his life, he felt certain about something; and, when a passing seagull swooped low and dumped a thick white splodge on the top of his head, he accepted it as an omen, a kind of benediction. George Stetchkin, the anointed one.

Pausing only to wipe his head with his sleeve, he hailed a cab and headed for the airport.