Transcendence (90 page)

Not blind; his inner sanctum had been penetrated!

“
Get out!” He tried to scream, but only a gurgling set of vowels emerged from his throat. How could it be? Who was it? How!

He flicked on his comm overlay and found the security connections. He depressed all of them at once—he wasn’t constricted to the simple-minded, anthropomorphic technique of using a mental “finger”—and ordered every guard to the maze of catacombs beneath Feedcontrol.

Fear! No one knew of his inner sanctum. No one should even know of the maze.
How would they get there—here—in time?

But then Herrschaft noticed something even more terrifying: His comm hadn’t even fed out to Security.

Warm and cleansing, soft and nutritive, the chemical bath swirled his corpus as his brain seized in a fear he hadn’t experienced for nearly two centuries.

When Herrschaft tried to return his consciousness to his robot, nothing happened. When he attempted to open a splice anywhere in his Feedcontrol complex, nothing. The splice merely spread a black wedge between the white glare of the intruder’s light.

“
Brain,” he 3-verded.

“
Yes, my lord?”

I knew it
. “Brain, kindly please allow me to occupy one of my machines.”

“
I’m sorry, my lord, but all connections out from your core have been severed. You yourself—”

Herrschaft’s brain roared and his commcard flared, emitting every curse he had ever heard used on any of his worlds. His husk of a body thrashed to the minute extent it was able. When his rage subsided, Herrschaft re-opened communication with his computer counterpart.

“
Brain, let’s be reasonable. What can you hope to gain by keeping me locked away down here?” As Herrschaft spoke, he pictured the millions of tons of earth, concrete, and engineering miracles crushing down on this chamber. He felt the weight of all that, saw the worms boring holes through the soil, looked at the greasy underside of the greatest phased-array antenna ever built. No, he couldn’t die. At least not now, just before his EConauts destroyed the remnants of NKK’s space presence. Not now, just before Luke Herrschaft would be declared ruler of Solsystem!

“
I’m sorry, my lord, but I am not blocking you anymore,” said the Brain in calm, measured tones, reminiscent of a young Herrschaft. “You damaged my ability to interfere hours ago.

“
The EarthCo Warrior Sub-Boss, Hardman Nadir, has incapacitated your external cybernetic equipment. It will require a great deal of repairs before—”

Herrschaft couldn’t hear the last of the Brain’s analysis. A buzzing filled his skull. He broke into sobs, but he couldn’t feel any tears amid the wet current that washed over him. Luke Herrschaft, momentarily to become ruler of all humankind, felt as powerless and vulnerable as a baby in a cradle. And who was rocking that cradle?

Hardman Nadir squinted against the storm of plastic and metal kicked up by his rifle’s battering the wall of electronics.
Crack-thup
, his EMMA sang the familiar song of release. Once again, his rifle spoke the grace notes of a weapon working for all things good and right. And now, since his naïveté had been crushed and ripped away, he knew he was fighting for the good of his fellow man, as opposed to simply following the less-wrong path.

He eased off the trigger and smiled. Tears continued to scorch his cheeks. The cooling body of Paolo lay sprawled beside him, the boy’s boots—still bearing traces of Libyan sand—nearly touching the brushed-aluminum base of Herrschaft’s tank.

Nadir slung the rifle over his shoulder and stepped toward the liquid-filled cylinder. Only two medals remained pinned to his vest. One of these, a bronze disc earned in North India, he unfastened and tossed to the floor. He shone the flashlight right at Herrschaft’s face. “There you are,” he told the thing.

The purple eyelids flickered, then snapped open. The mandibles fell open.

“
Ohmygod,” Nadir said, stumbling backward. His heart thumped fast in his chest, making the bullet-wound pulse with fire. No saliva remained in his mouth as he tried to swallow.

“
Herrschaft,” he whispered. Nadir took a step closer.

Just then, a naked man and a teenage boy appeared in the room, a bare pace away. Nadir was startled that anyone was able to 3-verd him—
Isn’t my headcard burned?
The boy, dressed in ratty clothes, looked at Nadir, then Paolo, then turned to study the creature in the tank. The man crossed his arms over his chest. He seemed unaware of his nudity.

“
What’s on?” said Nadir, striving amid death and destruction for the mundane world of society. He’d nearly forgotten the etiquette for greeting civvies.

“
Who are you?” asked the man. “Are you the Director’s guard?”

Nadir doubled up in laughter, but when he opened his eyes, Paolo’s body lay at his feet and all humor fled the room. “No, sir, I’m certainly not. I’m here to save the world.”

The man smiled. “Well, that’s a coincidence. So are we. We’re going to stop the war.”

“
You mean my war?” asked Nadir.

The man looked confused. “The interplanetary war between EarthCo and NKK.”

Now it was Nadir’s turn to be nonplused. “What are you talking about?”

The boy looked away from Herrschaft at Nadir. “You don’t feed the war, man? Where’ve you been?”

“
I’ve been
. . .
out of feed,” said Nadir. “Is this war any bigger than the ones we’ve fought all along?” Feeling tired, he allowed himself to slump down along the doorframe and lay a hand on Paolo’s shin.

“
You could say that. Well, it seems you’ve done part of our job for us. Herrschaft can’t feed or transmit. We’ve got to be going.” But the man hesitated, looking inquiringly at Nadir.

“
Say, you’re hurt. What’s your story, anyway?” The man gestured the boy toward Nadir.

“
I’m a soldier,” Nadir said, “fighting for something I can’t really put a finger on. Virtue, I guess, all that’s good in our society. This boy’s my best friend.”

He felt so disoriented for a moment that he truly forgot Paolo had died. The pain magnified when he remembered.

“
Hardman Nadir?” a staticky speaker asked from its mount in the ceiling. “I know that’s you out there. What do you think you’re doing?”

Nadir realized his job wasn’t finished. He forced himself to stand; the movement drained the blood from his head, and it took him several seconds to blink away the stars.

“
Hardman,” the naked man’s 3VRD said, “put down the weapon. Come with us. We’ll figure out a way to bring Herrschaft later.”

Nadir aimed the EMMA at Herrschaft’s tank. He started to squeeze the trigger when he felt the man touch his bare forearm.
Odd
, Nadir thought.
I’m even feeding fivesen, and I thought my card was down
.

Then his vision melted.

Hardman Nadir watches his life unfold before his eyes. *Is this what it’s like to die?*

*You’re not dying,* someone says. *You’re being re-born.*

Another person’s life seems to appear all around him, as if his life is a sheaf of papers flipping down one after another, and this other person’s is a string of balls fastened one to the other like a set of buoys marking off where mines float in the ocean.

Someone reaches into his chest and removes the bullet lodged there. Energy suffuses into his being. Moments pass like ages of the Earth, and he experiences lifetimes in a moment.

Nadir mentally blinks.

“
Pehr Jackson, Jonathan Sombrio,” he says. “I’ve just lived your lives. No, I can’t become like you’ve become. I’m not the right kind. I’d be eaten alive.”

Nadir knows how to escape, back to his body, back to Herrschaft’s burial chamber. He begins focusing himself there—

“
You’re wrong,” says a woman’s voice—but when he tries to see her face, all he sees is another ball floating just beyond those of Jackson and Sombrio. “You’re the best kind: one who has seen the evil in the world and knows, one who has fought to topple evil. One who has spent his life like coinage to end it, yet has ended up richer for the spending. Now you can help us build something good in the vacuum left behind.”

“
All right,” Nadir says, “just a moment.”

He pours his body back into the space where it had stood beside the fallen Paolo, deep beneath the electropolis. His EMMA lay on the floor; he reached down, targeted the floating creature. . . .

Crack-thup
, the rifle spat tiny ceramic rounds at Herrschaft’s tank. The firing was satisfying but had little effect. He opened the canvas bag beside the EMMA, removed a strip of explosive tape, stuck it along the tank’s base, attached a detonator, and stepped out of the room.

The concussion momentarily deafened him. He re-entered the room and discovered the tank was crazed with cracks but not quite broken. With a small smile, Nadir picked up his EMMA and began to fire. It took several seconds before the ultraglas finally shattered and spilled out its putrid contents. The stench of medicine and bodily fluids fumed into the air. Nadir stepped out of the way as the wasted shell of a man tumbled over the sharp edges of its tank and writhed across the white-tile floor. It came to rest beside Paolo.

Nadir couldn’t accept that contact, so he kicked it aside. Clear chemicals oozed out of the mouth as it began to convulse, finally—in its death-throes—looking more alive than it had in the canister. He took pity on the thing’s suffering; after all, this had once been a man whose vision had created Feedcontrol. Every kid learned that in Edufeed, and Feedcontrol wasn’t all bad.

Nadir was about to remove the final medal when he realized that he, like Jackson had been, was naked.

The blazing sphere of Hardman Nadir reappears among us just as Pehr and Jonathan’s increasing grip on Herrschaft cuts clean. A silver star with purple and gold bits of ribbon appears upon Nadir’s surface, beyond which we can no longer see his thoughts.

“
Now my mission’s done,” he says. His words spread out across the gleaming arm of the Milky Way and form the rudiments of an orchestral piece. “I’ve paid my debt. Now I can be at peace.”

*Wait*—for we know what he’s thinking, even though his current thoughts lay hidden behind the brightening star.

“
Now it’s time the world be rid of me. I’m an artifact of another age of Man. You’re on the right path; keep it up.” As he speaks, the orchestra fills out; now the horn section, the percussion section, and the strings all build toward a crescendo.

Nadir’s sphere of self pulses a hundredfold brighter, casting loose the star, a medal he earned for bravery in a battle where he only waded in human waste until air cover bombed his besiegers to hell. The star drifts away into the intergalactic emptiness.

“
Don’t do this, Nadir,” I say.

“
No,” he says. “My gift is the skill that cuts and cleans and cauterizes wrongs.”

“
You could help us so much—“

“
I guess I’m selfish, then,” he says.

One memory-scene of his floats to the surface and I and I and I feel it pass into us.

Young Hardman Nadir sits in a bar in downtown Wolf Point, Montana, with his father. Mother has already gone away. It’s been a month. She’s not coming back.

Nadir looks around the dingy room at men and women slumped on stools or in booths, sipping glasses of beer. But their eyes are glazed—the store’s server is running special feed. They look like wax figurines
. . .
deaf, mute, blind, like Mother before she went away.

Nadir wants to make them melt. “What’s wrong with you?” he asks. No one takes notice of his words.

Nobody has any idea of this fire inside me. *See this?* The pressure-containment vessel that had begun to crack in the African village is beginning to fill. *I could explode. I’m a barrel of gasoline, I’m a brick of plastique, I’m a rocky mass of death and hollowness like a volcano stuffed full of fossilized bone. . . .*

“
I’m a goddamned black hole!” *I’ve got to do something before I explode and destroy all these people, before I suck the whole rotten world inside me and set it all afire.*

Young Nadir walks straight over to the EarthCo Warrior recruitment station, signs up, and goes off to war. But nothing fills the hollow space, nothing lets loose the pressure safely, until years later I smash my way into the core of rot and decay at the heart of Feedcontrol.