Out on Blue Six Page 24

  She threw away a mountain of memories.

  It wasn’t there.

  “It’s not there,” she said.

  “It’s what?” shrieked Angelo Brasil. “I said it, I said it, you should have let me have the chip, you don’t have the first idea how to use it.”

  Courtney Hall toyed with the idea of punching Angelo Brasil in the mouth. She resisted and said, “Listen for once, will you? The reason I can’t find it is because it was never there. As far as I can tell, the Polytheon foresaw a time when they might need The Unit, if the Compassionate Society was threatened from some outside agency. So, they gave the Electors the knowledge of where to find it and how to use it. But not the complete answer. They kept the Lamia and the riddle to themselves, as a failsafe against The Unit’s being used without their mandate. If and when the situation arose, they would give that Elector the answer to the riddle. But not otherwise.”

  “Well, isn’t that just jim-dandy,” said Angelo Brasil. He spat into the pool of the Lamia.

  “Might as well start guessing then,” suggested Xian Man Ray.

  So they did.

  At first, all three of them, trotting out the punch lines to every riddle remembered from eclectic childhoods. Exhausting those, they turned to the classical conundrums of kings and fools, masters and pupils, hobbits and gollums, before progressing into the mandalic incoherencies of quantumicity, Freudian paradigmism, Zen koans, and philosophic solipsisms; then, as Xian Man Ray’s imagination grew numb with trotting out jumbled mantras of word associations and allusion, she sat down on the metal plain to call to her cat; just the two voices, blatting out answers, answers, answers, none of which were right, until at length even the Lamia themselves wearied of saying “No no no no no” in their immaculate trinity of voices and lay half-submerged in their pool, human forms propped up on the edge with their monstrous arms, like sunburned hedonists trying to catch a pool waiter’s eye; and Courtney Hall was thoroughly sick, tired, fed up, hacked off, jacked off, jerked off, pissed off with riddles, riddles, riddles (“No no no no no”) so that only Angelo Brasil’s needle-sharp arrogance remained, dredging up permutations of language from his Series 000 and offering them up to the snake-sisters three until Xian Man Ray, weary and depressed and thoroughly sick, tired, fed up, hacked off, etcetera, said, “Give it a rest Angelo, will you? Who cares? I mean, who the fug cares?”

  “Pardon?” said the woman-headed serpents, the serpent-bodied women.

  “I said, ‘Who the fug cares?’” said Xian Man Ray, standing up and declaring her disgust to the steel plain and the brass gates. “Who the fug cares?”

  “Yes,” said the Lamia.

  “What?” said the three travelers simultaneously.

  “Yes!” spake the sisters of scarlet. “The answer to the riddle ‘What is it walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs?’ is ‘Who the fug cares?’”

  The Lamia slipped back into the receiving waters and the brass gates of the Final Arsenal (sealed four hundred and fifty years before by Elector Jennifer) slid open without so much as a plaint of binding, rusty metal, and a metal pont extended out across the Pool of the Lamia. Then the tall man, the small woman, and the big woman, with their cat, crossed into the Final Arsenal.

  Because she could not fully access the memories of the Electors, Courtney Hall’s knowledge of the Final Arsenal was strictly factual. She was as emotionally unprepared as her colleagues for what lay beyond the brass gates.

  What lay beyond those gates was hell.

  Strict interpretation Dante.

  On the cheap.

  And well, inverted.

  So that instead of the seven rings descending into the parabolic Pit, there were only two. Ascending. The outer ring, which covered two thirds of the radius of the massive chamber, was the Arsenal proper. The inner ring, a shallow conic hyperbola rising stalagmitically to meet its mirror image descending stalactitically from the ceiling, had been constructed to house just the one weapon.

  Echoes of another mythology here.

  The sloping surface of the inner cone had been sculpted into a labyrinth.

  The Final Arsenal possessed the power to amaze even guests of Victorialand, explorers of the Underground Jungle, sailors of the Fen of the Dead, and conquerors of the Wall. As they descended the ramp and the walls of piled megatons of war machinery rose up on either side, the thin man and the big woman and the small woman with the cat felt that they walked on holy ground. They trod softly, as if the least profane footfall would set the cavern ringing and awaken the almost-forgotten god that hibernated here. They came through avenues lined with tanks and self-propelled guns piled ten, twenty high, incongruous as mating turtles; past mountains of shells and thickets of sloped rifles, between cliffs of heaped artillery pieces to the aviators’ graveyard where the old warbirds had flown to fold their wings and die. Xian Man Ray paused to wipe four and a half centuries of dust from a nose cone and gave the painted stars and bars one last shine of glory.

  “Pretty,” she said sadly.

  Warbirds, and their eggs. Bombs; fragmentary, incendiary, high-explosive, armor-piercing, heat-seeking, radar-guided, laser-sighted, in various degrees of intelligence from those that fell with a shriek and a blast to those smart individuals that could circle all day until a target popped a nose out of shelter. Or they ran out of fuel.

  “What do they need so many different kinds for?” asked Courtney Hall. Napalm, defoliant, exfoliant, antipersonnel, tear gas, mustard gas, nerve gas.

  “I think they were designed purely with the idea of killing as many people as possible.” There was something akin to offense in Angelo Brasil’s voice. They entered a small amphitheater between tiers upon tiers of stacked helmets.

  Strange how the kilometers and megatons of green metal could find such peculiar echoes in their footsteps. The echoes dogged them as they spiraled through the Arsenal toward the inner ring; sounds like footfalls and whispers of voices not their own. Courtney Hall was convinced that there were others out there in the warren of weaponry, others, like the Lamia, not contained within her memories. Memory, she was realizing, can fail like an old stick under too heavy a burden. Might there not be other guardians set about this guarded place? Another possibility: might there not, indeed must there not, have been others who, in four and a half centuries, had guessed the answer to the riddle of the Lamia and had gained entrance to the Final Arsenal? Who might not have been able to get out again?

  Quiet, Courtney Hall’s imagination. That’s quite enough.

  The forest stood where outer and inner rings touched; the forest of missiles, the old world-burners pulled from their silos like worms from graves and set down here in the Final Arsenal, stark metal trees, tall and solid and aged as sequoias but without any of a tree’s nobility. A forest of missiles, a forest of names: Nike and Minuteman and Polaris and Trident and Poseidon and Pershing and Tomahawk Cruise and Titan and Atlas and MX and Rapier and SS-20, 21, 22; and picking her path between the steel trees with their strange fruit, Courtney Hall could not rid herself of the idea that things were moving, flitting, darting behind her back, going still, silent, concealed every time she turned to look for them. She caught Xian Man Ray also looking back over her shoulder.

  “You, too?” The small woman nodded. “Want to flip back and take a look round?”

  “You joking?” whispered Xian Man Ray.

  Dante and Daedalus: whoever the architect responsible for the Final Arsenal, he had designed so deviously that the travelers did not know they had passed from the forest into the labyrinth until, with a start, they found themselves contained between smooth, white walls.

  “I think we should think about this,” said Courtney Hall.

  “Rather too late for that, my dear,” said Angelo Brasil. Behind them smooth white doors were sliding out of the walls, sliding shut, shutting them in the labyrinth.

  “No worries,” said Xian Man Ray. “Instant reconnaissance.” She flipped to the top of the wall. “Hey, I c
an see all the way to the center of the labyrinth; there’s something funny up there where the two cones meet. Want I should flip up there and take a look?”

  Click.

  Suddenly arms flailed. Xian Man Ray gave a little scream, overbalanced, and vanished from sight.

  “Sis!” screamed Angelo Brasil.

  Soft fists against obdurate wall.

  “Sis!”

  The top of the wall had flipped up into a treacherous slope. One up to Daedalus. Angelo Brasil was bounding away up the corridor, frantically shouting his pseudosibling’s name.

  “I think we should wait!” called Courtney Hall. “I think we should wait for her to get her wind back and then she can flip back to us!”

  A section of labyrinth wall opened. Before Courtney Hall could shout any further caution, Angelo Brasil had plunged through. The wall began to close behind him. Courtney Hall ran. Useless. Before she was halfway there, the opening had sealed shut again.

  Two up to Daedalus, in as many minutes. The Amazing Teleporting Woman and the Man with the Computer Brain, the only ones with real power, instantly, effectively neutralized by whatever spirit guided the labyrinth. The big woman and the cybernetic cat remained. The big woman slid down the smooth white wall, a disconsolate heap of dirty laundry. The cybernetic cat rubbed around her knees, meeping querulously.

  A rushing boom of sound shook the Final Arsenal. Simultaneous with the sound pulse, something huge, low, and black dopplered in across the labyrinth. It cast a giant shadow over the woman in the maze. The shadow of a Love Police pantycar.

  The doors at the entrance to the labyrinth shivered and jolted open a crack, as if the spell that bound them was being overpowered by a higher, stronger will. Through the slit, suggestions of silver and black.

  She ran.

  Courtney Hall ran.

  The door spasmed open another handful of centimeters.

  Black and silver insect-men came squeezing through.

  Courtney Hall kept running.

  The Love Police came after her.

  And suddenly, there it was before her. It could not have been any more apparent had it been lit up in pink neon or pointed out by a finger from a cloud. A gap in the wall. No time even to think about impulsive decisions in a labyrinth; the woman and the cat piled through and the wall slammed shut behind them on the barrabrum of policemen beating out a headache on the smooth white wall.

  “Left or right?”

  The cat screeched, arched its back, and went leaping sideways down the corridor to the left.

  “Left, then.”

  Courtney Hall ran. Again.

  By the time Sergeant Morgan Grenfall and his team of elite Love-commandos had jimmied the wall with the lock-pick program hacked up for them by that damn punk of a Scorpio down in Room 1116, Courtney Hall and her cat were far away. And wherever she ran, doors opened for her, doors closed behind her. Amazing. Almost as if the maze were guiding her. She could not reconcile a computer that opened and closed doors to her, that was drawing her step by step closer to the final weapon, with one that was also hounding her with two pantycar loads of silver and black Love-commandos. Insane. She stopped in her tracks. That was it. Insane. Four and a half centuries in solitary, with only itself to talk with, only its own sentience to study, only the images of mass violence to contemplate: the computer was gently senile. It could reel her in toward the central wabe to the thing that looked a little like a ceramic flute and a little like a short sword but not a whole lot like either at the same time as a dusty alarm light flashed on some duty sergeant’s desk in West One, without self-contradiction.

  Courtney Hall flattened herself against a wall as the dark mass of the second pantycar thundered overhead. The Jetstream bowled up the corridor and snatched at her clothes. “Trashie?” Damn cat … She had to keep reminding herself that for all its enhanced this and rejiggered that and cyber-assisted the other, it was an animal, not even as inherently smart as the Tinka Tae, certainly not some feline neo-samurai.

  The Tinka Tae … She could have used a measure of Jinkajou’s polite advice right now. Damn cat … sniffing at the wall a hundred meters or so back down the corridor. “No, not that way, this way, up here”—a hundred meters the other direction where the corridor was closing as the walls were opening—“this way”—but the cat was up on its hind legs scratching at the wall, yowling, howling, meowing—“Look, come on!” (almost a scream because the doorway had opened to its fullest extent and would now begin to close) “Come on, come on, come on!” but the cat was scratch-scratch-scratching and the door was close-close-closing and there was nothing for it but to run run run and she made it through and the walls sealed after her but there was no Trashie and she was on her own, at the last as it had been at the first, the woman in the labyrinth, and the doors opened and closed and she was drawn round and round and up and up nearer and nearer to the thing in the maze.

  Elsewheres …

  ELSEWHERE: I

  Xian Man Ray the Amazing Teleporting Woman. The Amazing Teleporting Woman no more. The labyrinth neutralized her power. She could not flip where she could not see, and in the labyrinth every corridor was the same and every wall was the same, so even if she could have seen she would not have known where she was flipping to because it would be in every way identical to the place she was flipping from. Round and round and round and round … she knew the labyrinth was resisting her, frustrating her, denying her, realigning its walls and corners to send her round, round, round, never taking one single step nearer to the center.

  Then the pantycar threw itself overhead and she was afraid. And alone, all alone in her bold black-and-white zebra stripes.

  She wanted her brother.

  She wanted her cat.

  The bonefone implanted in her mastoid bone was dead as a pulled tooth. She suspected the Love Police were jamming everything from extralongwave up to just short of gamma. Damn them. Damn everything. Damn herself.

  Voices … sergeant this, sergeant that, there’s one in here, get that thing over here, we’ll have the wall open in a jiffy …

  She fumbled through her pack for the snap-together sections of her bow.

  A shriek. A howl. Inhuman. And therefore wonderful. A cat.

  “Trashie!” Bow at the ready, she wished herself up to the top of the wall and down into the next corridor before the wall could trip her up again. She crouched and scooped the hurtling cat into her arms. Purrs, licks, laughter, relief, and delight. And the wall section behind her opened and the squad of armed armored Love Police scrimmaged out. Bulbous insect eyes. Luvguns (and worse; this was the DeepUnder) leveled.

  Arms full of cat. No hands for the bow. Too many of them anyway. So what?

  So what?

  Surrender?

  Or flip? Where? Cardinal rule of teleporting: never, never, never flip blind. You could arrive out of unspace in the path of a pneumatique, half in and half out of a wall, at the bottom of the sea, in the middle of a magma puddle twelve kilometers down on the edge of the mantle.

  Crap on cardinal rules.

  “Hold tight, Trashie. We’re going.”

  Close eyes, hope (hope of the central place where world and sky met and The Unit waited), flip …

  An instant of almost sexual thrill. A guilt. A freedom. An inebriation, and then an agony. A tearing. A wrenching away to another undesired place.

  Arrive.

  Not at the central tabernacle. Not anywhere in the labyrinth. Or the Final Arsenal. Or the DeepUnder.

  Elsewhere.

  She screamed.

  ELSEWHERE: II

  It’s all a question of perspective, you see.

  That little red blink, that was himself.

  That web of shifting, intersecting green lines superimposed on the visual field of his left eye; that was the labyrinth.

  Perspectives, and perspicacity. It had all become so obvious once he had decided to stop and think. Emotion clouds. Reason enlightens. There was a mind, an intellect to this labyri
nth, and where there was a mind, Angelo Brasil could pick it. A few nanoseconds’ concentration to lynk past the geriatric defense programs into the hot core (more a lukewarm core after almost half a millennium of having only itself to play with) and flick what he found there up his spinal cord into his visual cortex, a trompe l’oeil graphic readout of the plan of the labyrinth. Nice. Another blink of concentration, two more red dots in the restless puzzle of shifting lines: there they were.

  Sometimes he loved having a Series 000 biocomputer coiled around his nervous system more than he could express.

  Then the first pantycar passed overhead.

  Blink. A host of busy buzzing red dots came spreading through the outer chambers of the maze. Love Police … how?

  Angelo Brasil lynked down. Hung within. Spread his consciousness like thin, poor ectoplasm through the Final Arsenal dataweb.

  Shug. Scanning field. Built into the glory-hallelujah gates of brass. Checked identities against MiniPain files; discrepancy, and the boys in black and silver went reaching for their helmets, diving for the pole down to their pantycars. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He should have foreseen that a society as paranoid as the Compassionate Society would not have left the final judgment to the Lamia, would have had some ultimate test of identification and arbitration. In his mind’s eye Angelo Brasil watched the Love Police advance, wall by wall, corridor by corridor. He could feel the portable unit they were using to override the labyrinth control system. They shouldn’t have needed to do that … unless the maze was resisting them as it would any other intruder. No reason … he stole another precious moment to relax fully into the dataweb … and came howling back into his own body. Crazy. An insane jungle of burning, clashing polygons, screaming things. Anything could happen in this place. Not even the Love Police could trust it. Thus the command enforcer. It took a lot of programming muscle to override what was virtually a minor, if mad, member of the Polytheon. There was only one UpSider he knew who could jack a program like that. He’d crossed chips with him, up there in the virtual domains of the Dataweb, a bright knight in cybernetic armor defending the Compassionate Society’s secrets from Dad’s acquisitive fingers.