Zelazny, Roger - Novel 05 (3 page)

 
          
 
As we had eaten oranges in the shade of the
water-processing plant, its doubtless onetime sleek and shiny walls softened
partly by weather and partly by the intervention of lilac and wisteria to a
monastery-like finish, I had stroked her hair and she had plucked the pale-green
hellebore, that ancient remedy for madness, tangling those flowers in my own,
and my thoughts had strayed beyond the severely drawn diagrams of skull and
walls, softened by their froths of blossoms, and into the completely automatic
workings of the installation, whose sounds were repeated to us, softly,
inevitably, as it took in, purified and spewed through underground conduits I
knew not how many thousands of gallons of the sea, and I considered the dual
nature of Herbert Styler, field representative for Doxford Industries on the
planet called Alvo, so far removed from the pale human star we formed as to be
equally inconceivable, but this time she did not notice and say, "What is
it?" as I wondered whether the man who had undergone experimental neural
abridgment of a kind still illegal on Earth, supposedly permitting him full
conscious access to the workings of a great computer complex, whether this man,
who, for his company, stood in the way of COSA's expansion on the choicest of
the outworlds, could be considered a machine with a human personality or a man
with a computer mind, and whether what I had been asked to do was properly
homicide or something totally new—say, mechanicide or cybicide— while the muted
thudding of the sea and the nearer vibration of the waterworks came into us,
along with the fragrances of the blossoms and the touch of salt the breezes
bore.

 
          
 
Paul had assured me that I would be given the
best training and equipment available for the fulfillment of the contract. He
had then recommended that I take a trip.

 
          
 
"Get away for a time," he had said,
and, 'Think about it."

 
          
 
Staring up through the night, feeling the
cold, wondering whether I could kill him, get away, come back and start over,
fresh and clean, belonging here, my other life as dead and sealed then ...

 
          
 
"I will try to," I said, and let the
curtain fall.

 
          
 
Here, then.

 
          
 
. . . Seeing her seated beneath that crazy
holiday-tree, soft hair fixed with a pale, coral clip, head and hand moving as
she transferred her sheep to paper, precise, deliberate; then a brightening of
the day, the fall of my shadow, her attention, the turning of her head, the
movement of her arm as she raised her hand to shade her eyes, me dismounting,
twisting the reins about a branch, starting down toward her, reaching for a
word, a face, her nod, her slow smile ...

 
          
 
Here.

 
          
 
... Seeing the fire-flowers unfold all in a
row beneath me, the final blossom covering half of the building, its target; my
vehicle faltering, diving, burning then, myself ejected, the cabin intact about
me and moving with a life of its own, dodging, darting, firing, downward and
forward, downward and forward, coming apart then and dropping me gently, gently
down, my prosthetic armor making the barest of clicks as my feet touch the ground
and the repellors cut off; and then my lasers lancing forward, cutting through
the figures who advance upon me, grenades flying from my hands, waves of
protoplasm-shattering ultrasonics flowing from me like notes from some rung,
invisible bell...

 
          
 
How many androids and robots I smashed, mockup
buildings I razed, obstacles I destroyed, projectiles I hurled in the two
months that followed, there on that barren worldlet where I was taken to be
familiarized with all the latest methods of violence, I do not know. Many. My
instructors were technicians, not killers, who would later undergo
memory-erasure, to protect both the organization and themselves. The discovery
that this was possible intrigued me, recalling to me some of my earlier
thoughts. The techniques, I learned, were highly sophisticated and could be
employed quite selectively. They had been in use for years as a
psychotherapeutic tool. The instructors, for their part, were a strange mixture
of attitudes and moods, at first exhorting me almost constantly to perfect my
techniques with their weapons while scrupulously avoiding any reference to the
fact that I would soon be using them to kill someone. Later, however, as the
realization gathered that whatever they said or felt or thought would subsequently
be removed from their consciousness, they began to joke frequently about death
and killing and their feelings toward me seemed to undergo a reversal. From an
initial state of undisguised contempt, they came in a matter of weeks to regard
me with something approaching reverence, as if I were a sort of priest and they
vicarious participants in a sacrifice. This disturbed me, and I took to
avoiding them as much as possible on my own time. For me, the job was simply
something that I had to do, to find my place in what seemed a better society
than the one I had left. It was then that I began to wonder whether people were
changing rapidly enough to assure the race's continued existence, if these men
could revert so readily, reach so eagerly for a violence-fix. I had few
illusions concerning myself, and I was willing to try to live with me for the
rest of my life; but I had considered them my moral superiors, and it was their
society I was trying to buy into. It was not until near the end of my training,
however, that I learned something of the dynamics which underlay their altered
attitude. Hanmer, one of the least objectionable of my instructors, came to my
quarters one night, bearing a bottle which made him somewhat welcome. He had
already done considerable work on its predecessor, and his face, which normally
bore the certainty of expression generally found only on ventriloquists'
dummies, had grown rather slack, his voice slowed from its usual chatter to a
thing of slow puzzlement. It was not long before I learned what was bothering
him. The sanctions and controls were not doing so well. It appeared that a
limited armed conflict—the situation to which I had alluded when speaking with
Paul some time before—had moved several steps nearer actuality, was indeed
imminent, as Hanmer saw it. The politics of it bored me, for they were not yet
mine, but the possibility of its occurring at all, with the ever-present danger
of its growing into something large and terrifying, was ironic as well as
alarming. To come all this way, and in the manner that I did, just to arrive in
time for a worldwide conflagration ... No! It was absurd. Absolutely. It began
to seem that their proximity to an instrument of violence, myself, at a time
like this had served to trigger something quite deep-seated and well suppressed
within these men. While it had released something violent and irrational within
the others, in the case of Hanmer, who, after a time, sat monotonously
repeating, "It can't happen," it had broken something.

 
          
 
"It may not," I said, to hearten
him, since it was his whisky I was drinking.

 
          
 
He looked at me then. Hope seemed to flicker
for a moment, then went away from his eyes.

 
          
 
"What do you care?" he said.

 
          
 
"I care. It's my world, too. Now."

 
          
 
He looked away.

 
          
 
"I don't understand you," he said at
last. "Or the others, for that matter ..."

 
          
 
I thought that I did, though it was of small
help to anybody. All my emotions at the moment were things based on absence.

 
          
 
I waited. I did not know him well enough to
know why his reaction should be different from the others', and I never did
find out. He said one other thing that remained with me, though.

 
          
 
"... But I think everybody ought to be
locked up till they learn how to behave."

 
          
 
Trite, laughable and quite impossible, of
course. At the time.

 
          
 
Mixing the remainder of the booze into two
stiff ones, I hastened him on his way to oblivion, partly regretting there was
not a bit more around, so that I might follow him.

 
          
 
Here, here, and then: There ...

 
          
 
[Stars] . [Out of the tunnel

 
          
 
. under the sky & down]

 
          
 
[Entry]

 
          
 
[Clouds

 
          
 
clouds

 
          
 
cl ou d s]

 
          
 
[Explosion #1]

 
          
 
[#2] [#3]

 
          
 
[Strobe lights & thunder]

 
          
 
[Song of the air] [Invisible fingers of
matter]

 
          
 
[Lasciate ogni sper- anza voi ch'

 
          
 
en trate?]

 
          
 
. . were flashes like scissors of lightning
cutting the sky apart. Despite the shielding and my distance from the
detonations, I was batted about like a shuttlecock. I was hunched forward in my
battle armor, letting the computer deal with these disturbances, but ready to
cut in on manual should the need arise. Alvo flashed beneath me in a too-quick
pattern of greenbrown-grayblue for me to distinguish features, unless perhaps I
had had the time to simply sit and stare down at it. But I was not especially tense
as I wound the miles inside me, annihilating the distance, threading its
thunder. To do the job as quickly as was deemed necessary now allowed no time
for subtlety. Doxford's internal security setup was too strong for anything
short of a years-long infiltration campaign. A surprise thrust, a juggernaut
attack, had therefore been decided upon as having the best possibility for
success. Styler's defense was excellent, but we had expected nothing less.

 
          
 
He must have picked me up almost immediately
upon my appearance in the vicinity of Alvo. I spent little time wondering at
the technical feat involved in my detection, as I swept along, low now,
speeding toward that fortress of an office complex where he made his
headquarters, but I wondered what Styler's thoughts and feelings must have been
when first he had noted me. How long had he expected this attack? How much
might he know concerning it?

 
          
 
For a time then, I dodged or withstood
everything he threw at me, my own weapons systems ready to come into play in an
instant I hoped to at least commence my assault from the air.

 
          
 
A crackle of static, a whistle, a sound of
heavy breathing. My radio had come to life. I had not expected this. It seemed
something of an exercise in futility for anyone to try to threaten or cajole me
at this point.

 
          
 
However, "Unidentified vessel and
etcetera, you are passing over unauthorized such-and-such. You are ordered to
..." did not emerge.

 
          
 
Instead, "Angie the Angel," I heard.
"Welcome to Alvo. Are you finding your brief visit interesting?"

 
          
 
So he knew who I was. And it was Styler
himself speaking. I had heard his voice and viewed his likeness many times in
the course of my preparations. I had had to force my instructors to cut a
programmed accompaniment of vilification which had been part of the
familiarization sessions, as I had found it distracting. They found it
difficult to believe that I did not feel it necessary to hate the short,
pale-eyed man with the puffy cheeks and the turban about his head that covered
the terminals of his permanent implants. "Of course it is
propaganda," they said, "but it will help you when the time
comes." I shook my head slowly. "I do not need emotions to help me
kill," I told them. "They might even get in the way." They had
to accept this, but it was plain that they did not understand.