Zelazny, Roger - Novel 05 Read online

  I rose, crossed the room to the window, drew back the curtain, stared up through the night The embers in the grate still glowed cherry and orange. The outer cold had passed through the walls and was pressing now like a spiritual glacier toward our corner of the room.

  "I must be leaving soon," I said.

  "Where will you go?"

  "I may not say.*

  Silence. Then, "Will you be coming back?"

  I had no answer, though I wished I did.

  "Would you like me to?"

  Silence again. Then, "Yes."

  "I will try to," I said.

  Why was I going to take the Styler contract? I had wanted to from the moment Paul had described the situation to me. A high-level sinecure with the company and a big block of expensive stock were but the surface returns on the thing. I had no illusion that my thawing, my treatment, my recovery had been the result of an unsullied desire for my company on the part of my descendants. The necessary techniques had been available for several decades. It is not unpleasant to feel needed, however, no matter what the reasons. My pleasure at their attentiveness was in no way vitiated by the knowledge that I had something they wanted. If anything, it was enhanced. What other hold had I on the day? I was more than just a curiosity. I had a value that went beyond the emotions of the moment, and its realization could restore to me some measure of mastery, could earn me another sort of appreciation. I had been thinking about this, or something like it, earlier when I had drawn rein above the nearest village at a place where the olive terraces rose to scrub and bleakness, and stared down at the light and movement. Shortly, Julia came up beside me. "What is it?" she had asked.

  I was wondering at that moment what it would have been like if I had awakened with no memories of my earlier existence. Would it have made it easier or more difficult to find me some slot in life, to be satisfied with it? Might I then be like the inhabitants of the village below, bringing interest and something of pleasure to simple actions at their ten thousandth repetition?

  Standing beside a shallow, sheltered inlet on a warm, bright afternoon, watching the reflected ripple of the water trace trembling lines across her naked breasts as she stopped splashing and the smile went out of her face and she said, "What is it?" I was thinking of the seventeen men I had killed back when they had begun calling me "Angie the Angel," as I had risen through the ranks to secure that earlier existence. Paul had not known about all of the killings, of course. I was surprised that he had known of as many as he did—eight, to be exact, the names spoken with a measure of confidence I did not feel he could have faked. For my part, I found it virtually inconceivable that the legal niceties and organization-chart formalities had become something more than a facade, that in fact there were few reliable professional killers to be had any more. So it seemed that I had indeed brought something of value across the years with me. I had for the most part personally eschewed such activities, however, once I had secured my position at a higher level within the organization. Now, to be offered a contract, in a sedate time of almost total cultural availability, smoothly meshing gears, life prolongation and interstellar travel ... It seemed more than a little strange, no matter how delicately Paul put it.

  As we had eaten oranges in the shade of the water-processing plant, its doubtless onetime sleek and shiny walls softened partly by weather and partly by the intervention of lilac and wisteria to a monastery-like finish, I had stroked her hair and she had plucked the pale-green hellebore, that ancient remedy for madness, tangling those flowers in my own, and my thoughts had strayed beyond the severely drawn diagrams of skull and walls, softened by their froths of blossoms, and into the completely automatic workings of the installation, whose sounds were repeated to us, softly, inevitably, as it took in, purified and spewed through underground conduits I knew not how many thousands of gallons of the sea, and I considered the dual nature of Herbert Styler, field representative for Doxford Industries on the planet called Alvo, so far removed from the pale human star we formed as to be equally inconceivable, but this time she did not notice and say, "What is it?" as I wondered whether the man who had undergone experimental neural abridgment of a kind still illegal on Earth, supposedly permitting him full conscious access to the workings of a great computer complex, whether this man, who, for his company, stood in the way of COSA's expansion on the choicest of the outworlds, could be considered a machine with a human personality or a man with a computer mind, and whether what I had been asked to do was properly homicide or something totally new—say, mechanicide or cybicide— while the muted thudding of the sea and the nearer vibration of the waterworks came into us, along with the fragrances of the blossoms and the touch of salt the breezes bore.

  Paul had assured me that I would be given the best training and equipment available for the fulfillment of the contract. He had then recommended that I take a trip.

  "Get away for a time," he had said, and, 'Think about it."

  Staring up through the night, feeling the cold, wondering whether I could kill him, get away, come back and start over, fresh and clean, belonging here, my other life as dead and sealed then ...

  "I will try to," I said, and let the curtain fall.

  Here, then.

  . . . Seeing her seated beneath that crazy holiday-tree, soft hair fixed with a pale, coral clip, head and hand moving as she transferred her sheep to paper, precise, deliberate; then a brightening of the day, the fall of my shadow, her attention, the turning of her head, the movement of her arm as she raised her hand to shade her eyes, me dismounting, twisting the reins about a branch, starting down toward her, reaching for a word, a face, her nod, her slow smile ...

  Here.

  ... Seeing the fire-flowers unfold all in a row beneath me, the final blossom covering half of the building, its target; my vehicle faltering, diving, burning then, myself ejected, the cabin intact about me and moving with a life of its own, dodging, darting, firing, downward and forward, downward and forward, coming apart then and dropping me gently, gently down, my prosthetic armor making the barest of clicks as my feet touch the ground and the repellors cut off; and then my lasers lancing forward, cutting through the figures who advance upon me, grenades flying from my hands, waves of protoplasm-shattering ultrasonics flowing from me like notes from some rung, invisible bell...

  How many androids and robots I smashed, mockup buildings I razed, obstacles I destroyed, projectiles I hurled in the two months that followed, there on that barren worldlet where I was taken to be familiarized with all the latest methods of violence, I do not know. Many. My instructors were technicians, not killers, who would later undergo memory-erasure, to protect both the organization and themselves. The discovery that this was possible intrigued me, recalling to me some of my earlier thoughts. The techniques, I learned, were highly sophisticated and could be employed quite selectively. They had been in use for years as a psychotherapeutic tool. The instructors, for their part, were a strange mixture of attitudes and moods, at first exhorting me almost constantly to perfect my techniques with their weapons while scrupulously avoiding any reference to the fact that I would soon be using them to kill someone. Later, however, as the realization gathered that whatever they said or felt or thought would subsequently be removed from their consciousness, they began to joke frequently about death and killing and their feelings toward me seemed to undergo a reversal. From an initial state of undisguised contempt, they came in a matter of weeks to regard me with something approaching reverence, as if I were a sort of priest and they vicarious participants in a sacrifice. This disturbed me, and I took to avoiding them as much as possible on my own time. For me, the job was simply something that I had to do, to find my place in what seemed a better society than the one I had left. It was then that I began to wonder whether people were changing rapidly enough to assure the race's continued existence, if these men could revert so readily, reach so eagerly for a violence-fix. I had few illusions concerning myself, and I was willing to try to live with me fo
r the rest of my life; but I had considered them my moral superiors, and it was their society I was trying to buy into. It was not until near the end of my training, however, that I learned something of the dynamics which underlay their altered attitude. Hanmer, one of the least objectionable of my instructors, came to my quarters one night, bearing a bottle which made him somewhat welcome. He had already done considerable work on its predecessor, and his face, which normally bore the certainty of expression generally found only on ventriloquists' dummies, had grown rather slack, his voice slowed from its usual chatter to a thing of slow puzzlement. It was not long before I learned what was bothering him. The sanctions and controls were not doing so well. It appeared that a limited armed conflict—the situation to which I had alluded when speaking with Paul some time before—had moved several steps nearer actuality, was indeed imminent, as Hanmer saw it. The politics of it bored me, for they were not yet mine, but the possibility of its occurring at all, with the ever-present danger of its growing into something large and terrifying, was ironic as well as alarming. To come all this way, and in the manner that I did, just to arrive in time for a worldwide conflagration ... No! It was absurd. Absolutely. It began to seem that their proximity to an instrument of violence, myself, at a time like this had served to trigger something quite deep-seated and well suppressed within these men. While it had released something violent and irrational within the others, in the case of Hanmer, who, after a time, sat monotonously repeating, "It can't happen," it had broken something.

  "It may not," I said, to hearten him, since it was his whisky I was drinking.

  He looked at me then. Hope seemed to flicker for a moment, then went away from his eyes.

  "What do you care?" he said.

  "I care. It's my world, too. Now."

  He looked away.

  "I don't understand you," he said at last. "Or the others, for that matter ..."

  I thought that I did, though it was of small help to anybody. All my emotions at the moment were things based on absence.

  I waited. I did not know him well enough to know why his reaction should be different from the others', and I never did find out. He said one other thing that remained with me, though.

  "... But I think everybody ought to be locked up till they learn how to behave."

  Trite, laughable and quite impossible, of course. At the time.

  Mixing the remainder of the booze into two stiff ones, I hastened him on his way to oblivion, partly regretting there was not a bit more around, so that I might follow him.

  Here, here, and then: There ...

  [Stars] . [Out of the tunnel

  . under the sky & down]

  [Entry]

  [Clouds

  clouds

  cl ou d s]

  [Explosion #1]

  [#2] [#3]

  [Strobe lights & thunder]

  [Song of the air] [Invisible fingers of matter]

  [Lasciate ogni sper- anza voi ch'

  en trate?]

  . . were flashes like scissors of lightning cutting the sky apart. Despite the shielding and my distance from the detonations, I was batted about like a shuttlecock. I was hunched forward in my battle armor, letting the computer deal with these disturbances, but ready to cut in on manual should the need arise. Alvo flashed beneath me in a too-quick pattern of greenbrown-grayblue for me to distinguish features, unless perhaps I had had the time to simply sit and stare down at it. But I was not especially tense as I wound the miles inside me, annihilating the distance, threading its thunder. To do the job as quickly as was deemed necessary now allowed no time for subtlety. Doxford's internal security setup was too strong for anything short of a years-long infiltration campaign. A surprise thrust, a juggernaut attack, had therefore been decided upon as having the best possibility for success. Styler's defense was excellent, but we had expected nothing less.

  He must have picked me up almost immediately upon my appearance in the vicinity of Alvo. I spent little time wondering at the technical feat involved in my detection, as I swept along, low now, speeding toward that fortress of an office complex where he made his headquarters, but I wondered what Styler's thoughts and feelings must have been when first he had noted me. How long had he expected this attack? How much might he know concerning it?

  For a time then, I dodged or withstood everything he threw at me, my own weapons systems ready to come into play in an instant I hoped to at least commence my assault from the air.

  A crackle of static, a whistle, a sound of heavy breathing. My radio had come to life. I had not expected this. It seemed something of an exercise in futility for anyone to try to threaten or cajole me at this point.

  However, "Unidentified vessel and etcetera, you are passing over unauthorized such-and-such. You are ordered to ..." did not emerge.

  Instead, "Angie the Angel," I heard. "Welcome to Alvo. Are you finding your brief visit interesting?"

  So he knew who I was. And it was Styler himself speaking. I had heard his voice and viewed his likeness many times in the course of my preparations. I had had to force my instructors to cut a programmed accompaniment of vilification which had been part of the familiarization sessions, as I had found it distracting. They found it difficult to believe that I did not feel it necessary to hate the short, pale-eyed man with the puffy cheeks and the turban about his head that covered the terminals of his permanent implants. "Of course it is propaganda," they said, "but it will help you when the time comes." I shook my head slowly. "I do not need emotions to help me kill," I told them. "They might even get in the way." They had to accept this, but it was plain that they did not understand.

  So he knew who I was. It was surprising, but hardly prostrating. Tremendous amounts of current information were regularly dumped into his computer adjunct, and he was supposedly possessed of a sound, somewhat spectacular mind, complete with imagination. So while I felt he was guessing, it was doubtless a very informed guess, and of course an accurate one. I saw no reason to talk with him, though; or, for that matter, not to talk with him. It made no difference at all to me. Words could change nothing.

  Still, "It will be a brief visit," he insisted. "You will not be leaving here, you know."

  A shaft of something like lightning ran through a dark cloud, ahead/beside/behind me. The ship shook, some circuits sputtered, a wave of static took away some of Styler's words.

  ".. are not the first," he said. "Obviously, none of the others ..."

  Others? He could have tossed that out just hoping to upset me. But it was something I had not considered. Paul had never said that I was the first to attempt this. In fact, thinking about it, it was probable that I was not. While this did not disturb me, I did wonder how many others there might have been.

  No matter. Contemporary kids. They had probably required the brainwashing business, had needed to work up a hatred in order to essay the thing. Their business. Their funerals. It was not my way.

  "You can still call it off, Angel," he said. "Land your vessel and remain with it. I will send someone to pick you up. You will live. What do you say?"

  I chuckled. He must have heard it, because, "At least I know you are there," he said. "Your attack is an exercise in futility in more ways than one. Outside of the fact that you have no chance of succeeding and will doubtless die here, and soon, the reasons for your making the effort at all have been removed." ,

  He paused then, as if waiting for me to say something. That was his exercise in futility.

  "Not interested, eh?" he said then. "Any moment now my defensive assault will pierce your screen. COSA had no way of knowing what I have added to the system since their previous effort. Any one of these next might do it"

  There followed a series of jarring explosions. I emerged from these without mishap, however.

  "Still there," he observed. "Good. That still allows you a chance to change your mind. I would like you to live, you know, as I should be very interested in talking with a man like you, from another time, a man w
ith your background. As I began to say, there are other reasons than fatal obstacles for giving the thing up. I do not know what you may or may not have heard, because I know you have been offworld for a time, but it is true that there has been a war—and I suppose, technically, it is still in progress. From all reports I have received, the Earth is in a pretty sorry state just now. Both of our employers have been very hard-hit. In fact, I believe we lack home offices at the moment. This being the case, I see more need for salvaging whatever remains of both organizations than for continuing our conflict. What do you say?"

  Of course I said nothing. I had no way to verify any of his talk, and he had no way of proving it to me, unless I were willing to land and take a look at whatever he might have to offer in the way of evidence—which was naturally out of the question. So there was no basis for conversation on that count.

  I heard him sigh, across a tiny rivulet of static.

  "You are determined that there be more death," he said then. "You think that everything I have told you is purely self-serving in nature ..."

  I almost cut him off then, because I do not like people who tell me what I am thinking, whether or not they are right. Still, it was the best show in town ...

  "Why don't you say something?" he said. "I would like to hear your voice. Tell me why you are about this business. If it is only money, I will pay you more to give it up—whatever they are paying you—and protect you afterward." He paused, waited, then went on, "Of course, with you, there is probably something else involved, too. Family loyalty. Solidarity. The tribal blood-bond. That sort of thing. If that is what it is, I will tell you something. You are probably the only one around who believes in it the old way any more. They do not. I know these men, have known them well for years, whereas you have only known them for a brief while. It is true. Their values are no longer yours. They are capitalizing on your loyalty,