The Orpheus Machine

Chapter 24

A VERY strange sound came from the Machine’s hiding place, a sound so strange that Ruiz at first could not identify it.

Then he understood that it was laughing, nervously and from a multitude of throats.

“Come out,” Ruiz said. “Now!”

The laughter slid seamlessly into an eerie moan, but the armored door opened and the Machine came forth, edging into the light unsteadily.

Were it not so monstrous a thing, Ruiz might have been moved to pity. Its health had deteriorated; it was not the sleek horror it had once been. Wrinkled flesh sagged from its bones, and here and there meat had sloughed away from its metal chassis. Among the hundreds of feet that moved it, many were hanging dead and half-decayed, nothing but dragging bones and scraps of sinew. Even the metal was corroded, and only a few of the Gencha segments still showed active sensory tufts.

“What may I do for you, new master?” it asked in a voice that broke and bubbled.

A rustle behind him made Ruiz whirl — but it was only the Gench. Evidently the creature had survived the Moc’s return, a fact which pleased Ruiz a little.

“Do not trust your eyes, Ruiz Aw,” the Gench said. “The Machine is old, but still strong. Here in its lair, we cannot entirely suppress its power to project a semblance.”

Ruiz shook his head. “What do you see?” he asked Nisa’s clone.

“A hideous thing. I cannot begin to describe it… but it does not seem weak to me.”

“Thank you.” He stepped forward and slapped the first mine against the thing’s chassis, triggered its lock-on barbs. They punched into the metal with a pneumatic clang, releasing a puff of vapor. The Machine screamed, a terrible many-voiced harmony.

Ruiz took out the next mine. “Don’t move,” he ordered.

“Oh, please, master,” sobbed the Machine. “Don’t do this foolish thing.” Its tongue came out, and the hands patted entreatingly at Ruiz, leaving trails of slime on his armor.

“Please please,” it said. “Don’t take my poor miserable life, such as it is. I’m only a tool, like a gun or a mech; I can only do what I’m told. Monsters have ordered me to do monstrous work. Is that my fault? No! No!”

Ruiz fixed another mine to the Machine. The mindfire seemed to have thickened inside his skull, so that everything was too bright, too loud, too painful. “Is the mine attached to metal?” he asked Nisa’s clone.

“Yes,” she answered. “But the metal bleeds red. Does that matter?”

“No,” said Ruiz.

“Oh please,” said the Machine. “You’re no monster; you could make a new universe with my help. Think! Think, please. What do you hate most? I see it written in your soul — you hate slavery. A monstrous institution, no question. I understand these things. Who is more enslaved than I?”

Ruiz felt a dizzy uncertainty, but he went on to another patch of bare alloy and set another mine. “You’re wrong,” he said through clenched teeth. “I’m as monstrous a person as you’re ever likely to meet.”

The Machine made a high squeal of terror. “Oh, stop,” it implored. “No no no. You’re missing the great opportunity of your life, throwing it away like so much garbage. You hate the Art League? Their commerce in humanity? We could crush it, set a thousand worlds free. Think!”

Ruiz raised his last mine, then lowered it. “It’s too late, anyway,” he said, thinking of the soldiers who fought far above.

“No, no. Not at all.” The Machine’s voice strengthened, became sure and sweet, swelled with confidence. “You’re too tired to think straight; that’s why you’re trying to destroy humanity’s best chance for happiness. Listen to me: I’m your hostage against those who will come; you’ve secured me against all your enemies. You’ll have your finger on the trigger, you’ll demand men to defend us, in exchange for my services. Whoever comes will be afraid to risk destroying me — they’ll give us men. We’ll make them safe forever; they’ll be the beginning of our army. And you’re clever, much brighter than the slaver Corean was. Such an idiot she was. Soon you’ll best your enemies and we can get on with making the universe free.”

“Roderigo first,” said Ruiz slowly, staring at the last mine, but not seeing it. Instead he saw worlds throwing off their ancient chains, rising into the sunlight of a new age. The mindfire consumed him, and lovely visions filled his universe: the laughter of freed slaves, the smiles of children, humanity sailing the void between the stars, safe and certain. He saw the wounds of humanity heal, the lifeblood no longer draining from humanity’s heart.

He saw Gejas the Tongue, begging for mercy, begging to keep his soul, and he saw Ruiz Aw laughing and tearing it from his enemy. He closed his eyes, so as to see this prophecy more clearly.

He felt bright laughter well up in his chest. “Beautiful,” he said.

“Yes!” sang the Orpheus Machine. “And look! See who has come?”

Ruiz turned to the arch. His heart thumped. Nisa stood there, looking lost. He remembered that he still wore his helmet; naturally she did not recognize him.

He reached up to unlatch the helmet. But a small voice spoke against the roaring joy that filled him.

He didn’t want to listen, but the voice, though small and sorrowing, was insistent. “Ruiz?” it said. “Ruiz? What are you looking at? I don’t see anything there. Ruiz?”

The joy turned cold and heavy within him, and Nisa’s ghost wavered into a warm shimmer… and then was gone.

“You’ve gone much too far, Machine,” Ruiz said grimly, and set his last mine.

The Orpheus Machine made a panicky gobbling sound, then broke into an unintelligible babble. The babble resolved gradually into desperate words. “An honest misstep. I was just trying to show you how we could bemuse your enemies, when they come. And what about freedom? Can you turn your back on the universe?”

“I think I must,” said Ruiz.

“No! No, you can’t!”

Ruiz stepped back from the Machine’s despairing face and tuned the mines to the transmitter on his forearm, so that he could detonate them remotely. “I cannot be the Emperor of Everything,” he said, regret filling his heart. “I’m much too much less than a god.”

The Gench still waited patiently by the far arch. Ruiz beckoned, and it came slowly forward. “A favor; will you do me one?” he asked.

“If I can.”

“You can.” Ruiz went to Corean, who still seemed unconscious. He stripped off a gauntlet and put his hand to the pulse in her neck. It was slow and strong. He put the gauntlet back on, got a grip on the neck flange of her armor.

The Gench stood beside the Orpheus Machine, its tentacle already penetrating the Machine, just over its monstrous eye. The Machine was finally silent, great terrible face frozen in abject collapse.

Corean began to wake as Ruiz dragged her the last few meters to the Machine. She tried to struggle, but her welded wrists prevented any effective resistance. She looked up at Ruiz, and then at the Machine. He forced himself to look into her wide unbelieving eyes.

She said nothing, but her face shifted through a spectrum of disbelief, horror, and then silent white-hot rage.

Hardest of all for Ruiz to watch was her expression at the last, just before the Gench’s tentacle slid into her brain. Between one heartbeat and the next, all her rage melted away, and most of her years, so that she looked very young. All her beauty came back to her, heightened unbearably by the mindfire.

She smiled, and it was clearly a smile of relief. She closed her eyes and her lips grew soft, as if for a kiss.

He turned away, sick.

Gejas still held back the tide that rose outside Yubere’s fortress. He had returned to the destroyer, where he was strongest, even though the destroyer’s commander and a large portion of its crew had been killed in repelling a squad of Obelisk berserkers. The only thing that still kept the pirates out was the bitterness of the fighting between the various surviving factions. But during the last half hour the pirates had withdrawn, and Gejas worried that they were forming alliances against him.

The Roderigan reinforcements were approaching the city; that was the only bright spot in the picture. They would have already arrived, were it not for the Shard strictures against warships maneuvering in large groups.

In the lulls, Gejas spent most of his time by the screens, waiting for Ruiz Aw’s next broadcast.

Corean waited for him by the arch with the young Gench. Her face was mild and docile — though to Ruiz, still dazzled by the mindfire, she looked like a breathing corpse. She held her splinter gun carefully, and it took all of Ruiz’s resolve to turn his back on her.

He spoke to Nisa’s clone, slowly and carefully, so that she and the Deepheart techs would understand exactly what he required of them. “I’m going now, but I’ll leave the camera. When I’m safely away, I’ll blow the mines, so you can record the Machine’s destruction. But I don’t want you to broadcast the event for an hour… or until soldiers reach the bottom of the pit. The Gench will tell you if that happens. I’m hoping a delay will give us time to get away from the stack unnoticed. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she said, in a low shaky voice.

Ruiz remembered that this voice was Nisa’s, whom he loved. He wanted to say something to ease her heart, but he seemed to have forgotten all the soft words he wanted to use. “Well,” he said finally. “You’re dear to me, now more than ever.”

“And you to me,” answered the clone, her voice breaking a little. She paused for a long moment. “I hope you find her. I hope you take her to a place where you can love each other well.”

“Thank you,” Ruiz said, inadequately. And finally: “Good-bye.”

He took off his helmet and wedged it into a wall niche, where it could transmit a view of the Orpheus Machine’s last moments — but at a vantage point from which his clone’s torn body was not visible. He spoke a few words into the camera, then latched down the helmet he had taken from Junior’s armor.

He gestured to Corean, who nodded and began to lead the way out of the maze.

As Ruiz passed the Gench, he looked at that alien creature and felt a cold gratitude. He glanced back at the Machine, and saw that it was touching the mines with its tongue, picking aimlessly and harmlessly at them, its voices merged into a low wordless drone.

At the far edge of the maze, he detonated the charges and felt the percussive thump of the explosion. The mindfire burned so bright for an instant that he was blinded and deafened. Then it faded, giving him back his senses.

Perhaps it was only the mindfire, but he felt a great and fatal emptiness beginning to spread through the enclave.

“Let’s go,” he said to Corean, his new machine.

Corean led him swiftly and silently back through the tunnels, and Ruiz was uninclined to speak to her, for fear that he would be even more horrified by the sensible but dreadful thing he had done. They met no living creature.

They passed the place where Junior had recaptured the Pharaohans, and Corean barely glanced aside at the corpses of her men.

Ruiz paused for a moment by the ugly remains of Molnekh, once a conjuror of the first rank on Pharaoh, but at the last only an organic machine belonging to a slaver. Ruiz wished the skinny mage had lived. Ruiz would have inherited Corean’s property, and he would have tried the experiment suggested by Gunderd the Scholar… and ordered Molnekh to act as he might have acted on his own. To become himself, again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. After a moment he went on.

When they reached the site of the battle between Junior and the servitors, Ruiz called a halt amid the pitiful bodies of the servitors.

They would shortly emerge into the central shaft of the stack, and if he was very lucky, he would find Nisa and the others waiting on the tram, guarded by the remnant of Corean’s Deltan slayers. Presumably Junior had promised to take them to the sub in exchange for their assistance and loyalty.

He tried to weigh the situation, to follow where the tangled threads of betrayal led, to see where his best advantage lay.

He discarded an impulse to simply rely on the integrity of the Deltans and proceed with Junior’s bargain. He laughed at himself for even thinking such a foolish thing. No, now was not a moment for trust.

“All right,” he said to Corean. “This is what we’ll do.”

When Nisa first caught sight of Ruiz Aw, she felt an incredulous joy. She had never expected to see him again — she had been certain, somehow, that he was going to his death. His leave-taking had been so formal, so final.

When she saw who walked behind him, prodding him along with her gun, her joy turned sour, though it didn’t entirely dissipate. At least he was alive.

But then she reconsidered. Perhaps Corean had taken his soul, as she had always meant to. No, Nisa decided, that was unlikely. Else why would the slaver be guarding him? And why would she have secured Ruiz’s arms behind him, bent back at an uncomfortable angle?

The higher-ranking of the two armored soldiers stood. His tentative posture betrayed surprise. “Corean Heiclaro?” he asked tentatively, when Ruiz and Corean had reached the halfway point of the sump’s causeway.

“Hello, Kroone,” she answered. “I’m surprised to find you here, when I ordered you to stay in the enclave.”

Kroone half-raised his weapon, then apparently thought better of his impulse. “An opportunity presented itself — the man you hold claims to know a way out. We intended to gain his confidence, disarm him, and wait for you.”

“A good plan,” Corean said dryly as she approached the tram. Nisa noticed that she prudently kept Ruiz between herself and the soldiers — apparently she was untrusting.

Kroone, shifting from foot to foot, looked as though he wanted to find some cover, too, but the tram offered nothing substantial. “Ah… what about the explosive in his helmet? What about the dead-man switch?”

“A bluff. He is clever.” Corean’s voice was weary, passionless. Nisa began to think that there was something wrong with the slaver.

Apparently Kroone reached the same conclusion, because in the next instant he snapped up his weapon and ignited a bright sparkling line of destruction. Nisa happened to be glancing toward him when he fired, and almost simultaneously Kroone flew backward as if struck by a fist. He smashed into the wall behind the tram and fell facedown, motionless.

The remaining soldier died just as swiftly.

Nisa was afraid to look at Ruiz, afraid that she would see him destroyed as thoroughly as the two soldiers had been. But when she finally turned back, he was rising from the ground, holding a huge weapon, which he had apparently concealed behind his back.

Corean holstered her weapon, from which vapor swirled, and then took off her helmet. Nisa saw the dead-ness in her face.

Ruiz came toward her slowly, as if he could not believe in Nisa’s reality. “Are you really there?” he asked, voice muffled by his helmet and some wary potent emotion. But still… his voice.

“Yes,” she said.

“Thank you,” he said. He leaped aboard the tram and gestured at the slaver, a peremptory motion to which Corean instantly responded, boarding the tram and taking the other seat. Ruiz threw the lever and the tram gathered speed, sliding up the rail toward the darkness above.

Not until they were all aboard the submarine, casting off from the air lock, did he finally remove his helmet. He was different again, she thought. His eyes were terribly weary, but somehow soft. His face seemed both older and more innocent.

“Hello,” he whispered. “We must be very quiet.” He pointed to the surface.

“Hello,” she said. Her own eyes filled, so that his face was only a dark shimmer in the sub’s red light. She smiled at him and touched his stubbled face. The smile spread from her mouth to her heart.