Transcendence (87 page)

Muscles in the sword-arm relax. The weapon itself crumbles into photons which accelerate, screaming, in all directions. Clarisse’s moment-memories begin to pop one after another as we all experience her again. But now I’ve lost the real being, who I am. *Let me go, Jonathan, the way you let Blackjack go. When you’ve lived a life so miserable that even such tiny gifts as playing fireball gather vast, out-of-proportion importance, what’s left to live for?*

“
Fuck you, Clarisse! You’re not paying attention.” Jonathan reveals himself again, and this time she doesn’t look away. Their communion happens as fast as a blink of the eye.

The lightshow ceases. We float, bodiless, between the orbits of Neptune and Saturn, near the needleship
Sigwa
as it and its armada hurl toward confrontation at Jupiter.

Now Clarisse’s floating world of memory brightens, looking like a new planet. She brightens another magnitude, outshining even the invigorated Jonathan.

“
Boy,” she says, “life’s going to be better for you, I promise.”

She outlines a new plan to stop what she set in motion. “You were right to come to
me, but I’m just a first step. We need to cut off the heads of the combatants. Then. . . . Life will be better. Anything is possible. Thank you.” Hope is a star blazing within her,
its solar wind washing clean the spaces of her memory, creating room for what is to come.

“
Now let’s get to work.”

Hardman Nadir waved back the remains of his army—five men, including Paolo—from the massive hicarb door. Feedcontrol Central’s administrative skyscraper towered high above them, gleaming silver in the cloudy light. Behind, fires continued to blaze among the shattered domes and toppled antennae where the battle had raged. Even the ground itself, billions of pivot-mounted plates bristling with tiny needles, smoked, spewing a brown fog over the electropolis.

“
Fire,” Nadir ordered the NKK soldier. The man opened up his plasma rifle at full energy. A small disk of white formed beside the door handle, oozing molten metal.

“
Hold it,” he said. The man ceased fire. “Now see if we can get in.”

Paolo turned the handle, but the door didn’t budge. After ten seconds of fire, when the NKK-soldier’s weapon charge began to weaken, Nadir realized it would take a lot more power to cut through.

“
Magnet charges,” he said. Each EarthCo Warrior carried two. When the first one was fastened into place, the men raced away—there was no cover to be found on the platform, but they at least avoided most of the concussion and flying fragments through sheer distance.

Again and again, they laid their charges in the growing crater. When it came down to Nadir’s own bomb, the men were panting and beginning to reveal signs of doubt. This time, when the deafening explosion tunneled deeper into the door, no debris whistled past Nadir’s head. He looked back and saw light shining through a ragged hole at the center of the crater, half a meter deep. Scorched wires and steel bars dangled within the hole, revealing a hollow space where the handle had been.

The other men looked up from their lying positions and began to cheer. Nadir didn’t have time for pleasure. He was focused like a megawatt laser. Up, Nadir forced his burning and tingling muscles to carry him once again to the door, where he slid his remaining charge into the mechanism within the frame. As soon as he set the timer, he jogged back to where Paolo lay. There he squatted and watched the virtually fireless explosion. Great slabs of armor jarred loose, fumes sprayed out from the doorframe, bits of lock and electronics rocketed in all directions. Even as Nadir walked back to the site, the door began to fall. He stepped aside as a warped, shattered, three-meter by two-meter plate of hicarb crashed to the concrete platform.

“
Let’s go,” he said through a cloud of cement dust, then unshouldered his EMMA and began to chop up the thin, inner section of the door. By the time his men reached him, Nadir was kicking a man-sized hole into a hallway.

They began running along deserted corridors, unmarked, twisting one way and another, featureless. Nadir—at point—turned a corner and, before he could veer out of the way, knocked down a woman wearing a long white coat.

“
Sorry,” he said, helping her up. She looked dazed, but not so much from the collision.

“
Sorry,” she repeated. She stood and stared blankly at Nadir, then blinked and seemed just then to realize she was surrounded by armed soldiers. A gasp stopped her next words.

“
Where’s Herrschaft?” Nadir demanded.

“
The Director is
. . .
everywhere,” she said. “If you want to find him, just wait around. We used to. . . .
No one knows where he is. But, oh, he’ll find you.”

Wispy eyebrows drew together as she frowned. Though she appeared unafraid, her voice rose an octave: “Why are you doing this? You’re ruining the greatest monument to humanity’s progress ever built. Why?”

Nadir turned away from her and began to run again. “If the people want to rebuild this place after they’ve experienced life,” he said, more to himself than the woman, “they’re welcome. I don’t think they will.”

But he began to wonder. Which would they choose: Mind-drugged comfort and all the ills it produces, or life and the pain it forces you to bear? He ran.

Finally they turned a corner and reached a roadblock. An ultraglas door stood just beyond the bend, with an armed guard seated to each side. They started, then raised their handguns. Nadir didn’t break stride as he aimed and fired, aimed and fired. The two men lay writhing on the floor, their gun-arms neatly severed.

“
Bust it down!” he called. Paolo and one of the other EarthCo Warriors began firing at the handprint pad beside the crystal opening-lever. Nadir told them to stop, then leaped at the door and hit it with a flying sidekick. As he rebounded back, the door lurched off its seating.

Nadir felt foolish for a moment as he realized it was a pull, not push, door. He got up from the floor and nodded.

But that only slowed him for a moment. He drew open the door. They continued on, deeper into the building. Nadir’s blood felt like fire, his mind like a laser’s pulse: Nothing extraneous, designed for one purpose, clear and dangerous.

On her way to meet with Luke Herrschaft, Lucilla paused. She was in no hurry; three days ago, her old concerns about Luke’s identity were confirmed—that the man who had made love to her countless times during her early days of service wasn’t a man at all, but a machine inhabited by a man.

She drew a deep breath that sounded more like a gasp and tried to compose herself as she listened to the alert. Someone had broken into the building. Funny, it didn’t seem to matter—only as much as it bore on her being with Luke again.

She could barely concentrate. This was the first time he’d invited her to his private chamber in
. . .
six years. She put out one arm against the clean wall to steady herself. The bastard.
Damn you, you bloody mannequin
, she thought.
I still love you
.

An idea struck her. Lucilla picked up her pace and stopped at a storage closet. There she withdrew a roll of toilet paper and an oil pen. Quickly, she wrote a note, folded it, and held it in the palm of her hand, against a thigh. She returned to the hallway and retraced her steps to a small feed-editing room, smiling at people as she passed, watching worried faces in the flickering light.

“
Fred?” she said, standing in the doorway. A man seated at a secure feedaccess desk—essentially a polished sheet of aluminum atop a plastic pedestal—turned toward her. After a few blinks, he smiled.

“
Lucilla, what’s on?”

“
Nothing. You?”

“
Same. Feed’s dead. I’ve got nothing to do.”

Lucilla walked closer to him, nonchalantly laying a hand on his arm. “Is Ann at work today?” she asked.

The piece of toilet paper fluttered from his arm to his lap. A confused look, then—

“
Sure,” he said, pretending to ignore the paper but shoving it into a shirt pocket. “We come in together every Friday.”

“
Could you tell her I’d like to see her later? Since you’re out of work until the repair equipment gets this place working again. . .”

“
No problem.” He stood, nodded, and left the room.

Two levels down, he entered his contract-wife’s cubicle. She seemed to be asleep, stretched out on an experimental mattress, but turned a smile toward him as he entered.

“
What brings you here now?”

He sat down on the buzzing mattress and put one hand on hers. The note passed into her palm. She clenched it and nodded.

“
Lucilla invited us to dinner.”

They were used to passing information this way—when eyes and ears are everywhere at all times, privacy requires heroic measures.

So the note passed from Ann to her quadrant’s human maid, from the maid to a pipe-fitter in a hissing boiler-room ten levels beneath the surface. The great atomic-powered generators lay silent while repairs went on overhead. From the pipe-fitter, the note passed to a friend who repaired the obsequious machines that kept Feedcontrol Central in top condition
. . .
and so on, until a feral-looking boy sprinted from shadow to shadow in the unpopulated service caverns, where condensation dripped to provide rats and insects with moisture. He had more luck than usual staying out of the light, for most sources of illumination were malfunctioning, casting a sort of strobe through his subterranean world. Not until he found the old man did he allow himself to eat the special treat that the mechanic had given him; sweet, rich chocolate melted on his tongue, and he hissed a laugh at the rats who took special notice.

The old man climbed out of his sleeping chamber, opened the crumpled tissue paper, and strained to read the words. He was now nearly blind, having endured the darkness for so long, but recognized the signature. “Ah, Lucilla.”

A fresh-faced girl sprang into his mind, a girl who had taken pity on the broken and feed-blinded servant of the great Luke Herrschaft. He nearly smashed the note before remembering where he was. He opened it again, holding it out at arm’s length where a triangle of light shone through the rusted steel catwalk.

“
Yes, my dear,” he said when done, and put the paper in his mouth. After he had swallowed, he cried out in his cracking voice:

“
Boy! Boy, come back here. You need to run another errand. I’m sure they’ll have a nicey for you up top.”

Luke Herrschaft told the door to allow Lucilla inside. She stepped into the room and shut the door behind her. Her eyes were directed toward the floor, where real Oriental rugs from the twentieth century kept bare feet insulated from the concrete.

“
Do you remember. . . ?” he asked.

Lucilla’s breasts rose against her thin blouse as she drew a deep breath. “Of course. This is where we first
. . .
made love.”

Herrschaft felt an odd pang of regret. “Won’t you smile? Is this so horrible? I need you now.”

“
Oh, Luke.” Her eyes rose to his, and her face wore a mixture of sadness and something he couldn’t recognize. She crossed a few steps closer to the bed.

“
You know,” Herrschaft said, rising to his elbows beneath the silk sheets, “I thought you’d be
. . .
disgusted with me after what happened in the boardroom.”

She shook her head. An odd smile lifted her lips—Such gorgeous lips, even at her age, he thought. He pulled the last 10% of his consciousness out of the monitors in the tower’s first floor, where a handful of soldiers were running toward a deadly gauntlet of autocannon. Being out of control shook him more than an ill-planned attack.

“
Luke.” She shook her head and sat on the foot of the bed. Herrschaft willed an erection, then had it go away again when he saw a pained expression cross her face.

“
No,” she said. “It’s okay.” Lucilla reached behind her back and loosened the blouse. It slid down the curves of her front.

A lace bra—retro by today’s market, but of the type Herrschaft liked best—held her breasts high on her chest. He remembered how this part of her anatomy had led him to hire the woman as his private assistant in the first place, and was pleased to learn she hadn’t deteriorated over the years. The graceful curve of her collarbone highlighted the soft skin. She smelled warm and human.

“
I wanted to come,” she said. “You know I. . .”