Denner's Wreck

Chapter Fourteen

“…she turned the next corner certain that it had to be the last, that she would see the great wooden door leading out onto the rocks above the sea, but instead she found herself back in the little stone room once again, where Lady Haze still sat before the fire, rocking and knitting, the strange music box tinkling beside her."

"'Hello, my dear,’ said Lady Haze. ‘Have you given up yet?'

"'No!’ the girl said. ‘I know I can find my way out!'

"Lady Haze sighed and put down her knitting and got up from her chair. ‘No, my dear,’ she said, ‘you can't find your way out unless I permit it. I told you, I am the mistress of this castle, and of the rocks on which it stands, and the fog that surrounds it, and the sea below. Nothing happens here that escapes me, and no one who comes here escapes me until I let her go. Within these walls I am the absolute ruler of all. Now, if you will give me back my jewel and swear that you will never enter my castle again, I shall let you out, and you will be free to return to your home. If you persist in this foolish attempt to leave, and still deny that you stole it when I can see it in your pocket right now, then you may well spend the rest of your life wandering about these passages.'

"And the girl broke down, defeated, and pulled the glowing gem from her pocket and gave it to the woman, weeping as she did so.

"Lady Haze accepted the jewel, and then turned and pointed. ‘There is your way out,’ she said.

"And the thief turned, and to her astonishment the great wooden door was right there, in the same room, where she knew only a blank stone wall had been just a moment before. She ran to the door and flung it open and stepped out, and found herself on the wet black rocks outside, the sea roaring behind her and gulls screaming overhead. She turned to look, and the door she had just come through was gone; the castle wall behind her was bare stone. The sky was grey and dim, the sun low in the west, and wisps of fog were rolling in, so she knew that soon it would be full dark, and foggy as well, making the rocks a very dangerous place to be; she despaired of her task and fled for the village, leaving the castle behind her, to vanish in the fog.

"And I might end her tale there, save for one curious detail. She was in Castle Haze for a wake or so, she believed-a light and a dark and a light-having entered at first dawn and left, she thought, at second sunset. But when she returned to her village, she learned that she had been gone for almost a season, more than eight tensleeps, and long since given up for dead!"

– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller

Bredon had long ago lost track of time, and it occurred to him, as he sat at the entertainment console sketching commands on a sensor with his thumb, to ask Gamesmaster how long he had been in Arcade. Before him, naked women who had never lived anywhere but his imagination danced obscenely. Several bore a remarkable resemblance to Lady Sunlight, but he had never dared to intentionally depict her.

The machine's answer shocked him. He flicked the sensor aside, and the holographic display he had been manipulating vanished in a mist of pinkish sparkle, leaving only the faint scent of female sweat that he had added for an extra touch of realism.

“Four wakes?” he said, looking up at the vermilion ceiling. “Just four wakes?"

“Well, seven lights, anyway; it's just now first sunset outside."

“Is that all?"

“Hey, kid, it's enough!” Gamesmaster replied. “What did you think?"

“I've learned so much,” Bredon said, marvelling. “It feels as if I've been here a season or more!"

Gamesmaster buzzed derisively. “Not hardly. You've slept just four times; did you think you were going a couple of dozen wakes at a time?"

“I don't know; I lost track, spending all that time under the ne… nyoo…"

“Neural-pattern imprinter."

“That's right, the imprinter. That seemed to last forever, sometimes."

“It generally took about ten seconds a shot."

“I know, I just… wait a minute.” He paused, readjusting himself to the real world after hours in the fantasy-land of high technology. “Four wakes? Has Geste been back?"

“No, he hasn't, not yet, but as a matter of fact he's on his way right now."

“I thought he must have come and gone while I was being taught,” Bredon said, concerned. “What took so long? Has something gone wrong?"

“That's hard to say,” Gamesmaster replied judiciously. “He didn't exactly set any recruiting records, but so far nobody's shot at him since he left the mountains."

“Who does he have as allies now?"

“The same two he started with, Imp and the Skyler."

Startled, Bredon asked, “No one else?"

“No one else. He got resounding disinterest from all the rest, from Starflower to the Lady of the Lake."

“Can the three of them stop Thaddeus?” Bredon asked worriedly.

“How the hell should I know?” Gamesmaster's voice remained fairly calm, but Bredon knew it was upset.

“Sorry, I guess that wasn't a fair question,” he said.

“It's all right. I guess we're both a little nervous."

Bredon hesitated, then asked, “Can an arti… artif… artificial intelligence be nervous? A silicon one, I mean?"

“Well, technically, kid, I don't really know if it's what you would consider nervousness, but it works for me. I feel it in situations that ought to make someone nervous, and not in others, and it's uncomfortable, so I call it nervousness."

“I guess that's nervousness, then. After all, I don't really know how other humans feel, just what I feel."

“Hey, you've got it exactly! Although I have the equipment to hook you up to someone else so you do feel what they do, if you want. But you'd need a volunteer to hook up to."

“Oh, that's all right,” Bredon said hastily, “I'm not that curious."

“The boss should be landing soon; he's just left the Skyland."

“Uh… why did he come back here, if he didn't get any more recruits? To pick me up?"

“Not hardly, kid. Don't get exaggerated ideas of your own importance. I don't think he plans to take you anywhere. He's here to pick up the weapons I've been whipping up for him."

“That's right, Bredon,” Geste's voice said from nowhere.

“Hey, boss, that's not nice! I hadn't had a chance to tell him you were listening!"

“I'm sure he doesn't mind."

“Well, I…” Bredon began.

“See?” Geste cut him off. “So, Gamesmaster, what little surprises have we got for Thaddeus?"

Bredon leaned forward in his seat and tapped panels on the console; a wallscreen blinked, and he found himself looking at a flawless three-dimensional image of Arcade's entrance hall where he had slept that first dark, home to the “enchanted forest” where almost all Geste's carbon-based playthings lived. The ceiling was rolling back to admit a flying platform. The Trickster himself, wearing dark red this time, stood aboard the airskiff.

“Well, boss, not as much as you might like, I'm sure,” Gamesmaster said. “I've whipped up a lot of plain-vanilla energy weapons, up and down the spectrum, most of them mobile and semi-intelligent and the rest portable miniatures, but I'll bet my last circuit that Thaddeus can defend against every damn one of them. I can't nail down his gene pattern exactly enough to tailor a personal virus-anything I can come up with by approximation has a good chance of killing someone else, usually Shadowdark, but sometimes Sheila or Feura, and it might get any number of short-lifers, so I haven't done any anti-personnel microbes at all. I've done some limited-field sabotage germs-stuff that can eat hell out of equipment but won't spread much. The problem with those is getting them into the systems they're bred for, and of course, he may have bacteriophagic protective systems; if he's as paranoid as his record implies, he might have his entire demesne laced with his own swarm of bug-eaters."

“What about his personal modifications, symbiotes, whatever?"

“We don't have good records on those, boss; remember, he's a born immortal, so he doesn't need as much symbiosis as most of you. I've worked up some bugs that I think might possibly eat out what he's got in his bloodstream, but you need to get them close. And of course, he may have added more that we don't know about at all, and he's sure to have his immune system alarm-rigged and multi-layered. Basically, boss, unless he's been sloppy, I don't think we can get at him with anything microscopic, but we may be able to invade some of his equipment and rot out the soft parts. And I've got some macroscopic stuff I'm working on, but even with forced growth and imprinted training I don't have anything bigger than a cockroach yet, and what I do have is dumber than dirt. They'll eat plastic, though, and dodge anything that moves, and they can take pretty high voltage without frying. I used what we had, but we didn't have anything in the forest that I could use unmodified. Those little brains don't hold much unless you build it into the genes, and they'd need better claws and teeth and defenses, so I've mostly been growing new ones, not training the ones we had. I'm working on some machine-killer mice, but they need another five wakes, minimum."

“We probably don't have five wakes."

“I know, boss, that's why I didn't bother with a metal-eating rhinoceros."

Geste, standing on his platform in the entrance chamber, cast a startled look in the direction of Gamesmaster's central processor. “Is that a joke?"

“Matter of opinion, I guess."

Geste smiled, and would have laughed aloud under other circumstances. “Have you got anything else?” he asked.

“Sure, boss, lots of it, hardware and software both, and a lot of it is already launched and trying to burrow into Fortress Holding, or riding in on the airwaves looking for a foothold. Saboteurs of all kinds. I think we may have taken out a few of his peripheral systems already, but I don't have enough feedback to be certain, and he's so decentralized and layered that it may not matter. And I've been working on space-benders and time-warping stuff; I've got a half-decent pocket-sized stasis field generator ready to go."

“Good, that's all good; I'm proud of you. Start loading it all on the Skyland, then, and see if you can give me an inventory, with instructions for use, that I can load into inboard memory."

“You got it, boss; transmitting to your skull-liner now."

Bredon had listened to all this with fascination. Even after his incredible cram course in Terran technology, he did not follow all of it. He had no idea what a rhinoceros was, or mice. Cockroaches he knew well, since the world-Denner's Wreck-had plenty of them. Microbes in general he was very vague about. He had not had time to learn everything, by any means, not even everything that was used in Arcade. At Gamesmaster's suggestion he had focused on the inorganic technology used in Arcade, emphasizing silicon-and metal-based systems rather than carbon-based life or warped space.

A stasis field generator? He knew what various field generators were, but not what a stasis field was.

He had encountered, but did not really understand, descriptions of the artificial symbiotes that the immortals had living inside them, augmenting the natural repair and maintenance mechanisms of their bodies and providing them with some of their “supernatural” powers. He knew now that his bruised nose and other injuries received in trying to break into the Forbidden Grove had been repaired by an offshoot of one of Geste's symbiotes.

What he chose to ask, though, was, “What's a skull-liner?"

“Oh, it's a computer that's grown onto the inside of the boss's skull, inside his head, where it can link itself to his brain. Gives him a few gigabytes of extra memory when he needs it, and lets me feed him information at high speed."

“What sort of a computer?"

“Silicon crystal, mostly."

“I thought silicon life was built; I didn't think silicon computers grew."

“They don't, by themselves; the skull-liner was installed by programmed silicon-skeleton bacteria."

“Oh.” The thought of tiny creatures growing into a machine in his head was somehow repulsive; he shuddered slightly.

His recent experiences had shaken him. Terran technology was overwhelming in its diversity, complexity, and power. He now truly understood that a Power, a Terran, could do almost anything with the right equipment-but so could anyone else.

The Powers were just people. What made them Powers were their machines and their creatures-and sometimes it was impossible to tell the machines from the creatures.

The true wonder was not the Powers themselves-after all, they had not created their technology, they had merely inherited the results of thousands of years of work by millions of people. The true wonder was their technology.

Bredon had begun to sample that wonder, to explore the fringes of a universe unlike anything he had ever dreamt of, and he wanted to know more. Thanks to the imprinter he had learned how to use most of the machines in Arcade, but Gamesmaster had had no basic science texts, no explanation for how most of the machines worked. Geste had no need of anything like that. What he needed was instruction manuals, and those he had.

Bredon wanted to know not just what the machines did, but how; not just how they worked, but why.

But even while his thirst for knowledge was driving him on, even as he revelled in his new mastery over Arcade's devices, there was a growing kernel of uneasiness, of fear, in the back of his mind. He sometimes thought that he was going too fast, that he was tampering with things beyond his comprehension, perhaps even beyond the comprehension of the people who built them. Some of the things he saw seemed unclean, or unholy, or just horribly dangerous.

Tailored bacteria, for example-those were bugs, like the bugs that caused disease, but instead of causing harm these performed useful tasks like assembling a computer inside Geste's skull.

But Bredon could not help wondering whether such bugs could be trusted, whether it was entirely safe to put a computer inside one's head. Could Geste ever really be sure that he was still the master of his own mind? The computer was, in effect, a disease. It was a beneficial disease, vastly expanding his memory, letting him think more quickly and more clearly, but by changing how he thought, didn't it also affect what he thought?

And the bugs that put it there-could they be trusted to follow the planned pattern exactly? What if a tailored bacterium, exposed to the myriad chemicals and radiations in Arcade and in Geste's body, were to mutate at the wrong time? Bredon had had the mechanism of intentional mutation explained to him in detail; Gamesmaster had passed off spontaneous or accidental mutation as unimportant, but Bredon did not feel sure of that.

And the bent-space generators, machines that could wrench reality itself out of shape, creating space where none previously existed, making rooms bigger on the inside than the outside, turning corners in directions that didn't exist before-those also worried Bredon. The Powers bent space to enlarge their homes, to save themselves long walks between scattered outposts, and for any number of other trivial purposes. Bredon knew, as a matter of simple pragmatism, that if you bend anything enough, it will break. Could space itself be damaged by the twisting the Powers gave it?

Terrans had been using these technologies for millenia, and as of four hundred years ago, when the Powers left to come to Denner's Wreck, Terra and most of its people were still intact. Even so, Bredon found himself uneasy at the thought of everything that might go wrong.

Now Geste intended to use these things as weapons, intentionally making them even more dangerous, right here on Denner's Wreck.

He also intended to leave Bredon here, in Arcade, while he went off to battle Thaddeus and perhaps rescue Lady Sunlight-or perhaps get her killed.

Bredon's mind snagged on that thought. He knew, consciously, that Lady Sunlight's plight was not his fault, but some part of his mind refused to accept that. If he had not broken the disk and summoned Geste, the Trickster might not now be preparing to fight. Lady Sunlight would still be wherever she now was, but not in danger of getting caught in the crossfire.

Geste was gathering weapons that could, if they went wrong, kill thousands of innocent people.

And when Geste left, he, Bredon, would be alone again in Arcade, with only the machine intelligences to talk to, and he did not care for that prospect. He knew now how Gamesmaster and the others worked, and that knowledge made them seem far less human-and less trustworthy.

Furthermore, he was running out of things he wanted to do in Arcade. He had not yet tried out most of Arcade's vast array of entertainments, but he did not care to; he had sampled enough to discourage him. The one hologame he had attempted, the simplest Gamesmaster could find, had ended in his ignominious defeat in mere seconds. The first story Gamesmaster had played for him had been incredibly realistic, exciting, and romantic, but had been so alien in setting and concept, and so emotionally complex, that he was still not sure what he had actually felt, and did not feel ready to try another. The very reality of the experience-sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, all slightly more intense than real life-had frightened him.

Part of the fear was of something he did not understand; another part was fear that he might become addicted to such experiences and give up his own world. Gamesmaster admitted that some humans did, indeed, prefer fiction, or history recordings, to reality. It mentioned other insidious dangers as well, drugs or neural hookups that could be addictive.

Bredon knew that if he grew bored enough, he might try things in Arcade that he would do better to avoid. He had already been dabbling in computer simulations that were fantastically real, and terrifying in the sense of power they gave him when he was actually controlling nothing but colored light, synthesized sound, and artificial odors.

He did not want to stay in Arcade.

Geste, however, probably would not want him along.

Geste did not necessarily have the final say, however. Bredon was not just a savage, cowering before a demi-god. He was a free human being, and could do as he pleased. Geste had carelessly given him partial control over Gamesmaster, and therefore over all the machines and creatures in Arcade, probably thinking that he would be too frightened and ignorant to make any use of them.

If so, Geste had been wrong, because Bredon had learned how to use them.

“Gamesmaster,” he said, “privacy, please."

Abruptly, he was enclosed in utter darkness.

“Yes, kid, what can I do for you?” Gamesmaster asked.

“Get me aboard the Skyland. Now."