Brass Man (34 page)

‘Stalek, it moved.’

‘Of course it moved, vacuum brain. It’s waking up.’

Briefly, the Golem achieved wholeness through his diagnostic programs, and with great precision viewed his surroundings. He was in a box of a room with bare brick walls, three metres high by seven wide to his left and right, and eight point three metres wide in front and presumably behind. The door directly ahead was close-grained wood—probably from one of the thousands of varieties of oaks prevalent on many worlds (a list scrolled down in what might once have been the Golem’s superego). Trying to stand, the Golem met resistance and, looking down, noted thick ceramal clamps binding his arms and legs to a chair of a similar material. He raised his head and focused his attention on the two men.

He knew which was which because he had located the source of each voice while his diagnostic and repair programs acted as mediators amid the bickering crowd inside his head. The first to have spoken was an aviapt: an adaptation the Golem understood, from his reference library, to be quite uncommon. The man’s eyes were those of a hawk, his face beaked, and small feathers layered his skin. Adaptation technology not being sufficiently advanced to enable a man to fly in Earthlike gravity, he did not have wings. This bird man was operating a Cleanviro auto-assembler and machiner in an area divided off by benches laden with equipment. From what the Golem could see of the touch console and screen inset in this bathysphere-like machine, the man was powder-compressing and case-hardening ceramal components.

Stalek was of a more standard appearance: a melting-pot human with just a hint more of the oriental than was usual. Unlike the bird man, who was clad in a padded shipsuit, he wore a wide-brimmed hat, long coat and fingerless gloves. Only on noting this attire did the Golem think to check the temperature in the room, and found that it would be cold for humans.

‘Am restrained,’ the Golem said, then coughed three times and closed its right eye.

‘It spoke,’ said the aviapt.

Stalek looked at the bird man as if studying a particularly fascinating variety of stupidity, then with a puzzled frown turned to the console and screen on the table before him. The small rubber dog attached to the upper edge of the screen seemed the only one in this room who had attention to spare for the Golem. Embarrassed, the bird man focused again on Cleanviro.

‘Repeat: why am . . . restrained?’

After a short delay, Stalek lifted his gloved hands up from the console and gazed across at the Golem. ‘You are restrained, Mr Longshanks, because if unrestrained you would attempt to return to your masters at Cybercorp. And we don’t really want you going back there.’

The Golem abandoned the conversation to a recalled Turing analogue, its own weird conception of self wandering around in the confusion of its skull.

‘I must return. I have my indenture to Cybercorp to work out before I can become a free Golem and choose where to be and what to do.’

‘Listen, machine, I’m not going to get into any pointless debate. We are going to make a few alterations to you, then your new owners will come and collect you.’

‘I am the property of Cybercorp and will not work for anyone else.’

Stalek grinned nastily. ‘You will when I’ve finished with you. You will actually commit murder for your new owners.’

‘I am incapable of taking human life.’

Inside his head, the Golem’s self-perception leaped from submind to submind at a frequency not dissimilar to a giggle. The untruth was just the sort of comforting balm it should feed to humans at every opportunity. The truth was some memory of morality which had no power over him.

Stalek pushed his chair back and stood up. As the man walked around the table, the Golem self divided into the subminds controlling its eyes. It noted that the man wore thick leather lace-up boots—very anachronistic footwear.

‘No,’ Stalek said, ‘you are capable of doing whatever you like, yet your mind is structured in such a way that you choose not to commit murder, but choose to abide by ECS rules. In fact you choose to be a good little citizen. This programming, though tough to break,
is
breakable. Ever heard of Serban Kline?’

The Golem searched his uploaded memory, and fragments of self, and came up with nothing. He shook his head.

‘Not surprising,’ said Stalek. ‘You probably get the nicely historical ones like Jack the Ripper, but not the more modern ones. The fact is that they could completely fill up your memory space with information, but they prefer you to find out some things for yourself -helps you develop your own personality. Well, in total, Serban Kline killed a hundred and eight women. He was clever and it took ECS years to track him down. They found him with his hundred and ninth victim, who he’d had for two weeks. They managed to give her back her face and body, but they never managed to restore her mind. In one of her more coherent moments she later chose euthanasia.’

‘Do not understand the relevance of serial killer,’ said the Golem.

‘Kline went for mind-wipe, and that is what happened to him, but not before a very naughty individual at ECS had made a memcording of Kline’s mind.’

‘For forensic psychiatric study,’ said the Golem.

‘No, for black VR entertainment. Amazing how much some people will pay to be a monster for a little while. Trouble is that they discovered Serban’s recording tended to drive into psychosis those experiencing it, so after a while it didn’t sell so well.’

‘Why are you telling this?’

‘Because I’m going to load a Serban Kline memcording straight into your silicon cortex. After a while you won’t be concerned about your indenture, or ECS law.’

The Golem decided it did not like the name Longshanks’ and so tested its bonds to the limit, but found that they were firm. Fear of losing itself was quite irrelevant. The Golem did not know what ‘self was.

- retroact ends -

* * * *

Consciousness was immediate, whereupon Thorn said, ‘Seems I’m still alive. The nanobots worked?’

‘They worked, Patran Thorn—you are human again,’ answered the disembodied voice of Jack.

Staring at the ceiling, Thorn tried to understand how this confirmation made him feel. He realized he felt the sadness of an addict freed from addiction—knowing the power of the narcotic, and that he could never go back.

Sitting upright, he surveyed the medical area and wondered how much time had passed. Sliding back the thin sheet that covered him, he inspected his naked body and saw no sign of drastic surgical intercession, but he did feel battered, slightly ill and weak. Slowly swinging his legs off the surgical table, he paused before standing up.

‘You have been unconscious for eight days,’ Jack informed him, ‘and since your . . . incapacity a number of things have occurred.’ Jack went on to detail them, while Thorn padded over to a wall unit, scrolled down a menu and called up a disposable shipsuit and slippers, which he took from the dispenser and donned. Then, from the same unit, he ordered coffee, but instead got a tall carton of some sickly vitamin drink—and quickly drank half of it. The AI’s voice tracked him as he left Medical, stepped out into the decorous corridor and headed for the dropshaft. By the shaft’s entrance, he looked around for somewhere to discard the carton.

‘Just throw it on the floor,’ Jack told him.

This he did, watching as something like a glass beetle scuttled out of a small hatch opening up at the bottom of the wall, caught the carton even before it hit the floor, and scuttled back again. He shuddered, stepped into the shaft.

There was only one occupant on the bridge, whom it took him a moment to recognize. ‘Cento,’ he said eventually.

‘Thorn.’ The Golem nodded to him, then turned back to face the spectacular view.

To the right, the giant incandescent orb of an F-class sun filled half their visual field. It was milky emerald, with the contrasting yellow of a titanic flare looping out from its surface, and other fires of orange, red and violet rippling out from a pox of sunspots like mosquito bites turned bad. To their left, a dark dwarf sun revolved with slow dignity, turned jade by reflected light, with the flickering dots of meteor impacts occasionally appearing on its matt, and apparently smooth, surface. Between the two suns, the occasional rocky moonlet—or maybe planet, as there was no real sense of their scale -tumbled through space.

‘It can loosely be described as a planetary system.’ Cento gestured: ‘The brown dwarf is small enough and cool enough to be defined approximately as a planet, and its mass is such that it orbits the sun here. Jack’s contracted the view so we can see both of them. In reality, if they were as close as they seem to be, they would be drawn in towards each other in a matter of days, and the cataclysm would be visible a thousand light years away, a thousand years hence.’

Cento now turned to Thorn, then glanced beyond him. Thorn himself turned as Cormac stepped out of the dropshaft.

‘I had hoped,’ the agent said, ‘that Jack would have finished scanning this system by now.’ He grimaced. ‘We had to check it, even though it seemed unlikely that either Dragon or Skellor would be here.’

Thorn rubbed his face—he still wasn’t up to speed, and he desperately wanted that coffee.

Cormac went on, ‘Of course Skellor could be present on any of those planetoids, under a chameleonware shield. We are actually looking for Dragon, and by finding him will eventually find Skellor.’ He looked up at the brown dwarf. ‘Anything more, Jack?’

‘Excuse the delay.’ The AI’s automaton suddenly came to life, tilting its head back to take in the external view. ‘On one of the planetoids exists a species of rock-boring worm, and a deeper scan was required to confirm that its tunnels were not the result of draconic pseudopodia.’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’

The automaton turned to frown at Cormac. ‘Must I explain to you the interaction of solar and U-space mechanics?’

Thorn watched as, with something odd in his expression, Cormac gazed out at the F-class sun. The agent replied, ‘No, you don’t. It’s a matter of extra minutes only on our departure time, which could add or subtract days from the duration of our next journey.’ He tilted his head, reaching up to press the tips of his fingers against his temples. ‘The solar gale will hit soon, and the distortion wave can carry us out, accelerate us . . .’

There were tides and currents in U-space, Thorn knew, and sometimes leaving a system later meant your subsequent journey took less time. Now, by his expression, Thorn realized Cormac must be conducting a silent conversation through that damnable impossibly functioning gridlink of his. Then the view winked out and he felt the strange slew of the
Jack Ketch
in a direction he could neither see nor indicate. Cormac still stood with his eyes closed and his fingertips to his temples. Thorn thought he himself must still be suffering the after-effects of surgery when the agent wavered and grew thin, so it seemed Thorn could see the drawing room showing right through him. Then, for a fraction of a second, Cormac was gone, then reappearing a pace to the left of where he had been standing -and Thorn knew that what he had seen was real but inexplicable.

* * * *

Sunrise usually quelled sleer activity, but this morning not so much as usual. Light cutting down the canyons and ravines now revealed a world of violently contrasting colour. As always, there were the beige, pink and sepia tones of the surrounding sandstone below the turquoise sky, but now dark green and purple shoots were spearing up everywhere from the ground, light-green roundish leaves ringing their bases, and nodular yellow growths spattering the butte faces and spreading to smear together in resinous masses. And the armoured brethren and prey of the sleers were also appearing.

Readying Stone for departure, Tergal observed a line of four small sand gulpers hoovering their way down the canyon towards them, sand spewing from their throat sieves as they worked, and only stopping when they lifted their heads to swallow vegetation compacted in their crops. He also noticed a large rock crawler, its piton feet wedged into stone while it sucked up yellow fungus with twin trumpet-shaped siphons.

‘Maybe we should try to get to a drier area,’ he suggested.

The changes in their relationship were quite plain. Anderson was not treating him very differently – still discussing things, still imparting his encyclopedic and sometimes boringly extensive knowledge of the fauna and flora—but Tergal knew he was now on trial and there would be no appeal. Out here, if Tergal fucked up, he knew the knight would kill him. But Tergal’s respect for Anderson had increased tenfold. He realized he wanted this man’s good judgement.

‘My intention entirely,’ Anderson replied as he strapped himself into his saddle up on Bonehead’s back.

‘Which way?’ Tergal asked.

‘No idea.’ Anderson shrugged. ‘If we just continue towards the Plains we stand as much chance of coming out of this as anywhere else.’ He rapped his goad on the shell immediately behind his hog’s raised sensor head. It extruded an eye-palp towards him as if to say it knew they were setting out and there was no need for his impatience, then it stood and, with a steady gait, tramped down the canyon towards the sand gulpers.

The gulpers, without even looking up, parted to allow the sand hogs passage, then closed together behind them. As he and Anderson moved on, Tergal observed something else, with thin fragile legs at least three metres long and similarly elongated pincers, reaching up sandstone faces to pluck down both yellow fungi and rock crawlers, stabbing both with its siphon pincers to suck them dry.