The Great Game (37 page)

  
"The stars are our destiny," the voice said, the old machine man voice, "and our destination–"

  
"When a superior and an inferior civilisation meet, war can be the only result."

  
"Humanity is a superior race, we have a manifest destiny–"

  
Harry – "No!" cursing, in the dark – "who
talks
like this?"

  
"I – we – you!"

  
He begged for silence, for the dark, but his request was denied.

  
Instead he got: "trajectories – control unit – air pressure in cabin – coordination of group-hive-mind operations – symbiosis – lunar topology – space walking–"

  
Harry: "This is insane. Stop it. Now."

  
"They are coming. We have to be prepared."

  
He was everywhere and nowhere, in a room with controls before him, buttons and dials and switches and levers and slowly he learned to operate them, to read the screens–

  
A place where his body was being spun, faster and faster, pressure mounting on his chest, his body, as though the Earth's pull was increasing–

 
 

 
 
 

"Erich?"

  He blinked, in the darkness.

  His mother's voice, comforting, known…

  But she was not there.

  His eyes opened, and suddenly he could see.

  The world changed.

  He was no longer alone.

 

Stars. The world was full of stars. Harry's consciousness stretched, stretched…

  And a hundred Harry Houdinis opened their eyes…

 

  
He woke up and he was many.

  
He was, he realised, Babbage's army.

 

Harry was sitting on top of a rocket, alone in a control room, the walls closing in on him, the awesome engine power behind him being, in effect, a giant bomb about to go off. His consciousness stretched, across the valley, and he knew, so many things he hadn't known before, when he was one.

  He knew of diesel, and of the vast deposits of the black, thick oil in the Arabian Peninsula, of how it could be used to power machines, and to generate vast, raw power to send men into space itself.

  He knew of the woman they called Alice, in the city called Bangkok, and knew what she had done there. There was a type of metal found in the ground, in India, and smuggled, from under the lizards' snouts, via Siam to this remote valley in Transylvania. Something more dangerous, more powerful and awesome even than Diesel's oil…

  
Uranium.

  What a strange word, Harry, thought, rolling it on the tongue. The control room shuddered, a hundred control rooms shuddered, and Babbage was with him, was inside his mind, woven into this new matrix of Houdinis, his knowledge Harry's knowledge, and he
knew
–

  Decades of planning and scheming, of building and learning, finding out things from first principles–

  And all the time the burning jealousy, hardening into hatred–

  The knowledge that all his work, all his genius, was in vain, that thousands if not millions of years in the past, another race of beings had gone through the same track, had already invented and perfected what Babbage, haltingly, was trying to do. The Bookman laughed at him, making perfect copies, making human machines… while the royal lizards lounged in their gardens, ruling an empire they did not deserve, ignorant even of the science which had made their conquest of humanity possible. To be so advanced as to be ignorant, Babbage thought. A paradox at the heart of a technologically advanced society…

  And he knew, early on he knew, that the lizards, those few on Earth, were not alone. That they had come from somewhere and that, therefore, the possibility existed:

  That one day the others would come, and to them the Earth would be less than a plaything–

  How much further would have the aliens' science advanced in the millennia since the one ship had crashed on Earth, on Caliban's Island, its living cargo frozen in cryogenic sleep?

  And so he planned, he schemed, sometimes with the Bookman and sometimes against him, sometimes with Mycroft Holmes and his organisation, sometimes against him. Collaborating with Krupp, with Edison, with Tesla and the others, and against them, a woven tapestry of conflicting and mutual interests–

  The Great Game.

  The only game worth playing.

  And now–

  The stars.

 

"Ten."

  "Nine."

  "No, wait!"

  From a hundred identical throats:
We are not ready!

  "Eight."

  "Seven."

  "Prepare for launch."

  The rocket thrumming, the very walls vibrating, Harry's palms moist, gripping the mostly useless controls–

  And Babbage's slow, insidious voice, saying, "The greatest escape of them all, Mr Houdini…"

 
 You don't understand,
Harry wanted to shout
. War is not always the answer, in the South Pacific the concept of Peace was sacrosanct, peace before justice, war was a guaranteed extinction, even if there was war it was a civilised affair, a contest between champions at the end of which everyone went off to lunch–

  "Six," the machine voice said, and it was indifferent to Harry's pleas, to all the Harrys, and he saw–

  
A hundred pairs of eyes opening, a hundred pairs of hands holding tight to the controls, a hundred identical bodies sitting on top of a hundred identical rockets, and the flames starting…

  
"Five," the voice said, remorselessly. "Four. Three."

  Harry closed his eyes. Some of the Harrys kept theirs open. One of the Harrys whistled. One cried. One prayed, in the old forgotten Hebrew of his youth. One grinned maniacally. But all of them tense, all of them ready, as ready as they'd ever be–

  "Two," the voice said.

  "One," the voice said.

  And: "
Lift off
."

 

  Harry felt the rocket thrumming, with eyes that weren't his own he could see the rockets sitting on the floor of the Carpathian valley, flames igniting, the mass of fuel burning as the rockets slowly, so slowly, began to rise into the air–

  He gripped the controls, felt his body being pushed back in its seat, then–

  Searing hot flame, a rumble rising from below and spreading, and he opened his mouth in a wide desperate scream, something was wrong, something was terribly wrong, and–

  The flames rose and the rocket shuddered, breaking up, with eyes that weren't his eyes he could see the rocket–

  Only a few feet above the ground it lost control, a fault somewhere in the thousands of components–

  Inside the module on top of the rocket Harry screamed but there was no sound, the flames burst and he felt his body being consumed, like the flicker of a match, like someone snapping their fingers, there was an enormous fireball–

  He screamed but there was no pain, no sight, there was nothing, and a metallic voice said, "One destroyed."

  "Commence tally."

  "Affirmative."

 

And with ninety-nine pairs of eyes Harry watched, the rockets rising, slow at first and then faster, and faster, and he could see, he watched the sky coming closer, the stars above, he was soaring, he was–

  The rocket lost its trajectory several hundred feet above the valley. Harry had only a moment to realise it, to see and feel the cliff-face of the mountain as the rocket, lost to all control now, aimed directly at the face of the Carpathians, trees and dark shrubbery and Harry screamed–

  There was a terrible explosion–

  "Two down," the voice said.

  "Commence tally."

  "Affirmative."

 

  
Three more rockets exploding on launch, two failed to start–

  Harry stood outside the rocket, glaring – up in the sky the rockets trailed smoke, but he was down there, left, forgotten, in that damned Transylvanian valley–

  A mixture of anger and relief and fear and exhilaration – he was alive, but grounded, and he suddenly realised just how much he had wanted this, the greatest feat of escapology known to man–

  
To go into space–

 

Harry Houdini sitting at the controls, the rocket piercing clouds, Transylvania disappearing below as the world
grew
, expanded–

  An explosion somewhere to the right, another rocket consumed in furious flames, another mental scream echoing down the shared mind connection of the Houdini network–

  But the others kept going, even as burning molten debris rained down on the mountains, where a forest fire came alive–

  Down below bears ambled away, troop carriers drove down the mountain dirt paths with water tanks, while up there–

  Up there where the air grew thin, and one could see, for the first time in human history, one could see the curve of the world, could see the truth in what the pre-lizardine, Greek philosophers had already known, that the world was a globe–

  And Harry's breath caught in his throat as he watched continents, oceans, merging and forming like a beautiful unique map, alive with colour–

  And beyond it, as the air thinned, the module heated up, the rocket pushing faster and faster and higher and higher, until–

 

"Stage two," the metallic voice said.

  Charles Babbage in his life-support cloud, in the observation deck, Ground Control, Harry beside him–

  "Initiate," Babbage said.

  There was a terrible tearing sound–

  A grinding as metal separated from metal, up there on the edge of space (but the sound was only internal, outside the air had gone and sound no longer travelled, out there, beyond the thin metal walls, was the vacuum)–

  Harry screaming as the separation of rocket and module did not go as planned, and a hole was punched into the metal and air escaped out into vacuum and Harry's voice was sucked away as he flew out, into space, and died, seeing stars–

  But the others separated and it must have been a marvellous sight, from the telescopes down on Earth, if anyone was watching – a fleet of rockets entering stage two, the rockets dropping away and the fragile modules separating from them and continuing onwards on the generated momentum, higher until they escaped the Earth's gravity well–

  Some circling the Earth while others pushed on, beyond Earth orbit, having reached escape velocity and Harry looked out, Harry looked out into space and he saw the stars, he saw the Earth down below, a fragile beautiful blue and white globe, spinning…

  And the words of an ancient prayer his father the rabbi used to say rose in Harry's mind, the ancient Hebrew words:
Baruch ata adonai, elohenu melech ha'olam, boreh meorei ha'esh
– blessed are thou, God, creator of the flames–

  As the world beyond the module shifted and flared, the thousands upon thousands of stars, like sand upon the shore, so many, he had never imagined there were so many, and Earth shrank behind, became an insignificant speck of dust, of sand, in a vast mysterious unknowable universe when–

  The world shifted, and changed, and the star field
blurred
, suddenly and unexpectedly–

  Beyond the moon's orbit, somewhere out there, between Earth and Mars–

  A great blurring, a hazing, as though something enormous, something as large as a
world
had materialised, in space, its outline blocking out the stars–

  But that was impossible, Harry thought, and the tiny little modules hung out there, in space, as pretty and useless as Christmas tree decorations, and Harry sighed, a great exhalation of air taking with it all tension, and fear, and leaving behind it only a great childish wonder–

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 
 
 

There was blood. That was the thing she couldn't understand, lying there. The blood. The ground was wet and sticky. There had been a lot of pain but now it came and went, in waves, and in between it felt quite peaceful, like rest, or a summer's day, or a dose of opium.

  She couldn't figure out where the blood had come from. Was it hers? Everything was confused, a jumble of images without the proper sound, like at a puppet show where the voices came a moment too late, once the puppets had already moved on the stage.

  There had been a gun battle…

  It had been a war of shadows, the moon cast down shadows and her men engaged the attackers, the ones who had ambushed Stoker, and she had said, "Kill them," and she was not going to leave any alive, save maybe for one, for interrogation. But she had wanted their blood.

  It had been a mistake, she saw now. She had been unprofessional, had lost her detachment in the battle.