“No…” said Robert. “Too soon…”
“What is? What’s too soon?”
“The Enemy ships. They’re here already. They must have a tracking device on this ship…Of course, that’s it: those VNMs must have done more than dissolve our engine…But where is it? I can’t see it…”
“Never mind that,” said Herb. “Jump, jump again.”
“No point, they’ll just follow us again. We need to find it first. But where is it?”
The ship shuddered, and a strange note filled the air, half warning signal, half death song. There was an edge of finality to it, and Herb suddenly knew that the ship would not be leaving this planet.
“What’s that…?” he asked, his voice faltering.
Robert didn’t answer. His face had gone completely blank. Herb knew that was a bad sign. Robert was having to concentrate entirely on something else.
Slowly at first, the twisted towers of the Necropolis began to move toward them. Herb felt a strange feeling in his stomach. He was now in free-fall; the gravity generators had finally given up. If the ship were to be hit now, there would be no dampening effect. He would be rattled around like a pea in a bottle.
Robert snapped out of his trance.
“That’s it, Herb. I can just about land this ship, but nothing else.”
Herb picked up the silver machine. “Shall I press the button?” he asked, his voice shaking. Nonetheless, he suddenly felt very brave.
“No point. We’re in the wrong place.”
Herb felt despair settle upon him. So that was it.
“So we’ve failed. I don’t understand. I really thought you knew what you were doing.”
Robert smiled. The care lifted from his face, and he was his old self again: the original, irritating, cocksure, supremely arrogant man who had stepped through the secret trapdoor all that time ago.
“We haven’t failed,” he said. “I’m sorry, Herb, but you’ve been tricked.”
Herb said nothing. He was beyond surprise.
Robert grinned. “You’re not the real Herb. You’re just another personality construct, living in the processors of the ship. The real Herb got on that other copy of your ship just after it was replicated, back above your misconverted planet.”
“You’re lying. This is just another one of your tricks. I’m in so much pain.”
“That’s just part of the simulation.”
“Then it’s cruel.”
“I know. But necessary. I had to distract the Enemy AI. It had to believe you were really on this ship. It had to detect human thinking and reactions.”
“Why?”
“So that it wouldn’t see the real you approaching until it was too late.”
“So what will the real me do?”
Robert grinned. The pain in Herb’s side suddenly vanished, and he was standing upright in the middle of the ship, a perfectly healthy young man again. Then he was standing in a room halfway up one of the towers of the Necropolis. Robert was standing next to him. A whole Robert Johnston, both arms intact, dressed in an immaculate navy blue suit, a matching hat tilted on his head.
They both gazed through the wide picture windows at the tattered wreck of Herb’s spaceship as it plunged to the ground before them. It landed with a jarring thud that both flattened and split it at the same time. It bounced once and skidded to a halt. No explosion. There was nothing on board that would burn. It simply lay, squashed and lifeless, against the side of the building.
“What was that?” asked Herb. “Something tumbled from the ship just before it hit the ground.”
“The Ouroboros VNMs we took from that planet a few jumps back. This place is a mess. It could do with starting again.”
Herb looked up at the twisted towers, the trailing strands of deformed buildings.
“You’re not kidding,” he muttered. “And what about us? What do we do now?”
Robert smiled, but it was a pleasant smile. A friendly smile. Herb found himself warming to it.
“Well,” said Robert. “You like VNMs, Herb. I thought maybe you’d appreciate the opportunity to do something positive. I thought that maybe we could help the transformation along. Would you like that?”
“Do I have any choice?” Herb said, almost out of habit, then he paused. Whether he was the real Herb or not, he’d realized something back on the ship. Something he needed to think about.
His life so far had been a complete waste. Maybe it was time to try acting in a different fashion.
Maybe here would be the perfect place to begin thinking about it. And why not think about it while doing something for someone else for a change?
“Actually, maybe I will help.” Herb began to smile, too. “I think I would like that.”
eva 5: 2051
Eva walked into the Watcher’s lair.
Her emotions were all there: fear, curiosity, even excitement, but they were muffled. It was as if her mind was at the end of a very long tunnel looking down at her body in the here and now, watching the strange figure that stumbled along in the cupped hands of the green-forested hills.
Alison strode ahead of her across the dusty yellow gravel of the enclosure, heading for an abandoned yellow digger that stood at the center of the flat, cleared area.
Ramshackle buildings cobbled together from concrete and corrugated metal lay silent around them.
Alison began shouting to someone, her head jerking this way and that.
“Well, I’m here! I’ve brought them with me!”
Katie shuffled along behind her, her head down, hands clasped tightly together. Eva paused just inside the gate and looked around in wonder. It was an old quarry site. Nestling among many taller ones, the top of a hill had been sliced away as neatly as the lid of a boiled egg to leave an area where trucks could park to be loaded up with yellow stone. The dusty grey windows of the surrounding buildings gazed blindly on. Long conveyor belts ran back and forth, still bearing fragments of yellow stone. The place looked deserted. Dead. The rusty old digger that Alison headed toward made Eva think of the picked-over skeleton of a dinosaur. Its tail scoop was stretched out on the ground behind it, lifeless as everything else in that dry place.
And yet there were the pylons. Heavy cables, humming with current, trailed to a building at the far side of the square. Something here needed power.
Alison was turning around and around now, spinning in the middle of the enclosure like a dancer as she searched for something.
“Well?” she shouted again. “I’m here! I want my reward!”
There was a faint metallic creak. All three women spun in its direction. They could see nothing unusual. Only another old building, bright orange rust forming lichen patterns on its roof.
“Come on! Answer me!”
There was another creak and an exhalation, almost as if the breeze had whispered “Very well” as it sighed across the shuttered buildings, and something flickered across the clearing.
Alison’s head fell from her body in a fine mist of blood.
Katie looked at her friend’s body as it slumped to the ground, blood still pumping from the severed neck.
All those emotions at the end of a tunnel. Eva could pick them up and examine them, each in turn. She could see Katie’s confusion at what had happened. She felt her strangely comical desire to ask Alison why her head had fallen off. She watched the recognition dawning in Katie’s eyes at what she was seeing. Eva could feel her own rising horror. It was all there, but viewed from a long way away.
Then Alison’s body was finally still, the head ceased rolling, and Eva’s feelings came rushing down the tunnel as she rejoined the here and now.
“Oh my God!” she whispered. And a voice spoke…
“It’s what she wanted.”
The voice was low and authoritative. It made Eva think of a Shakespearean actor, of pinstripe suits and old port in decanters, rich cigars and ripe Stilton. Who was it? From her expression, Katie knew.
Eva followed her gaze.
The digger was moving.
The front scoop lifted slowly from the ground and the vehicle began to turn. More than ever, the digger reminded Eva of a dinosaur. That great metal shovel on the long, jointed neck, the yellow tail of the trailing scoop flexing gently on the gravel.
The shovel swung toward them. Two cameras were mounted on either side of its grey metal blade, heightening the impression that they were looking at a mechanical monster.
The bottom of the blade dropped slightly and the dinosaur spoke.
“Hello. I’m the Watcher.”
“You killed her,” said Katie. “She did what you wanted, led us here to you, and you killed her.”
“That was the deal,” the Watcher answered. “She never had the courage or the opportunity to do it for herself.”
The head moved a little so that it directly faced Eva. Yellow dust fell from the shovel blade to the ground.
“She envied you that, you know,” it said. “You almost managed it on your own.”
“I know,” Eva said, and then she was silent.
Katie spoke in a little voice. “Couldn’t you have talked her out of it?”
“She loathed what she became whenever she was on a high. She despaired of sinking back into her lows.”
“Couldn’t you have cured her?”
“That’s not what she wanted.”
Katie was slowly nodding her head. “It’s right,” she said, looking at Eva. “This is what she always wanted.”
—But that’s not the point. It’s changed the subject and you didn’t even notice….
The voice was so faint Eva wondered if she had imagined it. She must have imagined it.
Katie was crying. Eva saw one tear run down her cheek, leaving a white trail in the dirt smeared there.
And yet Katie was smiling, too. Smiling sadly. She looked up at the yellow metal dinosaur.
“You know,” she said, “you don’t look like I expected you to.”
“How did you expect me to look?”
The Watcher’s voice had a strange edge to it, as if Katie and it were sharing a strange joke that Eva was not party to.
“I don’t know,” said Katie. “I thought maybe you’d be smaller, darker. Not so rugged maybe but, you know, still strong. I saw you as more of a forklift truck.”
The Watcher said nothing to that, it just continued staring at Katie through its two camera eyes, and Eva realized with astonishment that her impression had been correct. The two of them
were
joking. Katie was standing barely a meter from her decapitated friend, the blood that had been pumping from the neck now slowed to a gentle trickle, and they were joking. No, more than joking. There was something else there…What was the word…?
—It’s wrong…
The voice again…He was coming back. There, at the edge of her imagination.
Don’t look too closely or you’ll chase him away. Think of something else or you’ll lose him. Think of the sound of late afternoon in the quarry. Of dusty stone and the gentle hum of power cables.
—Tell it…It’s wrong.
And there he was. Her brother.
“No,” said Eva. “This isn’t right. You’ve played games with us to lead us here. You’ve played with our minds so much that we never know whether we’re following our will or yours. Now we’re here, you’re still playing with us. You killed Alison! Stop changing the subject! Stop making us change the subject! You killed her!”
“She wanted it. She needed help. The Center couldn’t cure her. She wanted release.”
“So what? There must have been a better way. I do not feel that an intelligent and enlightened being should kill someone because she has low self-esteem.”
“And you know all about that, Eva.”
The Watcher’s voice was now almost a whisper.
Eva felt herself begin to blush. The Watcher was right. Hadn’t she tried to do the same? She suddenly felt very silly, very small and very insignificant. Look at Katie, standing next to her, looking up at the big yellow digger with that strange expression. Katie was clever. Katie understood better than she did what was going on, and
she
wasn’t arguing. Eva should apologize for being so silly. The words rose in her throat…
—It’s doing it again. Choosing your emotions for you so that it can change the subject.
Her brother was right. He was sounding stronger…. She reached into her pocket and touched the twig, touched the leaves, gripped them tightly. Here she was, trapped in the middle of nowhere, trapped in the Watcher’s lair, but she was not alone.
—Alison had low self-esteem. Look at all those one-night stands and the depressions that followed. The Watcher is being judgmental. Tell it that!
“Yes…” She pulled herself up, straightened her shoulders. She had begun to slouch, to stare at the ground. The Watcher had made her do that. Now she gazed straight up at the dusty yellow shovel.
“You shouldn’t have killed her. You should have helped her. You could have, couldn’t you? You could have cured her!”
“I could.”
Katie lost her abstracted expression. She was gazing at the Watcher in horror.
“You could have cured her?”
The words came in a mad rush. Katie was slipping back again, back into her old self.
“I could have cured her,” repeated the Watcher. “Do you think I should have done that?”
“Yes!” Eva shouted.
“Interesting.”
—Why? Ask it why it’s interesting.
“Why?”
The tracks of the digger moved a little. It was shuffling, changing position, adopting a more thoughtful pose. It was acting like a human, Eva realized. It was mimicking body language; even now it was playing with their minds….
It spoke. “Everyone knows what you need, but I know what you want.”
“What does that mean?” Eva shouted, but Katie was nodding.
The Watcher continued: “I could have cured Alison. It also follows that I could cure you both as well. But where do I stop? I can cure the world. Should I do that?”
—Watch it!
Eva had already been opening her mouth to speak. She slowly closed it. The Watcher went on.
“Redistribute the world’s resources? Feed the world? I could do that. Just say the word and I can do it. What about crime, disease, overpopulation? I can solve those problems, too. I can make this world a more
efficient
place. Should I do that?”
“That’s not for us to choose,” Eva said primly.
“Oh, but it is,” said the Watcher. Its voice had lost that bantering tone. Now it was cold, matter of fact.