The Alejandra Variations (23 page)

It was a walking nuclear bomb.

Nicholas realized that inside the huge bullet head were several pounds of plutonium and uranium waiting to go off. The creature had five sparkling eyes like those of a spider, that winked on brilliantly. The bonfire had been scattered into small embers and burning logs as it came at them.

"Violation!" its voice box shouted.
"Violation!"

The bullet head stared down at them mercilessly. Its five heartless eyes cast them all in a dazzling accusatory light.

The Keeper's joints grated and squealed as it slowly gained its feet from where it had lain underneath tons of earth and grass. It stood an awesome thirty feet high. Dirt and a tapestry of roots fell from its shoulders and tumbled to the floor of the meadow. The terrifying machine had slept a long, long time, but despite its age it moved with a singular purpose in mind.

"No!" Cesya cried. "It can't be!"

The Keeper stepped toward them like a rust-colored reptile stalking its helpless prey. Its feet could crush a man without giving it a thought.

"Mistress!" yelled Ariuzu. "Hurry!" She tugged at Cesya with a desperate urgency.

The Clantrams were already starting up their engines. Lights had been turned on throughout the vehicles, and ladders were being withdrawn by those Clantrams which had already been filled.

Nicholas grabbed Cesya. She stared at the mechanical beast as if her eyes were deceiving her.

"Cesya, run!" he shouted.

The Keeper's legs lifted it beyond the scattered embers of the bonfire. "This is in Violation of the Directives!" it shouted down to them.

Cesya broke away from Nicholas. She thrust out her chest defiantly, gaining what courage she could. "We've done nothing wrong!" she shouted up at the machine. "Nothing has been disturbed!
Nothing!"

Nick's heart raced maddeningly as he watched the lights focus on Cesya. A row of numbers suddenly glowed in a bloody, vivid crimson on the Keeper's huge chest. The numbers were framed as minutes and seconds, and the seconds were counting off backward.

The bomb inside of its head had been fused and armed.

Twenty minutes were left for the Tejada Clan!

"It's not fair!" Cesya shouted as Ariuzu pulled at her. "I've done nothing wrong!"

Nicholas turned and saw all but the lead Clantram—Cesya's vehicle—begin to pull slowly away. They had abandoned their equipment where it lay, and Nick could see that people were still climbing the ladders to some of the trams. The giant wheels of the Clantrams groaned.

He suddenly realized that they weren't going to make it.

Cesya and Ariuzu turned and ran as fast as they could. The eyes of the Keeper were squarely upon them. Obviously, Keepers weren't designed to reason. The Law was the Law.

He could hear Cesya weeping as she ran in the darkness, a long, blue shadow stretching out before her. Ariuzu, despite her apparent age, was in excellent shape, and managed to keep up with her leader.

Nicholas stopped running. He had spotted a long piece of metal, which he assumed was an attachment to one of the loading carts. It was as long as his arm and quite thick.

"Violation!" the Keeper kept saying, walking slowly, awkwardly, toward the line of lumbering vehicles, its feet pounding on the earth.

Nicholas pitied the women who stood at the windows of the receding Clantrams. They had no weapons. There was nothing they could do but run away.

He hefted the cart attachment like a javelin. He turned and faced the Keeper. The lights of the behemoth were blinding as it stared down at him.

The Keeper reached down to grab him, but he was able to roll away from its grasp.

But he knew that they were all doomed. There was no question about it, unless… He didn't think that the bomb inside the machine's mindless skull was strong enough to reach the trams if they could get out of the meadow behind the hills to the south. It was probably a very small-yield device. If the Clantrams could put enough distance between themselves and the blast, they might be able to survive the gamma radiation and shock wave. Maybe.

There was only one thing Nicholas could think of doing: Stop the Keeper bodily from pursuing the Clan.

As the Keeper moved to grab him again, Nicholas ducked beneath the huge arm and thrust the metal attachment's flat edge into the crook of the Keeper's left knee. He had to jump to do it.

The Keeper spun, and as it righted itself, Nicholas heard the attachment snap violently and lodge firmly in the joint. Still wobbly from the alcohol and
gohhe
, Nicholas scrambled to his feet, then turned and ran for the lead Clantram for all he was worth.

He heard a resounding crash behind him and saw that the Keeper had fallen to the meadow floor, immobilized. The bomb inside its head still ticked away, and as the monster had gone down, Nicholas had noticed the time left: seventeen minutes, thirty-two seconds—and counting.…

"Nicholas!" Cesya shouted from across the meadow.

She and Ariuzu had gained the tram, which had fallen in behind the other vehicles. He could see Cesya standing on the ladder as the Clantram picked up speed.

"Hurry, Heart! Hurry!" she shouted into the darkness. Ariuzu stood just above her leader, silhouetted by the light from inside the tram.

Nicholas sprinted as fast as he could. But he was very drunk and didn't see the small stream beneath his feet. With a crash, he somersaulted across the shallow stream, landing face down in a clump of brittle cattails.

"Damn!" he yelled as pain skyrocketed through his leg. He had badly twisted his ankle.

With a loud groan—his heart pounding fiercely—he struggled to his feet and limped as best he could toward the last of the fleeing Clantrams.

"Nick!" came Cesya's frantic call, harking across the dark fields like the cry of a nightingale who'd lost her mate. "Don't do this to me!" she cried. "Please!"

Nicholas fell again and came up bruised and bleeding. He could see that barely a hundred yards away Cesya was struggling with her servants, trying to keep the ladder extended for him. But the Unit which was steering the vehicles had other things in mind—the first of which was its own immediate survival. The Clantram wouldn't stop for anything, even the golden woman's mate. Cesya fought against her servants and Ariuzu, but was eventually pulled inside. The door closed automatically, and its metallic ringing filled the meadow like the final bolt on a coffin lid.

They might make it, Nick told himself, fighting his pain. They just might.…

It was quite dark now; he couldn't see the line of hills to the south. Many of the Clantrams had already vanished.

There was blinding pain in his every step. He might have broken his ankle. He splashed into another of the meadow's many runoff streams and fell exhausted to his hands and knees. He knew that he had to keep going, to put as much distance as possible between himself and the Keeper. But he couldn't find the strength. His body, depleted by liquor and weakened by nights with Cesya, couldn't go any further. His foot felt like an unquenchable fire. His body seemed paralyzed with pain.

He twisted around, onto the bank of the tiny creek, and lay awkwardly among the small lilies, breathing hard.

He looked behind him, to the ridge beyond which he knew the Keeper lay struggling, trying to regain its feet so that it could pursue the Tejada Clan in its age-old obsession with the Law. Luminescent rods of crystalline light from the Keeper's five terrible eyes scanned the skies like searchlights.

Nicholas could hear its horrible voice shouting, "Violation!" like an executioner. The Keeper was a spider pinned to the ground, but its disability was only an illusion. Its bite was still deadly.

The stream's cold water revived him. He scrambled to his knees and moved away as fast as he could. He couldn't tell now how much time he had left. His perceptions of everything were distorted. He saw that the last of the Clantrams—Cesya's vehicle—had disappeared beyond the low hills.

Nicholas hobbled across the meadow, not looking back. There was no time. He found a ridge and climbed it quickly, the pain in his foot throbbing each time he put weight on it. His ankle had swollen severely.

Out of breath and desperate, he rolled down the backside of the ridge, sliding down the grass in sheer darkness.

All was quiet. He looked up into the sky.

The stars seemed to shuffle back into place, and he thought he recognized Lyra. But it was just an illusion. It was the familiar sky a dying man might want to see during his last moments on the earth. Then it shifted again, and the unfamiliar constellations were still in place. The world turned senselessly on its axis, as it had done all the long centuries, with or without man.

The Keeper exploded.

Nicholas screamed. The earth shook, and the sky was filled with light. A deadly wind scoured the meadow. Enormous chunks of rock and soil rained about him. A piece of metal thunked into his shoulder, drawing blood. He jerked and flung it into the brook.

But he was still alive. It could not have been a thermonuclear explosion which had racked the meadow.

Some of his hearing was gone. He shook his head. His body was so racked with pain that the fires in his ankle were only minor elements. His bladder and bowels had emptied during the melee.

Rocks and smaller debris kept raining about him, but the rumble of the major blast had subsided. He coughed and struggled on his stomach up the slope of the ridge.

The meadow had been totally destroyed. Smoke drifted up in wisps from small fires. He rose on one hurt knee. He smelled terrible; he felt even worse. He gazed across the plains of hell.

Among the fires, Nicholas noticed, were a number of rocks or small pieces of metal which glowed in the darkness. He knew that it was an illusion of some kind. It had to be.

Then he knew what had happened to the Keeper.

Over time, the casings of the uranium and plutonium stored in the Keeper's sleeping head had decayed or warped. For a nuclear bomb to go off, the inside lining of uranium had to be absolutely flush with the outer casing of plutonium. Otherwise, it would only break apart when the normal explosive on the inside was set off; there would be no chain reaction. Instead, there would be radioactive metal scattered all over the place.

The meadow had been seeded with millions of shards of radioactive debris that glowed in the night.

Yet, he knew that neither plutonium nor uranium glowed in darkness. Only his mind had made it come alive. Fear. Blue-green constellations of death dotted the meadow, the spectres of wars long past.

Nicholas rubbed his shoulder where the piece of the Keeper had struck him in the briar patch. Yes, he thought. This could have been paradise.

His shoulder burned with atomic fire. He'd been struck by white-hot plutonium. He was a dead man.

Chapter Five

BY MORNING HE was already weak.

During the night he had tried to follow the huge tracks that the caravan had left on the grass, but the going was rough. The utter darkness and the painful swelling in his foot made movement extremely difficult. Still, something compelled him to get beyond the meadow into the hills, to pursue the receding Clantrams. The voice in the back of his mind said,
Don't stop,
Nick.
But his body cried out:
Stop. Rest. Die.

The first thing he did when he left the fiery meadow was to wash himself in a stream. He had to get rid of the dust and debris that had sprinkled onto him in the explosion.

He fought off fatigue until the sun came up, when he realized that he was miles from the meadow. The terrain was nearly the same with its acres of green grasses, vine- and flower-choked woods, gently undulating hills. The tracks of the Clan were plainly visible in the soft turf that seemed to carpet the earth from horizon to horizon. The water-rich soil beneath the tracks yielded small puddles of black mud. From these, Nicholas could tell how recently the tracks had been laid down. The Clantrams were hours ahead. Nothing could be heard but the sounds of birds and insects which had risen to meet the dawn.

The sun cleared the top of a small chain of hills to the south as Nicholas came upon a brisk stream which paralleled the Clan tracks. He lay down upon the carpet of grass which lined the stream.

Sleep descended almost immediately, despite the pain in his foot and the dull burning at his shoulder. The world seemed horribly unreal. The horizon shimmered, the woods moved. He thought he heard the voices of an ancient past.

"Nicholas!" The call came from far off. "Nicholas! Can you hear me?"

He rolled to one side, blinking sleep from his eyes. His shoulder soared with pain. The height of the sun told him he'd been asleep for hours, but it had been a fitful, uneasy sleep. His ankle still hurt, and the skin of his whole body was now apple-red with sunburn.

"Nick!" came the call once again.

He noticed that blood had matted thickly where he had fallen asleep on the grass. He sat up, hearing the collective voices of men nearby, chatting among themselves. At first he thought they were part of his dreams, but then another cry rang out, and he knew they were real.

It was Holte.

Nick lifted himself away from the grass, and climbed the bank of the stream to where he could see better.

Holte and a contingent of men and women from the Clan had come down from the north—from the direction of the death-meadow. They rode strange-looking, horselike animals whose rainbow skins glistened spectacularly in the morning sun. There were no Clantrams in sight.

He stared at the posse in delirium. Riding next to Holte on a fabulous beast was one of the Clan's pilots, who scanned the ground with her eye device. Cesya was not present.

They were riding animals! Wasn't that a Violation? It would follow the logic of the Directives.…

But he was too exhausted to figure it out. The logic of this world was entirely arbitrary, as if it had been composed idiosyncratically in the mind of an unstable, emotionally insecure being. Perhaps it wasn't a Violation at all. Perhaps it was just some grown-ups riding colorful ponies coming to rescue him.