Gods of Riverworld (40 page)

Slowly, it came to him that she must have sent the android out first. And the idiot Computer, identifying her as the real Star Spoon, had sent the past-display along by her side. Then the real woman had emerged from her hiding place … she must have muffled her features in a hood or masked them … and she had come up an unmined shaft.

There she was, coming around the corner of the intersection from the corridor where Li Po and Gull were stationed. She was, as he had expected, inside a spherical armored flying machine, the duplicate of the android’s. If she had been masked, she was not how. Unlike the android, her face was expressive, set in a demon’s smile except for the lips, which moved as she talked to herself.

The machine came to the middle of the corridor just past the walls of the shaft—he could see through its openings—and it stopped, then made a quarter-turn so that she faced down the corridor. What had happened to Li Po and Gull? Were they still groggy from the explosion? Or had they foolishly attacked her as she passed them? He had no way of knowing; he would have been deaf to any cries.

The machine, moving six feet above the floor, came to the one closed door. It stopped and turned. A barrel slid out from the box beneath the seat, went through a hole in the sphere, and shot out a violet liquid. His mental processes were still sluggish; he should have recognized the fluid at once as the sealant. She was entombing the people that she believed were in the suite. Or, if she was not sure they were in there, she had to carry out this operation anyway.

He saw Alice’s dark head stick out from the half-open door. She ducked back after a very quick look. Star Spoon, intent on moving the vehicle along the sides of the door of Burton’s suite, had not seen her.

He could distinguish a glowing patch on the wall beside Star Spoon. That had to be the display of her memory. The Computer, after the android had disappeared in the explosion, had switched the display to accompany the real woman. Now that she was closing in for the kill, she did not care if they knew where she was. Perhaps she wanted them to know so that they would venture out to attack her.

Li Po, a beamer in his hand, stepped out into Burton’s sight. Seeing the woman, he stepped back. He was fortunate that Star Spoon had not noticed him or his past-display, which would have appeared on the wall of the bay opposite him.

A small TV set was mounted on her left. She would be in communication with the Computer and would be using it to find out if the five were loose, and, if they were, to track them down.

By now, the violet liquid had hardened over the door and the wall area around it. He expected her to turn the machine down, but she did not. Instead, she started to repeat the sealing process. Evidently, she wanted the door to be doubly unmovable.

He had a minute, perhaps two minutes, before she began searching. He strode to the e-m converter and gave instructions to the Computer. He was not worried that Star Spoon would be listening in or be able to learn anything of his activities or location at this moment. He had long ago told the Computer that it was not to reveal anything about himself or his companions to her. She could scan all the rooms in the tower, and she would not be shown this room. However, the refusal of the Computer to scan would give her negative knowledge. If he was not in the rooms scanned, then he must be in one of the other rooms.

He opened the converter, stooped, and picked up with one hand a gray doughy mass, 3.75 pounds of the plastic explosive. After carrying this to the doorway and putting it on the floor, he went back to the converter. He shut its door; two seconds later, he opened it. The proximity fuse lay on its floor. Going back to the doorway, he inserted the long, thin metal rod protruding from the small metal box into the center of the mass.

He set the fuse by voice and looked around the door again. He said, “Oh, my God!” Star Spoon had somehow determined that Alice was in her room, perhaps with a heat-and-sound detector. Alice had done the only thing she could do, closed the door with a codeword. And Star Spoon was sealing it.

Burton jumped out from behind the door, aimed the beamer, and saw the ray, a bright scarlet rod with a diameter of one-fourth of an inch, leap from the bulb at the end of his weapon to the side of the transparent sphere. If the ray could have pierced the shield, it would have gone through Star Spoon’s head near her left ear. Instead, the armor glowed at the point, and she saw it at once. She moved a control on the board by her right hand. The vehicle, rotating, moved away from the door, stopped, and shot toward Burton.

36

He turned and ran close to the wall, hoping that the second door would block him from her view. If he could avoid being hit, if she came by the door just as the explosive went off, if he could get inside the next door before it did … He wanted to look behind him to calculate the velocity of her vehicle. She might have accelerated to the point where she would pass the trap before it exploded. But he could not afford to glance behind because it would slow him, and there was nothing he could do about it anyway.

He grabbed the edge of the door and swung himself around it so vigorously that he banged his left shoulder on the doorway and was spun halfway around. Two scarlet rays shot past the door. Probably, other rays had hit the door.
No matter,
he thought.
I’m in.
Another shock wave knocked him down, but this one had far less impact than the first.

He got up, praying, and, clinging to the edges of the door, looked around it. Since there was not much smoke, he could clearly see the vehicle against the wall opposite the doorway where the charge had been placed. The explosion had thrust it across the corridor and slammed it against the wall. Star Spoon was unconscious. Burton watched as the car resumed its original speed, grating against the metal wall, and collided with the wall at the next intersection. There it stuck.

Li Po and Frigate, beamers ready, ran around the corners and up to Burton. “I boobytrapped her,” he said. “But we have to get her out before she comes to.”

“Where’s Alice and Gull?” Frigate said.

“No time for that,” Burton said. “Pete, have the hypodermic syringe ready. Po, you come with me.”

Frigate removed the syringe from the case attached to his belt. While Burton held his beamer ray steady on one point of the armor, the Chinese ran to the nearest room to order from the converter a ladder and two stepladders to use to climb up to the car. Burton wanted to take her alive, but he hoped that, if she showed signs of rousing, the hole would have been burned through the shell so that he could put a hole through her body.

However, Li Po returned quickly, and they burned off the hatch locks while she lay unmoving. Burton crawled in, took the syringe from Frigate, blew the drug into her arm, and used the controls to ease the vehicle to the floor. They carried her into the nearest room, placed her on a bed, stripped her, searched her clothes, and then put her in the converter so that the Computer could probe her neural system. It reported that her brain was too complex to be an android’s.

“I’d say we have her,” Burton said. “Only … what if she’s anticipated this possibility and ordered the Computer to make a false report? She’ll be alive somewhere in this labyrinth.”

“I don’t believe that she would consider that possibility,” Li Po said. “She must have believed that she was invulnerable in her armored vehicle. You have to take some things on faith.”

“No, I don’t.”

Though he thought that Li Po was right, he intended to search the tower thoroughly. Not until then would he be at ease about her.

Leaving Frigate to watch the woman, Burton and Li Po burned off the sealant over Alice’s door. Though not hysterical, she needed a long drink to quiet her nerves. She had thought that she might be imprisoned in the room forever or at least for a time that would have seemed forever.

On the way back to the room where Star Spoon was, they saw Gull’s body lying faceup on the floor of the corridor. Li Po explained that Gull had been caught by a ray from the vehicle as Star Spoon was pursuing Burton.

“He must have left the room just as I dived into mine,” Li Po said. “I don’t know why he did it. He told me just before we took our stations that he could not use his beamer. It was all right to kill the androids because they were not human beings, but he could not fight Star Spoon.”

“He should have said so at once and stayed with Alice,” Burton said.

“I think that he probably went out into the corridor to plead with Star Spoon,” Li Po said. “He was as crazy as she.”

After conferring, they decided that it would be cruel to lock Star Spoon up in a room with the hope of curing her insanity. Questioning the Computer, they learned that the cryogenic techniques of the Ethicals far surpassed those of Earth. She could be frozen instantaneously without tissue damage, and so she was. Star Spoon would wait in her casket until the Gardenworlders arrived.

After a day of rest, they began the search. The first room they went to was the one she had left when she set out to finish them off. The Computer would not directly give them the location, but it immediately yielded the records of the passage of the orange light on the diagrams. Entrance to the room on the one hundred and sixteenth level—the Ethicals counted the stories from the top instead of the bottom—was easy. Star Spoon had not closed the door, because she had thought that only she would be alive when her mission was accomplished.

They went cautiously into a very large room with halls running off it in two directions. There were five rooms off each hall, all but one with closed doors, which would not open at Burton’s request. Though he could not get into them, he could see into them by simply asking the Computer for screen vision. And he wished that he had not been so curious.

The only one of the all-male prisoners, one in each room, whom he recognized was Dunaway, the man who had raped Star Spoon in Turpinville. The others were three Chinese, two Caucasians, an Amerindian, two Negroes, and a Neanderthal. Li Po knew one of the Chinese.

“He is Wang Chih Mao, a minor official of the emperor. I met him once. Star Spoon later told me about him. He is the man who raped her when she was ten years old.”

Four of them were gibbering insane. Two seemed to be close to going crazy. Dunaway was one of the two who had retreated into catatonia. The ninth was hiding under the bed and would not come out when Burton called him via the screen.

Burton watched the past-displays on the ceilings, floors, and walls of all the rooms. Over and over again, as seen through Star Spoon’s eyes, the rapings were shown on large screens, in living color, and at high volume. The men could escape these only by sleep, which would not have come easily, by madness, or by death. Suicide was almost impossible. They were naked and so could not make nooses from their clothes. Their converters gave them only bread, boneless meat, and vegetables. Except for the beds, which consisted only of frame and mattress, there was no furniture. The bathrooms had a seatless toilet and a faucet for cold water above a small bowl. No soap, no towels, and no toilet paper.

Alice shuddered. “She got her revenge. Horrible!”

“Poetic justice,” Frigate said. “Gotten with the aid of science.”

“There’s nothing we can do for them,” Burton said, “unless we can shut off the converter power and let them starve to death.”

Questioned, the Computer said that it could not do that without Star Spoon’s authorization.

Finding nothing revealing in the main room or Star Spoon’s bedroom, they began working the areas that the Computer refused to scan for them. Though they came across twelve such, they could not get into the rooms that they knew were behind locked doors or blank walls. At the end of three weeks they quit. There was still another place to investigate, the vast deep underground preresurrection chamber in which Burton had awakened so many years ago. But they could not get into this.

“Neither could Star Spoon,” Burton said.

Now that the immediate major problem was out of the way, they had to consider their future. They could not get out of the tower, and they could bring in no lovers or companions. They were three men and one woman who would have only each other.

The years ahead of them, Burton thought, were not just bleak. The future was a psychic Siberia, an emotional Ice Age. It was true that the four of them had known one another intimately for many years and had gone through many hardships together and had worked as an excellent team—none better—for their goal. They were getting along now without suffering the abrasions that usually wore people out with one another’s too-close and too-often contact, but, eventually, they would grow sick of one another. They must have more than a community of four. They would need lovers and good friends and the occasional new person to meet.

“Man does not live by bread alone,” a wise man had once said. He could also have said that no one lives, truly lives, without others to talk to, many others.

By the time that the Gardenworlders came, the four would be twisted, cranky, eccentric. Strange. Odd hermits. Stir-crazy.

There was also the problem of sexual release. Alice would not take all three as lovers, or even one. Alice firmly believed that to be a lover, you had to be in love.

One evening, the men sat on chairs on a balcony of the castle in Burton’s world, where all were living for that month. The artificial sun was ten degrees above the artificial west horizon, and they were having their drinks while they waited for Alice to join them. Li Po had said that the longer time went on, the less repulsive was the idea of making beautiful female androids programmed to be bedpartners.

“You’d know that they were not truly human, that they’d be submorons,” Frigate said. “You couldn’t talk to them as you would to a real woman. You’d know that their passion was simulated, mechanical, and unconscious. OK, so you’d get sexual relief. But that’s not enough.”

“True,” Li Po said, “but they’d be better than nothing.”

“Would they?” Burton said.

Alice came onto the balcony then. The men dropped the subject, not because Alice would have been embarrassed by its nature but because she would have felt bad that she could do nothing to help them. They talked about what they had achieved during their studies that day, Burton with his investigations into the dialects that had formed the Urmother of the Semitic languages, Li Po in his studies of English and French, so that he could read their poetry, Frigate in his study of every motion picture that had been made (or at least preserved by the Ethicals), and Alice with her newfound passion of painting with oils.