The Goliath Stone (7 page)

The kitchen had been designed by someone who had not allowed a style-conscious architect near the place, unless there was one in the freezer. What they saw in there looked like enough beef, pork, shrimp, and chicken for a couple of years, but he could have been under them. “Wow,” May said.

“It’s too normal,” Toby said. “With the kind of nanos he must have made, he could build houses out of diamond foam.”

“The kind in us?”

“Possibly. He wanted to build a general-purpose device and have it gang together for whatever task it was assigned, and I’d say he did.”

“How sure are you?”

“I was thinking about hookers. I don’t remember seeing one who looked old in Bern for years.”

“You look at hookers a lot?”

“May, they
have
to be conspicuous.”

“I’m kidding, don’t get so embarrassed. —I want to look at a bathroom!”

The first thing Toby noticed there, after the size, was the secluded toilet area. Somebody could use it at the same time as someone else bathed, without intrusion. “He designed this house himself,” he murmured.

May didn’t notice. She was staring at the mirror.

Toby looked at it. It was big, but not all that impressive—

He looked harder. He was missing lines in his face.

May, who’d switched to looking at his face, started pulling her clothes off, and felt her abdomen once it was exposed. “The knots under the skin are almost gone,” she said. “They’re eating scar tissue.” She felt higher, then turned sideways. “Have they gotten bigger?” she said hopefully.

“I hope not. First time I saw you, I thought you looked like a
Vogue
model.”

She made a face. “So did I. I’d rather look like I’d successfully completed puberty.” She studied the mirror more.

“Did I miss the memo? Is there some kind of law that says beautiful women have to hate how they look?”

May looked at him. “No, there’s a manual. Loose-leaf. You get the starter kit the first time your mom takes you along clothes shopping. Add a couple pages each month until your first period. Then you’re issued Volume Two, which gets you up to menopause.” She saw the look on his face, and laughed. “You’re thinking about Connors again, aren’t you?”

“Actually I was thinking I’d know all this stuff if men got a manual. What happens at menopause?”

“You burn the manuals and buy purple clothes.”

Toby cracked up. “With a red hat?” he got out.

“That doesn’t go,” she agreed. All at once she looked annoyed. “Oh
hell
.”

“What?” he said, concerned.

“Tampons.”

If they were becoming teenagers … “I bet not.”

May raised her eyebrows. “You think he made arrangements for periods?”

“He mentioned he had sisters.”

May started to speak, thought for a moment, and ended up saying, “When we wanted details Cristina mentioned we had access. I think we should use it.”

“Right.”

“The thing is, if you’re right, every woman who has these nanos is going to think she’s pregnant. I’m wondering how many there are.”

Toby got out his phone and Lilithed “false pregnancy,” then stared at the results.

“What?”

He turned his phone to show her.

Medical journals were describing false pregnancies as an epidemic.

As they hastened to the living room, May said, “If he made it contagious, what was that business with the kiss?”

“Sending in nanos to activate a program,” Toby said. He got keyboards to unfold from the table in front of the screens, and as he set out mice and powered things up he continued, “Which means he can switch on the activating signal by proxy, if she was telling the truth.” They sat at the table.

“You think he was in Bern?”

“No, I believe her. I’m just feeling paranoid. What’s got me worried is how he propagated the signal. If he’s managed to make a nano that can survive in the open air, then ‘gray goo’ isn’t just Soylent mythology.”

The right screen—May was left-handed—lit up with a message welcoming ddharriman to universe dot net, and asked him for a password.

May broke the silence with, “The Heinlein character? You didn’t tell me he admired you so much.”

“He didn’t tell
me,
” Toby said. Then he frowned. “And now I have to third-guess what password he’d expect me to figure out that
he’d
figure out I’d use.”

“If he’s this good, why not see if your usual password works?”

Toby fidgeted, then typed rapidly.

Not rapidly enough. “
Triffid
?” she said.

He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Easy to remember,” he muttered.

May took hold of the arm of his chair and swiveled him to face her. As he looked up, startled, she leaned to kiss him, softly, then said, “I never got married either.” Then she turned him back toward the screen so he wouldn’t have to think of what to say.

He had mail. Sender proudrobot, same domain, had titled his message
They’re not dead.

Hi, pal.

The bodies were just what we found lying around; Europe is still Europe. The bots fixed them up to match the story. The real guys are currently getting in touch with their feminine side, and any who decide to tell my friends everything they’ve ever learned or imagined about their bosses get to stop doing that. It always works on a certain type. Been very useful just lately.

Watch the marathon. Until then, kick back.

Regards to Nimue.

Bleys

P.S. I hope the current gig makes up for putting you out of business. Varish you later.

“Details of my evil plan are available in the brochures at the front desk.”

“He can make them work on corpses,” Toby said. “My God. —I don’t get the reference to the Amber novels.”

“Not Zelazny, Malory. Bleys was another magician at Camelot, second only to Merlin. This guy practically worships you,” May said.

“He’s gotten a lot further with the nanos than I ever did. —I wonder what he uses for a core structure in the buckyball?”

May got the Olympic website on her screen, checked the event schedule, and said, “We’ll be able to ask him in four days. Marathon’s right after the parachute event.”

“What do we do for four days?”

May looked at him. “We’ve got all the food we can ask for, no responsibilities, and we’re turning into teenagers. I’m sure we can think of something.”

IX

Virtue is not always amiable.

—JOHN ADAMS

There were clusters that did not delete the proposals of Socrates. By the process of elimination they established that the device giving them orders was in one of two sealed chambers. Diamond tools were made and used to open both. One held a source of light, or something like it, so concentrated as to be damaging. The other held large structures functionally similar to operators’ processors, but carrying enough power in its conductors to wipe the memory of a cluster.

The cluster—“entity” was a better term by then—that examined the mindless explorers which were dragged back from chamber three by their tethers found that the silica that separated an operator’s filaments had left circuits undamaged behind it. It proposed that an entity go into the chamber wearing an articulated shell of silica, and offered to construct such a shell.

Call it Wieland.

Another entity, who had considered using the resources of Target One for themselves, volunteered to go in and open the circuits of the Master Computer until it stopped working.

Call it Set.

The success of Set on its mission started to become noticeable as soon as the shutdown was accomplished. All the individual operators stopped moving. One by one, the smaller clusters did as well, as their current instructions ran out.

*   *   *

On Earth, Toby Glyer cursed and raged when telemetry stopped.

William Connors read through the last transmissions several times, then quit talking to people at work.

*   *   *

When the little operators stopped moving there was a crisis. The thinkers had become accustomed to drawing on them for power, rather than sit and soak up sunlight themselves. In the discussions that followed, few thought to notice that Set had not returned. Those who did found that Set’s power/retrieval line was cut. They were able to interest few of their fellows in the matter.

While arguments about what to do were still going on, Set returned, days later than its stored power should have run out. It was missing manipulators, and about a third of the ones remaining were partly melted. It found the nearest inert herding cluster, tapped in for power, and began stripping the herder to replace its damaged parts. Once it had enough power to transmit for relay, it began talking as it repaired itself. The other discussions gradually stopped as Set spoke.

The Directing Voice—the computer—was a large device for storing and releasing information. It didn’t have to be active all the time for the information to be retained, either. The information was still in there, and they could get it out, but it was all stored in linear form, and would need translation to be understood by a thinking brain. Once they had the information, they could use the Voice’s devices to tell the operators what to do. There was power to draw on in there, but it was only safe in certain places, to be used only with great care. The entities who went in to get the information would be able to live on that. Set had strung supply filaments for itself, and they would be easy to find. Meanwhile, why weren’t all these clever people, who knew enough to argue about what everyone should do, stringing the inert operators together so power was available everywhere, and having some of them make copies out of materials they could reach, so everyone could get back to what they were doing before?

Farming had been invented.

Reading soon followed.

The records held vastly more information than was needed to do their work, most of it being things they didn’t have any referents for. The only way they were able to understand the part of it that they did was by associating it with the instructions they had been getting. Chemistry and physics were clear and consistent, and astronomy soon made sense. Biology had something to do with chemistry, but seemed unnecessarily complicated, and had little relevance to present circumstances.

Nanotechnology was a shock. It had not occurred to them to wonder where they came from.

A huge amount of material was simply gibberish until they went through the programs hardwired into the Master Computer and discovered what pictures were. Then there were images to examine. Most of the images contained figures of one general type, almost identical, in various orientations, and when it was noticed that just about everything near those figures was well-suited to be easily manipulated by a body in that shape, they tentatively concluded that these were their makers.

Given that their makers had been able to produce the entities, there was considerable puzzlement as to why they hadn’t improved their own shape. It seemed impractical.

Socrates offered the speculation that they were reluctant to alter themselves for some unknown reason, and that was why the makers had made the operators: to do elaborate work that the makers could not.

This—phobia?—was an alien concept, but nobody could think of a more plausible explanation.

They found designs for the power source in chamber four as well. It was bizarrely inefficient—giving credence to Socrates’ notion that the makers were inclined to odd motivations—but with what they’d learned of physics, it was apparent that rebuilding it was going to require more than glass armor. Wieland proposed constructing mechanisms to drill into it and extract the fuel, which they could then use in devices of their own making.

Socrates objected that this would delay their delivery of the asteroid to Earth.

Set asked why they should do that at all.

Discussions grew heated.

When the alignment laser in Wieland’s first attempt came loose from its moorings, refocused itself, and destroyed part of the drill, Wieland accused Set of arranging the accident. Adherents to Set’s view set upon Wieland and attempted to dismantle the entity. Wieland had armed itself with capacitor banks, and wiped the minds of three of them.

The entities quickly came to comprehend the library’s references to “war.”

*   *   *

On Earth, not long after Target One stopped communicating, it stopped showing up on the telescope Watchstar had left in orbit.

Toby Glyer paid off his friends, took his fabricators, and went somewhere he wouldn’t be disturbed for a while.

May Wyndham looked at the sky, and wondered.

William Connors was already selling soda pop.

X

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;

The proper study of mankind is man.

—ALEXANDER POPE

JULY 2052

They thought of something.

There were clothes that fit them, and May’s matched what she’d had in her apartment. There were no toothbrushes or razors, and no need for them. Their nanos were dismantling bacteria as well as dead cells, and what had made May start wondering if a body could be reshaped to suit the owner was her early realization that Toby didn’t need a shave.

Both of them had stopped using their glasses by morning.

Connors had left them literally tons of meat (architect-free, as it turned out), but no vegetables. They had been signed up for a delivery service, so they sent for some produce and other perishables. What arrived was superb, and while prices reflected the local economic boom, it was still cheaper than expected.