Strider's Galaxy (24 page)
Authors: John Grant
Would they? It was a question that hadn't occurred to her before. She'd become so accustomed to the Images being capable of doing anything they wanted to do that it had been easy enough to make the assumption they could track down the
Santa Maria
, wherever in The Wondervale it went. Now she began to worry. She knew so little about the nature of the reality that the Images inhabited. If she'd managed to lose them, the
Santa Maria
was dead—sooner rather than later.
"Images," she said despairingly to the air. "Images—are you there?"
There was no reply.
She didn't want to repeat the question. Sometime soon the others on the command deck would begin to share her apprehension. O'Sondheim was already beginning to glance over his shoulder as if in dread of finding that, for once, there wasn't anything there. She'd be best to put off the moment as long as possible.
Polyaggle moved up to the Pocket next to Strider's and edged her head forwards into it. At once the scene around Spindrift sprang into existence.
Of course,
thought Strider,
all this time I've been thinking about us, and more particularly me. Poor Polyaggle has a whole species to think of.
She called up the same image in her own Pocket.
The first thing she saw was that the pink deflector screen was still down. The fleet was forming a sphere around the naked planet. As she watched, yet another ship went up in flames, but there were still hundreds left. In the vista displayed by the Pocket they were just little gleaming needles, but she knew that each of them packed more firepower than anything that had ever been dreamt of on Mars.
It was good, in a way, seeing each one of them being blown to bits, because that meant there was one less that would be able to rain destruction down on Spindrift. The other side of the coin was that the explosion was proof that her Images were still back there among the Autarch's forces. She'd been too blase about the Images' abilities. Were they invulnerable? For all she knew, they were offering up their lives for the cause of trying to save Spindrift—a cause that Strider was beginning to believe was hopeless.
Words were starting to form in the graphic display behind the likeness of Spindrift and the slowly contracting sphere of cruisers.
SOME OF US WILL SURVIVE
, said the display. It seemed to be having great difficulty in forming the letters.
Polyaggle! Deprived of the Images, she was using her Pocket to communicate with Strider's.
Strider looked up at the Spindrifter, who touched her claws together and then returned to concentrate on her own Pocket. Strider took the hint, and bobbed her forehead into the invisibly defined space in front of her.
How many?
she thought as hard as she could at the display.
The display appeared to be fighting with itself for some seconds before new letters began to form.
ENOUGH
, it said.
I HOPE.
Strider kept her own thoughts to the back of her mind.
If you're wrong, sister, you're the last of your kind. And that's something nasty I'm going to have to live with for the rest of my life. Shit, but it's going to be a hell of a lot easier for me than it will be for you . . .
She hoped that nothing of this was being transmitted between the two Pockets. Absently, she shifted the vision in her Pocket to show once more the
Santa Maria
's progress across The Wondervale.
The graphic display behind the image of the galaxy went through that visually curious process of struggling with itself again.
I AM THE QUEEN OF MY HIVE
, the letters said.
AND I AM BEARING A NEW BROOD.
#
Kaantalech's mouth was abrim with joy. The planet was totally exposed to the weaponry at her command. She could see the polar icecaps—now oddly depleted—and the seas and the mountain chains. An aide came to report to her that the Human starship had fled, and she waved him away. The Autarch would never think to ask about the Humans when she made her report of successfully destroying the planet which he had so perceptively identified as a hotbed of rebellion. He would be very pleased with her: he was always pleased to hear of the justifiable demise of another species.
The Humans, the Autarch would think—if he thought about them at all—were a side issue, a single shipful of extragalactics who were of little importance in the grand scheme of things.
Kaantalech hoped that, with luck, they might be of great importance in removing the Autarch from his throne. To judge by the defenses that Spindrift had been able to throw up, the Humans had the knack of making useful friends. As another of her ships spontaneously exploded she yet again thought that the Humans, wherever they had come from, were no mean adversaries. They would make even better allies. Around Qitanefermeartha people were hoping for the day when the Autarch would die. Kaantalech was keen to advance the date. The Humans might be helpful.
But Spindrift wouldn't.
The fleet was almost perfectly in formation.
Kaantalech suspected that the Spindrifters had a bunker somewhere from which military operations were being directed. If she were a Spindrifter, trying to make the world look as unobtrusive as possible, she would have put a military stronghold somewhere in one of the icecaps and covered it in deadmetal so that as little as possible betraying electromagnetic radiation might escape.
If she merely torched the planet, that bunker might escape.
Her other option was to blast Spindrift into a belt of rather small asteroids.
Yes, that was the better thing to do.
She gave the command.
Just over eight minutes later, Spindrift died. And everyone on the world died with it.
3
Polyaggle, the Burden of Guilt
and the Yellow Brick Road
"Wake up, Leonie," said Pinocchio, shaking her shoulder gently. She looked at him for a moment as if she didn't know who he was, then brought her eyes into focus. She brought the bot to her bed occasionally for reasons of genuine affection or sheer loneliness or just sexual need. Last night she had brought him to her bed for reasons of misery.
Spindrift was dead, and almost every member of its native species along with it. She felt responsible. No matter that Polyaggle might be able to resurrect the Spindrifters as a species, Strider still felt culpable of a sort of inadvertent genocide. Pinocchio had spent long hours trying to talk her out of it, but there was a darkness in her soul that he couldn't reach. All the time, largely through Strider, he was learning more about human beings and, he believed, himself becoming more like them, but this was something he couldn't understand. She had made no mistakes and had committed no sins, yet she was racked by guilt. It was a mystery to him.
"Wake up," he repeated. "There is someone who wishes to speak with you.
Leaning over her, he saw her eyes moisten as a voice spoke inside both of their minds.
WE'RE BACK,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.
AT LEAST, THREE OF US ARE. NIGHTMIRROR HAS BECOME, FOR THE WHILE, PART OF SOMETHING ELSE.
Pinocchio could see Strider struggling to find something to say. She'd spent the past couple of days assuming that the Images were lost to them. The
Santa Maria
had been flitting around The Wondervale with no fixed purpose—which was probably the best way of keeping clear of the Autarchy's forces in the short term but spelt doom in the long. Pinocchio had done his best to stand in for the dead Main Computer when required, but he was no proper replacement for the Images. The
Santa Maria
was currently in orbit around the sterile inner planet of a red dwarf star. With luck, any Autarchy scan of the region would assume the starship was a tiny moon. It had been the best temporary stratagem Strider and Pinocchio had been able to think up between them. But it could never be more than that: temporary.
"Are you injured?" said Strider at last.
NO, ALTHOUGH WE FEEL THE LOSS OF NIGHTMIRROR MOST GRIEVOUSLY. HE WAS OUR FRIEND. NIGHTMIRROR WILL BE OUR FRIEND AGAIN, ONCE HE FINISHES WHAT HE HOPES TO ACCOMPLISH.
"He will live?" said Strider anxiously. She sat up on her bed, looking around the main room of her cabin as if she might be able to see the Image directly.
WE HAVE NO REASON TO EXPECT OTHERWISE,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free,
BUT IT IS A SADNESS TO US THAT HE WILL BE ALONE FOR A LONG TIME UNTIL HE CAN DO WHAT HE WANTS TO DO.
"What
is
that? What is it he's trying to do?" Strider was making her way to the shower.
WE DON'T KNOW. HE WAS EQUIVOCAL WHEN HE SAID HIS FAREWELL TO US.
"Polyaggle's Image—is he, or she, prepared to work with us?" said Strider as the pelt of lukewarm water began to massage away the despondencies of what had been a very long night.
OF COURSE. AS ARE THE OTHER SPINDRIFTER IMAGES.
"Others?"
THERE WERE SEVENTEEN IMAGES ON SPINDRIFT WHEN IT WAS DESTROYED. TWO HAVE CHOSEN TO RETURN TO OUR HOME UNIVERSE, BUT THE REMAINDER HAVE DECIDED TO STAY HERE AND TO HELP IN ANY WAY THEY CAN THE EXTINCTION OF THE AUTARCHY. THE IMAGES WERE VERY FOND OF THE SPINDRIFTERS. HEARTFIRE, MYSELF AND THE IMAGE CALLED ANGLER HAVE RETURNED TO THIS STARSHIP. THE OTHERS ARE ELSEWHERE IN THE WONDERVALE, PREPARED TO WORK NOT SO MUCH AGAINST THE AUTARCHY, ALTHOUGH OBVIOUSLY THAT COMES FIRST, AS AGAINST THE REGIME OF KAANTALECH.
Strider arched her back, feeling the water beat against her belly. "Kaantalech?"
SHE WILL BE THE NEW AUTARCH.
Ten Per Cent Extra Free seemed unwilling to say anything more.
Pinocchio, standing watching Strider as she showered in the water that was clearly so very luxurious to her, wished he could feel genuine lust for her. Real people would have wanted to pick her out of the spray and carry her back to her bed. At the moment he was wishing he could find some tactful way of saying that he wanted to get to the command deck as soon as possible so that he could start once again gaining direct data from the Images by interfacing with them through the Pockets.
He was uncertain as to what he should do. She obviously wanted him there with her. His duty was to start working with the Images as soon as possible. His prime directive was now to do whatever Strider wanted him to do. At heart she probably wanted him to do whatever was in the best interests of the
Santa Maria
, but all he could interpret from her was that she wished him to be beside her.
He made up his mind.
"I think I should go up on deck," he said.
"Go, then," she replied, washing her face. "I'll join you there soon."
As Pinocchio ascended in the elevator he thought about what had just happened. He had been guessing too hard about Strider's wishes. She had treated him, once he had made his diffident suggestion, as if he were a human being with a human being's full complement of free will, of independence of thought. Even Strauss-Giolitto was now dealing with him as if he were a human.
Yet he didn't
feel
like a human. There were directives built into his software that forbade him true freedom of thought.
He wasn't certain he liked the position in which he found himself. In a strange way that was rather cheering, because not liking things was a human attribute, was it not?
#
Lan Yi was glad that the Images had returned, because it meant that Geena had returned as well. No one else on the
Santa Maria
knew that Geena was here. Her presence was a secret between him and the Images.
Once upon a time Lan Yi, then working in Algeria, had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics or Chemistry. He had been delighted by the honor, but less so by the gift of two billion dollars in cash: he and Geena were living in the lap of luxury by comparison with the people around them, and so after only a brief debate they had chosen to give the money to charities dedicated to alleviating inner-city suffering. This had not gone down well with the Algerian government, which was going through a phase of declaring that even the poor were happy that the rich were rich. Lan Yi's post at the Institut Chemique d'Algiers had curiously vanished overnight: he was offered a sinecure at a reduced salary, and naturally refused—it would be easy enough for him to find somewhere else in the world to work. But the politicians were truly vindictive: he had never discovered what particular piece of corruption it was that he was supposed to have committed, but the stigma was enough that no scientific establishment would touch him with a bargepole. Except, as he discovered much later, the SSIA, who welcomed him with open arms once he chose to apply.
By that time he was living in poverty in Algiers, deserted by his former friends, surviving on the scraps given to him by kind-hearted shopkeepers. His home was a plastic dustbin which he had stolen in one of the wealthier suburbs: the theft was the only criminal act he was aware of having committed during his life. His and Geena's beautiful white-stone house on the outskirts of Algiers had been possessed by the government on the grounds of non-payment of taxes—a trumped-up charge, but one that was impossible to contest.
By the time he was living as a modern-day Diogenes in a dustbin in the alleys of Algiers, Geena was long dead. Taller than him by half a meter, she had been twenty-two and he ninety-seven when they had married. They had rejoiced in the many differences between them: the contrasts in their builds, their heights, their skin colors, their ages, their skills—she had been a cellist. Sometimes they would stand together half an hour or more in front of the mirror, naked, talking quietly and admiring the comparisons between them.
Persecution by the Algerian government had affected her more harshly than it had him. He had known hunger during his youth; she never had. She could have gone back to her own parents, who were wealthy residents of the southernmost tip of Spain, but she had too much pride for that. Instead, one day when he was out looking for a job as a shelf stacker or a puter noik or a frankly-anything-so-long-as-it-pays, she cut a length from someone's laundry line (she was very well aware of the cost of cello strings, and wouldn't have wasted one), tied in it an exceptionally neat noose, and succeeded in the very difficult task of strangling herself using the ligature. By this time they were living in a one-room apartment; Lan Yi would never forget the sight that greeted him when he returned wearily at the end of the day—Geena, blue-faced, leaning outward on her knees towards the front door. That she had killed herself was bad enough; that she had chosen to do so in such a personally demonstrative and painful way was a sign that she had grown to hate him.
Many people would never have forgiven her. Instead Lan Yi chose never to forgive himself.
But the Images had brought Geena back to him. To be sure, he hardly ever saw her, but often he was aware of her presence. Sometimes she apologized to him for what she had done and sometimes she berated him for his foolishness in reducing them to the penury that had made her so miserable that death seemed the only way out, but most of the time she was just
there
, which was all he wanted. Often he woke to feel her breath softly against his neck, her body spooned around his. Sometimes, when there was nobody nearby to overhear, he held long conversations with her; he was constantly astonished by the wisdom of her advice.
At other times he wondered about the status of the Geena with whom he conversed. He knew that she had been conjured back into existence by the Images—but did that make her presence any the less real? Was it the real Geena who had been spun back from the groves of death, or had the Images plucked from his memories a perceived version of Geena? Logic dictated that the latter was the case; experience suggested the former.
FORGET ME,
said a voice that was either Geena's or Ten Per Cent Extra Free's.
"I can't," said Lan Yi, addressing the wall of his cabin. Tears were flowing down his face.
THERE ARE SIX WOMEN ABOARD THIS SHIP WHO WOULD LIKE AN EXCUSE TO FALL IN LOVE WITH YOU. YOU'RE A FASCINATING ANACHRONISM: YOU WERE MARRIED ONCE.
"I don't want to be anybody's curio."
Lan Yi thought for a moment longer. It had been a hell of a long time since he'd held someone in his arms. The sex part of sleeping together had never seemed as important to him as the stroking and being stroked: he could still feel the velvet of Geena's shoulderblades beneath his fingertips.
"All right." He sputtered with laughter. "Just every now and then I don't mind being a curio."
Geena spoke directly into his mind.
YOU'LL BE MY CURIO TONIGHT.
#
"What I want to do," said Strider to Pinocchio, "is to kick the shit so far out of the Autarchy that it reaches orbital velocity. Then I want us to get home."
"The Spindrifters gave me very considerable information as to how we might get back to the Solar System," said Pinocchio. "I have yet to download this. They did not, however, give me enough. Perhaps others of the ancient species might . . ."
They were alone on the command deck except for Polyaggle, who had chosen to stay there seemingly in perpetuity. Strider had ordered O'Sondheim, Leander and Nelson to go and get some rest; she didn't feel she could issue any orders to Polyaggle, whose species would still be alive were it not for the arrival of the
Santa Maria
.
"What're you waiting for?" said Strider. "Though I don't know how much I like the idea of visiting other neutral species. Look what happened to the last one."
She had momentarily forgotten Polyaggle's presence. She bit her lip and wished she could take back the last few words.
"It is possible," said the Spindrifter, "that not all of those species may remain neutral now that they have seen what the Autarchy has done to our people." It was always hard to tell when listening to an alien voice through the medium of the Images, but there didn't seem to be a hint of grief in Polyaggle's words, nor even any desire for vengeance. All she seemed to be concerned about was the preservation of the ancient species, so that one day they could resume the arcadia they had enjoyed before the rise of the secondary peoples. Strider realized that Polyaggle would probably watch the demise of the Humans with complete detachment. Were the other ancient species the same? Was it a product of the Spindrifters' incredible age, as a people, that she could be so dispassionate? Her species must have seen others arrive on the galactic scene and then live out their cycle until eventual extinction. It was important that Strider kept it in mind that the aliens—
all
aliens—thought differently from the Humans. Otherwise there could be a foolish disaster ahead.
"Which of them do you think are the most likely to want to help us?" she said.
Polyaggle touched her claws together. "Once the bot has downloaded our information I will investigate the remains of your Main Computer to see what can be restored. At that point I will give you my assessment. In the shorter term, Captain Strider, I suggest you would be better advised to establish contact with some of the rebel species."
"Easier said than done," remarked Strider. "We don't have a holophone directory to The Wondervale."
Polyaggle closed her eyes. Concentration emanated from her like something tangible. Strider watched her, fascinated. For a moment she felt something of the same attraction that she knew Strauss-Giolitto did. Both Nelson and O'Sondheim had reacted to the Spindrifter in the same way. The alien was beautiful: it was not surprising that human beings perceived her as erotic, despite her strangeness.
The Spindrifter opened her eyes again. "I have been consulting with the Images," she said. "I have asked them to make some contacts for you. I would pay attention to your communications Pockets if I were you, Captain Strider."