The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 22

Corean ran behind the Moc, which followed close on the heels of the grotesque Soosen. The servitor was staggering a bit, gasping — obviously the pace was too quick for her. But Corean felt no fatigue at all, and the weight of the ruptor strapped to her arm was nothing, a deadly feather.

She called to Soosen. “Run, monster. If we fail to catch Ruiz Aw, I’ll take you away from here, out into the cold universe alone, where you’ll never smell another Gench as long as you live.”

Soosen threw a terrified glance back over her shoulder, and Corean laughed aloud.

Ruiz Aw followed the blood trail, and with every step he drew closer to the wounded person he pursued. Now he began to catch glimpses of a thin woman, who limped around each new turning of the tunnel with a little more desperation, with an increasingly frightened face. She seemed at first glimpse to be as human as Ruiz — but when he got a little closer, he saw that chevrons of pink mucus membrane decorated her back, gleaming wetly in the red light. The design gave her back the look of some odd crustacean, its alien flesh bulging beneath a segmented carapace of human skin.

Her wound was bleeding less, he saw when he was almost on her, though her leg seemed to be stiffening. Her gait had become a lunging shuffle. He slung his ruptor and prepared to seize her. He felt a sickness in his stomach; would she tell him where to find the Orpheus Machine, or would he be forced to torment the information from her?

He wasn’t sure he could do it. Despite his sealed armor, he suddenly smelled the ancient familiar scent of blood. A black memory of the Roderigo slaughterhouse slipped through his mind.

He was ten meters behind her when the Gench stepped out from a side passage, blocking his path.

“Stop, please,” it said as Ruiz skidded to a halt, almost losing his balance on the slippery tunnel floor. He shifted his ruptor, ready to fire. It made no aggressive movement.

The respite had apparently given Ruiz’s victim fresh energy; she vanished around the next corner with renewed speed.

He started to dodge past the Gench; their alien physiologies and psyches reportedly made Gencha difficult to torture — and how would one judge the truth of their admissions? But it spoke again. “Ruiz Aw. Wait. I would speak with you, to your advantage. Let the servitor go; it could provide no significant assistance to you in its present state of hysteria.”

Ruiz was so startled by this remarkable speech that he forgot all about the escaping woman. “You know me?”

“Yes. You do not remember me? I feel no surprise. I was the young Gench you freed from Publius the monster maker. I have an opportunity to redress this imbalance of gratitudes now.”

In his astonishment, Ruiz allowed the muzzle of his ruptor to drop for a moment, then jerked it up. “How? But more to the point, why? Gratitude is a human response.”

“No matter. I have other reasons. So. I will lead you to the thing the humans above call the Orpheus Machine. We must go quickly; the human Corean and her great warrior are close behind us. And two of her human killers.” Its eyespots scurried around to the far side of its skull.

Ruiz hesitated, looking down the tunnel. “Give me a reason to believe you.” He recalled an uncomfortable fact: he had once lectured this young Gench on the correspondence between sapience and the capacity for treachery.

A quiver ran through the Gench’s sacklike body. “Above, they fight for control of this Machine. Not so?”

“Yes.”

“And will they stop before they have it? Even if they must scour the stack down to bedrock, and slay everything that dwells within?”

“No,” admitted Ruiz.

“Then it is not our treasure, but our doom.” The Gench extruded a tentacle from one of its mouths; the tentacle lifted a small dataslate, apparently looted from the sump. “And did you mean what you said in your broadcast? That you will destroy the Machine?”

“I’ll try,” said Ruiz, who had passed beyond astonishment.

“Then if I wish to survive, I must aid you. As before. Though I must warn you, the Machine is persuasive and will argue forcefully for its life, so that you may lose your resolve.”

“And do any of your fellow Gencha think as you do?”

It wriggled its torso in the Gencha approximation of a shrug. “Not all of them, or even most of them. The Old Ones’ attention is fixed on Becoming. Nor can they believe in their own mortality; they believe they will live forever as gods. For too long they have hidden here from the human tide that fills the universe; they forget the danger that humans pose to our species. Thus in late years they thought to barter the use of the Machine for power.”

The Gench paused, and its faint breath sighed through its spiracles. “I spent far too much time as the slave of Publius the monster maker; these foolish dreams are not for me, nor will I ever grow to godhood. Survival seems a sufficiently ambitious goal for such a corrupt creature as I. And others find my limitations comfortable. We are a small faction, but determined. Hurry. A guide leads Corean and her bug to the Machine.”

Ruiz toggled his short-range channel again. “Junior? Where are you?” he asked, aware that his voice had acquired a querulous undertone. He got no answer. He waited a few moments longer, then came to a decision. “Let’s go,” he said.

The Gench set off at its awkward-looking rippling gait. At the first branch, it departed from the blood trail.

It was much faster than it looked, and Ruiz was forced to increase his oxygen flow again, to keep up with the creature.

Nisa staggered along, helped by Dolmaero, who seemed to have regained much of his strength down in this constricted Hell.

To either side of the passage were corpses — devolved humans who had tried to prevent them from returning to the tram. Ruiz and the others had gone ahead to do this damage, leaving one soldier to guard the three Pharaohans.

After a few minutes, Ruiz and the soldier called Kroone had returned alone. Kroone had limped and the black armor Ruiz wore was splashed with blood.

Ruiz still maintained his strange distance. The visions, the madness, she thought. That’s why he seems less than himself.

They eventually emerged into the great pit and crossed the sump without incident. Ruiz began to act even more strangely, casting looks back over his shoulder — more looks, Nisa thought, than could be accounted for by caution.

“What is it?” she asked him. But he didn’t reply, and the blank metal of his helmet gave her no clue to his thoughts.

They got onto the tram, and Nisa felt a sort of greedy eagerness to be away from this horrible place. She noticed that she was grinning. So wide was her smile that her face hurt.

Despite her anticipation, some formless misgiving had lodged painfully in her heart. She turned, saw that Ruiz Aw had not boarded the tram yet; his attention was fixed on the red-glowing mouths of the Gencha caverns.

“What is it?” she asked again.

Almost unwillingly, it seemed, his armored head turned toward her. Then he unlatched his faceplate and exposed his face. He was as dangerously beautiful as she remembered — the drug that possessed her only sharpened his beauty, made it both more predatory and more brilliant. He smiled at her with melancholy affection. Still, his black gaze was just a little colder, a little harder than she remembered. Perhaps it’s the drug, she thought.

“Do you know how much I have valued you?” he said, so low that she could barely hear him.

“Yes,” she answered.

“And have you noticed what a great fool I have always been?” He was smiling broadly now. She took no insult at the implication.

“Occasionally,” she answered seriously.

He looked at her as if carving her face carefully in some gallery of the mind. “I will always be grateful for our time together, no matter what happens,” he said, frightening her very badly. “Will you give me a kiss, soft and sweet, from your heart to mine?”

“Yes,” she said.

Ruiz and his guide moved rapidly. They began to pass an occasional semi-human person, who generally stood hastily aside and watched with open mouth as they passed. Down some of the side passages, Ruiz saw living areas, in which people had made pathetically ordinary little nests. In these dwellings, glowpoints gave a brighter light than the red bioluminescence that lighted the tunnels, so that Ruiz could see the few sticks of furniture the inhabitants had lashed together from the sump’s rubbish. The walls were decorated by crude drawings in black and white paint — stick figures with three legs and arms but human heads. Ruiz began to see children, and the youngest of these seemed entirely human. Their wide-eyed faces might have belonged to children anywhere in the pangalac worlds. He refused to think what their lives must be like, down here in the chemical madness of the Gencha enclave.

Abruptly the Gench veered into a side passage. Ruiz followed, to find the creature collapsed behind the concealment of a particularly high rubbish pile.

“What is it?” Ruiz hissed, looking back over his shoulder.

The Gench trembled. “Your enemy has reached the Machine first.”

“How do you know?”

The eyespots regarded Ruiz with an approximation of astonishment. “This information inflames the pheromonic net. Which fills the habitations. How could I not know?”

“How is it that the other Gencha don’t know what you’re doing for me?” Ruiz felt an incipient panic.

“They do know,” said the young Gench. “But what can they do? Our species does not act easily — only such corrupt ones as I can make any sort of individual decision. But now I have no information on which to act — my plan was based on the assumption that you would destroy the Machine before your enemy arrived to kill you.”

“I see,” said Ruiz dubiously. “So, do you also know what has become of my companion?”

“Yes, of course,” said the Gench. “We lost track of him briefly; then he managed somehow to run down a servitor. He forced it to guide him to the place where Corean had left her prisoners and a detachment of her guards. He killed two guards, then negotiated a truce with the survivors. They took the prisoners back to the tramline, killing a large number of our servitors who had attempted to obstruct their escape.”

“Prisoners?” A wild speculation filled Ruiz.

“A woman and two men, shackled into a coffle.”

Nisa. Who else could it be? Junior had acted with Ruiz Aw’s customary ruthless self-interest. Ruiz felt a sudden self-loathing — and a frantic disappointment. Why had he not thought to do the same? He had changed fatally, it seemed.

“Have they left?”

The Gench made its flaccid shrug. “I think not, but I speak with no assurance. The net grows tenuous in the relatively open air of the great pit, and convective currents fragment the data.”

Ruiz felt an almost irresistible impulse to abandon this foolish crusade, to rush back to the pit in the faint hope that Junior had not yet gone, taking Nisa with him. He found himself drawing great shuddering breaths, trembling with anger and grief. No! he told himself. It’s too late. Junior would start up the wall as quickly as he could load the tram, and soon he would reach the sub and be away. With Nisa.

No, only one significant act remained to Ruiz; he could keep faith with Somnire. He could spite Roderigo and all the other monsters of Sook who lusted for the Machine. That would be no small accomplishment, after all. He smiled crookedly.

He forced his attention back to the problem at hand. “Well, all might not be lost. Can you take me to a vantage point? Where I can see and not be seen?”

The Gench thought for a dozen heartbeats. “We can observe the approaches to the Machine, though not the Machine itself. Come. We go by old ways.”

“What were these, then?” Ruiz muttered under his breath, looking at the ancient trash that half-blocked the tunnel. He checked his oxygen level. To his horror, he saw that his reserve was down to fifteen minutes. How had so much time passed? He switched off the flow, so that he would have one more chance to clear his head, should the visions overwhelm him at some crucial point. He took one last breath of clean air, and then opened his armor’s vents.

The stench was too intense to be interpreted by the parameters of ordinary stenches. Ruiz gagged; then the impulse passed and he saw the universe slip sideways, twisted by the mindfire. There was a moment of terrible strain. Then reality tore into ragged scraps and blew away… to reveal the universe’s new face.

The dull red walls of the tunnels now shimmered in a thousand subtle shifting luminescences, as beautiful as a fire opal. The darkness of the side tunnels seemed velvety, full of possibilities both good and ill — but all intriguing. He looked down at his armored hands and was amazed by the cold beauty of the machined metal. The ready-lights of his weapon twinkled like little gems. A lovely blue light hazed the barrel of the ruptor. The Gench alone seemed little altered, its squat ugliness a sour presence in the midst of the sudden beauty that filled the tunnel. Even the trash exhibited a compellingly rich texture, a tangle of meaningful shape and color.

“Are you able to go on?” said the Gench, and Ruiz woke to a sense of passing time. Urgency seized him.

“Yes,” said Ruiz. He keyed the channel to Nisa’s clone. “Are you there?” he asked.

“I’m here,” she answered instantly. Her voice, always sweet, now seemed the most unendurably beautiful music Ruiz had ever heard. He felt his eyes filling.

He shook his head, shut his eyes, and forced his mind to cold purposefulness. “Listen. I’ve opened my armor; now I must depend on your eyes to show me what is true. If you observe me in erratic behavior, tell me what the camera shows you, since I’ll probably be seeing something that isn’t there — maybe my fear made visible, maybe the things the Gench believe about themselves and their servitors. Maybe events that have happened in this place — some of them long, long ago. Do you understand?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Record everything, but broadcast nothing until I tell you to do so.”

There was a pause, and Ruiz imagined her consulting with the Deepheart technicians to be sure she could do as he asked. “All right,” she said.

Ruiz resisted the urge to take a deep breath, and moved off, following the Gench.

It led him away from the inhabited tunnels, down through rough twisting passages rich with antiquity and strangeness. The red bioluminescence was very low in these unused tunnels, as if perhaps the organisms that gave the light fed on the stink of the habitations and were here starved for sustenance.

The Gench seemed to move less surely in these places, as though the pheromonic network were less intact here, and Ruiz occasionally drew a breath of purer air, so that his head cleared a bit.

They came to a place where the roof lifted away, and the tunnel widened into an echoing cavern. Crumbling ledges rose to either side; Ruiz soon identified them as the risers of an amphitheater. The ledges were oriented toward the far side of the dark chamber, and Ruiz strained his eyes, trying to make out a huge ominous shape that loomed there.

Abruptly he became aware of activity to each side, of rustles and soft footfalls and the sighing sound of many people breathing. He glanced up into the risers and saw dim silhouettes moving there, hundreds of them. He stopped and crouched, weapon ready. “Who are they?” he asked in a quivering voice.

The Gench stopped and its eyespots floated around to focus on Ruiz. “No one is here, Ruiz Aw.”

“I see no one either,” said Nisa’s clone.

Ruiz slowly straightened up… but the illusion persisted that he shared the cavern with a great crowd.

“What is this place?” he asked the Gench.

“This is the place where the Orpheus Machine was born,” it answered.

Ruiz moved forward a step. At the far end of the cavern an unhealthy green light gathered into dripping clots. Gradually it illuminated a massive object.

The Orpheus Machine was as tall as four men, and ten meters wide. Its facade was in the semblance of a great face, but the features moved with an independent life, a pulsing crawling animation. At first Ruiz couldn’t see why that should be so; he could only see the expression on the face, a sort of sly scheming lunacy.

He moved a little closer, and now he could see the source of the movement. The Machine’s facade was a mixture of limbs and torsos, all knit together into those dreadful features. Here and there under that hideous crust of flesh, a metal substrate glinted through.

What Ruiz had at first taken for wrinkles were the divisions between the body parts. There was a certain symmetry and purposefulness to the design; it had none of the casual stuck-together quality that marked the mutilations the Gench servitors wore. As he approached, he began to see the logic of the design. The cheekbones were a knotty mass of arms, the muscles clenching nervously. The forehead was a horizontal striation of long smooth feminine legs. The eyes were a pointillist design made up of thousands of real eyes — pale blue eyes for the sclera and black for the pupils — and each blinking eyeball glowed with a disorienting awareness. The lipless mouth gaped open in a loose grin, and Ruiz saw that its teeth were the blond shaggy heads of children, lolling in some ugly ecstasy.

Here and there on the face were patches of Gencha skin, bristling with sensor tufts.

Ruiz felt terribly ill. To see the Orpheus Machine was to want to destroy it, and he wondered how it had survived for so many centuries. And then he wondered who had made it.

He must have spoken aloud, because the Gench answered in its whispery voice. “A religious impulse — an aspect of human behavior I don’t pretend to understand. When we first divined that Sook would one day become a human world and took humans from the surface to mold into servitors, they fell prey to many madnesses. This was one — an attempt to synthesize a cyborg containing both human and Gencha elements. To make a god. They succeeded, to some extent. We theorize it was because they didn’t understand the impossibility of such a thing…. Here they made the Machine, and here they first worshiped it.”

Ruiz’s hands tightened on his ruptor. He told himself over and over that he was looking at an illusion, a memory of things long dead.

The Machine smiled even more widely and said, without moving its lips, “Am I?” The voice would have been deep and resonant had it not been so faint; Ruiz could feel it in his bones.

The tiny sound woke such a depth of loathing in Ruiz that his hands shook and he half-raised the ruptor.

“No!” warned the Gench. “Resist the illusions. The Machine’s ghosts work to confuse you. If you lose control, you will alert the soldiers your enemy has placed in ambush at the entry to the real Machine’s sanctum. Or your weapon may collapse the ceiling. The servitors refuse to maintain these passages — the ghosts afflict them also.”

“Yes,” said Ruiz, and lowered the ruptor. He moved toward the face, and with each step some hideous new monstrousness revealed itself. When he was very close, the face opened in a silent gloating scream, and the small heads that lined the jaws turned to look at him. They glared at him with mindless ferocity, their little sharp teeth snapping in an irregular rhythm.

“Too much,” said Ruiz faintly. He purged the atmosphere of his armor with pure oxygen and closed his vents. He took deep breaths, trying to clear his lungs of the mindfire.

The Machine slowly faded, though not entirely, becoming a transparent, static image, dimly glowing, no longer threatening.

Ruiz thought about what the Gench had said and switched on his spotlight. He looked up at the roof of the cavern and discovered sagging slabs of meltstone and alloy, held up precariously by two central alloy pillars, which had corroded badly.

“Let’s go,” he said, and stepped through the ghost of the Machine, which broke around him into a tatter of pale streaming color.

The Gench led him through an arch at the cavern’s far end, and then up a narrow staircase. Ruiz saw that his oxygen reserve was down to nine minutes; he shook his head and reluctantly opened his vents. He suffered an instant of vertigo, but no new horrors assailed him through the hallucinatory shimmer.

He didn’t look back at the spot where the Machine had been.

At the top of the stairs, the Gench indicated a row of dark alcoves spaced along a narrow gallery. “Look carefully,” it whispered.

Ruiz entered the nearest, moving cautiously. At the end of a short tunnel, a meter-wide opening glowed. He crept up to it and peeked through.

Below him a maze filled a vast cavern. The light was hotter and brighter — more orange, more energetic than the light of the tunnels. The thick meltstone walls, each a little higher than a tall man, rippled outward from a low central building. Corridors twisted and turned in confusing patterns, but from above, Ruiz could see that three paths led inward, from three separate arches in the perimeter of the cavern. Lying atop the walls at two of the entrances were armored men. Both men held weapons ready, all their attention concentrated on the arches. To Ruiz’s drugged eyes, they seemed like icons of ambush, dire and monstrous. He wanted to laugh at their unknowing vulnerability.

Beside him the Gench whispered, “The slaver’s mighty bug waits in a niche just inside the third way.”

Ruiz considered. “Will we be interrupted by hordes of bloodthirsty Gencha? Or servitors?”

“No,” answered the Gench. “We are not a physical race, and the servitors have all fled to the farthest holes of the enclave. They cannot understand this conflict among their gods.”

“I see,” said Ruiz. He forgot where he was and took a deep breath, attempting to calm himself, but the act charged his brain with distorted visions, and the armored men seemed to multiply, so that the maze was suddenly crowded with enemies.

Ruiz turned away and switched his oxygen back on. He fumbled with his weapons rack, then gathered the elements of a heavy pinbeam — identical to the one Junior had chosen to carry as a primary weapon. An assassin’s tool, Ruiz thought, inexplicably contemptuous.

His mind cleared a little as he assembled the thing.

In the pinbeam’s multiplier scope, the first soldier’s image swelled until Ruiz could set the cross hairs on his neck bellows — the weakest area of the Deltan’s armor. At first the man’s hunched shoulder blocked the most vulnerable surface of the armor. Ruiz waited until the man shifted slightly, and then he drilled the beam through armor and vertebrae. The man slumped silently.

Ruiz shifted his aim to the other soldier and killed him with even less effort. He felt strongly the new sickness that filled him each time he committed an act of violence, the sickness that had taken root in his heart during his stay on Roderigo. He pulled the pinbeam from the opening, gasping. Slowly it penetrated his consciousness that an alarm was buzzing. He looked at the oxygen gauge. Empty. He opened his vents and let the mindfire back into his brain.

“It knows. She knows,” said the Gench.

Corean stood before the beautiful corrupt face of her Machine, listening to the wonderful things it was saying to her, breathing in the mindfire that filled the Machine’s temple, glorying in her power. She had run out of oxygen some time before, but so far she felt no severe skewing of her perceptions.

The servitor Soosen had long since run away terrified, and Corean had seen no one since.

The Machine spoke in its own sonorous voice: “You will clone an army of Ruiz Aws and go forth to rule the worlds. Who could stand before you? Who?” It opened its mouth wide and the little skulls that lined its jaws sang a pure soprano refrain: “Who…?”

But then the mouth snapped shut and all its eyes flared with hallucinatory terror. The eyes flickered from side to side, and the Machine began to turn away from her on its hundreds of feet.

“What is it?” She felt a panic as fierce as her exultation had been a moment before.

“He’s here somewhere. Close,” said the Machine, lumbering toward its innermost shrine, a hollow lump of monomol in the center of its temple. “Your enemy. He seeks my blood and yours.”

“Where? Don’t you know?” Corean backed away from the arch that led into the temple, expecting to see Ruiz Aw, triumphant.

“No. But he’s killed your two soldiers.” The Machine scuttled into its shrine and crouched down. The shrine resembled a huge squat hat, and to Corean’s drugged perceptions, the Machine now became the head of some gigantic monster, temporarily buried neck deep in the alloy floor of the temple. Its thousands of eyes glittered out at her from the darkness inside the shrine. She willed it to rise up and defend her.

“Protect me!” she demanded.

“I cannot,” said the Machine. “My volition is a feeble thing. My great weakness is that I must obey the being who is physically closest to me. Is this not absurd? If you lose me to Ruiz Aw, he will be my master. Set your bug on him — quickly, before he can reach me.”

She ran toward the shrine, shouting for her Moc. She stood for a moment outside the shrine, hesitating. Some remaining human part of her wanted very badly not to go inside. But that part of her died quite suddenly, and she went to crouch in the decaying embrace of her Machine. The Machine cycled the protective blast doors shut.

She looked down through the grating under the Machine, into the small sump that fed the Gencha elements of the Machine. Cilia dropped into the slime, roiling the bones and undissolved gobbets of flesh; somehow it seemed inappropriate that the Machine should be feeding, even as Ruiz Aw pursued her. “Stop that,” she snarled, and the Machine retracted its cilia. It chuckled, oddly enough.

Then her Moc was outside, moving around the shrine in a flickering evasive pattern.

“Ruiz Aw is here,” she shouted. “Kill him.”

And the Moc was gone.