Aces High Page 13

  The general’s hand trembled as he replaced his phone in its cradle. It was the first time the android had seen him frightened.

  “That was electromagnetic pulse,” Carter said. “Somebody’s just gone nuclear, and I don’t think it was us.”

  The papers still screamed invasion headlines. Children in the Midwest were being urged to avoid drinking milk: there was danger of poisoning from the airbursts the Soviets had used to smash the Siberian Swarms. Communications were still disrupted: the bombs had bounced enough radiation off the ionosphere to slag a lot of American computer chips.

  People on the streets seemed furtive. There was a debate about whether New York should be blacked out or not, even though the Swarm was obviously on the run after six days of intensive combat.

  Coleman Hubbard was too busy to care. He walked along Sixth Avenue, grinding his teeth, his head splitting with the effort his recent adventure had cost him.

  He had failed. One of the more promising members of the Order, the boy Fabian, had been arrested on some stupid assault charge—the boy couldn’t keep his hands off women, whether they were willing or not—and Hubbard had been sent to interview the police captain in charge. It wouldn’t have required much, some lost paperwork perhaps, or a suggestion, implanted in the captain’s head, that the evidence was insufficient.… But the man’s mind was slippery, and Hubbard hadn’t been able to get ahold of it. Finally Captain McPherson, snarling, had thrown him out. All Hubbard had done was to identify himself with Fabian’s case, and perhaps cause the investigation to go further.

  Lord Amun did not take failure well. His punishments could be savage. Hubbard rehearsed his defense in his mind.

  Then a rangy redheaded woman, wearing a proper executive Burberry, stepped into the street in front of Hubbard, almost running into him, then moving briskly up the street without offering an apology. She carried a leather case and wore tennis shoes. More acceptable footwear peeked out of a shoulder bag.

  Anger stabbed into Hubbard. He hated rudeness.

  And then his crooked smile began to spread across his face. He reached out with his mind, touching her thoughts, her consciousness. He sensed vulnerability there, an opening. The smile froze on his face as he summoned his power and struck.

  The woman staggered as he seized control of her mind. Her case fell to the ground. He picked it up and took her elbow. “Here,” he said. “You seem a little out of sorts.”

  She blinked at him. “What?” In her mind was only confusion. Gently, he soothed it.

  “My apartment is just a little distance. Fifty-seventh Street. Maybe you should go there and rest.”

  “Apartment? What?”

  Gently he took command of her mind and steered her up the street. Rarely did he find someone so pliable. A great bubble of joy welled up in him.

  Once upon a time he only used his power to get laid, or maybe to help earn a promotion or two at work. Then he met Lord Amun and discovered what power was really for. He’d quit his job, and lived now as a dependent of the Order.

  He’d stay in her mind for a few hours, he thought. Find out who she was, what secret terrors lived in her. And then do them to her, one and then another, living inside her mind and his, enjoying her cringing, her self-loathing, as he forced her to beg, right out loud, for everything he did to her. He would caress her mind, enjoy the growing madness as he made her plead for her every debasement, her every fear.

  These were only a few of the things he’d learned from watching Lord Amun. The things that made him come alive.

  For a few hours, at least, he could submerge himself in another’s fear, and forget his own.

  Unto the Sixth Generation

  by Walter Jon Williams

  Part Two

  A FREEZING JET STREAM battered at the city, flown straight from Siberia. It tore down the gaps between buildings, tugged at the halfhearted Christmas decorations the city had put up, scattered minuscule bits of Russian fallout in the streets. This was the coldest winter in years. The New Jersey/Pennsylvania Swarm had been officially declared dead two days ago, and the aces, marines, and army had returned to a parade down Fifth Avenue. In another few days, American troops and whatever aces could be persuaded to join them would be flying north and south to deal with the Swarm’s invasions of Africa, Canada, and South America.

  The android jabbed a newly-fleshed finger at the slot of a pay phone and felt something click. One simply had to understand these things. He dialed a number.

  “Hello, Cyndi. How’s the job search coming?”

  “Mod Man! Hey … I just wanted to say … yesterday was wonderful. I never thought I’d be riding in a parade next to a war hero.”

  “I’m sorry it took so long for me to call you back.”

  “I guess fighting the Swarm was a kind of priority. Don’t worry. You made up for lost time.” She laughed. “Last night was amazing.”

  “Oh, no.” The android was receiving another police call. “I’m afraid I’ve got to go.”

  “They’re not invading again, are they?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I’ll call you, okay?”

  “I’ll be looking forward.”

  Something resembling a mucous-green gelatinous mass had erupted from a manhole into the streets of Jokertown, a Swarm bud that had escaped the showdown across the Hudson. The bud succeeded in devouring two Christmas shoppers and a hot-pretzel vendor before the emergency was called in and the police radios began to call.

  The android arrived first. As he dived into the canyon street he saw something that looked like a thirty-foot-wide bowl of gelatin that had been in the refrigerator far too long. In the gelatin were black currants that were its victims, which it was slowly digesting.

  The android hovered over the creature and began firing his laser, trying to avoid the currants in hope they might prove revivable. The gelatin began to boil where the silent, invisible beam struck. The bud made a futile effort to reach his flying tormentor with a pseudopod, but failed. The creature began to roll in the direction of an alley, looking for escape. It was too hungry or too stupid to abandon its food and seek shelter in the sewers.

  The creature squeezed into the alley and rushed down it. The android continued to fire. Bits were sizzling away and the thing seemed to be losing energy rapidly. Modular Man looked ahead and saw a bent figure ahead in the alley.

  The figure was female and white, dressed in layers of clothing, all worn, all dirty. A floppy felt hat was pulled down over an ex-Navy watch cap. A pair of shopping bags drooped from her arms. Tangled gray hair hung over her forehead. She was rummaging in a dumpster, tossing crumpled newspapers over her shoulder into the alley. Modular Man increased his speed, firing radar-directed shots over his shoulder as he barreled through the cold drizzly air. He dropped to the pavement in front of the dumpster, his knees cushioning the impact.

  “So I says to Maxine, I says…” the lady was saying.

  “Excuse me,” said the android. He seized the woman and sped upward. Behind him, writhing under the barrage of coherent microwaves, the Swarm bud was evaporating.

  “Maxine says, my mother broke her hip this morning, and you won’t believe…” The old lady was flailing at him while she continued her monologue. He silently absorbed an elbow to his jaw and floated to a landing on the nearest roof. He let go his passenger. She turned to him flushed with anger.

  “Okay, bunky,” she said. “Time to see what Hildy’s got in her bag.”

  “I’ll fly you down later,” Modular Man said. He was already turning to pursue the creature when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw the lady opening her bag.

  There was something black in there. The black thing was getting bigger.

  The android tried to move, to fly away. Something had hold of him and wouldn’t let him go.

  Whatever was in the shopping bag was getting larger. It grew larger very quickly. Whatever had hold of the android was dragging him toward the shopping bag.

  “Stop,” he said s
imply. The thing wouldn’t stop. The android tried to fight it, but his laser discharges had cost him a lot of power and he didn’t seem to have the strength left.

  The blackness grew until it enveloped him. He felt as if he were falling. Then he felt nothing at all.

  New York’s aces, responding to the emergency, finally conquered the Swarm bud. What was left of it, blobs of dark green, froze into lumps of dirty ice. Its victims, partially eaten, were identified by the non-edible credit cards and laminated ID they were carrying.

  By nightfall, the hardened inhabitants of Jokertown were referring to the creature as the Amazing Colossal Snot Monster. None of them had noticed the bag lady as she came down the fire escape and wandered into the freezing streets.

  The android awoke in a dumpster in an alley behind 52nd Street. Internal checks showed damage: his microwave laser had been bent into a sine wave; his flux monitor was wrecked; his flight module had been twisted as if by the hands of a giant. He flung back the dumpster lid with a bang. Carefully he looked up and down the alley.

  There was no one in sight.

  The god Amun glowed in Hubbard’s mind. The ram’s eyes blazed with anger, and the god held the ankh and staff with clenched fists.

  “TIAMAT,” he said, “has been defeated.” Hubbard winced with the force of Amun’s anger. “The Shakti device was not readied in time.”

  Hubbard shrugged. “The defeat was temporary,” he said. “The Dark Sister will return. She could be anywhere in the solar system—the military have no way of finding her or identifying her. We have not lived in secret all these centuries only to be defeated now.”

  The loft was quite neat compared to the earlier chaos. Travnicek’s notes had been neatly assembled and classified, as far as possible, by subject. Travnicek had made a start at wading through them. It was hard going.

  “So,” Travnicek said. His breath was frosting in front of his face and condensing on his reading glasses. He took the spectacles off. “You were displaced about fifty city blocks spatially and moved one hour forward timewise, yes?”

  “Apparently. When I came out of the dumpster I found that the fight in Jokertown had been over for almost an hour. Comparison with my internal clock showed a discrepancy of seventy-two minutes, fifteen point three three three seconds.”

  The android had opened his chest and replaced some components. The laser was gone for good, but he had his flight capability back and he’d managed to jury-rig a flux monitor.

  “Interesting. You say the bag lady seemed not to be working with the blob thing?”

  “Most likely it was a coincidence they were in the same street. Her monologue did not seem to be strictly rational. I don’t think she is mentally sound.”

  Travnicek turned up the heater control on his jumpsuit. The temperature had dropped twelve degrees in two hours; and frost was forming on the skylights of the loft in midafternoon. Travnicek lit a Russian cigarette, turned on a hot plate to boil some water for coffee, and then put his hands in his warm jumpsuit pockets.

  “I want to look in your memory,” he said. “Open up your chest.”

  Modular Man obeyed. Travnicek took a pair of cables from a minicomputer stacked under an array of video equipment and jacked them into sockets in the android’s chest, near his shielded machine brain. “Back up your memory onto the computer,” he said. Flickering effects from the flux generator shone in Travnicek’s intent eyes. The computer signaled the task complete. “Button up,” Travnicek said. As the android removed the jacks and closed his chest, Travnicek turned on the video, then touched controls. A video picture began racing backward.

  He reached the place where the bag lady appeared, and ran the image several times. He moved to a computer terminal and tapped instructions. The image of the bag lady’s face filled the screen. The android looked at the woman’s lined, grimy face, the straggling hair, the worn and tattered clothing. He noticed for the first time that she was missing some teeth. Travnicek stood and went back to his one-room living quarters in the back of the loft and came back with a battered Polaroid camera. He used the remaining three pictures and gave one to his creation.

  “There. You can show it to people. Ask if they’ve seen her.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Travnicek took thumbtacks and stuck the other two pictures to the low beams of the ceiling. “I want you to find out where the bag lady is and get what’s in her bag. And I want you to find out where she got it.” He shook his head, dripping cigarette ash on the floor, and muttered, “I don’t think she invented it. I think she’s just found this thing somewhere.”

  “Sir? The Swarm? We agreed that I would leave for Peru in two days.”

  “Fuck the military,” Travnicek said. “They haven’t paid us a dime for our services. Nothing but a lousy parade, and the military didn’t pay for that, the city did. Let them see how easy it is to fight the Swarm without you. Then maybe they’ll take us seriously.” The truth was that Travnicek wasn’t anywhere near being able to reconstruct his work. It would take weeks, perhaps even months. The military was demanding guarantees, plans, knowledge of his identity. The bag-lady problem was more interesting, anyway. He began idly spinning back through the android’s memory.

  Modular Man winced deep in his computer mind. He began talking quickly, hoping to distract his inventor from the pictures.

  “As far as the bag lady goes, I could try the refugee centers, but it might take a long time. My files tell me there are normally twenty thousand homeless people in New York, and now there are an uncountable number of refugees from Jersey—”

  “Piss in a chalice!” exclaimed Travnicek, in German. The android felt another wince coming on. Travnicek gaped at the television in surprise.

  “You’re screwing that actress lady!” he said. “That Cyndi What’s-her-name!” The android resigned himself to what was about to come.

  “That’s correct,” he said.

  “You’re just a goddamn toaster,” Travnicek said. “What the hell made you think you could fuck?”

  “You gave me the equipment,” the android said. “And you implanted emotions in me. And on top of that, you made me good looking.”

  “Huh.” Travnicek turned his eyes from Modular Man to the video and back again. “I gave you the equipment so you could pass as a human if you had to. And I just gave you the emotions so you could understand the enemies of society. I didn’t think you’d do anything.” He tossed his cigarette butt to the floor. A leer crossed his face. “Was it fun?” he asked.

  “It was pleasant, yes.”

  “Your blond chippie seemed to be having a good time.” Travnicek cackled and reached for the controls. “I want to start this party at the beginning.”

  “Didn’t you want to look at the bag lady again?”

  “First things first. Get me an Urquell.” He looked up as a thought occurred to him. “Do we have any popcorn?”

  “No!” The android tossed his abrupt answer over his shoulder.

  Modular Man brought the beer and watched while Travnicek had his first sip. The Czech looked up in annoyance.

  “I don’t like the way you’re looking at me,” he said.

  The android considered this. “Would you prefer me to look at you some other way?” he asked.

  Travnicek turned red. “Go stand in the corner, microwave-oven-that-fucks!” he bellowed. “Turn your goddamn head away, video-unit-that-fucks!”

  For the rest of the afternoon, while his creation stood in a corner of the loft, Travnicek watched the video. He enjoyed himself enormously. He watched the best parts several times, cackling at what he saw. Then, slowly, his laughter dimmed. A cold, uncertain feeling crept up the back of his neck. He began casting glances at the stolid figure of the android. He turned off the vid unit, dropped his cigarette butt in the Urquell bottle, then lit another.

  The android was showing a surprising degree of independence. Travnicek reviewed elements of his programming, concentrating on the ETCETERA file. Travnicek’s
abstract of human emotion had been gleaned from a variety of expert sources ranging from Freud to Dr. Spock. It had been an intellectual challenge for Travnicek to do the programming—transforming the illogicalities of human behavior into the cold rhetoric of a program. He’d performed the task during his second year at Texas A&M, when he’d barely gone out of his quarters the whole year and had known he had to set himself a large task in order to keep from being driven crazy by the lunatic environment of a university that seemed an embodiment of the collective unconscious fantasies of Stonewall Jackson and Albert Speer. He’d barely been at A&M for ten minutes before he’d known it was a mistake—the crop-haired undergraduates with their uniforms, boots, and sabers reminded him too much of the SS who had left Travnicek barely alive beneath the bodies of his family at Lidice, not to mention the Soviet and Czech security forces that had followed the Germans. Travnicek knew if he was going to survive in Texas, he had to find something massive to work on lest his memories eat him alive.

  Travnicek had never been particularly interested in human psychology as such—passion, he had long ago decided, was not only foolish but genuinely boring, a waste of time. But putting passion into a program, yes, that was interesting.

  He could barely remember that period now. How many months had he spent in his creative trance, a channel for his own deepest spirit? What had he wrought during that time? What the hell was in ETCETERA?

  For a moment a tremor of fear went through Travnicek. The ghost of Victor Frankenstein’s creation loomed for a moment in his mind. Was a rebellion on the part of the android possible? Could he evolve hostile passions against his creator? But no—there were overriding imperatives that Travnicek had hardwired into the system. Modular Man could not evolve away his prime directives as long as his computer consciousness was physically intact, any more than a human could, unassisted, evolve away his genetic makeup in a single lifetime.

  Travnicek began to feel a growing comfort. He looked at the android with a kind of admiration. He felt pride that he’d programmed such a fast learner.