Denner's Wreck

Chapter Twenty-Two

"’… so you have found me,’ Aulden the Technician said. ‘Now, what do you want of me?'

"'They say, in my village, that you can do anything,’ Golrol said. ‘Is it true?'

"Aulden stared at him for a moment, and then said, ‘Very nearly, at any rate.'

"'You can do anything?’ Golrol persisted.

"'Yes,’ Aulden said, ‘I can.'

"'Really?’ Golrol asked.

"Yes, I said,’ Aulden told him. ‘I can be anything and do anything.’ He instantly transformed himself into a giant, a hundred meters tall, and then vanished completely, and then reappeared as a sunflower with Aulden's own face, and then appeared human once more. ‘I can fly to the stars,’ he said, ‘or make their fire burn here on the ground. I know the secrets of time and space. I can make birds swim and fish fly. I can build a tower in a single night that will reach so high you cannot see the top. I can shake the earth and shatter the sky.'

"'So you say that you can do anything,’ Golrol said.

"'Yes, I told you,’ Aulden answered. ‘Try me; name a task, and I shall perform it.'

"'Can you bring me snow from the mountaintops, even now in midsummer?’ Golrol asked.

"'As easily as you can snap your fingers,’ Aulden replied, and he spun about, and held out a handful of snow.

"'Can you lift an entire mountain, then?'

"Aulden laughed, and said, ‘Easily.’ And he waved his hand, and with a rumble and a roar, one of the distant mountains tore itself free of the earth and rose into the sky, like the Skyland itself.

"'And can you create a mountain from nothing?'

"'Of course!’ said Aulden, and behold, with a great rending crash a mountain rose from the plain where none had stood a moment before.

"'And can you create a mountain so great that even you cannot lift it?’ Golrol asked innocently.

"And Aulden paused, and stared at him, and slowly a smile spread across his face, and he began to grin, and then to laugh, and then to roar with laughter.

"'Oh, mortal,’ he said, ‘you have me there. I should have known better than to boast so freely! Of course, I cannot. I am no true god. I can do many, many things that you cannot even imagine, but I cannot untangle such a paradox any more than you can… ‘"

– from the tales of Atheron the Storyteller

When Thaddeus and Geste had vanished through the doorway Bredon turned back to the prisoners. Lady Sunlight still showed no sign of interest in him, so he addressed himself to the group as a whole. “Now what?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do to help?"

“I don't know,” replied Sheila-the Lady of the Seasons, Bredon remembered, the goddess of the weather, who brought the warm sun in summer and the cold winds in winter.

Except that the woman he saw before him, although she was healthy and attractive apart from her fading burn, was just a woman, not a goddess. The Powers were only human, and their power lay in their technology.

And the seasons had nothing to do with technology, in any case.

“I don't know,” she repeated. “But I hope so."

“I'd like to get you out of those chains, but I don't have a key or anything that will cut them."

“Thaddeus keeps the key with him, I think,” the small man Bredon had identified as Rawl said.

“Why are you people talking to this savage?” Madame O whined. “What good can he do?"

“Thaddeus obviously doesn't think he can do anything at all,” Lady Sunlight said, “but Thaddeus has been wrong before."

Bredon felt his pulse quicken as Lady Sunlight eyed him appraisingly.

“He's not wrong this time,” O spat.

“Maybe not,” Bredon admitted. “I can try, though.” He looked around the room, but saw nothing useful. The red light above the door caught his eye. “Monitor, where is a key for these chains?” he asked.

The intelligence hesitated. “I am uncertain whether you are authorized to ask that,” it said at last.

“Why?"

“I have no record of your existence."

“Monitor,” Sheila demanded, “answer this man's question."

“No,” the intelligence replied at once. “The prisoner Sheila is forbidden all service beyond stated necessities and emergency aid."

Imp looked up from Aulden's chest for a moment, then glanced at first Bredon, then Sheila, then back to Bredon. “Aulden,” she whispered, “Bredon took a lot of imprinting at Arcade; he's no technician, but he can run machines. Thaddeus doesn't know that, and he didn't give the machines any orders about him. What can he do to stop Thaddeus?"

Aulden's expression slowly lost its underlying hopelessness as he considered this. He glanced up at the red light, then motioned silently for Bredon to come closer.

The mortal came and knelt beside the chained technician.

“I can't do anything about the machines Thaddeus designed himself, like Monitor up there,” Aulden whispered, “but they're all pretty stupid, because Thaddeus is a lousy technologist, so most of the fortress is run by intelligences we brought with us from Terra, or ones I designed for Thaddeus. I think you can do something with those. Except for Monitor, none of the machines can hear any of us immortals any more, but they ought to be able to hear you. And Thaddeus doesn't use purely biological intelligent systems because he doesn't trust them, since they have a habit of turning independent, so you won't have to worry about creatures, just machines."

Lady Sunlight glanced up at the red light that represented Monitor, and asked, “Aren't you afraid that that machine will hear you, and tell Thaddeus?"

“No,” Aulden replied. “You weren't listening. Thaddeus told it not to disturb him, with no qualification. Even if it hears us it won't tell anyone. It's a really stupid machine."

“What should I do?” Bredon asked eagerly.

“First,” Aulden told him, “you need the emergency codes."

Two levels and a corridor away, Thaddeus settled into a grey floating chair and gestured for the Trickster to do the same.

Geste obliged. Something felt very odd about the room, and he realized as the chair adjusted itself that no music was playing.

When both were comfortably seated, Thaddeus asked politely, “Now, why do you think I should stop my efforts to rebuild my stolen empire?"

“Because it's stupid and pointless,” Geste replied quickly.

“Oh?” Thaddeus's reply was cool.

“Yes,” Geste said. “Seriously, Thaddeus, what can you get by ruling an empire that you can't just buy now, with what you have? You can have any material possession you could possibly want; our galaxy is jammed with raw materials and energy, and all it takes is time and technology to make whatever you want-food, shelter, clothing, amusements, even women, whatever creatures you want. What good will an empire do you?"

Thaddeus cocked his head and smiled cruelly. “Can you really be that naive?” he asked. The smile vanished, and his voice turned hard. “I can have power. I will prove my superiority to all you young upstarts, with your foolish egalitarian beliefs and petty social rituals. I'll get the human race organized again, put an end to all this hedonistic anarchy."

“Will you?” Geste asked, almost sneering in mockery of Thaddeus's own behavior. “Do you really think you can do that?"

“Of course I can!” Thaddeus roared back. “I'm thousands of years older than you, Geste; show a little respect for your elders. I'm not a manufactured immortal like you, dependent on machines and symbiotes for longevity-I'm a natural immortal, a member of a superior race, one of the chosen people. My family is destined to rule over you ordinary humans. I have a head-start of more than two thousand years on any artificial immortal, and that two thousand years gives me experience and knowledge that you can't even imagine, with your pitiful few centuries behind you. You've lived all your life in pampered comfort, and you've been content with that, but I grew up in harder times, boy, I saw my mother's family murdered, my homeland destroyed, by you normal humans. I've lived through wars and disasters that would frighten you into catatonia, and I've learned from all of it."

“Have you? Then why did you fail twice before?"

“Because I was betrayed!” Thaddeus bellowed, rising from his chair, his face red with fury. “I trusted people, and they betrayed me!"

Geste resisted the impulse to taunt Thaddeus further. “All right, you were betrayed,” he said quietly. “Doesn't that show you that people don't want you to rule them?"

“What the hell do I care what they want?” Thaddeus asked, as he sank back into his seat. “I want it! I never claimed to be doing this for anyone else!"

Geste abandoned that line and groped for another.

“You could get killed,” he said. “You don't know what's happened out there these last few centuries. You might run smack into some sort of interstellar police force, or somebody else's empire, and get yourself killed."

“I'll risk it,” Thaddeus said. “I don't believe it, for one thing; I saw what you decadent babies were like, and now that you're all fake immortals, four hundred years wouldn't be enough to change that. You people need a thousand years just to decide what to have for breakfast."

“But what if some group of short-lifers took charge, caught someone by surprise…"

Thaddeus stared at him in such open disbelief that Geste did not bother to finish his question.

“Short-lifers,” Thaddeus said, “are absolutely harmless. They don't live long enough to learn anything dangerous. I've survived seven thousand years of the worst short-lifers can throw at me. If there's a short-lifer empire out there, all I have to do is wait for it to fall. It never takes very long."

The Trickster was by no means certain Thaddeus was right about that, but he did not see any sign that Thaddeus could be swayed by logical argument, and he did not continue that line of debate. “All right,” Geste said, “let me think.” He reached up and scratched his ear.

Thaddeus took the opportunity to signal a housekeeping machine for a drink. He turned to Geste, intending to play the gracious host and offer the Trickster something, and found himself staring at a sparkling web of metal in Geste's hand, a web he recognized immediately as a stasis field generator, though he had never seen one so small.

Before he could say anything, Geste triggered his weapon, and Thaddeus froze into total immobility, a sphere of air around him freezing with him. The soft light in the room refracted strangely through the interface between normal air and the motionless field, and the colors within the field-the red of Thaddeus's angry face, the grey of his chair, the black of his hair, the brown of his clothing-seemed to fade.

As the stasis field reached full intensity the three-meter globe first turned a dead, flat black, then brightened to gleaming, reflective silver, as light became first unable to leave the field, and then unable to enter.

Thaddeus was gone, sealed inside a mirror-finish bubble of timelessness. The housekeeping machine carrying his drink, a floating wedge of black with a crystal goblet embedded in it, bumped futilely against the bubble's bright, impenetrable surface.

Geste stared, trembling. He had forced himself to remain calm while arguing with Thaddeus; he had had his internal machines and symbiotes under orders to keep him calm, and a semi-intelligent biochip chanting gently hypnotic reassurance directly to his audial nerves. He had been as slick and smooth as anyone could have wanted in pulling the stasis generator from the bent-space pocket he had built into his ear.

Thaddeus had scanned his guests up and down the spectrum, checked for every sort of emission imaginable-Geste had expected as much, and had detected some of the operative devices with his own internal mechanisms. Thaddeus had blasted them all with high-speed flashes of high-intensity ultraviolet, infra-red, and gamma radiation that were too quick to seriously harm human tissue, but which would fry virtually all surface-dwelling or air-carried tailored microbes, and would burn out the metastable energy fields that made up noncorporeal intelligences-not that they had brought any noncorporeals to Denner's Wreck, or had the means to create them. He had doused them all in chemical suppressants to prevent any sort of pheromone-assisted psychological assault. He had removed their clothing and searched it, all the way down to the subatomic level.

Their symbiotes had been damaged, their own tissues somewhat damaged as well, and Geste was fairly sure that he had lost some magnetic memory somewhere, but Thaddeus had been reassured that he had disarmed his visitors.

However, he had not checked on the shape of the spaces they occupied.

Even Thaddeus could not think of everything.

Geste had counted on that. He had never heard of putting a bent-space pocket into a human body, and he had hoped that Thaddeus hadn't either.

Not that that had been his only trick. Thaddeus had wiped out a wide variety of artificial bacteria and a few viruses with his disinfectants and ultraviolet, and had confiscated more than a dozen weapons of various kinds in Geste's clothing.

The bent-space pocket had been the Trickster's best gimmick, though, and he knew it. People built the pockets into floaters all the time, but not into themselves; it seemed somehow unhealthy to put a hole through one's own body, even a polyspatial hole that bypassed mere normal-space flesh. For one thing, an opening was needed. Virtually all the natural openings in the human body were already spoken for, and creating new holes was dangerous and unesthetic.

Geste, of course, had been desperate. He had considered anchoring the pocket to the roof of his mouth, but had rejected that; he had needed to be able to talk. Instead, he had sacrificed the hearing in his right ear. He hoped that removing the pocket and rebuilding his inner ear would not be too difficult.

His trick had worked, and Thaddeus was captured, and now Geste's programmed calm had run out. Adrenalin poured into his blood unregulated by his damaged and panicky symbiotes. He stood, shaking, as the realization sank in that he had done it, he had stopped Thaddeus.

A sliver of triumph worked its way through the numb relief, and then shattered into full-blown gloating. He had done it! Thaddeus was neatly boxed up and out of the way.

On the heels of exultation came doubt. Was Thaddeus boxed up? It seemed too easy, somehow.

Perhaps there were machines that were programmed to release Thaddeus. Perhaps there were creatures with orders to kill the prisoners. Geste stepped back and looked about warily.

“Not bad, Geste,” Thaddeus’ voice said, speaking from the wall behind him. “Not bad at all."

Geste turned, telling himself that it was just a machine, a recording or an artificial intelligence synthesizing its master's voice.

“A very nice effort,” the voice said. “But not enough. No, Geste, I'm not a recording, not a machine. I'm Thaddeus. The real Thaddeus."

Geste was trembling again, harder than ever.

“You see,” Thaddeus said, “you only got one of me."