Darkship Renegades (29 page)

MOTHER I’M FRIGHTENED

My hair did stand on end, and I was, for a moment, frozen in place.

I didn’t think anything about it. Thinking didn’t come into it. Two instincts warred in me, the first being to console the creature speaking in that little voice and demanding comfort. The second was to kill it.

I’m not going to justify myself. I don’t think I could. I think fear of the mentally ill, like the uncanny valley effect that makes people afraid of things that are almost human but not quite, is one of the oldest instincts of humanity. It was what had made humans create the server bots shaped like columns with extrudable arms, instead of the humanoid creatures of ancient dreams. It was also probably responsible for the survival of the species.

No? Think about it. When a mentally ill proto-human was aggressive to others and large, how hard would it be to exterminate an entire band of hominids? Its own tribe, its own people?

I was sure that most of the legends of possession and were-animals came from incidents like that and were designed to allow people to do what must be done—kill the loved one who had become a danger—and go on living with themselves.

Compassion to the mentally ill and attempts at treatment were much more recent instincts, from a time when population had become so large and science so advanced, that killing those who might become irrationally dangerous was no longer a matter of life and death.

But now I was in a small room with someone who could easily overpower me, and he had clearly gone around the bend.

How did I know he had gone crazy? Easy. The voice that spoke was Jarl’s, but Jarl had never had a mother.

I swallowed hard, then said, in a whisper, as though attempting to communicate with a co-conspirator, “Kit?”

There was a little whimper, as Jarl tried to pick himself up off the floor, and seemed to be having trouble controlling his arms and legs. “Mother? Where are we?” And then in a completely different voice, “Irena, is that you?”

Uh uh. I was locked in a small room with six feet plus of crazy. Forget that we didn’t have food or drink. Forget that we didn’t have any way to get out of here, and that if we managed it, we would have to contend with the devil-machines created by a computer that had also gone around the bend, probably centuries ago, I was locked in a room with someone who could easily take me out for whatever irrational reason it conjured.

Normally it would be a great opportunity to hit him on the head and render him unconscious. No, even I wouldn’t have killed someone for going crazy. What can I say? Despite the barbarian princess weapons, I had grown up in a relatively safe and prosperous society. I had the prejudices of the civilized.

Besides, hitting this particular crazy on the head might simply eliminate what remained of my husband. If he wasn’t gone already, under the double onslaught of the nanocytes trying to turn him into Jarl and whatever these electronic spiders were telling the nanocytes to turn him into.

I wouldn’t think of that, though. I would simply somehow reach the computer and turn it off. But there was that reality thing again. How was I going to reach the computer that these machines were designed to keep safe? More than that, how was I going to get out of this room?

I realized light was decreasing and looked towards the window, and then it hit me. The window!

“Jarl, what are the windows in this compound made of?”

“No one helped me get out,” he said, sounding defensive. “You have no reason to punish everyone. It was my doing. No, I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to look at the area around here. I didn’t…No. Please don’t.” The last was a scream, and when I looked over, Jarl’s eyes were blank, and he seemed to be lost in some dreadful memory. His voice sounded young, but not like a child’s, and it didn’t take much imagination to picture him defending himself before one of the managers of the home he’d grown up in. I didn’t want or need to know any more than that.

I did, however, need to know if that window was breakable.

At some point between the twentieth and the twenty-fifth century, windows had changed from being made of clear transparent glass to being made of ceramite or, in the case of high-tech or high-security applications, of transparent dimatough. Mind you, lots of windows were still made of glass even in my time, because it was so much cheaper than ceramite, but this had been a high-end recreational compound. More than that, it had been taken over by a high-end paranoid, which meant that I could count myself very lucky if the windows weren’t made of dimatough.

Here was how things stacked up, though—while glass would be relatively easy to break, ceramite was almost impossible. And dimatough…well, you could melt dimatough with very specialized torches, but I didn’t have even a laser at hand.

I wished I could remember when transparent ceramite had become viable for windows. I knew the first type of ceramite created had been a sort of gingivitis-pink and smooth. It had been used to create rounded houses which were known as mushrooms. But I didn’t know how much longer it had taken for it to replace glass, or for it to become cheap enough to be used for windows.

If I had known how much I’d need it, I’d probably have devoted my misspent adolescence to learning the history of materials science, instead of learning about and exploring new ways to ride an antigrav wand in defiance of the law.

But that was all beside the point, and what did I intend to do about it, right then? I could improvise a way to climb to that window from the shells of machines scattered around me. But what if I got up there and there was nothing doing? What if Jarl, just before leaving in the
Je Reviens
, had replaced the windows with transparent dimatough?

And what if he hadn’t? What was I doing sitting around here, besides thinking that I’d really like some steak, anyway?

I forgot the imaginary steak, and the desired bottle of water which for some reason seemed even more attractive. Instead, I started piling up the broken machinery so I could reach the window.

Jarl talked to himself, his voice ranging through his life, from child to adult, his mind seemingly wandering at random through memories—his and Kit’s both.

“And if they mean to tell me how to pilot when none of them is a Cat, I’ll tell them where to shove it,” Kit’s voice said, followed by Jarl’s. “I was out…I was just…I was out, you see, and now they’re rounding up…they said something about escaped Mules. Lady, I’m not a Mule, please, save me. If the police catch me—”

It made my hair rise on end, that voice, the words that didn’t refer to anything in this room, anything in reality on Earth for the last few hundred years. I didn’t want to hear this, and I didn’t want to think about it, but the only way out was through that window, which frankly might be too small for me.

As I managed to reach the top, I decided to try the easiest method first. I took one of the larger hammers, drew back and banged the window hard.

I never expected it to work. Glass seemed the least likely thing for that window to be made of.

The thing is, it wasn’t. The window didn’t shatter like glass, not even safety glass. Instead, when the hammer first hit it, it seemed completely intact. And then within less than the time it took me to draw breath, it cracked and crazed, and it seemed to…splinter. Like wood under the action of acid, it seemed to disintegrate into its component fibers, until only a few threads of it were attached to the frame.

I felt the threads, which were like steel wool. Ceramite. Ceramite must become fragile with age. At least this type of early, transparent ceramite spun this thin.

I wouldn’t know. Again, I didn’t spend my adolescence studying materials science. A failure of the imagination, just like the people who had designed hotel machinery and had never thought that killing-force lasers might come in handy. Absent time-travel, neither were remediable.

I knew that the mushrooms made in the twenty-first century still stood. At least those with historical significance still stood. So, I was going to assume that some ceramite didn’t disintegrate with age. But this one had, and it was no use complaining about it.

“Sinistra!”

The voice made me jump and turn, but it was Jarl, who remained slumped as he’d been, though he still seemed to be making efforts to get up. It was like his legs didn’t both belong to the same person. Hell for all I knew, even a single one of his legs might not belong wholly to the one person. It must be getting crowded in Kit’s skull.

“’Xander! What did you do? How could you—”

Among the things I didn’t want to know, not wanting to know what Daddy Dearest had done back in the days when Jarl sounded like his voice was just changing from boy to man ranked somewhere pretty high. I could probably think of better things to do, like chewing my nails to the elbow.

But before I left here, I did need information that had to be locked in Jarl’s skull. “Jarl!” I called.

“Mother?”

Right. This was going to be fun. I tried, tentatively, the mental reach,
Kit? Kit, my love, I need help.

There was no answer, which, I realized with a pricking of tears in my eyes, might very well mean that Kit was now and possibly forever beyond the reach of my mental voice. It was entirely possible that he’d gone to find out that answer to what existed after death. Or could one find that out while one’s body was alive?

I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to know. But I knew that Kit, my husband, would never fail to respond when I asked him for help. “Jarl, you loon, what did you improvise to keep that computer from sending peripherals after us in the entrance room?”

“But you see, it’s not hard at all to rewire the sign so the hologram is different,” he answered, in the tone he used when giving technical instructions. “It’s just that making the angel fly away is somewhat difficult. No, the hologram can’t work once it’s away from the base, so of course the hologram can’t really fly away. But I can make it turn, and then diminish in size, and to most people, particularly when it’s above their heads, the effect will be the same as flying away.”

The effect in this case was for me to realize that I couldn’t count on help. Not from Jarl, not from Kit, and certainly not from whatever bit of Jarl had gone into the computer.

I tried to call my husband again.
Kit!

There was no answer. I didn’t expect any answer. So why did it feel so lonely, after all?

I didn’t want to ask and I didn’t want to know. I arranged the machinery again, so I could climb all the way up.

A head, poked out the window, showed me that there were no skittering electronic spiders outside. Instead, there was a gentle grassy slope amid birch trees. At least, I was almost sure that the trees were birch, though I’d like to point out I also didn’t spend my teenage years learning about botany. Frankly, now that I thought about it, I’d more or less wasted my youth.

Wriggling out the window was easier than I thought. I scraped myself pretty badly on the steel-wool-like bits clinging to the window frame, but that was good because it distracted me from the fact that I was starving, dying of thirst and very scared.

I put my hands through the window opening ahead of me, so that when only my feet remained in the room, I could use my hands to break my fall.

To the last moment, I expected Jarl to grab my feet, though of course the only reason he would do that would be if he were in thrall of the computer.

He didn’t. From what I could gather from his mumbles and complaints, he hadn’t even managed to get up from where he was sitting.

Which was just as well, since if he did he might think he could fit through that window. Who knew, after all, what personal image was in his head from wherever it was that the memories were coming from?.

But there was no way that he could fit through the window when I barely did, so I hoped he didn’t try it. He might be crazy. He might even be dangerous. But he was still occupying the only body my husband had. And if he got stuck I would have to find a way to get him out, which might get in the way of my other objectives, which were: figure out a way to keep the spiders away from me, then figure out a way to destroy the computer, or at least to disconnect it from its power source. I didn’t want to destroy the knowledge in it if I could help it, since Jarl had more or less admitted that not only did it contain his research on how to grow and transplant powerpods with less than the effort needed for the initial powertrees, but that it contained research on nanocytes of the sort he had used in his forlorn bid at immortality.

I didn’t know what those nanocytes would be, exactly. It couldn’t be exactly the same he had come up with centuries later. But he thought it was enough to give us a clue, since he’d wanted to erase it. Whether it really was enough or if Jarl was overestimating everyone else, as geniuses tended to do, I didn’t know. The chance of something being there was enough to keep the computer safe from me. But its active central, its malevolent personality had to be disconnected. Or maybe not malevolent, just bored and playful. And, yeah, totally insane.

I fell gently on the outer side of the window, got up on shaky legs and walked down the slope.

First things first. Before I undertook to fight a super intelligent computer with my bare hands, some improvised knives and some really nifty hammers, I had a date with river water. And then I was going to find the tree that Jarl had shown us when we were here before, the one loaded with ripe apples. And then I was going to figure out how to rescue Jarl from the computer and Kit from Jarl. And then we were going home. Eden was our home, and we were going to recover it.

BREAKING MIRRORS

When my immediate needs were satisfied, I took the long way around to the entrance room to the compound. The door was open, as Jarl had left it, which was good. While it was possible to disable a genlock with a laser and then do your best to push the door open by brute force, I doubted it was possible to open a genlock with a prehistoric knife and shove my way into the room when the door wouldn’t budge an inch.

I still took care not to walk in through the obvious path, but to sidle up to the door from the side, then inch in.

I know that Jarl—and Kit—had said that he’d made it impossible for the peripherals to come into the entrance room. But I also knew that the peripherals—presumably—had built a trap for me, and ended up with me hanging suspended from a tree. So, while it might have been set before Jarl had blocked its access to the entrance room and through it to outside, how did I know that it hadn’t set more traps that I hadn’t managed to activate before?

Whatever the machine was doing to Kit’s body and Jarl’s mind, it was clearly a matter of the greatest urgency that it not be allowed to go on.

I slipped into the front room without incident. It was as we’d left it. Still good.

It took me a moment to assess the room. I’d never paid much attention to it beyond the apparatus that Jarl apparently used to spy on people, but now I noticed that there were other features to it, including what looked like a large desk pushed against the far wall. It had probably, at one time, been a reception desk to the resort this had once been. But it had been pushed out of the way and the things on it looked not at all like something you’d find in a resort. There were gems, a gem reader, a little electronic pad of the sort we still used in Eden centuries later. And there were also piles of paper, a litter of pens and pencils, and a container filled with what looked like little metal spikes whose use I could probably divine, if I had enough time and needed to. Right then, though, I didn’t have enough time, and I didn’t care.

Instead, I rummaged through the drawers, and the little doors in it, looking for anything that might be useful. Jarl was a packrat. This didn’t surprise me. Being untidy must be genetic. Kit had a tendency to throw his dirty clothes around the
Cathouse
, instead of vibroing them. I normally ended up cleaning them in self-defense. He also had collected things, though not as much of a litter as Jarl had in these drawers.

There were pens, pencils, three pocket knives, a box full of what looked like very old currency, more gems.

A letter headed
Dear Jarl
, made me pause because it was Father’s handwriting, all pointy and jagged, and for a moment I paused. I didn’t read the letter. Reading correspondence from a dead man to a man who was supposed to be dead was no part of my interests. But the first line of it was impossible not to read, as it fell under my eyes,
I’ve taken care of the little matter you assigned me. Quite an interesting…

Yes, I was curious. No, I didn’t have time for this. I pushed the letter aside, and pushed on. There were three injectors; I wondered for what. Jarl, either in the accounts of him or in the admittedly fractured personality I’d met these last couple of months, didn’t strike me as a recreational drug user, even if it had been more or less an acceptable social habit in the twenty-first and twenty-second centuries.

The injectors were completely devoid of inscriptions and the colors were not in any scale I knew—and I’d been very well acquainted with the color scale for medicines, from both some casual trade and from my stay in various institutions. I suspected the color coding had changed, and what was contained in these could be anything from antihistamines to heart medicine. Which was too bad. It was entirely possible some of these could come in handy. You never knew, and it was my policy to keep most drugs I came across in this kind of situation.

Perhaps there was a drug there for using in taking crazy computers and crazy dead geniuses from your husband’s head. So, fine. It was unlikely. But a girl could hope.

Another letter, this one from Doc Bartolomeu saying, “Sorry the stomach trouble is back, but I’ve told you it’s just tension. You need to give yourself permission to be only human.”

I laughed. Clearly even Doc Bartolomeu had illusions about Jarl.

Under that letter, in the second-to-last drawer, was a tool set. And under that were twin burners. They were things of beauty, with carved silver handles and inlaid mahogany stocks.

I’d heard of ornamental burners, but I’d never owned any. Father had a set with gold-plated stocks, but nothing as fancy as this. By the time I’d become interested in weapons, most burners were completely utilitarian, molded in dimatough.

These had a J and an I, entwined, in fancy script, on the stock. I would guess they had been a gift and possibly, judging by the crazy junk my father had accumulated, a diplomatic gift. More to the point they were both fully loaded and charged. And there was a little holster next to them. I strapped it on, above the war hammers.

In the very last drawer there was nothing but piles and piles of paper written in a distinctly feminine handwriting. If I wasn’t going to read the letters of a dead man to a man who should be dead, I also wasn’t going to read the letters of a dead woman.

No, I had no reason to know she was dead, but look, what else could she be? It had been three hundred years, she wasn’t a Mule, and Earth didn’t have the rejuv tech that Eden had. If she were now a cyborg, I didn’t want to know either.

I closed the drawer slowly and turned to matters of importance.

First, I needed to figure out where that computer was. And then I needed to figure out how to keep the stupid spiders away.

Fortunately my facility with machines is truly high and not exactly rational.

To explain, I don’t just understand machines I’ve studied. It would be easier to say I understand the way engineers think, so I can usually figure out how to turn on something and how to prod around and discover what it does.

Even then it took me much longer than I wanted to figure out how to work the spy machine. I’d gone on the assumption that if it could spy on people far away and follow various humans in the compound, it might also be able to look into the unoccupied rooms of the compound.

Once I started poking around I figured that this machine had had its beginning before the place had fallen into Jarl’s hands. It had been, I thought, a way for the managers of the hotel to look at various areas. Possibly it had even been used for a little blackmail by recording wealthy guests in compromising positions.

More likely, though, it had been used to make sure no one was vandalizing the rooms and setting fire to the beds. I understand most hotels, even in my day, had something of the sort, though the good hotels didn’t activate the system unless there was some emergency, like a guest locked in a room and threatening to commit suicide.

Jarl had expanded the machine, added to it and updated it, but he’d never bothered to extirpate the central components or functionality. And why should he have? After all, Jarl then—and probably now—was paranoid, and this machine gave him the opportunity to look into every nook and cranny of his more or less secret domain, right?

It took me a while to figure out how to focus on the rooms of the resort. The top two floors could be ignored. Nothing but dusty rooms with falling-apart furniture in them. It looked still like a place that had once been expensive and opulent, but now it looked like any ruined, abandoned house. The next floor was the same, though one room was in pristine and clean condition, bed turned down, adjacent fresher done up with marble bathtub, a shimmering shower enclosure with swan-shaped faucets, and polished glimmering floors. Probably Jarl’s room when he stayed there. I was going to guess the other rooms had been abandoned in his time. Since he had no intention of having guests there, why wouldn’t they have been? I wondered if Jarl had clothes there. I didn’t like being naked. Or rather, I didn’t like being naked when I had to crawl through tight, scratchy places and drag myself on dirty floors. Clothes for protection would be nice, even if Kit’s clothes fit me as well as a spacesuit fit a chicken.

But there was no time for that either. The floor below that—the ground floor where I was at the moment—was well kept, mostly storage rooms. It was also filled with spiderlike things, skittering and chattering all over the walls. One room, on the far end, had a broken outer window. And Jarl. Jarl was still trying to rise and still failing. His lips were moving, his eyes looked panicked, and all I could do was hope that my husband was still in there somewhere.

Then I realized he had somehow managed to reach and get hold of one of the pieces of machinery I’d left strewn around. It wasn’t one of those that could be easily made into a knife or a hammer, but it was squarish and had a jagged edge. As I looked, he waved his hand around holding it.

For a moment I thought that he was fighting off an invisible enemy. Then I realized that he was aiming it at himself, and though I had no proof, nor could have it, something about the way he swung that thing around gave me the impressions he was trying to cut his own throat. Fortunately, his aim was as good at that as his ability to get up. So far he’d only managed to give himself light scratches on the forehead and nose.

I thought he would end up putting an eye out, and Cat eyes were near impossible to regenerate even if the optical nerve was intact. I was going to have to make haste.

If I could, I’d go back in there and tie him up to keep him from harming himself. But going there by the window was impossible. There was nothing I could climb on to get to it. And going there through the interior would need a disruptor of some sort. It might be quicker to turn off the computer than to get to Kit.

The computer—in a quick scan of downstairs showed—was in the furthest corner. Its door was sealed, except for small holes through which the tinier peripherals entered and left. The bigger ones mounted guard outside the door.

Uh.

I went to the door of the entrance room to examine what Jarl had done to keep the bugs away from this room. It think I expected something arcane, of the sort used to bar anything alive from outside coming into the resort, unless it were gen unlocked.

Turned out, though, that it was just little wave emitters. Electronic disruptors. Of course. If the peripherals talked to the computer it had to be through electronic, wireless communication. Disrupt those and they would be deactivated.

That I knew how to build, and how to make a little more powerful than the ones on the door. A little more powerful because I’d need to deactivate a wide enough area around me not to waste my time fighting them.

So I rummaged through Jarl’s desk again, found the components I needed. Judging from their disarray, he’d done much the same. I used the little tool kit to assemble them.

Assembled, they were spheres about the size of marbles, which I attached to my belt.

I’d go by the room I escaped first, I decided. I’d take the burner to soften the seal and see if I could open it. After all, it would take more time to get to the computer, and I wanted to make sure Jarl didn’t kill Kit. The man really did have an unacknowledged passion for suicide.