The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 23

“What’s going on?” asked Ruiz. “Where’s the Moc?”

The Gench shuddered, heaved its bulk forward, tentacles questing. Ruiz drew back from the glistening filaments; they made him terribly nervous, even though he believed in the Gench’s sincerity.

“I cannot say for sure. The opposing faction sends confusing messages over the pheromonic net.”

“Wonderful,” said Ruiz sourly. “My life — not to say the future of the human race — hangs on the outcome of a Gencha farting contest. Why am I not more astonished?” He felt a wild laugh bubble up into his lungs; frightened, he choked it off.

“There.” The Gench gestured and Ruiz looked.

The Moc flickered along the edge of the maze, its natural speed exaggerated by Ruiz’s distorted vision. He hoped it couldn’t see him in the darkness of the alcove above the maze, because in his present state he was absolutely certain to die in any direct confrontation with the uncanny thing. He jerked his head down and spoke to Nisa’s clone. “What did you see?”

“Corean’s giant bug, running along the edge of the maze. Why didn’t you kill it?”

Ruiz groaned and felt a paralyzing fear — it seemed to suck all the strength from his legs. His imagination ran wild; he saw the Moc killing him in a dozen painful ways. He squeezed his eyes shut — which, he realized sluggishly, was a mistake. In the absence of competing vision, the hallucinations became a great deal more vivid.

He opened his eyes wide. “Is there another way in? To this old place?”

The Gench turned to him. “Yes. Below. At the end of the corridor that crosses the back of this place is a door, long frozen in its sill.”

“Can you notify me of something at a distance? Send me a vision?”

“Yes — though not a powerful one. But something. All our faction’s strength is devoted to repressing the madness the majority sends against you. They will not expect us to send you a small piece of insanity.” Then the Gench drew its small transceiver from one of its mouths. “But why not use this?”

Ruiz repressed another gust of wild laughter. “Why not? Well, when the Moc is at least halfway to the far side of the maze, let me know. I’ll give you a channel.” He took the transceiver, keyed in a scrambled frequency, and fed in the proper decoding parameters. “And just so there’ll be no mistake, send me a vision too. Something that has meaning for us alone; do you understand?”

“Possibly,” said the Gench, accepting the transceiver.

Ruiz trotted down the staircase, the mindfire burning him. The ghost of the Machine squatted at the foot of the steps, looking up hungrily. As Ruiz grew near, the Machine grinned and stuck out a tongue. Ruiz saw that the tongue was a mass of intertwined arms… and all the hands beckoned languidly.

Ruiz forced himself to run through the ghost, and he kept his eyes half-closed, ready to ignore any horror that might appear in the interior of the ghost. As he passed through, he heard a faint resentful voice say: “Rude boy.”

He went down the central aisle, to the first of the two pillars, to which he attached a limpet mine, set for remote detonation. When he had mined the other pillar, he went to the back of the amphitheater and found the corridor that led to the maze.

He stopped before the door, which was a mass of ancient corrosion. He checked the contents of his explosives pouch, found that he had a half-dozen mines left. He needed to save enough to destroy the Machine — if he ever got close to it. Reluctantly, he took one out and set it for a low-yield explosion, then locked it to the door. Would it open the door without bringing down the roof? He looked up, and his drugged senses showed him the roof in unsteady movement, as if it were already settling toward him. It was so real a perception that he huddled back against the door, cringing.

“Ruiz Aw,” said the Gench’s whispery voice through his helmet speaker.

“Yes?” He looked down at his feet, trying to focus on something other than the collapsing roof.

“The bug is checking the first of your kills. Is that far enough?”

Ruiz resisted the impulse to take a deep breath. “I hope so,” he said. “Weren’t you going to show me something?”

“If you say I must, then I will.”

In the center of the amphitheater, a shape swirled into existence. It coalesced into a huge but familiar face. Ruiz recognized the vulpine features of Publius the monster maker, who smiled gently and horribly at him, and then looked down at the ghost of the Orpheus Machine with a great evil wistful longing.

“All right,” said Ruiz. “All right.” The face broke apart and dissipated in dim streamers. Ruiz set the mine’s timer and ran away as fast as he could, willing himself not to look up at the roof, or to think of all that weight above him, the kilometers of meltstone and alloy.

When he was halfway back to the stairs, the mine at the door detonated, and in the fading roar he listened for the grinding sound of collapse. It didn’t come, but by the time he reached the foot of the stairs, another terrible sound came to him — the scrabble of the Moc’s claws, as it forced its way through the demolished door. Even the ghost of the Machine turned to look, so that he didn’t have to endure its regard as he ran through it.

He climbed up a few treads, then turned as the Moc broke through with a clattering crash. As he stabbed at the controller slate on his forearm, he caught sight of a blur moving away from the amphitheater’s back.

The mines fired with a flat crack; the explosions blasted the bases of the pillars away, as though invisible hands had jerked them apart.

The Moc paused for an instant and then streaked forward. The roof fell toward it, so slowly that Ruiz was suddenly sure that the Moc would outrun gravity.

The great insectoid seemed to fill the world; Ruiz could see nothing else. He tried to get off a shot from his ruptor, but the Moc dodged so artfully that his shot went nowhere close.

He felt all the strength leave his legs. He was starting to sag toward the stairstep when a falling slab finally caught the Moc and took it down. Dust exploded upward, but not before Ruiz saw that the slab had crushed one of the Moc’s lower legs, and that more stone was falling toward the creature, which jerked and mewled, trying to get loose.

When the dust parted briefly again, Ruiz saw that a layer of stone two meters deep covered the amphitheater’s floor, and that nothing seemed to move beneath it.

The machine wailed, as if from a hundred different throats. Corean held her hands over her ears. “What is it?” she cried. The ground trembled and a deep rumble rose and fell.

“He’s killed your bug. Oh, he’s too strong, too strong. I feel my mortality on me.” It wailed again, a sound that sent shudders through Corean’s body.

“Shut up,” she said. It did. “He won’t destroy you as long as I’m here.”

It laughed hideously, until she shrieked at it to stop.

“What now?” Ruiz asked himself. He looked down at the maze from the alcove. Nothing moved below, except for the walls, which swam in the slow hallucinatory dance of the mindfire.

“Your enemy cowers with the Machine, beneath its armored hat. You must extract her before you can set your charges.”

“How?”

“You must devise a suitable scheme. Is this not your great skill?” The Gench spoke dispassionately.

“No,” said Ruiz. “My great skill was less admirable; the schemes were only means to that end.”

“Nonetheless,” said the Gench. “Examine your past dealings with the slaver. What deceptions have worked with her before? Humans rarely live long enough to learn from their mistakes.”

“I’ve lived a long time,” said Ruiz, somewhat resentfully. He tried to concentrate, to shut out the shimmering illusions of the mindfire — though he dared not close his eyes.

To his surprise, an idea came to him. It was a dangerous idea, and it depended on Corean’s foolishness, but it had one great advantage: If it failed, he would cease to suffer.

“Tell me,” he said to the Gench. “Are you capable of lying to the Machine?”

The Gench failed to respond, for long moments. Ruiz had begun to search for new ideas, when it finally spoke. “Possibly. Can you believe the lie? Will you allow me to take your reason, for a time?”

Ruiz turned to look at the Gench, and considered what a monstrous alien thing it was. Its eyespots grew still, ceasing their endless circulation over the lumpy skull.

“Why not?” he said. He heard Nisa’s clone take a sudden gasping breath.

Corean looked out through a slit in the Machine’s inner shrine, clutching her splinter gun in sweaty hands. She had almost grown used to the loathsome bulk of the Machine nearly touching her back.

“Does he come, yet?” asked the Machine in a throaty whisper.

“No,” she said, but as she spoke, she heard Ruiz shout in his cold deep voice. “Don’t shoot,” he said from some hiding spot just inside the maze. “I’ve been captured. I’m coming out, with my captor.”

The Machine laughed fearfully. “Kill him the instant you get a clear shot.”

“Yes,” she said. She slung the splinter gun and armed the big ruptor strapped to her left arm — if Ruiz Aw stood still and allowed her a shot at a perpendicular surface, the ruptor would be powerful enough to penetrate his armor and turn his chest to slush.

“All right,” she shouted, repressing glee.

He stepped from concealment, and for the first moment she could not react. It was like the culmination of a lovely dream. He stood in plain view, motionless, arms crossed over his head, apparently weaponless. The faceplate of his helmet was tipped up, exposing his dark features. A Gench sidled out from the maze, close behind Ruiz Aw. The mindfire threw Ruiz into a burning white glare, a light that showed him to her in all his predatory glory.

His face was full of an alien emptiness, she noticed, as she settled her ruptor’s sights on his vulnerable beautiful head. Her finger was tightening on the trigger.

She was so full of a transcendent relief, so glad that she was going to survive, that she almost didn’t notice the tendril that penetrated Ruiz Aw’s temple. She almost killed him. Then she saw the tendril and jerked her finger out of the trigger guard.

The Gench had him. It was true. She laughed, triumph washing her fear away. She turned to the Machine, just to be sure. “Is it true? The Gench controls him?”

“Maybe. Yes, it seems so. But take no chances; kill him while you can.” The Machine’s foul breath made her head swim.

She heard the words and took from them the sense she wanted, though there was in them an echo of another person’s words, words which she had once bitterly regretted disregarding.

“Oh no,” she said joyfully, and went out to claim him.

Ruiz stood dumbly, watching Corean Heiclaro emerge from the Machine’s monomol shrine. He couldn’t see her face — just the bright glitter of her eyes through the narrow armorglass slot of her helmet. He hadn’t been so close to her since the day she had loaded him aboard the airboat, so long ago, in the Blacktear Pens.

He felt like a powerless insect, caught in some thick amber nightmare. How had this happened? How had he been so easily caught? He couldn’t remember, and the mindfire pulsed through him, hot and thick, frustrating his attempts to think.

She stopped before him, her splinter gun raised cautiously. “How sweet,” she said, in a voice that trembled with joy. She reached up and touched his cheek with a cold metal gauntlet.

He couldn’t answer.

She spoke to the Gench who had apparently captured him. “Come, monster. We’ll take him right to the Machine and make him safe.” She looked at Ruiz again. “Strange that it should end exactly the way I had planned it to end — but after so much pain, so much frustration.” She gestured sharply with her splinter gun. “Come, I said.”

The Gench made a hissing sound of negation. “I must see your face. Thus am I instructed by those who Become. Much trickery is afoot. We must know that you are the same woman whose soul we touched before.”

She took a step backward, then another. “You may not touch me again. Trickery is afoot.” She paused for a moment. “But I will show you my face.”

Slowly she unlatched her helmet and then pulled it off, cradling it in the crook of her elbow. She shook back her black hair. The splinter gun was for a moment directed elsewhere.

Ruiz felt a tiny cold sting as the tendril withdrew from his brain. Just before it broke free, he heard a voice speak with the power of a god. “Slay,” it said, and the order boomed along his nerves and muscles.

At the same instant, the Machine shrieked, a high grinding sound of despair.

Corean’s eyes grew wide as Ruiz launched himself toward her. He moved in a red merciless dream, his self still hidden away somewhere far from harm.

He came to himself, kneeling there in the Machine’s throne room, his gauntlet twisted in Corean’s silky hair, his knee against her back, forcing her down. Her arms beat against the floor as she tried to throw him off, and her sonic knife flared and buzzed, trying to reach him. In his hand he held a splinter gun, and it descended, as if it had a will of its own, to press against the back of her skull. But for some reason he could not pull the trigger.

He could hear the thin screams of Nisa’s clone, like whispering terror in his ear. He wondered distantly what could be frightening her so, and he glanced up.

The Moc was driving toward him, dragging its injured leg, only slightly hampered by the damage.

Time slowed.

Ruiz opened his mouth to scream, though at the same instant he knew the Moc would kill him before he could make a sound.

A blur slid into his field of vision and passed across the Moc. The great insect pivoted violently, as the blur chopped through its good leg. With a whistling shriek the Moc fell on the blur, which slowed and revealed itself to be an armored man.

There was a flurry of struggle, and then the thumping report of a ruptor. The Moc heaved and broke apart at its segmented waist. The pieces flailed aimlessly for a moment, and then the Moc’s torso finished ripping the arms off the armored man. The arms came away with a dreadful tearing pop, and there was suddenly a lot of blood on the floor.

This instantaneous sequence of events seemed to take a very long time, but finally Ruiz began to react.

His finger jerked against the splinter gun’s trigger, but his hand twitched the muzzle aside, so that the spinning wires bounced off the floor in a flare of pink sparks. Corean screamed and convulsed. She almost bucked Ruiz off, but he struck down with the barrel of the gun, hitting her behind her ear, and she went limp. He ripped her ruptor loose, flung it across the floor, and leaped up.

By the time he reached the remnants of the Moc, it was trying to pull Junior’s legs off, but its strength was failing and all it could do was twist at the joints. It had succeeded in turning one leg backward, but at Ruiz’s approach its torso turned the clone loose and scrabbled around to face him. It started to crawl forward, but Ruiz fired the splinter gun, holding down the trigger, so that destruction sleeted through the insectoid.

The wires chewed the Moc’s head off and blew the carcass across the floor, to fetch up against the wall with a crunch.

The legs continued to wave feebly, but the creature was no longer a threat.

Ruiz knelt by Junior’s torn corpse, careful not to slip in the blood. He unlatched the helmet gently, though he was sure that Junior was far beyond pain. He was therefore shocked, when he exposed the white face, to see life still in the opaque black eyes, and a small smile on the blue-lipped mouth.

He jerked a medical limpet from his rack and started to activate it.

“Don’t be a moron, Ruiz Aw,” said his clone. “Even if you could keep me alive for a while, how would I climb out of here with no arms?” The clone tried to laugh, but the attempt came out a wheezy gasping sound.

Ruiz shook his head, denying the obvious truth of this.

“Just listen to me for a bit,” said the clone, his chest heaving, his breath rasping.

It was the sound of a dying body, a sound Ruiz had heard a thousand times before. He wondered, his thoughts moving slowly and painfully, why it was affecting him so, now. Then he remembered: This dying body is mine… and I’m full of mindfire. “Sure,” he said, his useless hands knotted together. He refused to imagine what it must be like for his clone, the pain heightened and focused by the mindfire.

The clone’s back arched, and he made a sound halfway between a sigh and a moan. “No, no, wait, wait a minute,” he said.

He fixed pleading eyes on Ruiz. “Listen to me,” he said. “You’ve sinned, you’ve been a great monster in your life, but you’ve died for your sins. See? See how it is? Like Nisa did, remember? You’re clean now. Now.”

Fluid bubbled in the clone’s throat. “Now you’re clean,” said the clone in a gentle reflective voice. “And you can… you can…” Then he died.

The only sound Ruiz heard was the low sobbing sounds that Nisa’s clone was making, a sorrowful music coming down the link.

He looked down at his dead self for a time, wondering. Why had Junior come back? Surely he must have understood the probabilities of the situation — that at best he would be saving his rival for Nisa’s love, that at worst he would find an ugly death. Why?

After a while an explanation came to him. Junior had been duplicated in the uncomfortable cusp of Ruiz Aw’s changed life, halfway between the cynical machine he had been for so long and the human being he was still becoming. His clone must have acted with only the dimmest understanding of the motives that now drove Ruiz Aw. But he had acted, and in an honorable and decent way. Ruiz felt a kind of twisted crippled pride… and a great sorrowing anger.

He got up and went back to Corean. He pulled a heat-sealer from his waist rack and temporarily melted the wrists of her armor together behind her back, just in case she was feigning unconsciousness.

He raised his eyes to the Orpheus Machine.