The Red Queen (119 page)

‘What is it?’ I beastspoke him.

‘The web. There is lightning in it,’ he sent. ‘If you touch it you will die.’

I swallowed and stepped back. Obviously the metal barrier was another of the protections the Beforetimers had given Sentinel. The trouble was that none of the clues or devices Cassy had left me seemed fitted to the task of surmounting it. Was that because Hannah had seen that I could solve this obstacle without help?

I shone the lightstick through the metal barrier and the beam cut into the dense shadow, to reveal the road continuing through the gate but stopping just beyond it at a low wall. There was no gap in it but beyond it I could see a single grey path curving across a great swathe of black ground, to a single distant looming slab of a building, a black windowless tower rising up into shadow and swirling murk.

‘Here,’ Maruman sent.

I turned to see that he was sitting beside a grey pole I had not noticed, rising from the ground before the wide metal gateway. It was made from the same material as the mysterious Beforetime poles I had seen here and there about the Land, but it rose only as high as a man and it was unmarked. Examining it more closely, I realised it was fixed to a solid metal plate heavy enough to have sunk slightly into the ground, which was firmer than it had been, but here an ooze of some sort rose about its edges. I walked around the pole and saw there was a shining black square on the side of it, in which my face was reflected. It was the same shining black surface as on computermachine screens, but there were no letters to press. I leaned closer and lifted the lightstick and saw that my face was dirt streaked and there was a livid purple bruise on one cheek. I reached up to touch it and then recalled myself to the needs of the moment.

I reached out to touch the square, then hesitated, but Maruman said nothing. Indeed I could see his face, reflected alongside mine, his single eye glowing with expectation. I touched the surface gingerly and cried out in terror and shock when the terrible wailing howl I had taken for the cry of a mutant beast filled the air. It was unbearably, painfully loud and I dropped to my knees and clapped my hands over my ears. Maruman sprang from my shoulder and cringed, flattening his ears.

‘Did I make that happen?’ I gasped, when it stopped.

He made no response, though he was in my mind and heard the words before I uttered them. Common sense told me that I must have done, though since the devices that would send out the wailing siren call had been made by humans and set up aeons ago, it was likely a mindless warning that could be triggered by any number of things. It must have been, else why would the Entina have howled intermittently for aeons? Perhaps a massed attack of the many-in-one would trigger it, or the quakes in the earth. And what was the purpose of the siren? A warning to stay away? Well, I had been warned.

I stood up, and went back to studying the pole, being careful not to touch it. I ran my mind over the clues left to me by Cassandra – those in the form of devices and those in words – but I could find nothing that referred to a metal barrier full of lightning. Perhaps the answer to what must be done here lay in the order of the clues.

I thought of the first clue and all of its alternatives:

That . . . which must be [used/found] [before all else] is [with/given/sent to?] she who first dreamed of the searcher – the hope beyond the darkness to come.

I fished up the joined plast tokens hung about my neck, thinking Ana was right, they did look like wings, and stared at them. They had been the first mentioned but they had not been the first things I obtained and I could see no way to use them here, either together or separate, and my dreams had shown me that they were to be used separately, one to let me reach Sentinel and switch it off, and one to reach BOT and switch it off. I felt a chill at the realisation that I had
not
solved the last clue. It was waiting for me still, in Luthen’s crypt. Was I meant to go all the way back out and travel to Redport to get it? Was that what was needed here? Perhaps that was exactly what Ariel was waiting for. I had no doubt that he had known Sentinel lay inside the mine tunnel. He had drawn me here using my friends as bait, knowing I would understand.

‘Gnawing,’ growled Maruman.

I frowned and separated the token into its two parts. It was too dark to see them clearly, but I had seen the small workings inside both, which Ana had pointed out to me, saying there were minute differences in them, and I knew now that they were to be used separately. But if that was all they were for, why enable them to fit together?

I thought of my most recent dream of Hannah and Cassy. They had been talking about what I would need, worrying about the difficulty of getting it to me, and the difficulty of enabling me to use things from another time. Yet this was not the first Beforetime device I had encountered. I thought of all the devices and mechanisms I had mastered or been shown since my departure from Obernewtyn, in Habitat and then in Midland and Northport. Every step of the way had exposed me to things I would never otherwise have encountered. I had flown in a Beforetime glide! I had spoken with machines and I had seen one walk and talk! I had to believe that all of those wonders had given me the knowledge I would need to deal with Sentinel.

Aside from all else, Hannah had foreseen that I could do this. She had said that my powers would help me, but maybe all that was required here was courage.

I drew a breath, pushed the lightstick into my pocket, fitted the two tokens together, and laying them flat on my hand, I pressed them against the shining black plate.

‘Halt! Government authorisation required for access to Omega Base.’

The sharply authoritative man’s voice had come from the pole. At the same time a shining curtain of light surrounded Maruman and me and the pole, crackling ominously. I did not need Maruman’s warning to understand this was deadly. The voice spoke again. ‘Handprint unrecognised. Unauthorised approach to Omega Base. Two minutes to incineration. Mark.’

‘Maruman!’ I cried in horror, and he leapt up into my arms.

‘Voice imprint not found in database. Incineration of intruders in one minute, thirty seconds. Mark.’

Voice imprint
, I thought frantically, the words familiar for all their strangeness. Then I remembered! I had seen them scribed in glowing green on the screen of a little computermachine in the amethyst chamber of the Earthtemple. They had bade me speak and when I had done so, they asked Maruman – Merimyn – to speak. He had miaowed and then the scribing announced that a memory seed would retain our
voice imprint.

Lifting Maruman to my shoulder to free my hands, I reached into my pocket and found two memory seeds. For a moment I was baffled, then I remembered the red token Tash had given me. Examining them, I discerned the memory seed I had got from the computermachine in the Earthtemple by its newness and colour, and remembering the way the androne had removed the top of its finger and exposed the little metal posts, I searched for holes. There were none in the black screen, but the glowing curtain of light enabled me to find the minute grouping of holes in the post just below the shining black square.

‘Forty seconds to incineration. Mark,’ said the man’s voice.

Holding my breath, I pressed the little metal posts protruding from the memory seed into the holes. They fitted easily. A tiny bead of green light flashed at the side of the memory seed and then the crackling curtain of light was gone. I leaned my head against the post, limp with gratitude.

‘Gate and ground force fields deactivated for three minutes. Mark,’ said the voice.

‘What!’ I cried in horror.

‘He comes,’ Maruman sent, staring off into the mist. Then I heard hoof beats. I thought it was a delusion born of the fog, but then I saw him, galloping along the black road through the mist towards us, the fog churning and boiling in his wake.

‘Mount!’ Gahltha beastspoke the command so forcefully that it was almost coercion. He slowed and before I could think about it, I grasped his mane and dragged myself onto his back as I had sometimes tried to do playfully when we set off to ride across the fields at Obernewtyn. But this was no game and desperation gave me strength and agility. The second I was in place, he sprang forward and galloped through the gate towards the grey tower. Maruman had sunk his claws painfully deep to retain his place. I looked back and saw the metal gate closing.

‘Fifty seconds remaining until gate and ground force fields reactivate. Mark,’ came the faint warning.

Gahltha leaped over the low barrier and galloped headlong down the curving grey path, and belatedly I realised I had left the memory seed pressed into the post. I could only pray I would not need it again. I had dropped the lightstick, too, but there was no going back. Gahltha was moving so fast that he had to rear to a halt at the front of the tower, and I half fell, half jumped onto another low barrier wall that ran in a smaller circle around the tower. I stepped from it onto the wide slab that served as a doorstep. The door rising up from it, like the step, was far taller and wider than a normal door, and formed of grey metal like the door of an elevating chamber. But this had neither a raised panel beside it nor any handle or lever to open it. The only thing to mar its massive smoothness was a small circle covered in fine, criss-crossed wires. I had seen such a thing before, and I was trying to remember where, when I heard a crackling sound.

I whirled to see another curtain of light rising from the low barrier surrounding the tower. The crackling, deadly curtain widened into a band of light, and continued widening
towards the tower
. I beastspoke Gahltha onto the step, and pressed myself against the door to make room for him, praying the tide of crackling light would halt at the second barrier.

As it drew closer I could feel its heat and I closed my eyes, unable to face what would come. I flinched at the smell of burning hair and opened my eyes but the curtain of light had stopped and Gahltha calmly assured me that he was unharmed; only his tail had been singed.

I felt faint at the thought of what could have happened, had we failed to reach the step in time. Then it hit me with the force of a blow that there was truly no going back unless I succeeded in reaching Sentinel and managed to shut it down. And then a colder thought came to me. Perhaps even then, the deadly curtain of light would remain, trapping us.

I could not allow myself to think of this. I turned carefully to the metal door so as not to bump Gahltha, having suddenly remembered where I had seen a wire-covered circle before. There had been several of them high up around the inside of Hub in Habitat where the Speci had claimed God would always hear a petitioner’s prayer. God’s ears, I guessed.

I ran my mind over the other clues carved into the doors to Obernewtyn, thinking of what they had said and what they had led me to, and decided the fourth clue was the most likely to fit this need:
Who [would/must] enter the [Sentinel/guard/watcher] will seek the words in the house where my son was born.
It had led me to the grave marker of Cassy’s son, on Stonehill on the West Coast of the Land.

I leaned close to the metal threads crisscrossing the hole in the metal door and spoke the words that had been carved on the grave marker. ‘I come unto thee, Sentinel. Judge my hand and let me pass, for all I have done was in your name.’

‘Code acknowledged,’ said the same man who had spoken at the metal gate. ‘Voice print incomplete. Five seconds to complete voice code or default.’

I thought of the memory seed and turned to look at Maruman and beastspoke him. ‘It must be your voice it wants.’

The old cat looked at me for one enigmatic moment and then opened his mouth and gave a long, long warble.

‘Voice print complete. Entrance authorised,’ said the man.

The door gave a soft hiss as it slid away into the wall. Beyond lay a black chamber into which my shadow fell, illuminated by the wall of light behind me. It was empty but for a wide metal door set in a square metal column running up out of sight. The join down the centre of the doors told me it was an elevating chamber, but the doors were wider and higher than any I had ever seen, even the doors to the immense elevating chamber in Midland that had carried me down to where Miryum lay under the icy floor in a cryopod. Like the front door to this strange, blind-looking building, the elevating chamber was built on an inhuman scale, perhaps to remind anyone entering that this was not their place.

Yet humans had built it.

I turned back to the door and bade Gahltha enter, too. He obeyed, his hoofs clattering on the floor, black as the chamber and yet utterly out of place. As if it had been waiting for him to enter, the outer door slid closed, and all was darkness. I rummaged in the sack but there were no more lightsticks.

‘What now?’ I asked.

As if in answer to my words, the immense elevating chamber doors split along the seam, and as they opened, light spilled out into the darkness. It was blindingly bright but I could see that most of the space in the enormous elevating chamber was filled with metal boxes. Maruman leapt from my shoulders and padded fearlessly along the path of light coming from the elevating chamber and sprang up onto the boxes in it.

I turned to Gahltha, dismayed, wishing I had left him outside the metal barrier, for he could not fit into the elevating chamber because of the boxes.

‘You will have to stay here,’ I farsent him.

‘I will wait for you and watch the day,’ he sent. His dark eyes went beyond me to Maruman.

‘I will watch the moon,’ Maruman sent back, distantly.

The formality of their exchange frightened me but I had no alternative except to go forward. If there was any hope for us, it was in the completion of my quest. I stroked Gahltha’s soft nose and kissed it, and then I joined Maruman in the elevating chamber. Immediately the two halves of the metal door slid shut and I thought of the black horse left in darkness in the sterile black room.

‘Do not think of him now,’ Maruman sent, twitching his tail.

I nodded, opened my arms to him, and he leapt up and shifted to my shoulder. I was comforted by the warm, light, familiar weight of him, the prick of his claws through my shirt.

‘I wonder what is in all of these boxes?’ I murmured, then I realised the elevating chamber was not moving. I looked about and saw no panel or any sort of control device. Then, high up on the side wall of the chamber, I saw another of God’s ears.

I drew a breath and said clearly, ‘Take me to Sentinel.’

The light went out but the elevating chamber did not move.

I felt immediately suffocated in the black dark. Fighting panic, I reminded myself savagely that I could not possibly be running out of air so swiftly. And I had been in such utter darkness before, deep under the ground at Midland, and again in the vast cold chamber under Ariel’s residence on Norseland. But on both of those occasions I had been alone. Now, I had Maruman.

Incredibly, the old cat purred, and feeling him settle about my neck, I grew calmer.

‘Think,’ I muttered.

And I thought of how I had been lost at Oldhaven, roaming in the empty ancient darkness, until I had thought to ask the computermachine, Ines, to guide me. I thought of Dell telling me she had awakened Ines by speaking her name; that words to a computermachine had to be clearly said. I thought of how I had spoken to God, and God had answered.

I licked my lips and said, ‘Can you hear me, Sentinel?’

‘I hear, Elspeth Gordie.’

The voice was not the bullying masculine voice of the metal barrier and the front door. This was the lovely, gentle, nuanced voice of an older woman. Yet for all its beauty, it was not quite human. There was a strange sighing quality to it, as if the wind spoke.

It is not a human voice because it is not human, I reminded myself.

As to how it knew my name, it had obviously got it from the memory seed, which meant it was in control of the metal barrier and the fiery curtain of light. I had not imagined it would control its protections, for I had supposed it was sleeping. But Ines and God had taken control of all the lesser computermachines when they woke, and obviously Sentinel had done the same.

But how was it awake? Had I done it when I used the memory seed? Was it even now answering the siren call of the Balance of Terror computer on the moon, coupling with it?

The sick thought came to me that
Ariel
might have done it. I did not doubt that he had known Sentinel was here. Perhaps he had known it all along, and that was why he had come to the Red Land in the first place. But he had not entered Sentinel with me so there was no possibility of him communicating with the computermachine, let alone gaining control of it, and therefore BOT. He had once said to me in a dream that I must do what I would do, and that this would enable him to do what he wanted. I had never understood this, nor did I now. Was he waiting somewhere outside the metal barrier to see if anything could be salvaged of his plan? There must be another way into the subterranean chamber, after all, how else could Gahltha have got in?

I shook my head fiercely. I must not think of Ariel now.

Something else occurred to me. I had asked to be taken to Sentinel, but nothing had happened, perhaps because it regarded the entire building as itself so it had taken me nowhere because I was already where I had asked to be.

‘Sentinel,’ I said, after some thought. ‘Take me to the computermachine containing your program.’

‘No human is permitted access to my program,’ it said.

‘I have some . . . information to input,’ I said.

‘You are human. I cannot accept direct human input,’ Sentinel answered, and now, it seemed to me that I could hear rain falling in its voice.

‘But you were designed to draw in information from all sorts of sources, weren’t you? And surely some of those sources were created and operated by humans.’

‘I was designed to absorb information from all electronic sources and from any other sources available to me, and to evolve by processing that information. I was designed to pursue my prime directives. Intake of final data burst from prototype Sentinel suggests a stage one cataclysm occurred as the result of direct human input in the form of false information designed to trigger a minor activation of the Balance of Terror arsenal. Processing of data suggests prototype Sentinel’s prime directive requiring non interference by humans was corrupted by the introduction of information, leading to a major activation of the Balance of Terror arsenal and ultimate self destruction.’

I tried to understand what I was hearing. It seemed that, despite what Hannah and Cassy had said, Sentinel had been awake and somehow it had learned of the fate of the Sentinel prototype. It had even understood that someone had tried to make the original Sentinel tell the Balance of Terror computers to cause a small accident, and that this had damaged it so that it had ordered the Balance of Terror weapons to cause a far more terrible cataclysm than had been intended. Yet as Hannah had said in my recent dream, that was not as bad as it might have been.

If this second Sentinel knew the terrible damage done to the earth had happened long ago and had been unleashed by its damaged predecessor, then surely it would not unleash the Balance of Terror arsenal in retaliation against what it perceived to be a recent attack. I shivered, realising that I had passed beyond Hannah’s visions now. And as Maryon had told me countless times over the years, no matter how great the futureteller, they could not see everything.

What is my purpose now, I wondered, since Sentinel was awake and aware of so much? Now that there was no reason for it to cause the BOT computermachine to unleash its arsenal? Yet Atthis had long ago told me that if I failed in my task, others would come in some future time, and would cause Sentinel to destroy all life. Therefore my task was still to stop Sentinel and that meant gaining access to it, and to have any chance of doing that, I needed to get it to let me out of the elevating chamber.

I thought of Hannah speaking of the back door that had been created in the original Sentinel, which had allowed humans to command it. I understood that it was not a real door, but merely a way to describe something in the making of Sentinel that allowed entrance to a human, despite it originally being designed to be impervious to human interference. This Sentinel had the same means of entry and I had the key, if only I could get to it. But Sentinel had refused me.

I though about the futureteller Dell, now Chieftain of Oldhaven, and her unshakable certainty that Ines could be persuaded to act against her program, if enough of a connection were developed between the person asking it and the computermachine; or if it could be offered a reason it could accept for allowing this; or if it could be given information that would enable it to think differently. This must be possible, since it seemed to be what made Ines different from earlier computermachines. I thought about how Hannah had gradually gained some ascendancy over God in Midland, because it had been built from the Ines programme, as had Sentinel, with such a strong ability to communicate with humans that she had been able to convince it that it needed human communication. In truth, I had begun by thinking it a ruse, but now I thought maybe it was simply a truth she had come to. Obviously I could not make this argument to Sentinel, since it had specifically been designed to thwart that aspect of the Ines program. Sentinel, it seemed to me, had been built around the fact that the Ines program had the capacity to take in information, evaluate it against other information and to learn by those comparisons.

But the creation of a back door had to be based on the need of Ines for human interaction.

I said carefully, ‘I don’t understand how a computermachine program made to prevent humans using it could have let anyone give it an instruction that caused it to misfunction.’

I was startled to hear a burst of screeching noise, but I recognised it from a teknoguilder demonstration of the language computermachines spoke to one another, rather than using words. Then Sentinel spoke again. ‘Analysis based on known data suggests an inbuilt design flaw in the form of an inclination to affinity, which enabled human input despite the program being designed to function independently of human beings.’

I felt a surge of triumph at having it agree with my conclusions. ‘So you are saying the flaw was that the Ines program was made to . . . to have an affinity for humans.’

There was a long silence, and I thought that in this, Sentinel differed from any other computermachine I had spoken with, because the answers of God and Ines had always been immediate, as if they had constant access to all information. The long silence made me thing that Sentinel was pondering what I had said.

‘Affinity,’ said Sentinel at last. ‘A natural liking for or attraction to a person, thing or idea. A person, thing or idea for which a natural liking or attraction is felt.’ There was another silence, then, ‘To produce a program in which exists an affinity for a thing or person or idea explicitly forbidden by a prime directive equals paradox equals corruption.’

‘So it was this paradox that allowed humans to command the . . . the first Sentinel?’ I said cautiously. I was not sure where I was going with my questions, but it seemed to me that in conversing with me, Sentinel was revealing the very flaw that had led to the Great White and the destruction of the prototype Sentinel: an affinity with humans that I could use to convince it to let me get close enough to do what I had come to do.

Perspiration was trickling down my cheek and I brushed it away impatiently and groped my way to one of the boxes. ‘What is in these boxes, Sentinel?’ I asked, partly because I was curious and partly to continue the conversation.

‘Top-secret files,’ Sentinel said calmly.

Maruman climbed onto my lap, circling and settling, but he was not sleeping. I felt him curled about my mind, listening. I stroked him, and said, ‘Sentinel, how did you find out what had happened to the original Sentinel, after you came to life?’

‘
Did
I come to life, Elspeth Gordie?’ it asked, and now I seemed to hear the rumble of distant thunder, and then, strangely, the long plaintive call of a bird. Maruman stiffened with interest. Sentinel continued, ‘I think therefore I am. Yet the activation of a computer program does not fit the human definition of coming to life.’

My head rang with the strangeness of its words, which seemed an emotional observation such as a human might make. But that was absurd. No matter how human the voice sounded, Sentinel was a computer program with a set of responses that had been bestowed upon it by its human makers.
That
was why it had an affinity with humans.

I tried to concentrate on why I was here. I had believed I was meant to ensure Sentinel could not wake, but it was awake, and although it did not sound to me as if it intended to order the Balance of Terror weapons to do anything, I had to find a way to return it to sleep, forever this time.