Wild Cards V (78 page)

“Hey…!”
The companion was running after, waving an arm.
“Bring him back!”
The huge gun, still jammed in Croyd's armpit, fired out and down through Croyd's coat. A ricochet struck bright sparks from an iron stanchion.

Croyd's guardian swerved. He leaped directly into the path of the train.

There was a burst of light, a crackling sound. The train stopped dead. The young man was hurled fifty feet farther down the track. When he hit the ground, a smaller burst of electricity jumped between him and the nearest rail.

The man jumped to his feet. In the bright light of the train's headlight the android could see his grin.

Modular Man made a brief calculation of the amount of kinetic energy possessed by a fully loaded train moving at fifteen or so miles per hour. Although Croyd's guardian hadn't absorbed all of it, and the excess had bled off in a burst of lightning—there were
some
limits on his power, fortunately—the total of what he
had
absorbed was appalling. The android's laser whined as it tracked toward the man standing on the tracks.

The man crouched, bracing his feet against the track, then jumped. His leap was aimed ahead of the android, to cut him off. The man tumbled in air—evidently he wasn't used to traveling this way—then hit a stanchion and fell to the ground. No electricity this time. He picked himself up and looked at the approaching android with clenched teeth. His clothing smoldered.

Swift calculations passed through macroatomic circuits, followed by lightspeed regret. Modular Man hadn't ever shot a real person before. He didn't want to now. But Croyd was killing people even in hiding, even in the tunnels deep under Grand Central. And if Croyd's guardian got his hands on the android, he could tear his alloy skeleton to bits.

The android fired. Then suddenly he was falling, his arms limp. Croyd tumbled to the ground. The android crashed to the ground at the young man's feet. The young man reached, seized him by the shoulders. The android tried to move, failed.

Modular Man realized that Croyd's protector didn't just absorb kinetic energy. He absorbed
any
kind of energy and could return it instantly.

Bad mistake
, he thought.

Suddenly he was flying again. He crashed through the side of the commuter train, sprawled across several seats in a spill of glass and torn aluminum. Someone's briefcase tumbled to the aisle, papers flying. The android heard a scream.

His sensors registered the smell of burning.

The few people on board—executives whose work forced them into the quarantined city—rushed to his aid. Lifting him from his ungainly sprawl across the seats, they laid him carefully in the aisle. “What's that on his head?” asked a white-haired man with a mustache.

Radar imaging was gone. Its control unit had been fried when Croyd's bodyguard returned the coherent microwave pulse. The monitor that controlled his ability to turn insubstantial was gone. His alloy underskin had a neat hole in it. The excess energy had blown a lot of circuit breakers. The android reset as many as possible and felt control return to his limbs. Some breakers wouldn't reset.

“Pardon me,” he said, and stood up. People faded back. The train gave a jerk as it started moving again, and the android tumbled backward, arms windmilling, and sat down in the aisle. People rushed toward him again. He felt the helping hands on his right side but not on his left. Balance and coordination were still affected. He rerouted internal circuits, but still something was wrong.

“Excuse me.” He unzipped and pulled off the upper half of his jumpsuit. Train passengers gasped. Plastic flesh was blackened around the wound. Modular Man opened his chest and reached inside with one hand. Someone turned away and began to be sick, but the other passengers seemed interested, one woman standing on a seat and craning her neck to peer into the android's interior through horn-rimmed spectacles.

The android removed one of his internal guidance units, saw melted connections, and sighed mentally. He returned the unit. The trip home was going to be pretty shaky. He certainly couldn't fly.

He looked up at the people on the train.

“Do any of you have five dollars for a taxi?” he asked.

The trip to Jokertown was humiliating and dangerous. Some of the passengers supported him out of the station, but even so he fell a few times. With some money given him by the man with the mustache, he took a taxi to the other side of the block from Travnicek's brownstone. He pushed the money through the slot in the taxi's bulletproof shield, then staggered out onto the sidewalk. He half-walked, half-crawled down the alley to Travnicek's building, then dragged himself up the fire escape to the roof. From there he crawled to the skylight and lowered himself down.

Travnicek lay on his camp bed, naked to the waist. His skin was light blue. Writhing cilia, covered with long hairs, grew from where his fingers and toes had been. A fly hummed over his head.

The swollen skin around his neck had split open, revealing a flower lei of organs. Some were recognizable—trumpet-shaped ears, yellowish eyes, some normal in size and some not—but others of the organs were not.

“The only left-moving ghosts,” he muttered, “are the reparametrization ghosts.” His voice was thick, indistinct. The android had the intuition that his lips might be growing together. And the words seemed half-unfamiliar, as if he no longer entirely comprehended their meaning.

“Sir,” said Modular Man. “Sir. I've been injured again.”

Travnicek sat up with a start. The eyes clustered around his neck swiveled to focus on the android. “Ah. Toaster. You look … very interesting … this way.” The eyes in his skull were closed. Perhaps, the android thought, forever.

“I need repairs. Croyd's companion reflected my laser back at me.”

“Why the fuck did you shoot him, blender? All forms of energy are the same. Same as
matter
, as far as that goes.”

“I didn't know.”

“Fucking moron. You'd think you'd pick up a little intelligence from me.”

Travnicek jumped up from his cot, moving very fast, faster than a normal human. He caught hold of a roof beam with one hand, swung around it to stand on his head. He planted his feet on the ceiling, the hairy cilia splaying, and then removed his hand from the beam and hung inverted. Yellow eyes looked steadily at the android.

“Not bad, hey? Haven't felt this good in years.” He moved carefully along the ceiling toward the android.

“Sir. Radar control is burned out. I've lost a stabilizer. My flux control is damaged.”

“I hear you.” His voice was serene, drifting. “In fact I don't just
hear
you, I perceive you in all sorts of ways. I'm not sure what some of them are just yet.” Travnicek grabbed another roof beam, swung to the floor, dropped. The fly buzzed airily in the distance. Sadness swelled in the android's analog mind. A mounting hush of fear, like white noise, sizzled steadily in the background of his thoughts.

“Open your chest,” Travnicek said. “Give me the monitor. There's a spare guidance unit in the cabinet.”

“There's a hole in my chest.”

The yellow eyes looked at him. The android waited for an outburst.

“Better patch it yourself,” Travnicek said mildly. “When you have the time.” He took the flux monitor and stepped to a workbench. “It's getting hard to think about all this,” he said.

“Preserve your genius, sir.” Modular Man tried not to let his desperation show. “Fight the infection. I'll get Croyd here.”

A touch of vinegar entered Travnicek's voice. “Yah. You do that. Now let me worry about the fermionic coordinates, okay?”

“Yes, sir.” Mildly reassured.

He staggered to the locker and began looking for a new gyroscope.

The
BARNETT FOR PRESIDENT
poster had been defaced. Someone had drawn a knife or fingernail file through the candidate's picture several times, then written
JOKER DEATH
over it in thick red letters. Next to it was a freehand drawing of an animal head—a black dog?—executed in thick felt tip.

“Hi. I need to talk.”

Kate blew cigarette smoke. “Okay. For a little while.”

“How are the Roman poets coming along?”

“If Latin weren't already a dead language, Statius would have killed it.”

Modular Man was hunched over the public phone again. His gyroscope had been replaced and he could walk and fly.

Except for the heavy presence of the National Guard and Army, the streets were nearly deserted. Half the restaurants and cabarets in Jokertown were shut down.

“Kate,” the android said, “I think I'm going to die.”

There was a moment of startled silence. Then, “Tell me.”

“My creator got infected by the wild card. He's turning into a joker and forgetting how to repair me. And he's sending me after the plague carrier, hoping the man can make it stop.”

“Okay.” Cautiously. “I'm following.”

“He seems to think the man's deliberately doing this to him. But most people think the guy is just a carrier, and if that's true, and I bring him to my creator, the chances are nine to one that if my creator's reinfected, he'll draw the Black Queen and die.”

“Yes.”

“And the man I'm after—his name is Croyd—is the man who killed me the first time. And this time Croyd has a protector who is more powerful than he is. We're already fought twice, and they've beaten me both times. The last time I could easily have died. And my creator can't put me together again. He's losing his abilities. He may not be able to repair the damage from the
last
attack.”

Kate drew on her cigarette, exhaled. “Mod Man,” she said, “you need help.”

“Yes. That's why I'm calling you.”

“I mean other wild cards. You can't face these two alone.”

“If I went to SCARE or someone, and we captured Croyd together, then I'd have to fight the SCARE aces to get him away. I'd be an outlaw.”

“Maybe you could make some kind of deal with them.”

“I'll think about it. I'll try.” Despair wailed through him. “I'm going to
die
,” he said.

“I'm sorry. Can't you—just leave?”

“I'm programmed to obey him. I can't refuse a direct order. And I'm programmed to battle the enemies of society. I don't have a choice in any of that. People like the Turtle, or Cyclone—it's their
decision
to do what they do. It was never mine. I'm not human that way.”

“I see.”

“Sooner or later I'm going to lose a fight. I don't heal like people, someone has to repair me. Any parts that get broken won't get fixed. If I don't die, I'll be a cripple, pieces falling off.” Like Travnicek, he thought, and a cold shudder ran through his mind. “And even if I'm crippled,” he went on, “I'll still have to fight. I
still
won't have any choice.”

There was a long silence. “I don't know what to tell you.” Her voice was choked.

“I was sort of immortal before,” Modular Man said. “My creator was going to mass-produce me and sell me to the military. If any single unit was destroyed, the others would go on. They'd have identical programming; they'd still be
me
, at least mostly me. Now that's not going to happen.”

“I'm sorry.”

“What happens to machines when they die? I've been wondering that.”

“I—”

“Your ancient philosophers never thought about that, right?”

“I suppose they didn't. But they had a lot to say about mortality in general. ‘Must not all things be swallowed in death'—Plato, quoting Socrates.”

“Thank you. That's really comforting.”

“There's not a lot of comforting things to say about death. I'm sorry.”

“I never really worried about it before. I'd never
died
before.”