Aces High by George R. R. Martin
In sudden fury, Hubbard reached out with his mind. He would take command of the android, smash him into the pavement over and over until he was nothing but shattered components.…
His mind touched the android’s cold macroatomic brain. Fire blossomed in Hubbard’s consciousness. He began to scream.
There was something black in the bag lady’s shopping bag. It was growing.
The android dove straight for it. His arms were thrown out wide. If the woman moved her bag at the last minute, things would get very messy.
The blackness grew. The wind was tugging at him, trying to spin him off course, but the android corrected.
As he struck the blackness of the portal, he felt again the obliterating nullity overcome him. But before he lost track of himself, he felt his hands closing on the edges of the shopping bag, clamping on them, not letting go.
For a small fraction of a second he felt satisfaction. Then, as expected, he felt nothing at all.
The Siberian winds had not chilled the warm air over the municipal landfill near St. Petersburg, Florida. The place smelled awful. Modular Man had lost almost four hours this time. His checks showed no internal damage. He was lucky.
He stood amid the reeking garbage and rummaged through the shopping bag. Rags, bits of clothing, bits of food, and then the thing, whatever it was. A black sphere about two kilos in weight, the size of a bowling ball. There were no obvious switches or means of controlling it.
It was warm to the touch. Clasping it to his chest, the android rose into the balmy sky.
“Nice,” Travnicek said. “You did good, toaster. I pat myself on the back for a great job of programming.”
The android brought him a cup of coffee. Travnicek grinned, sipped, and turned to contemplate the alien orb sitting on his workbench. He’d been trying to manipulate it with various kinds of remotes but had been unable to achieve anything.
Travnicek moved toward the workbench and studied the sphere from a respectful distance.
“Perhaps it requires proximity to work it,” the android suggested. “Maybe you should touch it.”
“Maybe you should mind your own fucking business. I’m not getting near that goddamn thing.”
“Yes, sir.” The android was silent for a moment. Travnicek sipped his coffee. Then he shook his head and turned away from the workbench.
“You can fly off to Peru tomorrow to join your Army friends. And make contact with the South American governments while you’re at it. Maybe they’ll pay more than the Pentagon.”
“Yes, sir.”
Travnicek rubbed his hands. “I feel like celebrating, blender. Go to the store and get me a bottle of cold duck and some jelly doughnuts.”
“Yes, sir.” The android, his face expressionless, turned insubstantial and rocketed up through the ceiling.
Travnicek went into the small heated room he slept in, turned on the television, and sat in a worn-out easy chair. Amid last-minute Christmas Eve hype for last-minute shoppers, the tube was featuring a Japanese cartoon about a giant android that fought fire-breathing lizards. Travnicek loved it. He settled back to watch.
When the android returned, he found Travnicek asleep. Reginald Owen was playing Scrooge on the screen. Modular Man put the bag down quietly and withdrew.
Maybe Cyndi was home.
Coleman Hubbard sat in institutional clothing in his ward at Bellevue. Brain-damaged people walked, argued, played cards. A little plastic tree winked at the nurses’ station. Unseen to anyone except Detective John F. X. Black, Amun floated in regal majesty above Hubbard’s head, listening to Hubbard as he spoke.
“One one nought one nought nought nought one one nought one one one…”
“Twenty-four hours,” Black said. “We can’t get anything out of him but this.”
“One nought nought nought one nought…”
The image of Amun seemed to fade for a moment, and Hubbard caught a glimpse of the figure of a thin old man with eyes like broken shadows. Then Amun was back.
I can’t contact him. Not even to cause him pain. It’s as if his mind has been in touch with … some kind of machine. His hands clenched into fists. What happened to him? What did he make contact with out there?
Black raised an eyebrow, TIAMAT?
No. TIAMAT isn’t like that—TIAMAT is more alive than anything you’ll ever know.
“… nought one one nought nought nought one nought…”
When I found him, I saw the bag lady, put her to sleep, and found nothing in her bags. Whatever is was, someone else has it now.
“… one nought nought one nought…”
The ram’s eyes turned to fire, and then his body twisted, becoming a lean greyhound shape with a curved snout and bared fangs, a giant forked tail towering over his back. Fear touched Black’s neck. Amun had become Setekh the destroyer. The astral illusion was terrifyingly real. Black expected to see blood dripping from the animal’s snout, but it wasn’t there. Not yet, anyway.
He used you on an unauthorized mission, Setekh said. As part of a plot that was probably aimed against me. Now, he is a danger to us all. If he snaps out of this, he may say something he shouldn’t.
Destroy him, Master, Black said.
Foam dribbled from the thing’s snout, smoked on the floor. The other patients paid no attention. The great hound hesitated.
If I get into his head I might get … whatever he’s got.
Black shrugged. Want me to handle it?
Yes. I think that would be best.
I already planted the will in his apartment. The one that leaves everything to our organization.
The beast’s tongue lolled. The look in its eyes softened. You’re thinking ahead. I like that. Maybe we can work you a promotion.
Millions of miles from Earth, almost eclipsed by the sun, the Swarm Mother contemplated her scattered, surviving budlings. Observers on Earth would have been surprised to know that the Swarm did not consider its attack a failure. The assault had been launched more as a probe than as a serious attempt at conquest, and the Swarm, analyzing the data received from its creatures, developed a number of hypotheses.
The Thracian Swarm had been confronted by three responses that utterly failed to cooperate with one another. It was possible, the Swarm considered, that the Earth was divided between several entities, Swarm Mother-equivalents, who did not assist one another in their endeavors.
Large numbers of the Siberian Swarm had been destroyed at once, broadcasting their telepathic agony to their parent. It was obvious that the Earth mothers possessed some manner of devastating weapon, which, however, they were reluctant to use except in uninhabited areas. Perhaps the environmental effects were distressing.
Possibly, the Swarm reasoned, if the Earth mothers were divided and all possessed such weapons, they could be turned against one another. If Earth was thereby rendered uninhabitable, the Swarm was willing to wait the thousands of years necessary for Earth to become useful again. The span of time would be nothing compared to the years the Swarm had already waited.
The Swarm, as it was eclipsed by the sun, decided to concentrate its monitoring activities on confirming these hypotheses.
It sensed possibilities here.
“So I says to Maxine, I says, When are you gonna do something about that condition of yours? I says, It’s time to let a doctor see it…”
The bag lady, one shopping bag hanging from her arm while she clutched a second bag to her chest, walked slowly down the alley, fighting the Siberian wind.
Cyndi’s blond hair flailed in the breeze as she shivered in a calfskin jacket. She watched as Modular Man tried to talk to the woman, give her a take-out bag filled with Chinese food, but she continued mumbling to herself and plodding up the alley. Finally the android stuffed the take-out bag into her shopping bag and returned to where Cyndi waited.
“Surrender, Mod Man. There isn’t anything you can do for her.”
He took her in his arms and spiraled into the sky. “I keep thinkin
“Superhuman powers aren’t an answer to everything, Mod Man. You have to learn to come to terms with your limitations.”
The android said nothing.
“The thing you need to understand, if this business isn’t going to drive you crazy, is that no one’s invented a wild card power that can do a goddamn thing for old ladies who are out of their heads and who carry their whole world with them in shopping bags and live in garbage cans. I don’t have any powers, and even I know that.” She paused. “You listening, Mod Man?”
“Yes. I hear you. You know, you’re awfully hard-bitten for a girl just arrived from Minnesota.”
“Hey. Hibbing is a tough town during a recession.”
They floated up toward Aces High. Cyndi reached into her jacket pocket and produced a small package wrapped in red ribbon. “I got you a present,” she said. “Seeing as it’s our last night together. Merry Christmas.”
The android seemed embarrassed. “I didn’t think to get you anything,” he said.
“That’s all right. You’ve had things on your mind.”
Modular Man opened the package. The wind caught the bright ribbon and spiraled it down into the darkness. Inside was a gold pin in the shape of a playing card, the ace of hearts, with the words MY HERO engraved.
“I figured you could use cheering up. You can wear it on your jockey shorts.”
“Thank you. It’s a nice thought.”
“You’re welcome.” Cyndi hugged him.
The Empire State threw a spear of colored spotlights into the night. The pair landed on Hiram’s terrace. The busy sounds of the bar could be heard even over the gusting wind. A Christmas Eve crowd was celebrating. Cyndi and Modular Man gazed for a long moment through the windows.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m tired of rich food.”
The android thought a moment. “Me, too.”
“How about that Chinese place? Then we can go to my apartment.”
Warmth filled him, even here in the Siberian jet stream. He was airborne in a fraction of a second.
Down the alley, something bright caught the eye of the bag lady. She bent and picked up a strand of red ribbon.
She stuffed it into a bag and walked on.
Jube: Three
“THE HOLIDAYS ARE THE crudest time,” Croyd had told him one New Year’s Eve, years ago. Times Square was full of drunks waiting for the ball to come down. Jube had come to observe, and Croyd had hailed him from a doorway. He hadn’t recognized the Sleeper, but then he seldom did. That time, Croyd had been a head shorter than Jube, his loose, baggy skin covered with fine pink down. He’d had webbed feet and a hip flask of dark rum, and had wanted to talk about his family, about lost friends, about algebra. “The holidays are the crudest time,” he’d repeated, over and over, until the ball fell and Croyd had puffed himself up like a balloon from the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade and drifted off into the sky. “The cruelest time!” he’d shouted down once more, just before he vanished from sight.
It wasn’t till now that Jube had understood what he’d meant. He had always enjoyed the human holidays, which afforded such colorful pageants, such lavish displays of greed and generosity, such fascinating customs for study and analysis. This year, as he stood in his newsstand on the morning of the last day of December, he found that the day had lost its savor.
The irony was too cruel. All around the city, people were preparing to celebrate the start of what could be the last year of their lives, their civilization, and their species. The newspapers were full of retrospectives on the year just ending, and every one of them had pegged the Swarm War as the year’s top story, and every one of them had written it up as if it were all over, except for some mopping up in the third world.
Jhubben knew better.
He shuffled some newspapers, sold a Playboy, and looked up glumly into a crisp morning sky. Nothing to be seen but a few cirrus clouds, high up and moving fast. Yet she was still there, he knew. Far from Earth, moving through the darkness of space, as black and massive as an asteroid. She would blot out the stars as she drifted across them, silent and chill, to all outward appearances cold and dead. How many worlds and races had died believing that lie? Inside she lived, evolving, her intelligence and sophistication growing daily, her tactics honing themselves with each setback.
Among the races of the Network, she was the enemy with a hundred names: the demonseed, the great cancer, hell-mother, devourer of worlds, mother of nightmares. In the vast minds of the Kondikki godqueens, she was called by a symbol that meant simply dread. The Kreg machine-intelligences referred to her by a string of binary impulses that signified dysfunction, the lyn-ko-neen sang of her in notes high, shrill, and pain-wracked. And the Ly’bahr remembered her best of all. To those vastly long-lived cyborgs, she was Thyat M’hruh, darkness-for-the-race. Ten thousand years past, a Swarm had descended on the Ly’bahr birthworld. Encased in their life-sustaining shells, the cyborged Ly’bahr lived on, but those who had stayed behind to wear flesh instead of metal were gone, and with them all the generations to come. The Ly’bahr had been a dead race for ten thousand years.
“Mother!” Ekkedme had cried out, and Jube had not understood, not until he slit the cord on his stack of newspapers the day the buds landed in New Jersey. It must be some mistake, he had thought inanely when he saw the headlines. The Swarm was a horror from history and legend, it was the nightmare that happened to other planets far distant, not the one you were actually on. It was outside his experience and his expertise; no wonder he had suspected the Takisians when the singleship was lost. He felt as though he was a fool.
Worse, he was a doomed and helpless fool.
She was up there still, a palpable living darkness that Jube could almost feel. Inside her festered new generations of swarmlings, the life-that-is-death. Soon her children would come again, and devour this perversely splendid race that he had come to have such affection for … devour him too, for that matter, and what could he do to stop them?
“You look like a pot of excrement this morning, Walrus,” a voice like sandpaper rasped casually.
Jube looked up … and up, and up. Troll was nine feet tall. He wore a gray uniform over green warty skin, and when he grinned, crooked yellow teeth stuck out in all directions. A green hand as broad as a manhole cover lifted a copy of the Times delicately between two fingers, nails black and sharp as claws. Behind his custom-made mirrorshades, the red eyes sunk beneath his heavy brow-ridge flicked over the columns of newsprint.
“I feel like a pot of excrement,” Jube said. “The holidays are the cruelest time, Troll. How are things at the clinic?”
“Busy,” said Troll. “Tachyon keeps shuttling back and forth to Washington for meetings.” He rattled the Times. “These aliens ruined everybody’s Christmas. I always knew that Jersey was just one big yeast infection.” He dug in a pocket, handed Jube a crumpled dollar bill. “The Pentagon wants to lob a few H-bombs at the Mother-thing, but they can’t find her.”
Jube nodded as he made change. He had tried to find the Swarm Mother himself, using the sensing satellites the Network had left in orbit, but without success. She might be hiding behind the moon, or on the other side of the sun, or anywhere in the vastness of space. And if he could not locate her with the technology at his disposal, the humans didn’t have a chance. “Doc won’t be able to help them,” he told Troll glumly.
“Probably not,” the other replied. He flipped a half-dollar into the air, caught it neatly, and pocketed it. “Still, you have to try, right? What else can you do but try? Happy New Year, Walrus.” He strode off on legs as thick and gnarled as the trunks of small trees, and as long as Jube was tall.
Jube watched him go. He was right, he thought as Troll vanished around the corner. You do have to try.
He closed the newsstand early that day, and went home.
Floating in the cold waters of his tub, awash in dim red light, he considered his options. There was only one, really.
<
But the Opportunity was light-years off, and would not return to this system for another five or six human decades. It must be summoned, the Master Trader must be informed that a sentient race with enormous profit potential was threatened with extinction. And the tachyon transmitter had been lost with the Embe and the singleship.
Jhubben must build a replacement.
He felt hopelessly unequal to the task. He was a xenologist, not a technician. He used a hundred Network devices he could not begin to build, repair, or even comprehend. Knowledge was the most precious commodity in the galaxy, the Networks only true currency, and each member species guarded its own technological secrets zealously. But every Network outpost had a tachyon transmitter, even primitive worlds like Glabber that could not afford to buy starships of their own. Unless the lesser species had the means to summon the great starships to their scattered, backward worlds, how could trade take place, how could planets be bought and sold, how could profits accrue to the Master Traders of Starholme?
Jube’s library consisted of nine small crystalline rods. One held the collected songs, literature, and erotica of his home-world; a second his lifework, including all his researches on Earth. The others held knowledge. Surely the plans for a tachyon transmitter would be in there somewhere. Whatever knowledge he accessed would be noted, of course, and its value debited from the value of the researches here on Earth, but surely it was worth it, to save a sentient race?
There would be expenses, he knew. Even if he found the plans, it was unlikely that he would have the necessary parts. He would have to make due with primitive human electronics, the best he could obtain, and probably he would be forced to cannibalize some of his own equipment. So be it; he had equipment he had never used: the security systems that guarded his apartment (extra locks would do), the liquid metal spacesuit that he could no longer squeeze into, the coldsleep coffin in the back closet (purchased against the contigency of a thermonuclear war during his tenure on Earth), the games machine.…