Forever Free (22 page)

"Here to trade?"

"Just here. Take us to some people."

A double door in the thing's side swung open. "I can take you to the spaceport. I'm not allowed on roads, without wheels."

We entered the thing and four large windows became transparent. Once we were seated, the door closed and the thing backed up, turned around, and lurched toward the other end of the long strip, moving fast. It walked on twelve articulated legs.

"Why don't you have wheels?" I asked, my voice wavering from the carrier's jerky progress.

"I do have wheels. I haven't put them on in a long time."

"Are there any people in the spaceport?" Mohammed asked.

"I don't know. I've never been inside."

"Are there any people in the world?" I asked.

"That is not a question that I am able to answer." It stopped so abruptly that Matt and I, facing forward but not belted in, were almost thrown from our seats. The doors sprung open. "Check to make sure you have all your belongings. Be careful upon exiting. Have a pleasant day."

The spaceport main building was a huge structure with no straight lines; all sweeping parabolas and catenaries, with facets like beaten bright metal. The rising sun gleamed orange from a hundred shiny surfaces.

We walked hesitantly toward the DIIJHA/ARRIVALS door, which for some reason slid open upwards. Walking through it gave me a guillotine kind of anxiety. The others hurried, too.

It wasn't quiet. There was a soothing sound like modulated white noise, pulsing in a rhythm slower than a heartbeat. There were chimes at the edge of perception.

The floor was littered with clothes.

"Well," Po said, "I guess we can turn around and go home."

Antres 906 made a hissing sound I'd never heard, and its left hand tuned in a continual slow circle. "I appreciate your need for humor. But there is much to do, and there may be danger." It turned to Marygay. "Captain, I suggest at least one of you return to the ship for a fighting suit."

"Good idea," she said. "William? Go see if you can catch that thing."

I went back to the arrivals door, which wouldn't open, of course. There was a MOSCH / TRANSPORTATION door a hundred meters away. When I went through it, the carrier minced up, clattering. "I forgot something," I said. "Take me back to the ship."

Putting on fighting suits used to be dramatic and communal. The ready room would have mounting harnesses for as many as forty people; you'd strip and back into the suit, hook up the plumbing and let it clamshell shut around you, and move out. You could have the whole company in suits and, theoretically, outside fighting in a couple of minutes.

When there's no harness and no hardware, and the suit isn't customized for your body, it's neither quick nor dramatic. You squirm this way and that and finally get everything in place, and then try to close it on your own. When it doesn't close, you go back a few steps and start over.

It took almost fifteen minutes. I walked down the gangway, clumsy at first. The carrier doors opened.

"Thanks anyhow," I said. "I think I'll walk."

"That is not allowed," it said. "It is dangerous."

"I'm dangerous," I said, and resisted the impulse to tear off a couple of its legs, to see what would happen. Instead, I started running, invoking the suit's strength amplification to give me a broad-jump lope. It wasn't as smooth and automatic as I remembered, but it was fast. I was at the spaceport door in less than a minute.

The door wouldn't open for me, sensing that I was a machine. I walked through it. The shatterproof glass turned opaque, stretched, and ripped apart like cloth.

Marygay laughed. "You could have knocked."

"This is the way I knock," I said, amplified voice echoing in the huge hall. I turned it down to conversational volume. "Our odd men out went to find their Trees?" The sheriff and Tauran were missing.

She nodded. "Asked us to wait here. How's the suit?"

"I don't know yet. Leg amplifiers work. Okay on doors."

"Why don't you take it outside and try out the ordnance? It's pretty old."

"Good idea." I went back through the hole I'd made and looked around for targets. What would we not need? I set my sights on a fast-food stand and gave it an order of fries, with the laser finger. It burst into flame in a satisfying way. I flipped a grenade at it and the explosion sort of put out the fire by scattering the pieces.

The personnel carrier came mincing up, accompanied by a small robot with flashing blue lights. It had PARKING POLICE stenciled on front and back.

"You are under arrest," it said, in a huge stentorian voice. "Surrender control to me." That was followed by some almost ultrasonic warbling. "Surrender control to me."

"Sure." I chambered a rocket, which the heads-up thing called MHE. That's not an acronym we used to have. I assumed "medium high explosive" and squeezed it off. It did vaporize the parking robot and leave a crater two meters in diameter, in the process knocking the personnel carrier on its back.

It righted itself by rocking back and forth until it tipped onto its spidery feet. "You didn't have to do that," it said. "You could have explained your situation. You must have a reason for this arbitrary destruction of property."

"Target practice," I said. "This fighting suit is very old, and I had to know how well it works."

"Very well. Are you finished?"

"Not really." I hadn't tried the nukes. "But I'll hold off with the other systems until I have more real estate to work with."

"Real estate outside of Spaceport?"

"Absolutely. There's nothing in here small enough to destroy."

It actually seemed to pause, integrating that statement into its world view. "Very well. I will not call the police again. Unless you destroy something here."

"Scout's honor."

"Please rephrase that."

"I won't hurt anything here without telling you ahead of time."

It sort of threw a mechanical tantrum, stamping its many feet. I supposed it was generating conflicting orders. I left it there to sort things out.

The sheriff came back to the group the same time I did.

"The Whole Tree gives no warning," he said. "There's no sense that anything was going wrong."

"Just like home?" Marygay said.

He nodded. "More complex things are going on," he said, "and the Tree is still trying to make sense of what has happened."

"But it hasn't," Po said.

"Well, now it has new information. What happened to us, out in space, and to Middle Finger. And Tsoget. It may be able to piece something together."

"It thinks by itself?" I said. "Without people connected to it?"

"It's not like thinking, exactly. It just sifts things; makes things more simple for itself. Sometimes the result is like thought."

Antres 906 had returned. "I have nothing to add," it said. Maybe we should have turned around and gone home. Begin to rebuild from what we had. Both the sheriff and the Tauran would have been in favor of that, I think, but we didn't ask them.

"Guess we ought to try a city," Marygay said.

"We're right next door to what used to be the biggest one in the country," Cat said, "at least in terms of acreage." Marygay cocked her head. "Spaceport?"

"No, I mean big. Disney!"

Marygay and I had been to Disneyworld, as it was still called, in the early twenty-first, and it had been large then. The one we'd gone to was now just one element in a patchwork of "lands"—Waltland, where you visited in groups, and a simulacrum of the place's founder took you around and explained the wonders.

The carrier had amiably agreed to produce wheels, and it got us to the outskirts of Disney in about twenty minutes. The perimeter of Disney was a huge ring, where parking lots for the patrons alternated with clustered living areas for the people who worked there.

You were supposed to park, evidently, and wait for a Disney bus to take you inside. When we tried to drive through an entrance, a big jolly cartoon robot blocked it off, explaining in a loud kiddy voice that we had to be nice and park like everyone else. It alternated Standard and English. I told it to fuck off, and after that all the machines spoke to us in English.

Goofy was the robot on the third one we tried. I got out in my fighting suit. It said, "Ah-hyuh-what have we here?" and I kicked it over and pulled off its arms and legs and tossed them in four directions. It started repeating "Hyuh … that's a good 'un … Hyuh … that's a good 'un," and I pulled off the meter-wide head and threw it as high and far as I could.

The living areas for the staff were blocked off by holograms that were only partly successful now. On one side we had a jungle where cute baby monkeys played; on the other, a sea of Dalmatian puppies running through a giant's house. But you could see dimly through them, and sometimes they would disappear for a fraction of a second, revealing identical rows of warren housing.

We came out in Westernland, a big dusty old town from a pre-mechanized West that once existed in movies and novels. It wasn't like the spaceport, with clothing scattered all around. It was very neat, and had a sort of dreamlike ordinariness, with people walking about in period costume. They were robots, of course, and their costumes showed unusual fading and wear, plastic knees and elbows showing through frayed holes.

"Maybe the park was closed when it happened," I said, though it would be hard to reconcile that with the thousands of vehicles in ranks and files outside.

"The local time was 13:10 on April 1," the sheriff said. "It was a Wednesday. Is that significant?"

"April Fool's Day," I said. "What a trick."

"Maybe everybody came naked," Marygay suggested.

"I know what happened to the clothes," Cat said. "Watch this." She opened the door and threw out a crumpled piece of paper.

A knee-high Mickey Mouse came rolling out of a trap door in the side of a saloon. It speared the paper with a stick and addressed us, finger wagging, in a scolding squeaky voice: "Less mess! Don't be a pest!"

"We used to throw stuff all around it and get it confused," she said.

The carrier was up on its toes again, to maneuver more easily through the narrow streets, and it tiptoed through this strange land of saloons, dance halls, general stores, and quaint Victorian houses, each with its retinue of shabby busy robots. Where there were wooden boardwalks, the robots had worn a light-colored trail a couple of centimeters deep.

There were broken robots frozen in mid-gesture, and twice we came upon piles of several helpless robots, their legs sawing air, where evidently one had stopped and the others tripped over it. So they weren't true robots, but just mechanical models. Marygay remembered the term "audio-animatronic," and Cat confirmed that two hundred years after we'd been there, the old-fashioned technology had been re-introduced for nostalgia and humor.

One universal anachronism was on the buildings' roofs, with solar cells covering the south side. (A more prosaic anachronism was that every building, even the churches, had something for sale.)

At least it made the business of food and shelter simple. There was enough frozen and irradiated food to last us several lifetimes, most of it more interesting than our survival rations, if less nutritious.

We decided to spend the night at Molly Malone's Wayside Inn. Marygay and I were surprised to see, behind the registration desk, a price list for sexual services. Cat said all you got was robots. Clean robots.

But then our own robot, the carrier, delivered its own larger surprise. We went back out of Molly Malone's to get our bags, and there they were, lined up neatly on the boardwalk.

And behind them, instead of a machine, stood a ruggedly handsome cowboy. He didn't look like the worn-out robots, but he didn't look quite human, either. He was too big, over seven feet tall. He left deep footprints in the dust, and when he stepped onto the boardwalk, it creaked alarmingly.

"I'm not really a carrier," he said. "Not any kind of machine. It was just handy to look and act like one, down at the spaceport."

He talked in a slow drawl that I recognized vaguely from childhood, and then it clicked: he looked like the actor John Wayne. My father had loved his movies and my mother despised him.

While he talked, he rolled a fat joint of tobacco. "I can be the carrier again, or whatever thing or organism we need about that size."

The Tauran spoke up. "Please demonstrate?"

He shrugged and produced a large wooden match, and scratched it alight on the sole of his boot. Sulfur dioxide and, when he puffed the joint into life, the acrid tang of tobacco. I hadn't smelled it in thirty years, or thirteen hundred. Cigarettes, they used to be called.

He stepped back three giant strides and blurred and flowed into the shape of the carrier. But he kept the colors of blue jeans and leather and held the smoldering cigarette in a human hand that grew out of the top.

Then he changed again, into an oversized Tauran, still holding the cigarette. He said something to Antres 906 in rapid Tauran, and then changed back into John Wayne. He took a last puff and pinched the cigarette out between thumb and forefinger.

None of us could come up with anything intelligent to say, so I opted for the obvious: "You're some kind of alien."

"Actually, no; nothing of the kind. I was born on Earth, about nine thousand years ago. It's you guys who are creatures from another planet."

"A shape-changer," Marygay whispered.

"Like you're a clothes-changer. To me, I'm always the same shape." He twisted his leg around to a break-bone angle and looked at the boot sole. "You don't have a name for us, but you could call us Omnis. The Omni."

"How many are you?" Po asked.

"How many you need? A hundred, a thousand? I could turn into a troop of Campfire Girls, as long as they didn't mass more than two-some tonnes. Maybe a horde of locusts. But it's hell to get them all back together in one bunch."

"You people have been on Earth for nine thousand years … " Max began.

"Try a hundred fifty thousand, and we aren't people. We don't even look like people, most of the time. I was a Rodin sculpture in a museum for more than a century. They never could figure out how the thieves got me through the door." He laughed, and John Wayne split down the middle, and re-formed as two museum guards in uniform, a petite young woman and a fat old man.