Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (65 page)

“Yes, but I started having this problem right after they took us into custody on the pod station. I recall trying to go to sleep in my cell that first night, with thoughts churning in my mind, but my brain wouldn’t work, at least not completely. I sensed things slipping away.”

“I’m no doctor, but it sounds stress-induced,” Noah said.

“We sure have a lot of that,” Anton said.

A guard pushed them apart with an electronic prod and shouting threats.

All of the prisoners were loaded on a groundbus, and whisked away to a walled compound just outside the industrial metropolis of Rainbow City. Noah recognized the area. He’d been there many times, under better circumstances. As the gates opened and the bus surged through, he saw a high, round tower ahead, which he knew to be one of the nehrcom transmitting stations for sending high-speed messages across the galaxy.

The work crew spent the rest of the morning performing landscape work and spraying poisons outside the transmitting station. Supposedly, this was to keep insects, small animals and plants away from the highly sensitive facility, which required an almost antiseptic environment. Noah had heard about this procedure, and had always wondered if it was one of many ruses employed by Jacopo Nehr to throw anyone off track who might be trying to figure his transceiver out.

As Noah sprayed a canopa oak, he forgot where he was for a moment and smiled at Jacopo’s eccentricities. Now the famous inventor was Supreme General of all Merchant Prince Armed Forces. Noah wondered how he was doing at that, and which planet he had ended up on when the podships stopped.

Preoccupied, Noah didn’t notice a black robot watching him intensely. The robot moved closer…

* * * * *

Moments before, Jimu had come out of the nehrcom building, having sent a cross-space message on behalf of the Red Berets. He had no idea what the message was, only that it was high priority. By definition, anything sent by this means fell into that category. Afterward, he paused to watch the work crew around the building.

It was almost midday, with low gray clouds that threatened to dump their moisture on the land.

Thinking he saw a familiar face in the crew of prisoners, Jimu had paused to search his internal data banks. Now he brought up the information: Noah Watanabe, along with a summary of his biography and the charges against him.

The blond, mustachioed man working near him also looked familiar. Moments later, Jimu had his name, Anton Glavine, and all of the particulars on him, including his parentage: Doge Lorenzo del Velli and Francella Watanabe.

Concerned about finding such high-security prisoners on the work crew, Jimu did rapid scans on the others. None of them were anywhere near the caliber of these two.

The robot was deeply concerned. This was important work at the nehrcom station, but he didn’t think that such high-priority prisoners should be included in the assignment. It must be some sort of a mistake.

He activated weapons systems on his torso, and took custody of the two men. “You will come with me,” he said, in an officious tone.

Three guards approached, weapons drawn. Jimu had the prisoners behind him inside a crackling energy field, a small electronic containment area.

As he argued with the guards, Jimu opened a comlink to his superior officer in the Red Berets, and notified her of what he had discovered. “I thought it best to protect the prisoners, and then ask for instructions,” he reported.

While the dedicated, loyal robot awaited further instructions, more guards appeared and surrounded him. None of them were robots, and he knew he had the weapons systems to blast through if necessary. But he maintained his mechanical composure. A standoff.

Twenty minutes passed.

Finally, Jimu’s superior officer in the Red Berets appeared, a self-important woman named Meg Kwaid. She marched up to him sternly, followed by half a dozen uniformed soldiers. A tall woman with curly black hair, she smiled and said, “That was quick thinking, Jimu. This will look good in your personnel file.”

She ordered Jimu to release the two prisoners, and when he did, she assumed custody over them. “This pair is going back to prison,” Kwaid said.

Just before departing, she took a third man into custody … the work crew boss who had removed them from the prison in the first place.

“No one told me they were high-value prisoners,” the man protested. “I was only ordered to get the work done, and I didn’t have the manpower.”

His protests were to no avail. The man was put in a cell just down the corridor from Noah Watanabe.

Jimu returned to his own assignment, with his career path enhanced.

* * * * *

Among the Red Berets, Jimu’s machines were unusual: they were “breeding machines” that could locate the necessary raw materials and construct replicas of themselves. Since joining the force, Jimu had been supervising the construction of additional fighting units, more than quadrupling the number of machines he originally brought with him from the Inn of the White Sun. All of Jimu’s machines serviced themselves, and made their own energy pellets from raw materials, including carbon and mineral deposits.

Now, with the high demand for laborers, he was ordered to increase his production rate, adding a new type of machine—a worker-variant—to the fighting units he had been manufacturing. As with everything he did, Jimu completed this assignment with utmost efficiency. In short order, he had full production lines operational, producing both types of machines.

For this, and for his quick thinking in the Watanabe and Glavine extractions, he was promoted to a fourth-level Red Beret. This gave him access to more of the secret rituals, language, and symbols of the military society. Jimu just memorized them; he didn’t really understand why people were so fascinated with such matters.

But Jimu had a continuing problem.

The sentient machines under his command were being mistreated, jeered at and kicked by many of the Red Beret soldiers, especially whenever the Human men drank. Too often, alcohol was thrown at the robots to see if they would short out—a bitter, sticky drink called nopal that the men favored.

Through it all, the machines still remained loyal to their Human masters, and so did Jimu. Their internal programming did not permit them to do otherwise, and they had fail-safe mechanisms to make sure nothing went wrong.

Chapter Ten

What is the highest life form?

What is the lowest?

The answers defy analysis.

—Tulyan Wisdom

In his cell one evening, surrounded by the orange glow of a pattern-changing containment field, Noah had plenty of time to think. The guards had modified the electronic field around him. Instead of traditional bars, now triangles, squares, and other geometric shapes glimmered and danced around him.

In them, he thought he saw images of Humans being blasted away or maimed, with their arms and legs flying off. Since he had performed amazing mental feats himself, it occurred to him that he might be able to focus and catch what he thought were subliminal messages in the containment field, cruel tricks employed by his captors. Noah tried this for a while, but found himself unable to do so.

His thoughts drifted to what kept him busy most of the time when he was alone, envisioning ways he might escape from this dismal cell in Max One. Intermittently he had been able to accomplish this, but only in his mind, where he took fantastic but unpredictable space journeys. And always when he returned from those sojourns into the realm of Timeweb, he was faced with a stark reality, the imprisonment of his body.

As before, the space journeys were like timetrances, and he looked forward to them. They were increasingly unpredictable, though, in that he could never predetermine how long he would remain in the alternate dimension. Sometimes, after only a few moments of mental escape, he felt himself kicked out, dumped back into his cold cell.

One morning Noah lay on his bunk, staring at the ceiling. A spider was working up there, using its legs to spin an elaborate, wheel-shaped web to trap insects. The spider went down the web, working for several moments with one pair of legs, then alternating with others. Then it went back up.

From somewhere, Noah heard a terrible scream. His heart dropped. He hoped it was not Anton. He also prayed that the injury was not too severe. But the scream told him otherwise.

As far as Noah was concerned, the Doge was the worst of all men, not only for his cruelties to prisoners, but for the damage his Merchant Prince Alliance inflicted upon the environment. The ecology of each planet—like the cellular integrity of each prisoner—was a living thing, deserving of respect and care.

Noah became aware of the spider again. It had lowered itself on its drag line and was suspended just overhead, staring at Noah with multi-faceted eyes. Noah saw intelligence there, and perhaps more.

This tiny creature seemed, in many respects, superior to a Human being.

Abruptly, the spider rose on its line and returned to its web. Noah found himself struck by the perfection of the gossamer structure, so uniquely beautiful and astounding in the way it had been spun. He found his mind expanding on its own, spinning into the cosmos and onto the faintly green cosmic webbing that connected the entire galaxy. As if he were a podship himself, he sped along one strand and then another, changing directions rapidly, vaulting himself out into the far, dark reaches of space.

He saw a podship and caught up with it, but he could not gain control of it. He was, however, able to seep inside, and entered the central sectoid chamber. There, he saw a tiny Parvii pilot controlling the creature from a perch on the forward wall of the chamber.

Tesh!
he thought, feeling a rush of excitement.

She looked to one side, and then to another, as if sensing his presence.

Noah noticed something different this time, compared with prior occasions when he had journeyed around the cosmos. A faint mist formed where he was, and it took the barely discernible shape of his own body, dressed in the very clothing he had on now. Could she see this? Was it really occurring, or was it only in his imagination?

Drifting closer to her, he dwarfed her with his presence. And he whispered to her, but to his own ears the words were ever so faint, as if coming from far across the cosmos. “I’ve missed you,” he said. “Can you hear me? I’ll tell you where I am.”

No reaction.

He said it again louder, and this time he added, “Have you been thinking about me, too?”

She looked to each side again, and then turned her entire body and looked around the sectoid chamber.

“You heard me, didn’t you?” he said.

A perplexed expression came over her. She looked toward him, but in an unfocused way, as if peering beyond him.

To check her, Noah moved around the chamber, and after a moment’s delay each time, her gaze followed his movements. “What do you see?” he asked.

No reply. Obviously, she could not make out the words, and he didn’t think she could discern his ghostly mist, either. But she seemed to be sensing something. How far did it go?

On impulse, he floated to her side. Since his physical form (as he saw it) was much larger than hers, and he wanted to kiss her, he brought his mouth as close to hers as he could and let his lips touch hers. Or seem to.

Instantly, she jerked her head back, then brought a hand to her mouth.

“Who’s there?” she demanded.

He kissed her again in the mismatched way, like a hippophant kissing a tiny bird. This time she didn’t pull her head back, but left it in position, and even moved toward Noah just a little, as if cooperating in the cosmic contact.

“Noah?” she said as they separated. “Is that you?”

In response, he attempted to kiss her again, but this time she showed no reaction at all. He tried again, but still she didn’t respond. “Tesh?” he said. “Did you feel that?”

Abruptly she turned away, and resumed her attention to her piloting task. “I’m going crazy,” she said. “That wasn’t Noah. It couldn’t be.”

“But it is me!” he shouted. Now he didn’t hear the words at all, not even the faintest sound. And looking down at his misty form, he saw that it was fading, disappearing entirely.

In a fraction of a second, Noah found himself back in the prison cell, wondering what had just occurred.

Chapter Eleven

Never let down your guard, especially in time of war.

—Mutati Saying

The violence had been totally unexpected.

On the grounds of the Bastion at Dij, the Emir Hari’Adab strolled along a flower-lined meadow path, skirting a grove of towering trees. A large white bird flew beside him, alternately soaring upward into the cerulean sky and then back down again, keeping pace with him.

But it was not really a bird. It was a shapeshifter, a female aeromutati with whom he had a special relationship. For the moment, she left him to his troubled thoughts.

In contrast, Hari’Adab was a shapeshifter who moved along the ground, a terramutati like his father the Zultan. As a boy growing up on Paradij, he had always intended to do what was expected of him. Since Zultan Abal Meshdi and Hari’s late mother, Queen Essina, had little time for him, the boy had been raised by tutors, always taught the proper way of doing things. In particular, he was taught to show respect for his elders and for the rules of Mutati society that had been laid down by the wise zultans and emirs of countless generations.

In Mutati society, a man kept his word, and that imperative started at an early age, as soon as he could speak and understand the rule of law, and the unwritten code of honor that was passed on from generation to generation by word of mouth. By those standards he had pledged to uphold important traditions, the threads that held together the powerful social fabric of his people.

Throughout his young but eventful life, though, Hari had expressed more than his share of defiance, bordering on rebelliousness. He had steadfastly refused to use an Adurian gyro that his father gave to him, a foreign-made mechanical device that was supposed to help him make better decisions. In the past couple of years it had become very popular in Mutati society, particularly among the young, but Hari didn’t trust the Adurians or their inventions. That race, from far across the galaxy and supposedly allied with the Mutatis, had insinuated themselves on Mutati society in a short period of time, bringing in their loud music, garish clothing, noisy groundjets, and a whole host of other products.