Paradox Alley

12

I climbed forward-the rig was inclined at a sharp angle now. I sat in the driver's seat and looked out. A large structure, part of the strange craft, loomed before us. It looked something like the neck of a bottle with an aperture like an iris. The aperture began dilating as we approached, soon widening enough to admit the truck. Which it did. We shot right in there. The aperture closed behind us, and we were in semidarkness.

The truck settled.

Prime's voice boomed at us from the dark cavity ahead.

"I AM VERY DISPLEASED," he said gravely. "IT SEEMS THAT YOU MAY NOT BE TRUSTED. VERY WELL, THEN. YOU HAVE FORCED ME TO TAKE HARSH MEASURES. PREPARE TO MEET YOUR DOOM!"

"Go to hell!" I shouted.

We heard an impish chuckle.

"JUST KIDDING!" came Arthur's voice.

"What?" I rasped, switching the feed from my mike to the outside speakers. "Arthur! You son of a bitch, where the hell are you?"

"Now don't get testy," Arthur said, his voice at a lower volume. "Just having some fun. You ought to be grateful. I just saved your butt, you know."

I exhaled, relief flooding over me. "You did?"

"You better believe it, dearie. That last missile had your number on it."

"Oh," I said. "There was one coming at us?"

"Right on target. Of course, I knocked it out before it got very far."

"Oh."

"Oh," Arthur said mockingly.

"Thanks."

"You're welcome. Hold on a minute."

We waited. A minute later, Arthur came waddling out of the darkness. "Come on out," he said.

Carl was sitting up. He looked embarrassed, still a little scared, and at least partially rational.

"You okay?" I asked.

"Yeah. I…" He ran a hand over his face, and shook his head to clear it. "I don't know what happened. Something snapped. I dunno." He looked up. "I'm sorry," he added, rubbing his neck.

"Forget it. Is this your flying saucer? The one that nabbed you?"

Carl got to his feet, came forward. "Looks like it. Same damn goofy-looking place."

We got out. The chamber was like the inside of an egg flattened on the bottom. Behind the truck, the entrance had closed up into a puckered sphincter-valve affair. The room was uniformly constructed out of some dark material.

"Still angry?" Arthur asked, smirking.

"A little," I said. "You do a good imitation of Prime."

"Why, thank you, Jake," Arthur said in Prime's voice. "I plan to make a career in show business, you know."

I looked around. "What now?"

Arthur shrugged. "What do you want to do?"

"You're not taking us back to Emerald City?"

Arthur shook his head. "Not if you don't want to go."

I turned to Darla. "What do you think?"

Darla shook her head. "I don't know, Jake. We'd probably be safer in Emerald City, but…"

"I don't want to go," I said. "But I have to find Sam. He's got to be there somewhere."

Arthur said, "Oh, Sam's fine. I kind of like him. He's your father, right? You know, he looks a lot like you."

I must have looked as if I'd been hit with a power hammer. Arthur stared at me blankly for a second; then something dawned on him. "Oh, of course. You left before Sam…" He brought his four-fingered hand up and slapped his face. "Dearie me, I think I've made a boo-boo."

"What are you saying?" I managed to get out.

"Um… I think I'd better take you back to Emerald City. Right now. Follow me."

We followed him. Another sphincter-valve, this one much smaller than the first, was set into the far wall. It opened to admit us, and we went through into a curving tube-shaped corridor that bent to the right and led into a circular room. In the center was a high cylindrical platform on which rested a wedge-shaped box affair looking somewhat like a lectern. Arthur stood in front of it and began to slide his fingers across the box's slanted top face. A control panel, I thought.

Nothing much happened. I didn't feel any movement. I looked over Arthur's shoulder. The triangular panel, made of the same dark material that the rest of the ship was composed of, was totally blank, yet Arthur seemed to know where to put his fingers.

"Want a view?" Arthur asked.

"Huh? Oh, yeah."

The ship around us disappeared.

Darla squealed, and Lori fell to all fours. Carl jumped back, yelling, "Jesus Christ!" He stared unbelieving at his feet, beneath which was nothing but air.

I stared down, stamping my right foot. The floor was still there-something was there, anyway. I turned around. And behind us, about ten meters away, flying along with us like a escorting fighter, was the truck.

We were soaring in open air about three hundred meters above the surface of Microcosmos. Arthur still had his hands extended over the now invisible control panel.

"Sorry," he said. "I should have warned you. Let me opaque the ship's mass a little."

The walls and floor came back abruptly, then gradually faded to full transparency, but this time they looked like tinted glass.

"Do you have a sense of the ship around you now?" Arthur inquired.

"Yeah, better," I said.

Lori got up. "I'm going crazy," she declared. "I really think I'm gonna go completely bats."

"Hang on, honey," Darla said soothingly, putting an arm around her shoulders.

"Where did you get this… ship?", I asked.

"Belongs to Emerald City's fleet," Arthur told me. "It's a spacetime ship. Goes anywhere, anytime. Zips you there real fast."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah. It's probably the most advanced spacecraft ever built. Don't ask me who built it. I'd break my jaw trying to pronounce the name."

"Do you know how it works? What drives it?"

"Oh, quantum this, that, and the other thing. You really want me to go into it? You couldn't understand it, anyway."

"Forget it."

The patchwork quilt of Microcosmos rolled beneath us. Our airspeed couldn't have been much. Ahead, I could see the Emerald City atop its citadel, sparkling in the light of the setting sun.

"You have to take it easy going short distances," Arthur went on, anticipating my next question. "You can't do continuum jumps near big masses. I mean, you can do them, but it's tricky. Even for me. And I'm pretty good at driving this thing."

"You do a lot of flying?"

"Never. This is my first time."

"I see." I shrugged to myself.

The ship made its approach to Emerald City. Everything seemed to be going fine until we suddenly veered off. The world below us tilted crazily.

"What's wrong, Arthur?" I said, fighting an attack of vertigo.

"Something's coming our way."

I searched the sky and found it. It was a yellow glowing ball trailing streamers of fire, streaking down at us.

"What the hell is that?" I shouted.

"I don't know," Arthur said calmly. "Some kind of weapon. Don't worry."

"Worry? Who, me?"

The ship made a dizzying turn and headed away from the green castle. The fireball executed the same maneuver and streaked after us, hot on our tail. Our speed increased rapidly, but there was no feeling of acceleration, no G-forces. We climbed swiftly, then leveled off. The fireball did the same, and it seemed to be gaining. Arthur appeared to be aware of this without having looked.

"Uh-oh," he said. "Hang on, kids."

Arthur proceeded to put the ship through some impossible maneuvers. We flipped, looped, dived, pulled up, then went into what would have been called a stall, had it been done by an airplane. Then we dropped like a stone, tumbling end over end.

I fought off vertigo, closing my eyes. There was absolutely no physical sensation of movement.

When I opened them again, we were flying close to the ground at tremendous speed. Behind us, the fireball was pulling out of a dive to match our altitude.

"Dearie me," Arthur fretted. "I can't seem to shake this thing off our tail."

"Doesn't this ship have any weapons?" I asked.

"Not much offensively, but a whole bunch defensively. The ship's supposed to be invulnerable to just about any weapon ever created. Anyway, that's how it was touted in its day. But I can't take any chances. I have no idea of what technological culture that fireball may have come out of. It might have been specifically invented to challenge this ship's claims to invulnerability. You know how arms races go."

We shot up into the sky again and did a series of evasive maneuvers, these more improbable than the last. The fireball matched our every move.

"Dearie me!" Arthur exclaimed. "Now I'm starting to worry…"

"What about those defensive weapons?"

"I've already tried to neutralize it. Nothing worked."

"Can't you shoot it down?"

"Dogfight with it?" Arthur cringed. "You don't know what you're saying. Dogfighting is probably that thing's trump suit. You never know what to expect with these standing-wave energy weapons, which is probably what it is. It might be able to absorb the energy of an attack and grow even more powerful."

I looked ahead. The edge of the disk-planet was coming up fast.

"We're running out of world, Arthur," I said, trying to sound as composed as possible.

"That may be our only chance," he replied.

Our speed must have been stupendous by then. The edge of Microcosmos swept past, and we streaked out into space. The planet shrank behind us, its disk tilting away, bringing the edge into view. Forty-five degrees along the rim of the world, the luminous sun-disk was falling below the horizon. Beneath us, the world-edge was rounded and looked metallic, busy with embossed geometric patterns which could have been mazes of pipelines, conduits, power stations, and other technological facilities. I estimated the edge's thickness to be about two hundred kilometers. There very well could have been roads down there, but I couldn't make any out.

The other face of the planet, still dark, flipped up toward us. Before long, though, the sun, now on the opposite side, peeked back over the horizon and sent long shadows across the land. It was magnificent to watch, even under the circumstances.

The fireball had dropped back. Suddenly, there was a split second of a blinding flash. The walls opaqued instantly, cutting it off. Purple spots swam in front of my eyes.

"Well, we outran it," Arthur said, breathing a sigh. "It was losing energy, so it gave up and dissipated. Rather spectacularly, wouldn't you say?"

"Anything else coming at us?" I asked.

"No."

"Any idea who sent it?"

"There's only one possibility."

"The lady, the goddess in white?"

Arthur glanced at me over his shoulder. "I've never met her. Let me tell you, though, you should put quotes around lady. She's no lady, any more than Prime is a man. Those are simply outward forms, adopted for the sake of convenienceand for facilitating communication with you people."

"Can you guess why she'd want to give you trouble?"

"I can guess, but when you're talking about the Culmination, dearie, you might as well be trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin."

"She's part of the Culmination?"

"That's right. And mortals like us can only dream about what's really going on."

I began, "But I thought-" And realized I didn't know what to think.

"What you have to understand, dearie, is that Prime and the Goddess represent two aspects of the same being. They both share the same ontological base. Stop me if the vocabulary gets too stuffy."

"I think I know what you mean." I didn't know what the hell he was talking about.

The walls faded again, and we saw that the land below had brightened up. Brilliant morning light fell across the face of the world. Our altitude had decreased to the point where we could pick out individual features of the landscape. There seemed to be more structures on this side. Sizable city complexes lay here and about. We swooped toward one of them.

"This is an industrial arcology built by a race known as the Mumble-mumble," Arthur informed us. "Like most alien names, you can't say it in human."

Below us lay an aggregation of multicolored domes, spires, and polyhedral buildings. The ship angled toward an octagonal structure with a wide flat roof.

Arthur smiled at me over his shoulder. "I'm in contact with the Artificial Intelligence that runs the complex. It wants to know if we're technicians on our way to work. I'm telling it yes. When we land, try to look proletarian."

"What are we doing here?" I asked.

"Laying low for a while. We don't dare try making the trip back to Emerald City until we find out what's going on."

It made sense. I nodded.

Our craft swooped in over the roof and hovered over a circular area outlined in red. Then it set gently down. Arthur made a few swipes at the control panel, then turned away. The wall opaqued again.

"Nice landing," I told him.

"All in a day's work."

He led us back into the connecting tube. We passed the valve-door of the chamber where the truck was, following the curving corridor around to another valve. Arthur touched an area of the wall beside the bulge, and the sphincter dilated.

We were descending.

"Elevator," Arthur said, pointing up.

The hole in the roof was being sealed off by a secondary sliding door. The platform on which we rode came down into a large machinery-clogged chamber and merged with the floor. The door-valve distended itself, seeking ground, met it, and dilated a bit more. While all this was going on, I examined the seemingly monolithic material of which the ship was constructed. Its color was a very dark olive drab, not really black. The texture was grainy, and there was something else going on across the surface, an ingrained pattern of tiny lines and geometric shapes, barely visible. I tapped the wall. It rang hollowly.

We stepped out and got our first chance to get a good look at the ship. It was essentially an irregular grouping of curving tubes with nipple-shaped ends. Breast-shaped protuberances stuck out here and there. Rather erotic, this ship, in a way. I wondered what symbolism it had had for its nonhuman builders.

The big valve, the one we'd gotten sucked up by, was open.

"Jake, would you get your truck out of there, please?" Arthur asked.

I did, backing it out carefully. By the time I had parked and powered the rig's engine down, something startling was happening to the ship.

It was shrinking like a balloon with a fast leak. It didn't hiss. It just got smaller.

And smaller. And…

When it had shrunk to a diameter of about two thirds of a meter, Arthur picked the damned thing up and held it in both arms. It looked like a model of itself. It was a model of itself.

"Arthur!" I screamed. "That's impossible!"

"Why?" Arthur asked.

I looked at Darla, Carl, and Lori. They were dumbfounded, staring at me as if I had the answer.

"Why?" I said. "Because you couldn't possibly pick it up. It's got to weigh-"

"Oh, no," Arthur said, "its mass isn't very much at all. Here."

He tossed the thing at me. I lurched and managed to balance it. It was heavy as hell, but it should have weighed at least a hundred tons. More, maybe.

He looked at Carl, Darla, and Lori, then back at me. "Satisfied?"

"Very," I said, stepping forward to give him his ship back.

"Oof," Arthur said, struggling with it, though he obviously had three times my strength. "Just don't ask me about the power source."

"Don't worry, I won't," I told him.

Arthur waddled over to the middle of the red circular platform, set the ship down and walked back. "When it's deflated it's kind of inert, and can't be detected at all."

"What now?" I said.

"Now I get in touch with Prime." He stared off into space for a moment. "Except he's not available, damn it. He never is, when I want him. Dearie me." He sighed. "We'll have to wait."

Bruce's voice came from the rig's exterior speaker. "Jake?"

"Yeah?"

"Jake, there is some sort of attempt being made to communicate with me. My guess is that it is a computer system indigenous to this structure."

"Oh, I forgot," Arthur said. "That's the… I guess you'd call it the plant foreman."

"I am making an attempt to establish contact. Is this permissible?"

"Go ahead, Bruce, do your best," I told him, then turned to Arthur. "Now, before anything else, what was it you were trying to tell me about Sam?"

"Oh, yes. Well, he's been… loaded into another machine."

"By whom, and for what reason?"

Arthur's tone was apologetic. "I'm afraid Prime is the culprit, Jake. And the reason, as far as I can understand it, was that Prime determined that Sam, as an Artificial Intelligence, was sufficiently advanced enough to warrant special consideration."

"You mean he's to be a Culmination candidate?"

"You got it."

I scowled, shaking my head. "Why is it that Prime's motives always seem to be as pure as the driven snow, no matter how underhanded his methods are?"

"Good public relations?" Arthur suggested.

"You ought to know."

"It's a living, dearie. The employment situation here is tight."

"Yeah. One other thing. You said that Sam looks like me. How could you know what he looks like?"

"From your memories of him, Jake. I have a pretty clear picture of Sam in my data files."

I nodded. Somehow Arthur's answer didn't satisfy me. "Jake?"

It was Bruce again. "Yeah?"

"Jake, I have managed to establish a rudimentary form of communication with the unknown A.I. It has put a number of questions to us. Do you wish to reply?"

"Well, what's it asking?"

"It would like to know the purpose of our visit."

"Jeez, I don't know."

Arthur said, "Tell it that we're on an inspection tour."

"Jake?"

"Huh? Yeah, go ahead."

A few moments later Bruce reported, "The Intelligence says it is happy to receive us and wishes to know what aspect of the plant's operations would be of greatest interest to us."

"Research and development," Arthur said.

After another pause, Bruce relayed, "Very well. Would you like to begin the inspection immediately?"

"Tell it no," I said. "Tell it… um, say that we have had a long journey and would like to rest first. We will begin the inspection in approximately eight hours."

"Very well."

"That ought to hold it," I said. "I don't plan to stay here for eight hours."

"I can't guarantee that I'll be able to contact Prime within that time," Arthur informed me.

"No? What's he doing?"

"I don't know. All I know is that he's not available and there's no telling when he will be."

I thought of something. "Then who's looking after the rest of my crew?"

"I activated another servant. They'll be fine."

"Another servant?"

"A multipurpose robot about half my size. Nice kid, but not much personality."

"Great." I yawned. "It's been an exciting day. Much too exciting."

"Yeah," Arthur said snidely, "chewing up vast stretches of parkland can take a lot out of you."