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SIXTY-SIX Squid Pro Quo

Rosalind never got to see whatever it was the evil and demented Nikola Deshovich intended doing to her.

Not that time, at least.

In the first place, she'd passed out, something she'd have sworn, as a medical practitioner and a strong-willed modern woman, she'd be incapable of. True, she argued with herself inside a darkness having little to do with the absence of light, she'd gone at least two or three days without eating. She'd also just been kidnaped by the horrifying wreckage of what had been a pretty horrifying man to begin with. She'd spent uncounted hours tied hand and foot, breathing badly oxygenated liquid fluorocarbon of dubious purity at paralyzingly cold temperatures. She'd even had to listen while Deshovich gloated over the vile trick he'd played on poor Sam's grieving friends, not to mention the callous, despicably underhanded murder of a very wise and ancient being she'd come to respect and admire.

Finally, forced to witness the Banker's disgusting eating habits—and threatened with his other habits of a different nature—she'd thrown up. Still, she argued disappointedly, she'd always believed she had a lot more character than to swoon away like a silly little schoolgirl in a novel two centuries out of style.

Somehow it all proved something, but she wasn't certain what.

She never knew how much time she spent in this half-contemplative, half-unconscious state. The next thing she was aware of, she heard somebody else arguing—no, more like two somebody elses, which made more sense than the argument she'd been having—outside. With a little effort, she discovered that she had a vague memory of Deshovich—what was left of the son of a bitch, on the half shell—interrupted in mid-villainy, hurrying from the room where he was keeping her a prisoner, alarmed and angry because someone or something in an adjoining corridor had tripped his perimeter warning devices.

How Deshovich had left the room was another question. Four meters on a side, the dimly lit chamber she lay in, tied and naked, consisted of six featureless walls—two of which she arbitrarily decided were the floor and ceiling—so bare she might as well have been inside a solid metal cube that had somehow been turned inside out.

Even so, she wasn't alone. The place swarmed with hundreds of the little squid the Banker had been eating alive. Seeing them now made her shudder; she'd never feel the same about calamari again. They reminded her of the big brown moths her family had called "millers"—because they were dusty like medieval people who ground grain, she supposed—only these were larger. And slimy instead of dusty.

Somewhere, as if in the great distance, she could hear Nikola Deshovich thundering away in Russian—she'd never learned it herself, but there wasn't a single American who didn't know what it sounded like—and someone replying less passionately in the same language. Whoever it was, it was a female, probably Model 17.

Rosalind hoped it was. Any trouble that arose between the trilobitoid robot and the Banker, she reasoned, almost certainly had to be good news for Rosalind. Just as the disagreement outside of what she was beginning to think of as her cell seemed to be reaching some kind of crescendo, Model 17 herself crawled through the wall—where there had been no visible seam or opening of any kind—and came to a multilegged rest beside the physician. Since the noisy discussion continued, Rosalind calculated blearily, it had to be somebody else out there with Deshovich.

During the entire time, Rosalind had been lying on her side, weak from hunger, numb with the cold, generally in great discomfort. She spoke to the floor now, without making the impossible effort of turning to look up at Model 17. "Well, are you here to rescue me, or are you just helping the Banker keep me prisoner?"

The trilobitoid robot stirred on her many mechanical legs again and courteously skewed around to face Rosalind. "You are here against your will, Doctor Nguyen?"

With a mental exertion that was painful in itself, Rosalind bit back a sarcastic answer that would have been wasted on the robot and may have been unjustified in any case. "Yes, Model 17, I'm here against my will. My people call it `kidnaping.' "

The unblinking device hesitated in thought. "An odd phenomenon, this individual will, Doctor Nguyen. Inscrutable, if you don't mind my saying so. I've studied it profoundly every nanosecond I could spare and still I fail to understand. Among my creators, you see, no single organism could ever be imprisoned against her will, since, if the community desired her confinement, it would also be her will to go along. Likewise, no one organism would perform this act of . . . kidnaping you speak of, because the community wouldn't countenance it, and therefore neither would any prospective kidnaper. In either event, were you one of my people, you wouldn't be here."

"Is that so?" Rosalind shook her head, which had felt fuzzy to begin with and might never function correctly again after enough conversation with this mechanical entity. "If I were one of your people, Model 17, I wouldn't be here because they're all gone." Straining against her bonds, she tried sitting up and failed. "Just where is `here,' by the way? And who is Deshovich arguing with?"

"To answer your first question, Doctor Nguyen, you have been here before. We are still very near the hull wall—which you interpret as the surface of the asteroid. Our outer location is the chamber in which the physical aspect of the individual called Sam was broken and destroyed just before his essence entered the cyberspatial realm."

Rosalind's head reeled worse than before. "My God, we can't be inside one of those little—"

"Our inner location is a storage facility created by folding space to generate a subcontinuum which—"

"Cut the Captain Video routine," Rosalind's sudden anger broke through her confusion, surprising her, "and give it to me straight, Model 17—those metal cubes that smashed Sam up were only about a meter across. This place is at least four times that size. Exactly what the hell is going on here? Did Deshovich shrink me somehow, or did you do it for him? How can I get back to my normal size?"

"You are your normal size, Doctor Nguyen; so am I. We remain whatever size we would be according to the specific, localized laws of spatial geometry. By the standard of our outer location, we might appear to be about one fourth our previous size, although no way exists for anyone to observe us from there. In any event, it makes no sense to measure anything except with regard to local conditions. You are no smaller, with reference to the laws of this subcontinuum, than you would be outside it, under a more general set of laws."

"Thanks a bunch, Model 17. Now, have you got an aspirin? You're telling me that as big as this asteroid is already, there are a zillion more cubic meters inside it than anybody could tell simply from examining its exterior?"

"I'm afraid I have no definition of `zillion' in my vocabulary, Doctor Nguyen, but there are many cubic kilometers of storage within this facility—and many more such facilities scattered throughout this ship." The robot paused, then spoke again, somewhat diffidently. "Doctor Nguyen, do you truly wish your limbs to remain attached to one another in that manner? I deduce, from what I have learned of human anatomy and physiology, that it might be extremely uncomfortable."

Rosalind's heart leaped. "You're offering to untie me? I accept, Model 17, I accept! Er, just make certain that my limbs remain attached to me, will you?"

"That I will, Doctor." A specialized wire-cutting limb emerged from beneath the robot's arched and armored carapace and made quick work of Rosalind's bonds. Freed, the young woman sat up against a wall, briskly rubbing circulation back into her cold-numbed hands and feet until they began to tingle painfully. As she'd suspected, the wall she leaned against was warmer than the liquid surrounding her.

"Great," she told the robot after a few minutes. Her mind began to turn now to thoughts of escape—and food—but for the time being she kept them to herself. "So here we are, still our normal size, but somehow stuck inside a hollow metal cube only one fourth the size on the outside that it looks on the inside?"

Model 17, a shy entity, had backed off to the opposite wall as soon as she had finished untying Rosalind. "The volume we occupy—I'm not happy with that verb—is solid, Doctor, not hollow. Nor do the dimensions of projected images on a screen have anything to do with the originals on the emulsion. It is equally unimportant what the screen is made of, as long as its surface characteristics lie within the correct range of reflective properties."

The physician thought the words through as carefully as she was capable of at the moment, almost having to tick off the points Model 17 had made on her fingers. "I think I follow you. But where are we, then?" She wrapped her arms around her knees and shivered, wondering what Deshovich had done with her clothing.

"We are precisely where I told you we are, Doctor Nguyen." This was as close as the robot, programmed by her creators to remain polite under any circumstances, ever got to displaying exasperation. "We are in a subcontinuum associated with the unique alternative reality in which the vessel 5023 Eris has its existence."

Rosalind frowned, concentrating hard against the overwhelming pressures of fear, cold, and hunger. At that, she reflected, arguing the whichness of what and unscrewing the inscrutable with a billion-year-old robot was better than cowering alone in terror. "I remember your saying something like that before, Model 17, but it didn't make any sense to me. I'm afraid it still doesn't."

The robot almost sighed. "Then perhaps an analogy will help. It is the same analogy that I have adopted in order to understand the problem of sapient individuality."

Rosalind smiled. "Okay, I'm game."

"I take that to mean you wish me to continue. Very well, consider the mind of an individual sapient. In many ways it operates much like the other minds around it, following the same principles. Yet in matters of detail—which appear to accumulate until they become as important as those operating principles, if not more so—it is extremely different, even from the minds closest to it."

Rosalind nodded. "Okay, Model 17, I understand you perfectly so far. I even agree with you, based on personal and professional experience. But where does it get us?"

"I am coming to that, Doctor Nguyen, if you will kindly exercise whatever faculty you possess for patience. Please accept, for the sake of this discussion, that these minds are somewhat akin to the various worlds of alternate reality—touching at their borders, even communicating with one another with the advent of interdimensional translocation—yet separate, distinct. Often that distinctness is their most sharply defining quality. Do you accept this analogy?"

"Model 17, I can accept anything that will help me understand what the hell is happening to me." Despite her circumstances, Rosalind had to laugh at the idea of being given a lecture on the virtue of patience by a machine. "You're saying alternative universes are like different individual minds. I understand that you don't mean this literally, but simply as an illustration. Please go on."

"Very well, I draw upon what I have learned of your culture over the past several days, much of which remains as incomprehensible to me as this must be to you. Consider a fictional character or location created by an individual mind. If that mind works hard enough, if it dwells upon that character or location with sufficient concentration for a long enough time, does not that character or location begin to assume—if not reality, then an importance to that mind, and perhaps to others, comparable with that of real people and places?"

Rosalind thought about it for a long moment. Mostly she thought about Sherlock Holmes, Lazarus Long, Lord Darcy, Jim Kirk, and Win Bear. Model 17 was right: they were all more real to her, or at least more important, than, say, Abraham Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Bill Clinton, or Tom Sellick. She knew more about them, and cared more about them, too. They were the intimate companions of her childhood and immortal, whereas the others were just dead presidents, in their own way more fictional than her childhood friends.

"All right, Model 17, but I still don't see—"

"Excuse me: in the sense that a fictional person—an artificial mind—may abide within the mind of a real individual, so, given the technology, may an artificial subcontinuum abide within the confines of a natural one. Such a subcontinuum requires an anchor, a point of physical focus in the originating universe, if it is neither to dissipate nor assume the qualities of a genuine universe itself. It is the function of these blocks to provide such a point of focus."

Rosalind's head ached, and her last reserves of energy suddenly seemed to have drained away. "That's interesting, Model 17, and I'd like to know more, right after the lobotomy. But how do we get out of here?" She thought of Eichra Oren. "My friends will be looking for me, sooner or later." Outside, they could hear Deshovich's angry rumbling, counterpointed by a higher voice, and Rosalind realized that the robot had never answered her second question.

"They already are," Model 17 declared. "Please watch the apparent surface of the wall you appear to be facing."

Rosalind shook her head at what all those apparent qualifications seemed to imply (now she was doing it), but turned her attention to the wall as instructed. What she saw was a colorful three-dimensional image of Eichra Oren, Toya Pulaski, and Corporal Owen, coming to her rescue, if Model 17 was to be believed. The trouble was that they were passing through an enormous room which she had never seen before and which had never been described to her by anyone, human or otherwise, who'd explored the asteroid's interior.

To begin with, the vast floor of the stadium-sized chamber was slanted, down and to her friends' left, nor did any of the walls intersect each other or the ceiling—several hundred meters above their heads—at right angles. It was amazing how disorienting a simple thing like that could be. In addition, the room was strung with millions of, for want of a better term, big rubber bands the thickness of her little finger, set parallel to one another no more than a handspan apart. In order to get through them, the three adventurers had to push them apart, step through, push the next set apart and let the first bunch snap back—sometimes with a painful slap at various portions of their anatomy—into place.

What this "facility" was meant for, Rosalind had no idea. It was far from the first time 5023 Eris had handed them such a mystery. Eichra Oren bore the hardship of traversing the room with a grimly set jaw and stoic silence, while Corporal Owen's language grew fouler with every meter. Toya, constitutionally incapable of imitating either of them, alternatively shrieked whenever one of the bands stung her and whimpered quietly to herself, but she kept going, nevertheless.

Abruptly, Rosalind was staring at a blank wall again.

"Your friends," Model 17 told her, "will arrive eventually. They have been delayed so that circumstances may be prepared for them. In the meantime, I am here to assure that no further harm comes to you, since this falls within the category of responsibilities for which I was programmed. I regret that unless it threatens the ship, I cannot take a greater hand than that in what is about to happen."

"You mean you can't get me out of here? What is about to happen, Model 17?" Rosalind sat up. "And who the hell is out there, arguing with the Banker?"

The robot's voice grew more solemn than before, if that was possible. "A conflict is taking shape between two, possibly three groups of Successor species. I was created to serve all Successors alike, and may not take part in conflict between them."

Rosalind nodded. "Which is why none of us saw anything of you during the invasion from Earth. I guess that makes a certain demented sense. But you can prevent the Banker from doing horrible things to me, for which I thank you very much."

"No need to thank, Doctor Nguyen, it is my function. Had I known the Injured One intended to kidnap you, I would have prevented it. As it is, I now believe that he deceived me with regard to his purpose here, and will have to reevaluate everything else he told me."

"And is it also your function to avoid answering the question I've asked you twice already?"

"Who argues with the Injured One? No, Doctor Nguyen. Only . . ." It was the first time she'd heard the robot hesitate. "I'm uncertain I can credit the answer myself. She claims to be the maternal progenitor of Eichra Oren, who is called Eneri Relda."

 

 

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