Among the Powers (19 page)

“I know, I just... wait a minute.” He
paused, readjusting himself to the real world after hours in the
fantasy-land of high technology. “Four wakes? Has Geste been
back?”

“No, he hasn’t, not yet, but as a matter of
fact he’s on his way right now.”

“I thought he must have come and gone while
I was being taught,” Bredon said, concerned. “What took so long?
Has something gone wrong?”

“That’s hard to say,” Gamesmaster replied
judiciously. “He didn’t exactly set any recruiting records, but so
far nobody’s shot at him since he left the mountains.”

“Who does he have as allies now?”

“The same two he started with, Imp and the
Skyler.”

Startled, Bredon asked, “No one else?”

“No one else. He got a resounding lack of
interest from all the rest, from Starflower to the Lady of the
Lake.”

“Can the three of them stop Thaddeus?”
Bredon asked worriedly.

“How the hell should
I
know?”
Gamesmaster’s voice remained fairly calm, but Bredon knew it was
upset.

“Sorry, I guess that wasn’t a fair
question,” he said.

“It’s all right. I guess we’re both a little
nervous.”

Bredon hesitated, then asked, “Can an
arti... artif... artificial intelligence be nervous? A silicon one,
I mean?”

“Well, technically, kid, I don’t really know
if it’s what
you
would consider nervousness, but it works
for me. I feel it in situations that ought to make someone nervous,
and not in others, and it’s uncomfortable, so I call it
nervousness.”

“I guess that’s nervousness, then. After
all, I don’t really know how other humans feel, just what
I
feel.”

“Hey, you’ve got it exactly! Although I have
the equipment to hook you up to someone else so you
do
feel
what they do, if you want. But you’d need a volunteer to hook up
to.”

“Oh, that’s all right,” Bredon said hastily,
“I’m not that curious.”

“The boss should be landing soon; he’s just
left the Skyland.”

“Uh... why
did
he come back here, if
he didn’t get any more recruits? To pick me up?”

“Not hardly, kid. Don’t get exaggerated
ideas of your own importance. I don’t think he plans to take you
anywhere. He’s here to pick up the weapons I’ve been whipping up
for him.”

“That’s right, Bredon,” Geste’s voice said
from nowhere.

“Hey, boss, that’s not nice! I hadn’t had a
chance to tell him you were listening!”

“I’m sure he doesn’t mind.”

“Well, I...” Bredon began.

“See?” Geste cut him off. “So, Gamesmaster,
what little surprises have we got for Thaddeus?”

Bredon leaned forward in his seat and tapped
panels on the console; a wallscreen blinked, and he found himself
looking at a flawless three-dimensional image of Arcade’s entrance
hall where he had slept that first dark, home to the “enchanted
forest” where almost all Geste’s carbon-based playthings lived. The
ceiling was rolling back to admit a flying platform. The Trickster
himself, wearing dark red this time, stood aboard the airskiff.

“Well, boss, not as much as you might like,
I’m sure,” Gamesmaster said. “I’ve whipped up a lot of
plain-vanilla energy weapons, up and down the spectrum, most of
them mobile and semi-intelligent and the rest portable miniatures,
but I’ll bet my last circuit that Thaddeus can defend against every
damn one of them. I can’t nail down his gene pattern exactly enough
to tailor a personal virus—anything I can come up with by
approximation has a good chance of killing someone else, usually
Shadowdark, but sometimes Sheila or Feura, and it might get any
number of short-lifers, so I haven’t done any anti-personnel
microbes at all. I’ve done some limited-field sabotage germs—stuff
that can eat hell out of equipment but won’t spread much. The
problem with those is getting them into the systems they’re bred
for, and of course, he may have bacteriophagic protective systems;
if he’s as paranoid as his record implies, he might have his entire
demesne laced with his own swarm of bug-eaters.”

“What about his personal modifications,
symbiotes, whatever?”

“We don’t have good records on those, boss;
remember, he’s a born immortal, so he doesn’t need as much
symbiosis as most of you. I’ve worked up some bugs that I think
might possibly eat out what he’s got in his bloodstream, but you
need to get them close. And of course, he may have added more that
we don’t know about at all, and he’s sure to have his immune system
alarm-rigged and multi-layered. Basically, boss, unless he’s been
sloppy, I don’t think we can get at him with anything microscopic,
but we may be able to invade some of his equipment and rot out the
soft parts. And I’ve got some macroscopic stuff I’m working on, but
even with forced growth and imprinted training I don’t have
anything bigger than a cockroach yet, and what I
do
have is
dumber than dirt. They’ll eat plastic, though, and dodge anything
that moves, and they can take pretty high voltage without frying. I
used what we had, but we didn’t have anything in the forest that I
could use unmodified. Those little brains don’t hold much unless
you build it into the genes, and they’d need better claws and teeth
and defenses, so I’ve mostly been growing new ones, not training
the ones we had. I’m working on some machine-killer mice, but they
need another five wakes, minimum.”

“We probably don’t have five wakes.”

“I know, boss, that’s why I didn’t bother
with a metal-eating rhinoceros.”

Geste, standing on his platform in the
entrance chamber, cast a startled look in the direction of
Gamesmaster’s central processor. “Is that a joke?”

“Matter of opinion, I guess.”

Geste smiled, and would have laughed aloud
under other circumstances. “Have you got anything else?” he
asked.

“Sure, boss, lots of it, hardware and
software both, and a lot of it is already launched and trying to
burrow into Fortress Holding, or riding in on the airwaves looking
for a foothold. Saboteurs of all kinds. I think we may have taken
out a few of his peripheral systems already, but I don’t have
enough feedback to be certain, and he’s so decentralized and
layered that it may not matter. And I’ve been working on
space-benders and time-warping stuff; I’ve got a half—decent
pocket-sized stasis field generator ready to go.”

“Good, that’s all good; I’m proud of you.
Start loading it all on the Skyland, then, and see if you can give
me an inventory, with instructions for use, that I can load into
inboard memory.”

“You got it, boss; transmitting to your
skull-liner now.”

Bredon had listened to all this with
fascination. Even after his incredible cram course in Terran
technology, he did not follow all of it. He had no idea what a
rhinoceros was, or mice. Cockroaches he knew well, since the
world—Denner’s Wreck—had plenty of them. Microbes in general he was
very vague about. He had not had time to learn everything, by any
means, not even everything that was used in Arcade. At
Gamesmaster’s suggestion he had focused on the inorganic technology
used in Arcade, emphasizing silicon—and metal-based systems rather
than carbon-based life or warped space.

A stasis field generator? He knew what
various field generators were, but not what a stasis field was.

He had encountered, but did not really
understand, descriptions of the artificial symbiotes that the
immortals had living inside them, augmenting the natural repair and
maintenance mechanisms of their bodies and providing them with some
of their “supernatural” powers. He knew now that his bruised nose
and other injuries received in trying to break into the Forbidden
Grove had been repaired by an offshoot of one of Geste’s
symbiotes.

What he chose to ask, though, was, “What’s a
skull-liner?”

“Oh, it’s a computer that’s grown onto the
inside of the boss’s skull, inside his head, where it can link
itself to his brain. Gives him a few gigabytes of extra memory when
he needs it, and lets me feed him information at high speed.”

“What sort of a computer?”

“Silicon crystal, mostly.”

“I thought silicon life was built; I didn’t
think silicon computers grew.”

“They don’t, by themselves; the skull-liner
was installed by programmed silicon-skeleton bacteria.”

“Oh.” The thought of tiny creatures growing
into a machine in his head was somehow repulsive; he shuddered
slightly.

His recent experiences had shaken him.
Terran technology was overwhelming in its diversity, complexity,
and power. He now truly understood that a Power, a Terran, could do
almost anything with the right equipment—but so could anyone
else.

The Powers were just people. What made them
Powers were their machines and their creatures—and sometimes it was
impossible to tell the machines from the creatures.

The true wonder was not the Powers
themselves—after all, they had not created their technology, they
had merely inherited the results of thousands of years of work by
millions of people. The true wonder was their technology.

Bredon had begun to sample that wonder, to
explore the fringes of a universe unlike anything he had ever
dreamt of, and he wanted to know more. Thanks to the imprinter he
had learned how to use most of the machines in Arcade, but
Gamesmaster had had no basic science texts, no explanation for how
most of the machines worked. Geste had no need of anything like
that. What he needed was instruction manuals, and those he had.

Bredon wanted to know not just what the
machines did, but how; not just how they worked, but why.

But even while his thirst for knowledge was
driving him on, even as he revelled in his new mastery over
Arcade’s devices, there was a growing kernel of uneasiness, of
fear, in the back of his mind. He sometimes thought that he was
going too fast, that he was tampering with things beyond his
comprehension, perhaps even beyond the comprehension of the people
who built them. Some of the things he saw seemed unclean, or
unholy, or just horribly dangerous.

Tailored bacteria, for example—those were
bugs, like the bugs that caused disease, but instead of causing
harm these performed useful tasks like assembling a computer inside
Geste’s skull.

But Bredon could not help wondering whether
such bugs could be trusted, whether it was entirely safe to put a
computer inside one’s head. Could Geste ever really be sure that he
was still the master of his own mind? The computer was, in effect,
a disease. It was a beneficial disease, vastly expanding his
memory, letting him think more quickly and more clearly, but by
changing
how
he thought, didn’t it also affect
what
he thought?

And the bugs that put it there—could they be
trusted to follow the planned pattern exactly? What if a tailored
bacterium, exposed to the myriad chemicals and radiations in Arcade
and in Geste’s body, were to mutate at the wrong time? Bredon had
had the mechanism of intentional mutation explained to him in
detail; Gamesmaster had passed off spontaneous or accidental
mutation as unimportant, but Bredon did not feel sure of that.

And the bent-space generators, machines that
could wrench reality itself out of shape, creating space where none
previously existed, making rooms bigger on the inside than the
outside, turning corners in directions that didn’t exist
before—those also worried Bredon. The Powers bent space to enlarge
their homes, to save themselves long walks between scattered
outposts, and for any number of other trivial purposes. Bredon
knew, as a matter of simple pragmatism, that if you bend anything
enough, it will break. Could space itself be damaged by the
twisting the Powers gave it?

Terrans had been using these technologies
for millenia, and as of four hundred years ago, when the Powers
left to come to Denner’s Wreck, Terra and most of its people were
still intact. Even so, Bredon found himself uneasy at the thought
of everything that might go wrong.

Now Geste intended to use these things as
weapons, intentionally making them even more dangerous, right here
on Denner’s Wreck.

He also intended to leave Bredon here, in
Arcade, while he went off to battle Thaddeus and perhaps rescue
Lady Sunlight—or perhaps get her killed.

Bredon’s mind snagged on that thought. He
knew, consciously, that Lady Sunlight’s plight was not his fault,
but some part of his mind refused to accept that. If he had not
broken the disk and summoned Geste, the Trickster might not now be
preparing to fight. Lady Sunlight would still be wherever she now
was, but not in danger of getting caught in the crossfire.

Geste was gathering weapons that could, if
they went wrong, kill thousands of innocent people.

And when Geste left, he, Bredon, would be
alone again in Arcade, with only the machine intelligences to talk
to, and he did not care for that prospect. He knew now how
Gamesmaster and the others worked, and that knowledge made them
seem far less human—and less trustworthy.

Furthermore, he was running out of things he
wanted to do in Arcade. He had not yet tried out most of Arcade’s
vast array of entertainments, but he did not care to; he had
sampled enough to discourage him. The one hologame he had
attempted, the simplest Gamesmaster could find, had ended in his
ignominious defeat in mere seconds. The first story Gamesmaster had
played for him had been incredibly realistic, exciting, and
romantic, but had been so alien in setting and concept, and so
emotionally complex, that he was still not sure what he had
actually felt, and did not feel ready to try another. The very
reality of the experience—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste, all
slightly more intense than real life—had frightened him.

Part of the fear was of something he did not
understand; another part was fear that he might become addicted to
such experiences and give up his own world. Gamesmaster admitted
that some humans did, indeed, prefer fiction, or history
recordings, to reality. It mentioned other insidious dangers as
well, drugs or neural hookups that could be addictive.