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SIXTY-FOUR: The Wrong Arm of P'Na

The Proprietor gazed across his desk at the massive artificial organism, almost as impressive in appearance as himself, who'd requested an appointment with him.

"I've come to report," declared Model 17, "that we're prepared to test this vessel's drive system."

Being a machine, she'd refused his offer of refreshment, and it had put him off his pace. He would have liked to have a beer himself, but felt it would be ungracious, since he'd insisted that his assistant, Aelbraugh Pritsch, squeeze himself into an environment suit—the bird-being disliked having his feathers wetted by liquid fluorocarbon—and lend his presence to the unusual occasion. Also, he missed his songfish more than he might have guessed.

"We?" he asked.

The robot stirred slightly on her many feet. "Yes, Mister Thoggosh. At your request, I have included personnel from all groups represented here in my maintenance and start-up procedures. They are now sufficiently familiarized with the systems—at an empirical, rather than a theoretical level—to assist me."

Mister Thoggosh lifted a tentacle and idly scratched the area above one eye, a gesture he'd unconsciously picked up from several of the humans he knew. "Remarkable. I don't recall making any such request, although it is an excellent idea."

Aelbraugh Pritsch made throat-clearing noises, similarly acquired. "Er, I made the suggestion, sir, on my own initiative." He turned from Model 17 to his employer, obviously feeling awkward in the suit. "I hope I did right. I believed that such a demonstration of trust would help eliminate friction among us."

"Thank you, Aelbraugh Pritsch." The nautiloid laid a reassuring tentacle on the avian's plastic-clad shoulder. "Who are these representatives, Model 17?"

"Your power systems engineer, Remgar d'Nod. At the suggestion of General Gutierrez, the American spacecraft commander Colonel Juan Sebastiano, And, since there was no individual with the requisite technical background among the PRC Extra-Special Forces, their leader, Colonel Tai. The cybernetic entity referred to as Sam has also been observing and participating in our activities."

The nautiloid chuckled at the picture her words made in his mind. "Quite a motley crew, I daresay. And when do you purpose to begin testing—and what precaution should we take on the surface? Should we scour the settlement, fastening things down?"

"That will not be needful, Mister Thoggosh." There was a hint of impatience in the robot's tone which he could well appreciate. "What your theorists call the Virtual Drive takes no account of inertia—rather it binds everything within its influence into the same inertial reference. Certain inefficiencies exist, but I greatly doubt that you will even be able to feel the Virtual Drive in operation."

"That's a trifle disappointing, Model 17. Call me a romantic if you will, or merely hopelessly nostalgic, but I confess that I had expected us to stretch out and snap away to the Great Beyond, trailing streaks of colored light."

Model 17 turned a few degrees and looked at Aelbraugh Pritsch as if to ask whether the Proprietor were serious. With amusement, Mister Thoggosh watched the bird-being suppress a shrug. "I can arrange that if you wish," the robot replied, "but it will then be necessary to take the precaution you mentioned. As to when: the initial phase will be a short displacement of perhaps ten million kilometers which I'm prepared to initiate immediately upon your command."

The Proprietor was startled. "Oh? Very well, then . . . er, make it so." He'd always wanted to say that.

"Yes, Mister Thoggosh." A heartbeat. "It is done."

"What?" He was startled all over again. Even Aelbraugh Pritsch seemed to shiver at the robot's words.

"It is done," Model 17 repeated, sounding slightly irritated. "We are now ten million kilometers further from the solar primary than we were before you issued the command."

For a long moment, Mister Thoggosh was at a loss for words. Then: "Great Egg, as my loyal and trusty assistant would doubtless say were he not shocked into an entirely uncharacteristic silence. I find that I'm impressed after all, Model 17. How gratifying. How very gratifying. When shall we do it again?"

"In about twenty hours. I will need to take measurements and do some recalibrating. After that, we can go anywhere you care to, Mister Thoggosh, at any time you wish."

Unaware that he did it, the nautiloid muttered to himself, " `Where no mollusc has gone before.' "

"Excuse me, Mister Thoggosh," Aelbraugh Pritsch asked diffidently, "what was that you said?"

"What?" He forced himself back to alertness, momentarily wondering whether such kelp-gathering wasn't a pathological sign of advancing age. "Oh, nothing of significance. Please carry on, then, with your measurements and calibrations, Model 17."

"Yes, Mister Thoggosh." The robot turned like an armored vehicle and started for the door.

He lifted a tentacle. "And Model 17?"

She paused. "Yes, Mister Thoggosh?"

He dropped the tentacle. "Thank you very, very much."

"It was my greatest pleasure, Mister Thoggosh, if I understand the word, and the only justification for my existence." She turned and faded into the hazy distance of the liquid-filled room.

"Mine, too, Model 17," the Proprietor of 5023 Eris muttered to himself, "mine too."

* * *

The forest was as colorful and brilliant as a thousand-ring circus going on in a tent with ten thousand poles, and almost as noisy. Trees, bushes, and flowery undergrowth of every hue imaginable gave food and shelter to screaming scarlet birds and chattering monkeys with painted faces—and backsides—while the littered woodland floor rustled with a small, warm, gray- and brown-furred life of its own.

Eichra Oren neither saw nor heard the performance going on all around him. Exercising an almost inhuman capacity for concentration, he shuffled slowly through the forest litter, half bent over, intent on discovering a tell-tale broken twig, a torn leaf, an upturned stone, or a patch of toe-scuffed moss. The only things missing were his famous predecessor's brass-bound magnifying glass and deerstalker cap.

Somewhere at the back of his mind, set aside and ignored just like the forest beauty surrounding him, the reason he was here boiled and churned like a sour stomach.

"For a celebrated thinker of elevated thoughts, you're having a hard time with your anger, Boss."

The man straightened abruptly, startled at the voice inside his head although he'd spent most of the day with his semideceased canine partner, searching for traces of the Vietnamese-American doctor and what everyone seemed to be assuming was her unknown abductor.

"Oh. Sam." Now that he allowed himself to notice it, he discovered that his back ached. "I'm afraid you may be right."

The disembodied voice that only Eichra Oren could hear at the moment had an irritable edge of its own. "You know goddamned good and well I'm right! Boss, we've been together for five centuries. I know what you're thinking before it gets processed through your implant. First the lovely Estrellita Reille y Sanchez, whom p'Nan principle—and a need for self-defense—compelled you to kill."

Eichra Oren raised an eyebrow, electronically conveying the unique sensation to Sam. "Whom?"

The dog seemed to ignore him. "And then the not-so-lovely Toya Pulaski, whom you never really cared for in the first place and whom you were ordered to betray in the second. And now Rosalind Nguyen, as lovely on the inside as the outside—the foregoing was an unsolicited testimonial—this time, gone before you two even had a chance to—" 

"Sam!" For once it was Eichra Oren, rather than one of his KGB-fearing American friends, who glanced around nervously to see if anyone was listening. Recalling suddenly that Sam's words would have been completely inaudible, even to someone standing right beside him, only made him angrier. When he realized how irrational a reaction that was, he took several deep, cleansing breaths and attempted to calm himself. "Sam, you're the only one I'd ever permit to say things like that to me."

"Like the plain truth? Gee, Boss, that kinda gets me right . . . right . . . now where did I put that pesky organ?"

"Asshole. I only meant that I trust you. Just don't wear the privilege out, all right?"

"Feeling a bit touchy, are we? And on top of that, we get a dead body planted in our front yard, and El Mollusco Supremo gets slipped the ultimate Mickey, and me—"

The man made a snorting noise. "And you, as usual, go all the way and get yourself murdered!"

"Oh well, who was it who said `anything worth doing is worth overdoing'?"

Eichra Oren made a face. "Charles Manson."

"Well the experience is worth it, Boss. Basically, I'm a self-modifying program. I can go anywhere, do anything, even be in two places at once. And you wouldn't believe the colors! We'd be rich if I could bottle what I'm seeing and drop it on sugar cubes—as long as I get a chance to help you hunt down the moron who committed possibly the most imperfect murder in the history of crime!"

The man laughed. "Not that we aren't entitled to an occasional nervous breakdown, but I suspect both of us are letting our emotions get in the way of our work. For instance, I shouldn't have accepted the assumption, right from the beginning, that Rosalind has been kidnaped. It's just that knowing her as I do—"

"It's the likeliest possibility? Me, too, Boss. Rosalind is all right. Practical and intelligent. And she smells good. I can't see her stumbling into a gopher hole and breaking a leg—"

"Or running off somewhere to `find herself'?"

"Or taking it on the lam after bludgeoning poor old S*bb*ts*rrh into anchovy paste."

"Lobster bisque," the man corrected. "Then again it's possible that to someone with a little more detachment, the other matters you mentioned—S*bb*ts*rrh and Mister Thoggosh—should be assigned a higher priority than we've given them."

"Especially our esteemed employer? Don't listen to the Americans, Boss. A century of state capitalism has left them soft in the gray matter. The trouble with making the right moves and climbing the corporate ladder is that it doesn't go anywhere you want to go, and you're unfit for anything but cutting out paper dolls by the time you get to the top. What the hell, we've done what we've done."

"I agree." The p'Nan assessor bent over and began his slow, searching shuffle across the leaf-littered clearing floor again. To his urbanized eye, completely unpracticed at detecting in the out of doors, it looked as though no one had been here since the beginning of time. "And I refuse to make excuses, even to myself."

Sam simulated a rude noise. "Hooray for us and three cheers for our personal integrity. I hope you've been keeping up the premiums on our unemployment insurance. Not that we've accomplished much of anything with our day's inattention to duty."

"How could we, Sam?" He stood up again and waved a frustrated arm around, indicating the ground he'd just covered a square centimeter at a time. "I've known all along exactly where Rosalind was supposed to be at the time she vanished, because I asked her myself to meet me at the house after our meeting with Mister Thoggosh. That was before we heard about the shuttlecraft fire, of course."

"—I understand, Boss. At least we're not a total loss as detectives. We managed to find out that she was seen entering these woods by several human witnesses."

The human camp had been the first place they'd searched, aided by thirty-odd Soviet Americans shaken by the destruction of their only way home, and as worried about their doctor as the Antarctican and what somebody had called his "virtual dog." It had taken all of the moral debt assessor's persuasive power to keep the whole mob from similarly "helping" him to comb the woods, at the risk of destroying fragile physical evidence that might lead them to her.

Eichra Oren added, "And by our friend Scutigera—"

"Ha! That wily old crustacean—"

"He's not a crustacean, Sam, but a giant centipede and you know it. You only call him that to annoy him, and he's not here now, so lay off. He says he saw her halfway between the house and the camp. She'd have missed me at the house—we'd responded to the emergency by then—but Rosalind is hardly the type to flounce off over something like that, and we'd have gotten together eventually."

"Sounds like the story of your life. What beats me is that there's no sign she ever made it to the house."

"Right." Eichra Oren looked at the ground around him in disgust and frustration. It may have been thickly littered with dead leaves, broken twigs, seed cases, and all sorts of bugs, but it was barren of information to his untrained eye. "I even sent a message home from Mister Thoggosh's office, telling her about the fire. She would have headed straight for Raftan's infirmary when she let herself in and read it. But according to him, and to the terminal I had installed for the benefit of those without implants, she never received it."

"Lift that hand again, Boss, will you? That's what I thought—it's shaking. Is that worry about Rosalind or simple fatigue? Have you eaten anything today?"

The man grinned. "A little of both, probably. Sam, you sound like my mother—which is something of a coincidence. I had an odd hallucinatory experience myself, if you could call it that, earlier, while you were off tormenting Scutigera."

"Crustaceans don't torment, Boss, they can take care of themselves. What kind of odd experience?"

"If you tell anybody about this . . . I thought I saw my mother. Strike that, Sam, I did see my mother, although whether she was really there is another question. I was pushing through a thicket. When I got to the other side, there she was in one of her billowy party gowns, about forty meters away, across a clearing."

Sam was silent for several seconds. "I think you need a good meal and a lot of sleep."

Sensing his friend's concern, Eichra Oren nodded. "That's exactly what I think. I also think I've been cracking up ever since we came to this blasted asteroid."

"You've said that before, Boss. I don't believe it."

"Then account for what I saw, Sam. I didn't just get a vague glimpse of her. She turned and looked at me and winked—my mother! Then she slipped between some bushes and there wasn't any more trace of her afterward than we've found of Rosalind."

"Hmm. You don't suppose it could be some kind of feedback from what I'm going through, could it?"

The man lifted both eyebrows this time. "I hadn't thought of that. She surely didn't come here the way we did, through Mister Thoggosh's dimensional translator."

"That we'd know about. On this little world, it's the light show to end all light shows. I can still see and hear the tropical storm we caused arriving here."

"So can I. I like your feedback theory. Let's consult one of the implant network technicians about it."

"In our copious free time. Meanwhile, I see that our trusty scouts have come back empty-handed."

Together, through Eichra Oren's eyes, they watched a pair of armed men trudging toward them, looking every bit as worn out as the debt assessor felt himself. One was relatively short and broad, the other tall and black. Each carried an ASSR-issue Mini-30 semiautomatic rifle chambered for the obsolete 7.62x39mm cartridge, and some sort of pistol on his belt. When they'd come close enough for the gesture to be seen, the short, broad one, Major Jesus Ortiz, shook his head. He and the implant network's newest reporter, C. C. Jones, had taken up hunting several times a week, to feed the American expedition.

Eichra Oren shrugged back at Ortiz. Within minutes they were joined by the soil geologist, Captain Hector Guillermo, and Major Federico Ortega y Pena, the expedition's botanist. They, too, were familiar with the territory, and had been searching from the opposite side, with no more apparent success than Ortiz and Jones.

"So here we are," Sam observed. "From the place Rosalind was seen by Scutigera, to the place she was supposed to have been, not a single clue, not even to the woods-wise senses of Davy Boone and Daniel Crockett over yonder. Which leaves only three alternative possibilities, each of them more depressing than the other two."

"Thousands of offices, residences, businesses, warehouses, and other structures in the Elders' settlement," Eichra Oren agreed. "Or thousands of kilometers of endless, twisting corridor, down below, constructed by the Predecessors."

"Or the rest of this stupid asteroid's surface," Sam finished the list, "a geographical area equal, I've been told by those who know, to the American state of Soviet Texas."

"Yippee-ki-yo, motherfucker!" the man quoted with uncharacteristic sarcasm. His knees had begun to shake like his hands.

"I admire the way you always know the right thing to say, Boss," Sam replied. "For what it's worth, my money's on the interior—the deeper the better."

"You don't have any money, Sam."

"I've been meaning to discuss that with you." Eichra Oren could feel Sam shrug. "I don't have anything right now, except myself, but do you hear me complaining?"

Bone weary with this futile searching, the debt assessor sighed. "Do nautiloids squirt luminous ink?"

 

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