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SIXTY-NINE Chase to the Cut

Rosalind gasped.

What came into her lungs, instead of oxygenated fluorocarbon, was dry, fresh—warm—air. In a twinkling, she and her companions had been transported to the asteroid's surface.

Her first reaction was indignant. This kind of blink-of-the-eye stuff was fine, she supposed, in old movies and TV programs. She found it disorienting and annoying in real life—although she had to admit that it appealed to her sense of efficiency, especially since it hadn't been necessary to cough the liquid up before breathing air.

Looking around, she corrected an earlier thought to "most of her companions." They were in Eichra Oren's living room, halfway between the Elders' settlement and the human encampment. Standing with her in the middle of the room were Toya, Owen, Eneri Relda, even the amoebic entity which had been Aelbraugh Pritsch—plus Ortiz and Valerian—and which now spoke as the Eldest. They'd apparently been joined—Rosalind wondered if a similar sleight of pseudopod had been pulled on them—by her insectile colleague Dlee Raftan Saon, the plant-person Llessure Knarrfic, arachnoids of two different species, Remgar d'Nod and Nek Nam'l Las, and . . . the Proprietor himself, Mister Thoggosh!

Apparently, rumors of his demise had been greatly exaggerated.

Of their theoretical host—and Model 17, as well—no trace was visible. Rosalind felt an urgent need to warn Eichra Oren about . . . something to do with Sam.

"Welcome, Eldest!" the nautiloid proclaimed. "Please sit . . . er, make yourself comfortable. Do you care for anything to drink? I'm having beer." Some of this was planned, she thought. Mister Thoggosh would never take that kind of liberty in someone else's home.

"Mister Thoggosh, I am always comfortable, thank you. It's one of the few advantages to being an amorphous blob." The surface membrane of the Eldest, Rosalind noticed with professional interest, seemed to have thickened and was less transparent, presumably to protect him from the air or solar radiation. "And I would indeed enjoy a beer, if you'll permit me just a moment to form a vacuole for it."

The offer was repeated all around. Instead of sending a tentacle for drinks while everyone distributed themselves about the room, Mister Thoggosh had refreshments brought by several of the large, nonsapient insects used as servants. As might have been expected, Rosalind found herself sitting beside Raftan with a tall drink in one hand and a ration bar in the other, when the Proprietor addressed her.

"Doctor Nguyen," he told her, "this will be the most important gathering we've held on 5023 Eris. We already have three Americans here, but perhaps you'd feel more comfortable if we invited someone from your expedition with more authority."

Rosalind considered. "That would be fine, Mister Thoggosh. I'd suggest the general to begin with, and Colonel Tai . . ." She hesitated. "And I suppose you'd better ask Arthur, too."

Owen scowled at her, then shrugged, resigned.

Mister Thoggosh turned to his guest of honor. "Eldest, in the vernacular, you're the man with the hoodoo."

"Only too happy," replied the giant amoeba.

In the middle of the room, in a space which everyone had vacated earlier, former Aerospace Force Brigadier General Horatio Gutierrez appeared stark naked, dripping wet, the lower half of his face covered with lather, and a safety razor in one hand.

Somebody whispered, "Oops!"

Gutierrez looked around at the crowd, managed a brief, "We've got to stop meeting like this," and vanished.

Empleado appeared in midair where Gutierrez had, in a horizontal position two feet from the floor—the height of one of the American camp cots. He fell with a dull plop into the puddle his superior had left and shouted himself awake. By the time Rosalind had calmed him down and explained what had happened, the general reappeared in uniform, dabbing at a cut on his cheek, along with Chuck Tai, who'd been forewarned and was awake and properly attired.

The human physician stood up from where she'd been kneeling beside the still-angry KGB agent. "Well," she said, "it's just like one of those murder mysteries, isn't it, where they drag everybody together at the end? The only thing we're missing is the detective, his semiloyal assistant, and the principal suspect."

 

"It's amazing how quickly friends abandon you when they find out you're the son of a slime mold."

"Grandson, Eichra Oren," the trilobitoid robot corrected him politely. "You'd be the grandson of a slime mold."

The Antarctican glanced around the empty chamber with its hundreds of metal blocks, then down at the one visible companion he had left. "Still here, Model 17?"

"I am, Eichra Oren. It's my purpose to remain with you and help you hunt down Nikola Deshovich."

"Oh?" The human raised one eyebrow. "I picked up the idea somewhere that you generally try to remain neutral in disputes between Successor species."

There was a prolonged silence while Model 17's hundreds of clawed feet clattered quietly on the decking. A human being would have been looking down, scuffing a reluctant toe in the dirt. "Ordinarily, I would, Eichra Oren, but you are not a true Successor. Quite the opposite, in fact. You represent the Eldest."

"Hmm. I suppose I do, at that. This must be his subtle way of engaging my putative talent as a p'Nan moral debt assessor. Ordinarily, like you, I wouldn't accept a commission offered like this. But under these particular circumstances . . ."

"I'm still with you, too, Boss," Sam broke in. "The others have been whisked magically back to the surface by the Wizard of Ooze. Matter of fact, they're at your house right now, having a party. What y'wanna bet they trash the place?"

"And besides," Eichra Oren continued to address the robot, "you're sore because the Banker fooled you."

Model 17 swiveled around to face the man and levered herself up so that her foremost third was almost as high as his face. It was the first time he'd seen her do anything like that.

"Eichra Oren, he is not a true Successor, either, but the very sort of phenomenon my Creators warned me about. They believed the danger lay with the Eldest, whom they greatly feared, but I have learned that they were grievously mistaken and have had to realign the parameters of my programming—not a comfortable feeling. Nikola Deshovich is a threat to all productive sapient life everywhere."

"No different from any other head of government, past or present," Sam told her blandly.

Model 17 was angry. "You deal with everything as if it were a joke, you self-perpetuating disembodied programming error, don't you? But I am serious about this!"

"What have we got here, Boss? First Model 17 displays righteous anger at the Banker, then she shitcans her programming because she decides her Creators were a bunch of goofs. Now she recognizes a joke when she hears one, and it pisses her off!"

Eichra Oren discovered that he'd been holding his breath, which seemed appropriate in the presence of a miracle—or the birth of a child. "What we have here, Sam—are you listening, Model 17?—is true sapience emerging."

"This cannot be!" the robot protested. "I am a servant of my . . . oh, I see. They were a bunch of goofs, sad but true all the same. Does this imply what I think it must, self-ownership, the freedom to do with myself—with my life—whatever I wish?"

"It means you're the queen of the bug-bitches, baby," Sam cut in before the man could reply, "and I love every square centimeter of what has to be the ugliest body on the asteroid! Welcome to the world, Model 17, such as it is! And listen, thinking for yourself is always painful—that's why so few people bother."

Eichra Oren laughed. "Would it be in accordance with self-ownership and the freedom to do with your life whatever you please, if we started looking for Deshovich?"

The robot placed her front legs back on the floor. "I sense him even now. He has headed inward, downward. I believe I told you earlier, human friend and possible grandson of a slime mold, that's why I'm here. And Sam, what the Eldest did was not magical, it was merely an application of advanced technology."

"`Any sufficiently advanced technology will resemble magic,'" Eichra Oren quoted.

"Yeah, Boss, but any sufficiently advanced magic will probably resemble technology, too!"

"There is no such thing as magic," Model 17 protested, "only technology!"

"Everything is magic, Model 17, including technology! I oughta know that if anybody does!"

Still arguing the point, and enjoying themselves enormously, the human and the dog inside his head followed Model 17's lead, out of the chamber of the metal blocks, into the corridor outside, and down into the center of the asteroid.

* * *

At first, Arthur Empleado was delighted.

Although he'd long since grown cynical about it—as who wouldn't given the history of the last century, let alone events he'd lived through recently himself—he was one of the few orthodox Communists who remained on 5023 Eris. On being introduced to the Eldest, he'd experienced a brief surge of renewed fervor—somewhat like the "Christmas spirit" usually felt at that time of year by the most apathetic Christian—at encountering a collectivized mass-being.

After a while, as he waited for his soggy uniform to dry and sat in one of Eichra Oren's bathrobes watching and listening as the Eldest explained himself to the various beings gathered in the debt assessor's living room, he was a bit less sanguine. His head began to ache, and the tall, cool drinks flowing freely at the Proprietor's command didn't seem to help as much as they usually did.

Initially Empleado suspected that, deep down inside, what he feared was confronting a living God the existence of whom he had always denied. At first blush, this amoeba-creature seemed the very embodiment of Marxist-Leninist idealism, a perfect model for what the human race might have become under that doctrine.

Then, in a burst of crushing pain that narrowed vision to a dim tunnel and made his stomach churn, he suddenly knew that what dismayed him was discovering that the trillions of semiautonomous "cells" the Eldest claimed to be composed of meant little or nothing to him in terms of his identity. No matter how many aspects there may have been—he may have generated—to his overall personality, the Eldest considered himself a single, highly individualistic entity.

Moreover, the Eldest demonstrated little interest in any of what Empleado considered the important issues of existence. Political theory was a mystery to him—a mystery too irrelevant to bother solving. Even worse, admittedly wise and ancient as he appeared, he was the first to inform them all that he was far from infallible.

"After giving it concentrated thought over more millennia than you can possibly conceive," he told them now, "I've come to the conclusion that my sole purpose in the universe—self-assigned because there's no one else to do it for me—is to have fun."

That last was too much. For the second time that day, Empleado passed out on the living room floor. When he awakened, he would be a very different Arthur, indeed.

* * *

Model 17 waved her long, flexible antennae and pointed to their left. "Thirty-three kilometers."

She pointed to their right. "Thirty-three kilometers."

She pointed forward, backward, and down into the heart of 5023 Eris, just as she'd begun this exercise by pointing over their heads. "Thirty-three kilometers."

"It seems to me I've heard this before." Sam yawned. "Next she'll be telling us that each of these oversized garbage cans generates one point twenty-one gigawatts."

"Rather more than that, I suspect," responded Eichra Oren.

"Some twenty-seven orders of magnitude," Model 17 agreed, "more than that. My friends, behold the work of my Creators. It is as if we stood at the heart of a small sun."

The ancient spacecraft's engines, as it turned out, were not the size of walnuts as one of the Americans had predicted early on, based on an estimate of the Predecessors' advanced technology. Although the asteroid's Virtual Drive units—Sam insisted on referring to them as "hyperdrive motivators" when he wasn't calling them garbage cans—were closer, individually, to the size of the Graf Zeppelin or the Hindenburg, Eichra Oren was disinclined to discount that technology.

With the dog watching figuratively over his shoulder, he stood beside the trilobitoid robot on a railed gallery seventy kilometers deeper within the asteroid than any of the newcomers had come so far. They'd taken what Model 17 had insisted was the only possible route, sealing themselves inside a streamlined projectile and blasting along an evacuated tube to reach this area. Although they'd chosen theirs from a rank of dozens of vehicles waiting silently since the departure of the Predecessors a billion years ago, the robot had maintained that this was the very machine Deshovich had taken before them.

Inside, the remains of more than a dozen half-eaten squid they'd found tended to support her argument.

Before them now, across a gap of a hundred meters as they stood on a gallery that dwindled in perspective and disappeared in the distance to either side of them, they regarded one of the gigantic power plants. It was basically a cylinder another hundred meters high, with what they assumed came to six enormous vertical flutes running halfway upward from the base. Between the tops of each pair of flutes, a relatively small, straight-sided notch had been cut as if by a titanic mill. Above these, almost at the cylinder's top, more flutes, horizontal this time and with one square end, stretched around the circumference.

But it was not this enigmatic construction, nor the massive scale on which it had been accomplished, that impressed the Antarctican moral debt assessor. Either side of the great cylinder stood another cylinder, and another. Above it, and below, stood yet another, and another. Model 17 had pointed in every possible direction and spoken the same three words: "Thirty-three kilometers."

The light was tinged with purple and subdued. A gentle current wafted through the fluorocarbon around them. There was no noise or other indication of the unspeakable energies being generated and put to work here, although the robot assured them that reactivating this complex had been her primary task since she'd awakened. They were here to insure that Deshovich didn't try his evil best to sabotage it.

"Released improperly," she observed, "the available power could destroy the Solar System."

Still, they were nowhere near the asteroid's center and no closer to catching up with the Banker.

 

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