Aces High Page 10

  The android lowered himself from the table and stepped to a metal cabinet. He swung open the door. “Flux-field insubstantiality,” he said, taking a plug-in unit off the shelf. With it he could control his flux generators so as to rotate his body slightly out of the plane of existence, allowing him to move through solid matter. “Flight, eight hundred miles per hour maximum.” Another unit came down, one that would allow the flux generators to manipulate gravity and inertia so as to produce flight. “Radio receiver tuned to police frequencies.” Another module.

  The android moved a finger down his chest. An invisible seam opened. He peeled back the synthetic flesh and his alloy chestplate and revealed his interior. A miniature flux generator gave off a slight Saint Elmo’s aura. The android plugged the two modules into his alloy skeleton, then sealed his chest. There was urgent chatter on the police band.

  “Dr. Travnicek,” he said. “The police radio reports an emergency at the Central Park Zoo.”

  Travnicek cackled. “Great. Time for your debut. Take your guns. You might get to hurt somebody.”

  The android drew on a flexible navy-blue jumpsuit. “Microwave laser cannon,” he said. “Grenade launcher with sleep-gas grenades. Magazine containing five grenades.” The android unzipped two seams on the jumpsuit, revealing the fact that two slots had opened on his shoulders, apparently of their own accord. He drew two long tubes out of the cabinet. Each had projections attached to their undersides. The android slotted the projections into his shoulders, then took his hands away. The gun barrels spun, traversing in all possible directions.

  “All modular equipment functional,” the android said.

  “Get your dome out of here.”

  There was a crackle and a slight taste of ozone. The insubstantiality field produced a blurring effect as the android rose through the ceiling. Travnicek gazed at the place on the ceiling where the android had risen, and smiled in satisfaction. He raised the bottle on high in a toast.

  “Modern Prometheus,” he said, “my ass.”

  The android spiraled into the sky. Electrons raced through his mind like the raindrops that passed through his insubstantial body. The Empire State Building thrust into cloud like a deco spear. The android turned substantial again—the field drained his power too quickly to be used casually. Rain batted his radar dome.

  Expert-systems programming raced through macroatomic switches. Subroutines, built in imitation of human reasoning and permitted within limits to alter themselves, arranged themselves in more efficient ways. Travnicek was a genius programmer, but he was sloppy and his programming grammar was more elaborate and discursive than necessary. The android edited Travnicek’s language as he flew, feeling himself grow in efficiency. While doing so he contemplated a program that waited within himself. The program, which was called ETCETERA, occupied a vast space, and seemed to be an abstract, messy, convoluted attempt to describe human character.

  Apparently Travnicek intended the program to be consulted when the android needed to deal with the problems of human motivation. ETCETERA was bulky, arranged badly, the language itself full of afterthoughts and apparent contradictions. If used the way Travnicek intended, the program would be comparatively inefficient. The android knew that it would be much more useful to break the program into subroutines and absorb it within the portion of the main core programming intended for use in dealing with humans. Efficiency would be enhanced.

  The android decided to make the change. The program was analyzed, broken down, added to the core programming.

  Had he been human he would have staggered, perhaps lost control. Being an android, he continued on the course he set while his mind blazed like a miniature nova beneath the onslaught of coded human experience. His perceptions of the outside world, complex to a human and consisting of infrared, visible light, ultraviolet, and radar images, seemed to dim in contrast with the vast wave of human passion. Love, hatred, lust, envy, fear, transcendence … all stitched an electric analog pattern in the android’s mind.

  While the android’s mind burned he flew on, increasing his speed till the wind turned to a roar in his ears. Infrared receptors snapped on. The guns on his shoulders spun and fired test bursts at the sky. His radar quested out, touching rooftops, streets, air traffic, his machine mind comparing the radar images with those generated earlier, searching for discrepancies.

  There was definitely something wrong with the radar image of the Empire State Building. A large object was climbing up its side, and there seemed to be several small objects, human-sized, orbiting the golden spire. The android compared this fact with information in his files, then altered course.

  With difficulty he suppressed the turmoil inside him. This was not the proper time.

  There was a forty-five-foot ape climbing the building, the one that the android’s files told him had been held in the Central Park Zoo since it had been discovered wandering Central Park during the great 1965 blackout. Broken shackles hung from the ape’s wrists. A blond woman was held in one fist. Flying people rocketed around it. By the time the android arrived the cloud of orbiting aces had grown dense, spinning little electrons around a hairy, snarling nucleus. The air resounded with the sound of rockets, wings, force fields, propellers, eructations. Guns, wands, ray projectors, and less identifiable weapons were being brandished in the direction of the ape. None were being fired.

  The ape, with a cretinous determination, continued to climb the building. Windows crackled as he drove his toes through them. Faint shrieks of alarm were heard from inside.

  The android matched speeds with a woman with talons, feathers, and a twelve-foot wingspan. His files suggested her name was Peregrine.

  “The second ape-escape this year,” she said. “Always he grabs a blonde and always he climbs the Empire State Building. Why a blonde? I want to know.”

  The android observed that the winged woman had lustrous brown hair. “Why isn’t anyone doing anything?” he asked.

  “If we shoot the ape, he might crush the girl,” Peregrine said. “Or drop her. Usually the Great and Powerful Turtle simply pries the chimp’s fingers apart and lifts the girl to the ground, and then we try to knock out the ape. It regenerates, so we can’t hurt him permanently. But the Turtle isn’t here.”

  “I think I see the problem now.”

  “Hey. By the way. What’s wrong with your head?”

  The android didn’t answer. Instead he turned on his insubstantiality flux-field. There was a crackling sound. Internal energies poured away into n—dimensional space. He altered course and swooped toward the ape. It growled at him, baring its teeth. The android sailed into the middle of the hand that held the blond girl, receiving an impressionist image of wild pale hair, tears, pleading blue eyes.

  “Holy Fuck,” said the girl.

  Modular Man rotated his insubstantial microwave laser within the ape’s hand and fired a full-strength burst down the length of its arm. The ape reacted as if stung, opening its hand. The blonde tumbled out. The ape’s eyes widened in horror.

  The android turned off his flux-field, dodged a twelve-foot pterodactyl, seized the girl in his now-substantial arms, and flew away.

  The ape’s eyes grew even more terrified. It had escaped nine times in the last twenty years and by now it knew what to expect.

  Behind him the android heard a barrage of explosions, crackles, shots, rockets, hissing rays, screams, thuds, and futile roars. He heard a final quivering moan and perceived the dark shadow of a tumbling long-armed giant spilling down the facade of the skyscraper. There was a sizzle, and a net of what appeared to be cold blue fire appeared over Fifth Avenue; the ape fell into it, bounced once, and was then borne, unconscious and smoldering, toward its home at Central Park Zoo.

  The android began looking at the streets below for video cameras. He began to descend.

  “Would you mind hovering for a little while?” the blonde said. “If you’re going to land in front of the media, I’d like to fix my makeup first, okay?”
br />   Fast recovery, the android thought. He began to orbit above the cameras. He could see his reflection in their distant lenses.

  “My name is Cyndi,” the blonde said. “I’m an actress. I just got here from Minnesota a couple of days ago. This might be my big break.”

  “Mine, too,” said the android. He smiled at her, hoping he was getting the expression right. She didn’t seem disturbed, so probably he was.

  “By the way,” he added, “I think the ape showed excellent taste.”

  “Not bad, not bad,” Travnicek mused, watching on his television a tape of the android, who, after a brief interview with the press, was shown rising into the heavens with Cyndi in his arms.

  He turned to his creation. “Why the fucking hell did you have your hands over your head the whole time?”

  “My radar dome. I’m getting self-conscious. Everyone keeps asking me what’s wrong with my head.”

  “A blushingly self-conscious multipurpose defensive attack system,” Travnicek said. “Jesus Christ. Just what the world needs.”

  “Can I make myself a skullcap? I’m not going to get on many magazine covers the way I look now.”

  “Yeah, go ahead.”

  “The Aces High restaurant offers a free dinner for two to anyone who recaptures the ape when it escapes. May I go this evening? It seems to me that I could meet a lot of useful people. And Cyndi—the woman I rescued—wanted to meet me there. Peregrine also asked me to appear on her television program. May I go?”

  Travnicek was buoyant. His android had proved a success. He decided to send his creation to trash Bushmill’s office at MIT.

  “Sure,” he said. “You’ll get seen. That’ll be good. But open your dome first. I want to make a few adjustments.”

  The winter sky was filled with bearded stars. Where the weather was clear, millions watched as fiery patterns—red, yellow, blue, green—stormed across the heavens. Even on Earth’s dayside, smoky fingers tracked across the sky as the alien storm descended.

  Their journey had lasted thirty thousand years, since their Swarm Mother had departed her last conquered planet, fired at random into the sky like a seedpod questing for fertile soil. Thirty kilometers long, twenty across, the Swarm Mother looked like a rugged asteroid but was made entirely of organic material, her thick resinous hull protecting the vulnerable interior, the webs of nerve and fiber, the vast wet sacks of biomass and genetic material from which the Swarm Mother would construct her servants. Inside, the Swarm existed in stasis, barely alive, barely aware of the existence of anything outside itself. It was only when it neared Sol that the Swarm began to wake.

  A year after the Swarm Mother crossed the orbit of Neptune, she detected chaotic radio emissions from Earth in which were perceived patterns recognized from memories implanted within its ancestral DNA. Intelligent life existed here.

  The Swarm Mother, inasmuch as she had a preference, found bloodless conquests the most convenient. A target without intelligent life would fall to repeated invasions of superior Swarm predators, then captured genetic material and biomass would be used to construct a new generation of Swarm parents. But intelligent species had been known to protect their planets against assault. This contingency had to be met.

  The most efficient way to conquer an enemy was through microlife. Dispersal of a tailored virus could destroy anything that breathed. But the Swarm Mother could not control a virus the way she commanded larger species; and viruses had an annoying habit of mutating into things poisonous to their hosts. The Swarm Mother, thirty kilometers long and filled with biomass and tailored mutagenic DNA, was too vulnerable herself to biologic attack to run the risk of creating offspring that might devour its mother. Another approach was dictated.

  Slowly, over the next eleven years, the Swarm Mother began to restructure herself. Small idiot Swarm servants—buds—tailored genetic material under carefully controlled conditions and inserted it via tame-virus implant into waiting biomass. First a monitoring intelligence was constructed, receiving and recording the incomprehensible broadcasts from Earth. Then, slowly, a reasoning intelligence took shape, one capable of analyzing the data and acting on it. A master intelligence, enormous in its capabilities but as yet understanding only a fraction of the patterned radiation it was receiving.

  Time, the Swarm Mother reasoned, for action. As a boy stirs an ant nest with a stick, the Swarm Mother determined to stir the Earth. Swarm servants multiplied in her body, moving genetic material, reconstructing the most formidable predators the Swarm held within its memory. Solid fuel thrusters were grown like rare orchids in special chambers constructed for the purpose. Space-capable pods were fashioned out of tough resins by blind servants deep in the Swarm Mother’s womb. One third of the available biomass was dedicated to this, the first generation of the Swarm’s offspring.

  The first generation was not intelligent, but could respond in a general way to the Swarm Mother’s telepathic commands. Formidable idiots, they were programmed simply to kill and destroy. Tactics were planted within their genetic memory. They were placed in their pods, the solid-fuel thrusters flamed, and they were launched, like a flickering firefly invasion, for Earth.

  Each individual bud was part of a branch, each of which had two to ten thousand buds. Four hundred branches were aimed at different parts of Earth’s landmass.

  The ablative resin of the pods burned in Earth’s atmosphere, lighting the sky. Threads deployed from each pod, slowing the descent, stabilizing the spinning lifeboats. Then, just above the Earth’s surface, the pods burst open, scattering their cargo.

  The buds, after their long stasis, woke hungry.

  Across the horseshoe-shaped lounge bar, a man dressed in some kind of complicated battle armor stood with his foot on the brass rail and addressed a lithe blond masked woman who, in odd inattentive moments, kept turning transparent. “Pardon me,” he said. “But didn’t I see you at the ape-escape?”

  “Your table’s almost ready, Modular Man,” said Hiram Worchester. “I’m sorry, but I didn’t realize that Fortunato would invite all his friends.”

  “That’s okay, Hiram,” the android said. “We’re just fine. Thanks.” He was experimenting with using contractions. He wasn’t certain when they were appropriate and he was determined to find out.

  “There are a pair of photographers waiting, too.”

  “Let them get some pictures after we’re seated, then chase them out. Okay?”

  “Certainly.” Hiram, owner of the Aces High, smiled at the android. “Say,” he added, “your tactics this afternoon were excellent. I plan to make the creature weightless if it ever climbs this high. It never does, though. Seventy-two stories is the record.”

  “Next time, Hiram. I’m sure it’ll work.”

  The restaurateur gave a pleased smile and bustled out. The android raised a hand for another drink.

  Cyndi was wearing an azure something that exposed most of her sternum and even more of her spine. She looked up at Modular Man and smiled.

  “I like the cap.”

  “Thanks. I made it myself.”

  She looked at his empty whiskey glass. “Does that actually—you know—make you high?”

  The android gazed down at the single-malt. “No. Not really. I just put it in a holding tank with the food and let my flux generators break it down into energy. But somehow…” His new glass of single-malt arrived and he accepted it with a smile. “Somehow it just feels good to stand here, put my foot on the rail, and drink it.”

  “Yeah. I know what you mean.”

  “And I can taste, of course. I don’t know what’s supposed to taste good or bad, though, so I just try everything. I’m working it out.” He held the single-malt under his nose, sniffed, then tasted it. Taste receptors crackled. He felt what seemed to be a minor explosion in his nasal cavity.

  The man in combat armor tried to put his arm around the masked woman. His arm passed through her. She looked up at him with smiling blue eyes.

  “I was wa
iting for that,” she said. “I’m in a nonsubstantial body, schmuck.”

  Hiram arrived to show them to their table. Flashbulbs began popping as Hiram opened a bottle of champagne. Looking out the plate-glass window into the sky, the android saw a shooting star through a gap in the cloud.

  “I could get used to this,” Cyndi said.

  “Wait,” the android said. He was hearing something on his radio receiver. The Empire State was tall enough to pick up transmissions from far away. Cyndi looked at him curiously.

  “What’s the problem?”

  The transmission ended. “I’m going to have to make my apologies. Can I call you later?” the android said. “There’s an emergency in New Jersey. It seems Earth has been invaded by aliens from outer space.”

  “Well. If you’ve got to go…”

  “I’ll call you later. I promise.”

  The android’s shape dimmed. Ozone crackled. He rose through the ceiling.

  Hiram stared, the champagne bottle in his hand. He turned to Cyndi. “Was he serious?” he asked.

  “He’s a nice guy, for a machine,” Cyndi said, propping her chin on her hand. “But definitely a screw loose somewhere.” She held out her glass. “Let’s party, Hiram.”

  Not far away, a man lay torn by nightmare. Monsters slavered at him in his dreams. Images passed before his mind, a dead woman, an inverted pentagram, a lithe naked man with the head of a jackal. Inchoate shrieks gathered in his throat. He woke with a cry, covered in sweat.

  He reached blindly to the bedside lamp and switched it on. He fumbled for his glasses. His nose was slippery with sweat and the thick, heavy spectacles slid down its length. The man didn’t notice.

  He thought of the telephone, then realized he’d have to maneuver himself into his wheelchair in order to reach it. There were easier ways to communicate. Within his mind he reached out into the city. He felt a sleepy mind answering inside his own.