A. Warren Merkey Page 6

  “What can I say that you would believe?”

  “Damned little,” he responded in Twenglish.

  “I was manipulated. I don’t know why or how.”

  “Who manipulated you? In what way?”

  “They made me build the ship. I don’t know who. Your personal security may have been compromised, Jon. Mine apparently was. That’s why I brought you far away from Headquarters.”

  “My personal security?” Horss was unable to analyze one too many ideas and its implications. He had to just shut up and think hard. Realization then struck him and he felt naïve and stupid for not suspecting the cause for his isolation aboard Demba’s yacht. He was in quarantine. No, he was not stupid. He could not be faulted for not believing he could be an unwitting agent of such a sinister action. He could never believe himself invaded by a coercive agent, reduced to an expendable pawn in a show of power by an offended Commander of the Navy. A worm! She thought he could have a worm! “I’ve never talked at such length with an admiral.” Horss was momentarily calm and alert, aided by his augments. “I suppose you are expecting some word in our conversation that will trigger a worm. And then I will try to kill you. As a matter of curiosity, how did you expect to defend yourself?”

  “I didn’t. That’s why I have a medical cocoon aboard the yacht and Baby watching to wink me into it.”

  Horss stopped to think some more. He could hardly decide where to start. “Damn,” he said in Twenglish. “This is interesting. Did you consider the further consequences, regardless of how this visit to Earth transpired? Even if all goes well and we both survive, what keeps Etrhnk from removing both of us from the Freedom?”

  “I did consider that,” Demba replied. “All I could do was take one step at a time. I can never know how Etrhnk will react. His predecessors were more predictable. I’ve been manipulated, so now I’m less concerned with a task that someone else has set for me. It would be interesting to see what becomes of the Freedom but it was apparently never my ship and never my mission. I got it built for those who wanted it, and my services are probably not needed any longer. And now I’ve put myself in a situation that guarantees I’ll not sail on her.”

  Horss did not quite relax but he did feel more comfortable, more informed, even as strange as the information was. “And into this mess a human child magically appears. Did you learn anything about Samson when you questioned him under anesthesia?”

  “I had too little time and not enough expertise when I questioned him. Samson doesn’t remember his family. He doesn’t remember anything beyond about a year ago. He has wandered through this part of Africa, aiming to visit the space elevator. It was sometimes a tourist attraction. He thought someone might find him there. In that year of wandering, often out in the open plain, no one saw him. No one reported him missing. I’ve already searched for news stories. It would have been prominent in the media. Nothing. I believe he came from… nowhere, and he was put here for me to find.”

  “Why? Who could have anticipated you would come here?”

  “I have no answers, just paranoia.”

  Horss considered that Navy Commander Etrhnk would have the power to place a real child on Earth for Admiral Demba to stumble upon, although it implied an immoral facility far greater than Horss imagined existed. How would he know where Demba would land? What possible role would he have a child play? Etrhnk couldn’t have anticipated the Request for Voluntary Reassignment. Nor did Horss believe Etrhnk could have reacted swiftly enough to do much more than breach Horss’s personal security for a crude attempt to make him kill or injure Demba. If Etrhnk needed revenge to maintain his status, Horss imagined it would be a subtle and elegant yet unmistakable object lesson for all of his enemies. The mechanism must still be only in the planning stages. “I can’t imagine what threat Samson could pose,” Horss said. “If he was mechanical, if he could be some kind of assassin, I’m sure you were motivated to inspect him very thoroughly.”

  “I can’t even imagine solving the mystery of his appearing to me at this precise moment in time. And there is also the person named Milly who Samson believes is real, not just an artificial intelligence program in his computer.”

  “Do you think Milly is real?” Horss asked.

  “No, but I hate to think the child is mentally ill.”

  “He would be in good company.”

  Demba gave him a look of arched eyebrows that Horss could easily see in his shiplink image of her. “I don’t know what is good about us, Jon. Are you interested in helping me track Samson?”

  “Certainly, Admiral. Are we allies for the moment? Can we divide our attention away from the threat we may pose to each other?”

  “We had better, Captain. Samson has disappeared.”

  “This is a bad dream,” Samson complained, finding a moment of mental clarity. “I feel like I’m floating. I can’t control anything.” His feet were down there somewhere, shuffling along in the tunnel. He held his spear without really feeling it in his hand. He should have been apprehensive, even alarmed, but he wasn’t.

  “Tell me about it,” Milly said with commiserating inflection. “Life is a dream, without control, without understanding, without meaning.”

  “You sound sad. Are you a real person? Are you alive? The other Milly said she wasn’t.”

  “You can still ask these stupid questions, zombie-boy?”

  He was not accustomed to such emotion from Milly. His computer always spoke factually and patiently, no matter how hard he tried to elicit a human reaction from it. “Are you alive?”

  “I’m not dead!”

  “What is a zombie?”

  “Somebody who’s dead and doesn’t look like it.”

  It was strange how the haze in his mind seemed to lift a little when talking to this person. “You’re not very nice.”

  “It isn’t as much fun as naughty.”

  “Do you know anything about my parents?”

  “I know they’re dead.”

  ” You don’t know that!”

  His Milly never expressed an opinion about his parents, except to say it was logical he had parents. He worked hard to get Milly to explain his possible genetic origins. He only learned by looking at his reflection to ask about race and culture, birth and death. His mythological parents grew to godlike stature in his imagination. Their logical existence kept hope alive.

  “If they were good parents and loved you,” Strange Milly said, “wouldn’t they do anything in their power to rescue you? They had plenty of time for the rescue, so they must be dead.”

  “I could have been kidnapped and escaped and nobody knows where I am.” It was one of many excuses he gave his parents for abandoning him. Sometimes he hated them. More often, he created elaborate and emotional scenes of reunion, and never questioned why he was abandoned.

  “Sure.”

  “Why can’t you help me, whoever or whatever you are?”

  “Why couldn’t the other Milly help you, whoever or whatever she was?”

  “I don’t know! I always thought she was just my computer. It’s only today that I began to think she wasn’t my computer at all. She started talking to me like she was a person or maybe an AMI. And it didn’t sound like her voice was always coming from the computer. Why do you sound like her? How do you make your voice come out of the air in front of me? Where are you?”

  “I’m somewhere over the rainbow. Maybe I sound the way I do because that’s how you want to hear me.”

  “Why can’t you help me? If you can make your voice come out of the air, you can probably do other things. You can see me, can’t you? You’re just invisible like the Navy officers.”

  “I’m not visible because I’m not there, Sammy. Nor do you need to know what else I can and cannot do.”

  “You could talk to the Navy people and tell them where I am.”

  “I think they can find you if they want to.” Milly’s pitiless voice echoed behind him as Samson continued down the tunnel. He tried to wait for the
Navy officers every few steps but the urging of the stone didn’t allow him. Dusty light beams stabbed into the tunnel through gaps in the debris. The tunnel sloped downward into darkness. He used his spear to feel his way along, the blade sparking against the mineral surface. The darkness stretched on for a timeless distance.

  Samson’s spear lost contact with the tunnel wall just ahead of him. Impelled to walk at a fast pace in the dark, he frantically probed the changing tunnel but still fell down when the floor sloped steeply. He lay in dampness for a few moments until the stone made him move. He didn’t know if he was injured and bleeding. He was numb beneath the tingling, pleasuring signals of his tiny master.

  He walked as slowly as he was permitted. His footsteps echoed in the black distances of a large room. He was afraid of a dark with no stars and moon and shiny space cities. He kept the spear in front of him, striking support pillars, then a wall. He followed the wall until he found a doorway. Beyond the doorway he could not touch the opposite walls with his spear extended fully. He walked for a long time in the dark, the wide corridor sloping upward as it followed the spiral design of the African Space Elevator pedestal building. He knew the Navy would find him but he was afraid they wouldn’t. He was also 38 Far Freedom

  very tired. The admiral was right. She didn’t fix all that was wrong with him.

  They stood atop a table of concrete, captain and admiral, and looked around them for a sign of Samson. Each could see the other as an image projected through their shiplink augment but no one else should have been able to detect their presence. They also studied passive sensor data overlaid on their ocular terminals as the yacht and Baby searched for Samson.

  “Why is the Elevator still here, still projecting into space?” Horss asked. He gazed up at the giant pedestal, shaped like a smoothly threaded screw twisted into the earth. “It must be five hundred years old. And dangerous as hell.”

  “Five hundred twenty-three.”

  “But its collapse isn’t imminent?”

  “No. The other three elevators were designed for easier disassembly. This was the original. It should be another five hundred years before they need to take it down.”

  “Where did he go?” Horss wondered aloud, sounding genuinely concerned.

  Admiral Demba had to consider her feelings about the boy. Did she have any feelings for anybody, even for herself? She had carried Samson from the yacht, unconscious in her arms, and she had worried about him less as a real person than as an enigma and a huge complication. Now that he was gone from sight, he seemed less real, as though he was so impossible that he might never have existed. But she had dressed him in clothes she had learned how to fabricate, had measured him and studied him, had felt something good about what she accomplished, all the while wondering and wondering and wondering. She remembered the feel of him, his helplessness, limp in her arms.

  “We’re here, but there’s no trace of Samson. I see no way in, not down here. The highways entered the elevator building well above ground level, and they no longer exist. There are no doors or stairs or ladders Samson could have reached. I think we missed him. He may have fallen in this rubble and hurt himself. I think we should go back.”

  “We may never find him.” She was disappointed about something, perhaps the loss of something almost like magic - an unsolvable mystery. “It’s almost as if he never existed.”

  They turned away from the massive tower. They leaped down and picked their way through a tangle of rusting cable exposed when demolition pulverized long beams of prestressed concrete.

  “There are many places in this field of rubble,” Horss commented, “where he could stay hidden, if he’s immobile. We may have to ping to find him. What is that?” Horss pointed to a field of level debris off to one side of their route. The lengthening shadows of late afternoon brought contrast to the chaos of broken material.

  “It appears to be the track of some machine.”

  “What machine would cause such an irregular track?”

  “Is that a tunnel it leads to?”

  Admiral Demba felt an urge within her augment-deadened body that made her stride quickly down the strange path to the hole. When they reached it she knew what the urge was. She very much wanted to find the boy. Her sanity seemed to depend on Samson’s existence. They squatted in the mouth of a tunnel that seemed purposely drilled through an irregular ridge of rubble. They examined the smooth walls and noted the oval shape of the cross section.

  “I don’t like this tunnel,” Horss said, “because I can’t imagine how or why it was made.”

  “He was here. Samson went this way. He fell right here. That’s blood. He hurt himself.”

  “Samson!” Horss shouted into the tunnel. “Why would he go in there, especially if he’s hurt? Are we so terrible that he runs away from us? You knew it was wrong to send him away.”

  “I know it now. But I think there is something happening to him that I couldn’t anticipate. I didn’t believe in Milly, but I didn’t believe Samson was mentally unstable. I thought he liked me. I thought he wouldn’t go so far.”

  “How could you believe he liked you in five minutes of conversation ending in his forced departure?” Horss asked angrily. “Let’s get in there, Admiral. Samson may be in danger.”

  Even as she worried about his physiological telemetry, Demba thought Horss was passing a test that she was failing. Despite the situation into which she had forced Captain Horss, he was only concerned now for the safety of Samson. She, on the other hand, still hoped that she would live to sail the Freedom. Its mission was her responsibility, it was another mystery to solve, and she deserved to share the fate of its crew.

  The low height of the tunnel made their progress slow and uncomfortable.

  Samson shuffled by a phosphorescent sign in the vast upward spiral of the passageway. The sign marked the location of yet another emergency communications terminal which no longer existed. Fatigue dragged at his legs. Another phosphorescent glow drifted toward Samson in the gloom: an elevator. He slowed and tried to stop. His legs trembled. The red stone pushed him to continue but fatigue pulled him down. He collapsed next to the elevator with his back against the wall. After a few moments a sigh of pleasure escaped from his chest. The sweet tingling rippled across his body. It was all he could feel; beneath it was total numbness. He struggled to his feet, took a few steps, and collapsed again.

  “I can’t go any farther!” he shouted weakly into the echoing dark. “Tell it to leave me alone!”

  “Rest for awhile,” Milly suggested from a distance. “The Navy will be along shortly. Or will it be something else?” The darkness almost made Samson believe there was a person standing over there. She was trying to scare him. He hated that she sounded like Milly.

  “What is it? Why am I here? I didn’t want to come here!”

  “It isn’t that interesting, is it? Just a big, empty, dark building. It’s hard to believe close to eight billion people came through this very corridor.”

  “I want to go back!”

  “Don’t you want to meet your new friend?”

  “No! Where is it? What is it?”

  “It’s large. It’s hot. Stay here a little longer. You’ll see it.”

  Samson pulled himself up again, using both the wall and his spear. He moved into the shallow indentation formed by the elevator doorway. He peered in both directions into the darkness of the hallway. He heard a frightening raspy sound echoing from the walls not far away.

  “Try the elevator.”

  Cold, dusty steel rubbed across Samson’s back as the doors behind him opened. He almost fell backward. He grabbed at the edge of the opening, dropping his spear. He glanced into the deep darkness of the elevator car and tried not to imagine what he couldn’t see. Samson stooped to find his spear and something in his peripheral vision made him look toward the upslope corridor. He saw a patch of twinkling starlight. The little points of light twitched in unison. He jumped, stumbled backward. He lost his grip on the sli
ck edge of the doorway and struck the stone in the palm of his hand on the metal. The shock almost rendered him unconscious. The concrete floor rushed up to hit him in the face. He lay stunned for a few moments, until vibrations registered on the ear which lay against the floor. A burning smell reached his nose. A trickle of adrenalin urged his body to move but Samson couldn’t feel his extremities, much less use them.

  “Don’t go into the elevator,” a different voice said, speaking very close to him.

  The red stone slipped off his hand. Sensation prickled under his skin out to the ends of his arms and legs. Nerves in his skin revived slowly and painfully. Flailing weakly against the floor, his hand touched something that burned him. He cried out, dragged his hand to his chest where he could smell burned flesh. He rolled in a circle until he got himself partly into the elevator.

  “Do you want to go up?” Milly asked.

  “YES!” he shouted, feeling for his knees with hands whose nerves were on fire.

  “Going up.”

  The floor vibrated under him, and as it rose above the level of the corridor he could sense that he was still not completely within the elevator car. A wave of heat flowed past him. He found one knee and pulled. Something touched him lightly, probing his back and shoulders, starting to curl around his sides. He resisted.

  “WAIT!” Samson cried.

  “Aren’t you in yet? Shut up and MOVE! You can’t understand how difficult this is for me.”

  “Milly, it’s in here with me! MILLY!”

  Acceleration pinned his weak body to the floor. A dagger of pain stabbed the back of his neck. Darkness fell across his mind.

  [You have a wife and daughter, Jon,] Demba sent to Horss’s ocular terminal.

  The signs were quickly getting fresher as Demba and Horss came into the spiral corridor and began the ascent. Infrared vision and augmented sense of smell were sufficient to track Samson. Any minute now they should also be able to hear him. Now that it appeared they would soon find the boy, Demba began a silent conversation with the captain. She was still monitoring Horss’s physiology by direct link to his Class-1 uniform. His telemetry seemed normal enough, given the circumstances. She doubted her own body chemistry was any less disturbed.