Dancers in the Afterglow (7 page)

DANIEL WAS BORN ON A SMALL, CROWDED PLANET
called Diedrian—an old planet, worn and limping, whose denizens were mostly poor and directionless, and usually died young. There were few ways out of there, ever, and these only for the exceptional person.

Daniel wasn't thought exceptional, but he took an avenue that helped. He volunteered for the navy near the beginning of the war, and he let the navy teach him the basic skills, reading and math, and give him the libraries that were his opening to a wider world. He was a good sailor, exceptional for his diligence and dedication, and he had a lot of help in getting the peripheral education needed to pass the entrance tests for the Applied Naval Institute. At thirty-four, he was its oldest student, but the late start didn't deter him. In three years he had his engineering degree for naval rating, and a year after that he qualified as a fighter pilot with the rank—mostly because of his age—of lieutenant.

The fighter was an old human concept but not one used by the Machists. At first the enemy couldn't even figure out what the lightning-fast tiny blips were supposed to signify. They learned fast, as the fighters, racing in well behind the front, hit freighters and supply vessels while avoiding direct combat with larger craft

The Machists were slow to adapt to change. The fighters chopped them up in the vital-supply-line area until they managed to adjust their tactics. Finally, they started to nail a large percentage of the fighters, even though many continued to break through. Curiously, the Machists never built or bought up fighters of their own.

It wouldn't have mattered much if they had, not really.
They
were the ones with the long supply lines and huge empty spaces; to humanity Machist fighters would have been annoying, but not crippling.

Each fighter pilot had to fly three hundred missions; then he'd be transferred to a bridge subcommand on one of the big ships that was his mother and his base, and that he might, if good there, eventually command.

By Daniel's hundred and ninety-seventh mission, the Machists had gotten good enough to nail one in four fighters per mission. Sixteen or seventeen percent of the fighter pilots lived through the full three hundred.

For Daniel, number one hundred ninety-seven was the end. It was a simple mission, the kind he'd made dozens of times—a large convoy of military supply ships moving from deep in the Machist rear to resupply picket ships along his sector of the front. Twelve fighters set out from the big battleship on the human side of the zone and had little trouble punching some big holes in the enemy freighters.

It had been a simple mistake, really; the pilots call it "zigging when you should have zagged." He swooped in and stuck several torpedoes amidships of a large freighter, then pulled up to miss the exploding target. A huge piece of metal from a different target slightly above him and to the right slammed into his ship.

He woke up, sort of, in what the meds called a brain tank.

Fighter pilots were almost literally wedded to their ships; when the crunch came, much of Daniel's body was crunched and squeezed beyond recognition, but the biomonitoring network continued to provide both a blood substitute and oxygen to the brain. Of course, the shock to his nervous system was such that he was completely unaware of any of this; but the net result was that his brain and spinal column remained intact and functioning, while the rest of him was a mess.

It was rare, almost unheard of, for such a thing to happen. Usually there was some serious or severe break, but in this case there had been none.

Realizing their luck, ambitious surgeons preserved him. They sent what remained of his body back for the regulation hero's burial, but the important part of him went carefully to Naval R&D Labs. They worked on the problem, came up with some connections that would allow him to be brought to full consciousness for a short time, with message input and output. It took a while to overcome the shock, the isolation, but the surgeons were very careful and kept his consciousness highly sedated except for the key periods.

Then they put the alternatives to him, carefully. They could clone another Daniel, yes, but that clone would have its own brain and such. Transplants
were
possible, but they never got one-hundred percent of the connections right—the procedure was too complicated; the time they needed for connecting everything exceeded the amount of time they could handle the brain outside of its artificial life-support system. The effects were never the same—cerebral palsy to one degree or another, loss of all feeling and sensation. Nobody was ever really right after it.

He could choose to die, of course. They would permit that, although with great reluctance. This one-in-a-million freak might not happen again.

Or they could make him into a cyborg, a robot with a human brain. But cyborgs never worked well, either. The living part needed too much in the way of life-support to be practical.

However, R&D had a dream looking for a likely subject, and it was that dream that Daniel became. He was wedded to a master computer and life-support combination housed in a golden egg about twenty meters around, with a propulsion system much like that of a fighter but with far greater range. For local service he could put himself in orbit and spread great solar wings for power.

Daniel
became
a spaceship, and the computer increased by a million-fold his ability to handle complex problems.

But what of the ground? What of renewing supplies when they ran low? He needed oxygen and chemical nutrients, even though he had a ten-year capacity within the egg.

Besides, the navy wanted more than a thinking fighter. Civilization had robots by the ton; they did almost all the really tough manual labor, which is why so many people were idle. But even the most complex computer of the self-aware variety could make such robots do only so much.

Daniel was different. The robots the medics and engineers built was undeniably their finest creation. Powered by an energy-beam connection to the spaceship
Daniel,
with a lot of practice it could walk, talk, act, and react, much as the flesh-and-blood original would have. Small relays that he could place in orbit allowed him to be on the other side of a planet and still maintain contact

The robot was his eyes, ears, and even, thanks to special circuits, nose. He got so he could run the thing so naturally that just about no one could tell it wasn't human. A flesh-form chamber enabled Daniel to design the thing to look any way he wanted, down to the flexible blue veins in his hands and the tiniest hairs on his chest. He could be old or young, male or female. Of course each incarnation had to be 180 centimeters tall and of minimum build. The basic robot inside could not be altered.

Happy with the one, the scientists now got bolder. Additional programing, additional work, and they added another body along with the capacity to run both at once. Without the machine, the human brain could not have done it.

Enraptured by their success, the techs decided to find out how many of these complex mechanisms he could handle at once. With additional computer work, the answer turned out to be twenty-two.

Although trapped forever in a golden egg, Daniel could actually be twenty-two different people at once.

In eleven years of tests and probes and new ideas, the scientists found out everything they wanted to know about their new creations. No less than thirteen thousand people had worked on parts of him at one time or another, most without knowing exactly what they were doing it for, and the most self-aware computers and best human minds in science had poured themselves into him.

The perfect mechanism, the absolute marriage of man and self-aware computer. They'd done it. They were excited. Perhaps this was the harbinger of a whole new group of beings that could go where no one else could, do things no one else could—a device that perhaps, with additional refinement, would make human forces obsolete, carry the war to the enemy, be the shock troops of retribution.

Yes, the scientists, technicians, and government leaders told themselves, they had done it. They'd thought of everything.

It was so like scientists. They never liked things that couldn't be quantified, so they didn't think about them.

It was so like governments, used to thinking of people only as statistics.

It was so like the military, so used to thinking of people as toy soldiers to be pushed around computer maps; congratulating themselves that
only
a few thousand people were lost in a battle.

It was so like them all to forget that somewhere inside that golden egg was a human being.

Lamentoso

After blowing up the spaceport and some large buildings to demonstrate dramatically to the people their isolation, there comes the period of the long march when the population is forced at gunpoint to the countryside. This induces the feeling of being both
a
prisoner and a property, and secondarily, weeds out the exceptionally frail and rebellious, who are eliminated as object lessons to the rest. Pushed almost beyond endurance, the inhabitants are then split into groups whose size depends on the number of people and the enemy's ability to supply and contain them, and placed in the ultimate degradation situation which we term "denial of technology." Here, despair leads to multiple suicides; the rest, those who cling to hope, can then be rebuilt.

—
A Primer on Machist Behavior,
p. 962, NC 1161 A.C.

THEY HAD BEEN WALKING, IT SEEMED, FOREVER. THEY
were one of many lines of marchers who set out from the city in different directions, but it still seemed as if their own group stretched forward and back forever. Up and down the line were ratlike soldiers of the Machist Army, all of whom seemed identical in every detail, as if they'd all been produced in a factory on the same machine or were all cloned from a single specimen. They spoke little to one another and not at all to the marchers, except to urge them on, prod them, or warn them against conversation.

That was the hardest part. The no-talking rule.

Occasionally people would drop, or protest they could go no farther. They were usually given some chance to go on, to get up and continue. But if they did not, or weren't helped, the soldiers showed no reluctance to vaporize them right there.

Young children and the elderly had been weeded out already. Many parents had been killed protesting; many others, trying to protect their parents, met the same fate.

Night fell, and still they marched, through the woodlands, now. Many paid the price of discovering how well the Machist soldiers could see in the dark.

Then things started changing. After their once-an-hour five-minute rest period, some were culled out, apparently at random, and were taken off with a group of soldiers into the woods. This pattern, often with several groups going off in different directions, was repeated almost every kilometer.

Finally, well into the night, they stopped and were told they could sleep. There was mixed reaction to this development; it was welcome relief, but it implied another long march for most of them the next day.

Small trucks came along, as they had all day, dispensing little tins of water and packs of bluish-gray material, much like a half-loaf of bread in size and appearance, yet fairly hard and crunchy.

And tasteless.

But it was food, and they ate it ravenously, those who weren't too sick to eat

Exhausted, most were asleep within minutes of eating.

If the exercise weren't enough, the last batch of water contained an additive to insure slumber, making it much easier for the hard-pressed soldiers who, nonetheless, seemed never to tire or need breaks themselves.

Soldiers awakened them after daylight. The man and the girl from the hotel awoke painfully, feeling every aching muscle. The residue of the sedative helped somewhat, but not much.

He groaned and stretched. She shook her head in an attempt to clear it, and looked around cautiously.

"How far do you think we've come?" she whispered to him.

"Not far," he replied in a low, cautious tone. "Maybe ten, fifteen kilometers at most, probably a lot less. You can still hear the screeches of gulls occasionally above the trees."

She looked up, trying to penetrate the forest and catch a glimpse of the white birds, as if seeing one would convince her that something real was left in the world. There were a few breaks in the foliage, but although she thought she heard them once or twice, they never showed themselves.

"How much longer are we going to walk?" she moaned in tired hopelessness.

He shook his head sadly. "I don't know. And I don't know what is waiting when we get there."

Suddenly he noticed one of the soldiers looking at him and shut up even though their captors seemed in a better mood, more relaxed than they'd been the day before. There were many whispered conversations and complaints in the group, but rarely did the soldiers move to stop it.

This was not, the man knew, a sign that the worst was over; it was, rather, a sign of extreme confidence in their captors.
Their
worst was over; they'd done their job efficiently with, to them, a minimum of trouble.

The small trucks came slowly by again, dispensing more of the blue-gray loaves and, this time, pure water. Many more were hungry now, and they ate the stuff with gusto. A few fights started when some in the huge population tried to steal food and water from their fellows, and these confrontations had to be broken up by the guards.

The man looked at the scene in disgust. How quickly we become animals, fighting each other for the enemy's enjoyment, he thought sadly.

About ten meters further back, Genji and Moira were also decrying their aches and pains. Moira looked like hell. There was no other way to put it. She had dressed for a different purpose, and now the flimsy pant-suit was showing wear and tear. Her hair hung limp and tangled.