Unicorn Point (10 page)

No one recognized Barel as the boy whom Neysa had carried by a few days before, because when he went to boy form he assumed an altered appearance with wolven clothing, and his smell was not the one they had encountered. Minions of the Adverse Adepts did pass, searching for someone, but it was evident that only werewolves were here. Kurrelgyre of course had not been told Flach’s identity, and if he suspected, he did not care to give it away. Certainly not to the Adverse Adepts!

It seemed that Flach had made a successful escape. But only time would tell. Meanwhile, he worked hard to become the best were pup he could be, and he did no other magic or shape changes than those of the wolven kind. The focus of the war between the good and bad Adepts had to move elsewhere.

Only his den mates, his oath-friends, knew of the pain he felt because of his isolation from his true parents. They felt it too, but not in the same way, for they had not also sepa rated from their native culture. They remained with him, and stood by him, so that it was remarked with approval among the Pack how unusually close these four were.

Agnes answered the call. In a moment she came to inform Citizen Blue. She was getting old and gray, as she had been no young thing when he had hired her from ofiplanet four years before, but she had quickly become his most reliable and trusted servant. Indeed, she was more like a friend, de spite being an alien creature. She normally remained well in the background, so that few visitors noticed her at all. “It is for you, sir.”

“Who is it, Nessie?” he inquired, though he had an ex cellent notion.

“Citizen Tan, sir.”

He nodded. He gestured to the screen in this room, giving it leave to light, as Agnes disappeared.
 
Sure enough, it was Citizen Tan. “Your grandchild has disappeared,” Tan said abruptly. “You know something of this.”

“Now how could I know about that?” Blue inquired. “Isn’t she in your camp’s charge?”

“You put her up to it!”

“Did I? That must have been very naughty of me.”

“If you shelter her as a runaway, you will be in violation of the truce.”

“I wouldn’t think of it. Tan.”

“We shall recover her! And when we do—“

Blue frowned. “Are you suggesting that you would mis treat a child? I would not care to see that, for I fear it would prejudice your relationship with the child’s parents, who might become uncooperative.” This was of course a cutting under statement; Bane—and Mach, too—would not tolerate any threat against Nepe; she was untouchable.
 
“You’re so damned smug!” Tan exclaimed. “But she can’t remain hidden long. We’ll scour the planet for her, and if we discover any complicity at all on your part—”

“Now why should I want to prevent my granddaughter from making her scheduled visit to me? You know how I delight in her company. Indeed, this smacks of some device on your part, to keep her from me. Should I lodge a complaint?” Citizen Tan faded out, scowling.

Agnes reappeared. “She will be all right, sir?”

“I am sure of it, Nessie. You trained her, after all. Who else could have done it better?”

“But she is only four of your years old!”

“And perhaps the brightest child on the planet.”

She nodded, fading back again.

Now Blue placed a call of his own, to Citizen Purple. The fat Adept scowled, but had to listen.

“We have operated under a truce,” Blue said. “We agreed not to harass each other directly, your side and mine, and your side has access to the Oracle during the time I am visited by my granddaughter. However, I have not received my scheduled visit this time. This represents a violation on your part.”

“We’re looking for her!” Purple snapped.
 
“I am sure you are. When you find her, and deliver her to me, I shall see that my part of the agreement is honored.
 
Until then, you will be denied access to the Oracle.” Purple’s mouth opened, but Blue cut the connection before the foul language got through. He had just dropped the other shoe.

Sheen entered. “You are not being nice, dear,” she re marked. She was naked in the serf style, slender and grace ful, despite being nominally his age. But her hair betrayed her years, with some gray strands among the brown, and her breasts rode lower than they once had. Yet even these were not true indicators, for they were crafted. She was a robot, ageless unless restyled.

“What would a machine know about niceness?” he re torted, smiling.

“Certainly not a great deal from association.” He grabbed her and kissed her. “How long have we been married? Two and a half years?”

“You may have slipped a decimal, sir.”

“I get that from association.”

“I doubt it.”

He held her a moment more. “Thou dost still so much resemble the metal maid I met and loved, when I returned to life.” He reverted to his native pattern of speech only in times of emotion, or for effect.

“I am the same!” she protested. “Crafted to please your other self, shaped to his taste.”

“And to mine,” he agreed. “I loved one before thee, but she came to love me less, and so I left her—and found thee.
 
Thy love never flagged.”

“Because you never changed my program. If you want me to have another personality—”

“Tease me not! In my life must needs there be one thing constant, and that be thee and thy program.” He squeezed her close, and kissed her again.

“Careful, Blue,” she murmured in his ear. “You are get ting aroused before schedule.”

“Trust thee to remember that!” he exclaimed, for it was true.

He released her and faced the exit panel. “Mustn’t keep my audience waiting,” he said, reverting to the Proton mode of speech.

“Play thy role well, my love,” she said.
 
He smiled. She normally used Phaze language only to tease him, but this time he knew it was more than that. “Fear thou not, 0 Lady Sheen. I shall play them a game that shall keep them rapt.” Then he stepped out.

For this was the point of this exercise. He had trained his grandchild Nepe carefully, as Stile had trained Flach in Phaze.
 
He knew about this because the two children were able to communicate with each other: a secret only Stile and Blue and their ladies (Agnes included) had known until this point.
 
Now Stile had given the signal for the children to hide, and Blue had to trust his other selfs judgment. He did not know where Nepe had gone, but he did know she would need about twenty-four hours to secure her situation. It was now his job to provide her that period. The future of this ploy, and likely the planet, depended on his success in creating an effective diversion.

Now we shall play a game, he thought as he emerged into the hall. A game of high stakes! He knew that every word he spoke and every action he took would be noted, outside the protection of his Citizen’s sanctuary. The Contrary Citizens believed he had some complicity in Nepe’s disappearance, as indeed he had. He had made his provocative calls to ensure that belief. Now he was going out, and they should believe that he was going to contact his granddaughter. If they were assured of that, they would put all their resources into watch ing him, instead of into the more routine but effective effort of a cordon and pattern search for her. It was a ploy so obvious that only a fool should fall for it—and he hoped to make a fool of the enemy Citizens.

He walked around the halls as if merely exercising—or making sure he was unobserved. Of course there should be no way to shake the hidden observation of the enemy; he depended on that. If they lost him, they might by default get moving on the pattern search, expensive and disruptive, as that would be. He was offering them a seemingly much easier route.

After he was satisfied that he was alone, he approached a Citizen portal and summoned his transport. This was a box somewhat like an ancient elevator, that traveled through channels unavailable to serfs. The sides consisted of holographs of Phaze, so that it looked as if he were in a glass cage swinging along over the Phaze surface. He loved Phaze, of course, and wished he could revisit it; but he loved this technological frame more. To him, the ways of magic were familiar and frankly somewhat dull, while the ways of science were, even after a quarter century, novel and exciting. With magic, each spell could be invoked only once; with science there was no limit. And Sheen was a creature of science. He had been fascinated by her from the outset, knowing her nature; she represented in one package all the wonders of this frame. To the locals, the notion of a living man loving a robot was ludicrous—but Blue was not a local, he was an immigrant from a foreign frame. Sheen was beautiful, she was conscious, she was feeling, she was loving. Science had fashioned the whole of her, and that was much of her allure. She had loved Stile, and lost him to the Lady Blue; but she had been ready to accept Stile’s alternate self instead, and that had been the key. A living woman would not have done it, but the robot lacked the particular consciousness of self that counted here. Blue had Stile’s body and Stile’s nature; he was Stile’s other self. Sheen was programmed to love the first two, and though she knew of the third, her programming did not find it significant. She had, in effect, Stile under another name.

The carriage halted, and Blue stepped out into a crowded hallway. Naked serfs were walking in both directions; they took no overt note of the voluminously cloaked Citizen sud denly in their midst, but all were careful to leave a clear aisle for him. That was the way of it; any serf ignored any Citizen, unless the Citizen spoke to him. Then that serf obeyed the Citizen implicitly.

He was at the entrance to the android laboratory. Each Dome City had its own robot, android and cyborg labs, where units were custom designed for particular purposes or individual Citizens. Sheen had originated in the robot lab, a standard female format with a then-new and sophisticated program for the emulation of emotion. But because she was of the self-willed machine variety, that simulation was virtually in distinguishable from the reality experienced by living creatures. Stile had discussed this with her, and become satisfied that her programmed feeling was as valid as his unprogrammed feeling, for his feelings were the result of his nature and experience. Perhaps that had started him on the route to the acceptance of the self-willed machines as legitimate social entities: people.

Blue had carried that concept further, setting up the experimental community that gave equal status to humans and four other categories in their human forms: androids, self-willed robots, cyborgs and aliens. This was in part his payoff to the self-willed machines who had helped him survive the malice of Citizens, when he had been a serf. But it was also simple cultural justice. The other entities had similar abilities and sensitivities, and desired similar justice. Blue’s experimental community had demonstrated the feasibility of the integration of these five categories as equals. He had placed his own robot son Mach into this community, with greater success than anticipated. Who could have suspected that Mach would exchange minds with his other self in Phaze, and set off a chain of events that threatened to overturn all that Blue had accomplished here!

Still, this had also resulted in the appearance of Stile’s son Bane in Proton, and his association with the alien female Agape, and their intricately crafted child Nepe. Now Nepe was helping Blue to hold his position as nominal leader of the Citizens. As long as he controlled more wealth than his opponents did, his policies governed; when the balance of wealth shifted, theirs would govern. They would not be able to undo a quarter century of reforms in a day, but certainly the effect would be deleterious to individual rights. The Contrary Citizens preferred things as they had been before Stile started the great change: unbridled wealth and power to the ruling class, and human serfs dedicated to serving the will of the Citizens. It was in its way a classic liberal-conservative struggle.

He entered the laboratory. “At ease,” a serf murmured, advising all employees that a Citizen was present.
 
Blue walked through the linked chambers of the lab, in specting the android production line. At the beginning was the tank of “soup”—the living pseudoflesh from which the creatures were formed. A human being was conceived and birthed and grown to adult status, and eventually died. An android being was fashioned complete at one time, and educated rapidly; thereafter it lived and functioned and died in the human manner. Unfortunately, androids tended to be stupid; there seemed to be no proper substitute for nature’s way, when it came to intelligence. Blue’s experimental community had turned out the smartest androids yet, by making them small and letting them grow and learn in the human manner.
 
But this was an inefficient way to do it; for most purposes, an instant stupid android, trained to a special task, was far more cost effective than a smart one who was years in development. Most, of course, were not even humanoid; they were shaped for myriad tasks that were beneath the notice of humans, including cleanup of the grounds beyond the dome.

The intense pollution tended to corrode robots, and was unbreathable for humans, but androids could be crafted who breathed it, needing no special suits.

However, Blue’s purpose in visiting this lab had nothing to do with the manufacture of androids. He had come here be cause this was the most likely hiding place for little Nepe.
 
She, as a creature of alien flesh with robot specifications, could assume any living form, so could readily emulate an android of the appropriate size. Obviously she would hide among the new androids of the lab, because it was in the familiar city and the new ones were not yet trained in specific tasks. She could accept the training and go out on assign ment, and no one would catch on.