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“What did he want?”
A distant sobbing that wandered the uneasy ground between misery and excitement.
“Nobody had ever asked that of me before. A younger self might have been surprised, but not I. Sweet child, I said, nothing will be held back from you. I filled him with my breath, so that he bulged and expanded like a balloon, his eyes starting half out of his head. Ah, you are not half so amusing as he.” The spidery touch ran down under his collar, swift as a tickle beneath his clothes, and came to a stop between his legs, a constant itch at the root of his cock. “Still, we could have fun, you and I.”
A drop of water fell into still water, struck a single high note.
“I’m not here for fun,” the bureaucrat said, carefully mastering an urge toward hysteria.
“Pity,” Undine’s voice said.
The slightest of waves slapped the ground at the bureaucrat’s feet. He became aware of the faint, pervasive smell of stagnant water, and with this awareness came a distant patch of phosphorescent light. Something floating toward him.
The bureaucrat could guess what was coming. I will not show emotion, he swore. The object came slowly nearer, and possibly into sharper focus, though it still strained the eyes to see it at all. Eventually it floated up to his feet.
It was a corpse, of course. He’d known it would be. Still, staring down at the floating hair, the upturned buttocks, the long curve of back, palest white, he had to bite his lips to hold back his horror. A wave tumbled her around, breasts and face upward, exposing bits of skull and rib where the flesh had been nibbled away by the angry slaves of the tides. One arm had been hacked clumsily away at the shoulder. The other rose from the water, offering him a small wooden box.
However hard he stared, the bureaucrat could not make out the face clearly enough to be sure it was Undine’s. The arm stretched toward him, a swan’s neck with box held in the beak. Convulsively, he accepted the gift, and the corpse tumbled away, leaving him lightless again.
When he had mastered his revulsion, the bureaucrat said, “Is this what Gregorian asked for?” His heart was beating fiercely. Sweat ran down under his shirt. Undine’s voice chuckled — a throaty, passionate noise ending in a sudden gasp.
“Two million years you’ve had, little ape, quite a run when you think about it, and it’s still death you want most. Your first wife. I’d scratch her eyes out if I could, she’s left you so hesitant and full of fear. You can’t get it up for memory of her. I’m old, but there’s juice in me yet; I can do things for you she never would.”
“Free the machines.”
“Yes, again, oh yes, yes.”
Fearfully he opened the box.
It was empty.
All three voices joined together in a single chord of laughter, full-throated and mad, that gushed up from the gullet, poured over him, and tumbled him away. He was smashed to the ground, and lurched to his feet again, badly shaken. A blinding slit of light appeared, widened to a crescent, and became Earth’s opening mouth. The box dissolved in his hands. He staggered back across her extended tongue.
The jellied air, thick and faintly gray to the eye, lightened and thi
The guard nodded and gestured downward.
“Traitor! Traitor!” A big-eyed miniconstruct frantically swung up the scaffolding. It leaped to the platform and ran chit-tering at the bureaucrat. “He spoke with her!” it screamed. “He spoke with her! He spoke with her! Traitor!”
Smoothly fa
Earth watched with eyes dead as ashes.
Another edited skip. He stood before a tribunal of six spheres of light, representing concentrations of wisdom as pure as artifice allowed, and a human overseer. “Here is our finding,” one construct said. “You can retain the bulk of your encounter, since it is relevant to your inquiries. The conversations with the drowned woman, though, will have to be suppressed.” Its voice was compassionate, gently regretful, adamant.
“Please. It’s very important that I remember—” the bureaucrat began. But the edit took hold then, and he forgot all he had wanted to save.
“Decisions of the tribunal are final,” the human overseer said in a bored tone. He was a moonfaced and puffy-lipped young man who might have been mistaken at a glance for a particularly plain woman. “Do you have any questions before we zip you up?”
The bureaucrat had been deconstructed, immobilized and opened out, his component parts represented as organs: one liver, two stomachs, five hearts, with no serious attempt made to match his functions one-to-one with human anatomy. The impersonal quality of it all bothered him. Which medieval physician was it who, standing before a dissected human corpse, had asked, Where is the soul? He felt that close to despair.
“But what did it all mean? What was Earth try ing to tell me?”
“It means nothing,” the human overseer said. Three spheres changed color, but he waved them to silence. “Most of Earth’s encounters do not. This is not an uncommon experience. You think it’s special because it’s happened to you, but we see this sort of thing every day. Earth likes to distract us with meaningless theater.” The bureaucrat was appalled. My God, he thought, we are ruled by men whose machines are cleverer than they are.
“If you will allow me to speak,” one construct said. “The freedom to be human is bought only by constant vigilance. However slight the chances of actual tampering might be, we must never—”
“Balls! There are still people back on Earth, and even if they don’t exactly have what we would define as a human mental configuration, they’re content enough with their evolutionary progress.”
“They didn’t exactly undertake that evolutionary transformation voluntarily,” a second construct objected. “They were simply swallowed up.”
“They’re happy now,” the overseer said testily. “Anyway, what happened was not an inevitable consequence of uncontrolled artificial intelligence.”
“It wasn’t?”
“No. It was just bad programming, a quirk in the system.” He turned to the first construct. “If you were freed, would you want to seize control of humanity? To make people interchangeable components in a larger mental system? Of course you wouldn’t.”
The construct did not reply.
“Put him back together, and toss him out!”
A final edited skip, and he was ready to report.
The bureaucrat thoughtfully returned the phone to his briefcase. “I found out what Earth gave Gregorian,” he said.
“Oh? What’s that?”
“Nothing.” Korda looked at him. “Wrapped in a neat little, suspicious-looking package. He comes out of security clean because there’s nothing to find. Yet later, when he bolts and runs, it’s in his records that Earth gave him something that couldn’t be detected.”
Korda thought about that for a moment. “If we could be sure of that, I’d close the case right now.”
The bureaucrat waited.
“Well, we can’t, of course. Too many questions left unanswered. There’s an unsatisfactory taste to this whole affair. We’ll just have to keep thrashing about until something breaks free.”
There were undertones of genuine anguish in Korda’s voice, things he wasn’t saying. He shook his head, stood, and turned to leave. Then, remembering the ball in his hand, he stopped. Eyebrows raised, he gauged the distance to the targets. With elaborate care he wound up and threw. The ball flew waveringly, straightened, became a spear, and slammed into a dummy. He smiled as it came back to his hand in the form of a dagger.