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LIES, INC. -- CHAPTER FIFTEEN |
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To Freya Holm the flapple repeated in high-pitched anxiety, "Sir or madam, you must evacuate at once; all living humans must leave me, as my meta-battery is about to deteriorate. Due to various punctures in my hull, which punctures having been caused by the demolition of the simulacrum of Mr. Ferry, or rather because of which -- in any case I am no longer able to maintain homeostasis, or whatever the phrase is. Please, sir or madam; do heed me: your life, sir or madam, is being risked each moment!" Furiously, Freya grated, "And go where, once I leave here?" "Down to the surface of the planet," the flapple said, in a tone of voice suggesting ultimate mechanical smugness; as far as the flapple was concerned it had solved everything. "Jump?" she demanded. "Two thousand feet?" "Well, I suppose your point is well-taken," the flapple said in a disgruntled tone; it evidently was displeased to have its solution dealt with so readily. "But the enormous inter-plan and -system ship which I am now attached to; why not hie yourself there? Or however the expression goes." "It's Ferry's!" "Ferry's, Schmerry's," the flapple said. "This way you'll perish when I do. You want THAT?" "All right," she snarled, and made her way unsteadily toward the entrance hatch of the flapple, the link between it and the huge ship blowing its ceaseless wisps of fuel vapor, obviously ready to take off at an instant's command. "My meta-battery has nowwwaaaa fooooof," the flapple intoned hazily; its expiration had accelerated by leaps and bounds. "Goodbye," Freya said, and passed out through the entrance hatch, cautiously following the shorter of the two THL agents. Behind her the flapple murmured in its dim fashion, "Tttturnnn uppp yrrrr hearing aaaaaaiddddd, misssszzzz." And drifted into oblivion. Good riddance, she decided. A moment later she had entered the great ship -- Theo Ferry's post from which he -- obviously -- operated when on Fomalhaut IX. "Kill her," a voice said. She ducked. A laser beam cut past her head; instantly she rolled, spun to one side, thinking, They did it to Mat, but not to me; they can't do it to me. A second last try for us, she thought desperately; if Rachmael can do anything. I can't. "Ferry," she gasped. "Please!" The prayer proved worthless. Four THL agents, in military brown, deployed strategically at several compass points of the ship's central cabin, aimed at her emotionlessly, while at the controls, his face a dull mask of almost indifferent concentration, sat Theodoric Ferry. And, she realized, this was the man himself; this did not constitute a simulacrum. "Do you know," Ferry said to her quietly, "where Rachmael ben Applebaum is at this moment?" "No," she gasped. Truthfully. At that Ferry nodded toward the four THL agents; the man to his immediate right caustically grimaced -- and squeezed the button that controlled his laser tube. I made a mistake, Freya realized. The flapple tricked me; it deliberately made me come here -- it's a THL flapple and it knew who I was and what I wanted to do. It was my enemy ... and I failed to identify it as such -- in time. Now it was too late, far too late. The laser beam came once more, narrow and alit with strength; it scraped past her, created its own escape-hole in the wall behind her. "I'm very much interested in this Rachmael individual," Ferry informed her. "If you could possibly recall where he might be --" "I told you," she said in a tight, almost inaudible whisper. "I have no idea." Again Ferry nodded at his employee, an expression of resignation on his face. The laser beam howled, then, in Freya's direction. Once more she prayed. And this time not to Theodoric Ferry. *** The eye-eater said pleasantly, "Mr. ben Applebaum, reach inside me and you will find a slightly different edition of Dr. Bloode's Text. A copy of the twentieth edition, which I ingested some time ago ... but as far as I can determine, not already dissolved by my gastric juices." The idea seemed to amuse it; the lower portion of its face split apart in a peal of excruciatingly penetrating laughter. "You're serious?" Rachmael said, feeling disorganized. And yet the eye-eater was correct; if it did possess a later edition of the text he most certainly had reason to seek it out -- wherever it lay, even within the body of the offensive eye-eater. "Look, look," the eye-eater exclaimed; it held in one of its longer pseudopodia several remaining unchewed eyes, and these it had placed close to its stomach in order to see properly. "Yes, it's still in there -- and you can have it, free! No, but seriously, folks, the twentieth edition is worth a lot more to a collector than the seventeenth; get it while the getting's good or this free money-back offer expires forever." After a pause Rachmael shut his eyes and reached his hand gropingly into the midsection of the cephalopodic life-form. "Fine, fine," the eye-eater chortled. "That feels really cool, as the ancients said. Got hold of it yet? Reach deeper, and don't mind if the digestive juices destroy your sleeve; that's show biz, or whatever it was they formerly said. Tee-hee!" His fingers touched something firm within the gelatinous, oozing mass. The edge of the book? Or -- something else. It felt very much as if -- incredibly -- it consisted of the crisp, starched, lower edge of a woman's bra. "For god's sake!" a female voice declared furiously. And at the same instant a small but wildly intent hand grabbed his, forced it back toward him. Immediately he opened his eyes. The eye-eater glowered at him in indignation. But -- it had changed. From it long strands of women's hair grew; the eye-eater had a distinctly female appearance. Even its pawful of eyes had altered; they now appeared elongated, graceful, with heavy lashes. A woman's eyes, he realized with a thrill of terror. "Who are you?" he demanded, almost unable to speak; he jerked his hand back in revulsion and the pseudopodium released him. The pseudopodia of the eye-eater, all of them, terminated in small, delicate hands. Like the hair and the eyes, distinctly female. The eye-eater had become a woman. And, near the center of its body, it wore -- ludicrously -- the stiff white bra. The eye-eater said, in a high-pitched voice, almost a squeal of indignation, "I'm Gretch Borbman, of course. And I frankly don't believe it's very funny to do what you did just now." Breathing hotly, the eye-eater glowered even more darkly. "I'm -- sorry," he managed to say. "But I'm lost in damn paraworld; it's not my fault. So don't condemn me." "Which paraworld is it this time?" the eye-eater demanded. "The same one as before?" He started to answer ... and then noticed something which froze him into silence where he stood. Other eye-eaters had begun to appear, slowly undulating toward him and Gretch Borbman. Some had the distinct cast of masculinity; some obviously were, like Gretch, female. The class. Assembling together in response to what Gretch had said. "He attempted to reach inside me," the eye-eater calling itself Gretchen Borbman explained to the rest of them. "I wonder which paraworld that would indicate." "Mr. ben Applebaum," one of the other eye-eaters, almost certainly Sheila Quam by the sound of her voice, said. "In view of what Miss Borbman says, I think it is virtually mandatory for me to declare a special emergency Computer Day; I would say that beyond a reasonable doubt this situation which you've created calls for it." "True," the eye-eater named Gretch agreed; the others, to varying degrees, also nodded in unison. "Have his paraworld gestalt fed in so it can be examined and compared. Personally I don't think it's like anyone else's, but of course that's up to the computer to determine. Myself, I feel perfectly safe; I know that whatever he saw, or rather sees, bears absolutely no resemblance to anything I ever perceived." "What did he do just now," an eye-eater which reminded him of Hank Szantho said, "that made you yip like that?" The Gretch Borbman thing said in a low, sullen voice, "He attempted to diddle me." "Well," the Hank Szantho eye-eater said mildly, "I don't see where that alone indicates anything; I might even attempt that myself, some day. Anyhow, as long as Sheila feels it's called for --" "I've already got the forms ready," the one whom he had identified as Sheila Quam said. To Rachmael she said, "Here is 47-B; I've already signed it. Now, if you'll come with me --" She glanced toward the Gretchen Borbman eye-eater. "Miss Borbman already knows her paraworld ... I hope her confidence is vindicated; I hope that what you perceive, Mr. ben Applebaum, is not congruent with hers." "I hope so, too," the Gretchen Borbman thing agreed faintly. "As I recall," the Sheila Quam eye-eating entity declared, "Mr. ben Applebaum's initial delusional experience, set off by the LSD dart, consisted of involvement with the garrison state. Do you remember clearly enough to voluntarily testify to that, Mr. ben Applebaum?" "Yes," he said huskily. "And then the aquatic --" "But before that," Sheila interrupted. "When you first crossed by Telpor. Before the dart -- before the LSD." Hazily, he said, "It's a blur to me, now." Reality, for him, had slipped and floundered too much; he could not be absolutely sure of the sequence of events. With a vast final effort he summoned his waning attention, focused on his past -- it seemed a billion light-years ago, and yet in actuality the experience with the garrison state had been reasonably recent. "It was before," he said, then. "I perceived the garrison state, the fighting; then a THL soldier shot me. So the experience with the garrison state came first; then, after the LSD, the aquatic nightmare-shape." Hank Szantho said thoughtfully, "You may be interested to know, Mr. ben Applebaum, that you are not the first person among us to live with that hallucination -- I refer to the prior one, that of the garrison state. If your delusional gestalt, when you present it to the computer, comes out on those lines, I can assure you that a true bi-personal view of a paraworld will have been established ... and this, of course, is what we fear, as you well know. Do you want to see the garrison state world established as the authentic reality?" His voice lifted harshly. "Consider." "The choice," Sheila Quam said, "is not his; it's mine. I therefore officially declare this late Wednesday afternoon and Computer Day, and I order Mr. ben Applebaum to accept this form I hold here, to fill it out, and then return it to me, as Control, to sign. You understand, Mr. ben Applebaum? Can you think clearly enough to follow what I'm saying?" Reflexively, he accepted the form from her. "A pen?" he asked. "A pen." Sheila Quam, plus all the other eye-eating quasi-forms, began to search about their bulb-like bodies -- to no avail. "Chrissake," Rachmael said irritably, and searched his own pockets. Not only to be compelled to fill out the 47-B form, but to come up with his own pencil -- In his pocket his fingers touched something: a flat, small tin. Puzzled, he lifted it out, examined it. The eye-eaters around him did so, as well. In particular the Gretchen Borbman one. MORE FUN "How disgusting," Gretchen Borbman said. To the others she said, "A tin of Yucatan prophoz. The worst kind possible -- fully automated, helium-battery powered, good for a five-year life span ... is this what you had in mind, Mr. ben Applebatim, when you diddled me a moment ago?" "No," he said. "I forgot I had these." Chilled, he thought, Have I had this all along? The cammed, hyperminned UN weapon: the personnel variation of the time-warping construct which constituted the major device in Horst Bertold's arsenal. Naturally he retained it; the effectiveness of the camouflage lay beyond dispute and had now been tested and ratified in practice ... it had even seemed to him, during the first moment of discovery, that this was exactly as it appeared to be: a box of prophoz and nothing more. "Out of respect for decency and the women present here," the Hank Szantho eye-eater said, "I believe you should put that obnoxiously specific tin away, Mr. ben Applebaum; don't you, on second thought, agree?" "I suppose so," he said. And opened the tin. *** Acrid smoke billowed about him, stinging his nostrils. He halted, dropped into an instinctive crouch of self-defense. Matson saw gray barracks. Beside him. Freya appeared. The air was cold; she shivered and he, too, quaked, drew against her, stared and stared at the barracks; he saw row after row of them, and -- charged, twelve-foot-high wire fences with four strands of barbed wire at the top. And signs. The posted restrictive notices; he did not even need to read them. Freya said, "Mat, have you ever heard of a town called Sparta?" "'Sparta,'" he echoed, standing holding his two suitcases. "Here." She released his fingers, set the suitcases down, A few people, drably dressed, slunk by, silently, carefully paying no attention to them. "I was wrong," Freya said. "And the message of course to you, the all-clear, was spurious. Mat, I thought --" "You thought," he said, "it was going to be -- ovens." She said, with quiet calmness, tossing her heavy dark mane of hair back and raising her chin to meet his gaze, look at him face-to-face, "It's work camps. The Soviet, not the Third Reich, model. Forced labor." "Doing what? Clearing the planet? But the original authentic monitoring satellites reported that --" "They seem," she said, "to be forming the nucleus of an army. First starting everyone out in labor gangs. To get them accustomed to discipline. The young males go into basic training at once; the rest of us -- we'll probably serve in that." She pointed and he saw the ramp of a subsurface structure; he saw the descent mechanism and he knew, remembered from his youth, what it meant, this pre-war configuration. A multi-level autofac. On continuous schedule, hence not entirely homeo. For round-the-clock operations, machines would not do, could not survive. Only shifts, alternating, of humans, could keep the belts moving; they had learned that in '92. "Your police vets," Freya said, "are too old for immediate induction; most of them. So they'll be assigned to barracks, as we will be. I have the number they gave you and the one they gave me." "Different quarters? We're not even together?" Freya said, "I also have the mandatory forms for us to fill out; we list all our skills. So we can be useful." "I'm old," he said. "Then," Freya said, "you'll have to die. Unless you can conjure up a skill." "I have one skill." In the suitcase resting on the pavement beside him he had a transmitter which, small as it was, would send out a signal which, in six months, would reach Terra. Bending, he brought out the key, turned the lock of the suitcase. All he had to do was open the suitcase, feed an inch of punched data-tape into the orifice of the transmitter's encoder; the rest was automatic. He switched the power on; every electronic item mimicked clothing, especially shoes; it appeared as if he had come to Whale's Mouth to walk his life away, and elegantly at that. "Why?" he asked Freya as he programmed, with a tiny scholarly construct, the inch of tape. "An army for what?" "I don't know, Mat. It's all Theodoric Ferry. I think Ferry is going to try to outspit the army on Terra that Horst Bertold commands. In the short time I've been here I've talked to a few people, but -- they're so afraid. One man thought there'd been a non-humanoid sentient race found, and we're preparing to strike for its colony-planets; maybe after a while and we've been here --" Matson peered up and said, "I've encoded the tape to read, Garrison state, Sound out Bertold, It'll go to our top pilot, Al Dosker, repeated over and over again, because at this distance the noise- factor --" A laser beam removed the back of his head. Freya shut her eyes. A second beam from the laser rifle with the telescopic sight destroyed first one suitcase and then its companion. And then a shiny, spic-and-span young soldier walked up, leisurely, the rifle held loosely; he glanced at her, up and down, carnally but with no particular passion, then looked down at the dead man, at Matson. "We caught your conversation on an aud rec." He pointed, and Freya saw, then, on the overhang of the roof of the Telpor terminal building, a netlike interwoven mesh. "That man" -- the soldier kicked -- actually physically kicked with his toe -- the corpse of Matson Glazer-Holliday -- "said something about 'our top pilot.' You're an organization, then. Friends of a United People? That it?" She said nothing; she was unable to. "Come along, honey," the soldier said to her. "For your psych-interrogation. We held it off because you were kind enough -- dumb enough -- to inform us that your husband was following you. But we never --" He died, because, by means of her "watch" she had released the low-velocity cephalotropic cyanide dart; it moved slowly, but still he had not been able to evade it; he batted at it, childishly, with his hand, not quite alarmed, not quite wise and frightened enough, and its tip penetrated a vein near his wrist. And death came as swiftly and soundlessly as it had for Matson. The soldier swiveled and unwound and unwound in his descent to the pavement, and Freya, then, turned and ran -- At a corner she went to the right, and, as she ran down a narrow, rubbish-heaped alley, reached into her cloak, touched the aud transmitter which sent out an all-points, planet-wide alarm signal- alert; every Lies, Incorporated employee here at Whale's Mouth would be picking it up, if this was not already apparent to him: if the alarm signal added anything to his knowledge, that which had probably come, crushingly, within the first five minutes here on this side -- this one-way side -- of the Telpor apparatuses. Well, anyhow she had done that; she had officially, through technical channels, alerted them, and that was all -- all she could do. She had no long-range inter-system transmitter as Matson had had; she could not send out a macrowave signal which would be picked up by Al Dosker at the Sol system six months hence. In fact none of the two thousand police agents of Lies, Incorporated did. But they had weapons. She was, she realized with dread and disbelief, automatically now in charge of those of the organization who survived; months ago Matson had set her up legally so that on his death she assumed his chair, and this was not private: this had been circulated, memo-wise, throughout the organization. What could she tell the police agents who had gotten through -- tell them, of course, that Matson was dead, but what would be of use to them? What, she asked herself, can we do? Eighteen years, she thought; do we have to wait for the Omphalos, for Rachmael ben Applebaum to arrive and see? Because by then it won't matter. For us, anyhow; nor for this generation. Two men ran toward her and one bleated, "Moon and cow," shrilly, his face contorted with fear. "Jack Horner," she said numbly. "I don't know what to do," she said to them. "Matson is dead and his big transmitter is destroyed. They were waiting for him; I led them right to him. I'm sorry." She could not face the two field reps of the organization; she stared rigidly past them. "Even if we put our weapons into use," she said, "they can take all of us out." "But we can do some damage," one of the two police, middle-aged, with that fat spare tire at his middle, a tough old vet of the '92 war, said. His companion, clasping a valise, said, "Yes, we can try, Miss Holm. Send out that signal; you have it?" "No," she said, but she was lying and they knew it. "It's hopeless," she said. "Let's try to pass as authentic emigrants. Let them draft us, put us into the barracks." The seasoned, hard-eyed paunchy one said, "Miss Holm, when they get into the luggage, they'll know." To his companion he said, "Bring it out." Together, as she watched, the two experienced field reps of Lies, Incorporated assembled a small intricate weapon of a type she had never seen before; evidently it was from their advanced weapons archives. To her the younger man said quietly, "Send the signal. For a fight. As soon as our people come through; keep the signal going so they'll pick it up as they emerge. We'll fight at this spot, not later, not when they have us cut down into individuals, one here, one there." She. Touched. The. Signal-tab. And then she said, quietly, "I'll try to get a message-unit back to Terra via Telpor. Maybe in the confusion --" Because there was going to be a lot of confusion as the Lies, Incorporated men emerged and immediately picked up the fracas-in-progress signal "-- maybe it'll slip by." "It won't," the hard-eyed old tomcat of a fighter said to her. He glanced at his companion. "But if we focus on a transmission station maybe we can take and keep control long enough to run a vid track through. Pass it back through the Telpor gate. Even if all two thous of us were to --" He turned to Freya. "Can you direct the reps to make it to this point?" "I have no more microwave patterns," she said, this time truthfully. "Just those two." "Okay, Miss Holm." The vet considered. "Vid transmissions through Telpor are accomplished over there." He pointed and she saw an isolated multi-story structure, windowless, with a guarded entrance; in the gray sun of midday she caught a glint of metal, or armed sentries. "You have the code for back home you can transmit?" "Yes," she said. "One of fifty. Mat and I both had them; committed to memory. I could transmit it by aud in ten seconds." "I want," the wary, half-crouching veteran policeman said, "a vid track of this." He swung his hand at the landscape, "Something that can be spliced into the central coaxial cable and run on TV. Not just that we know but that they know." They. The people back home -- the innocents who lay beyond the one-way gate; forever, she thought, because eighteen years is, really, forever. "What's the code?" the younger field rep asked her. Freya said. "'Forgot to pack my Irish linen handkerchiefs. Please transmit via Telpor.'" She explained, "We, Mat and I, worked out all logical possibilities. This comes the closest. Sparta." "Yep," the older vet said. "The warrior state. The trouble-maker. Well, it is close geographically to Athens, although not quite close enough." To his companion he said, "Can we get in there and transmit the aud signal?" He picked up the weapon which they had assembled. "Sure," his younger companion said, nodding. The older man clicked the weapon on. Freya saw, then, into the grave and screamed; she ran and as she ran, struggled to get away, she knew it for what it was: a refined form of nerve gas that -- and then her coherent thoughts ceased and she simply ran. The armed sentry-soldiers guarding the windowless building ran, too. And, unaffected, their metabolisms insulated by preinjective antidotal hormones, the two field reps of Lies, Incorporated dogtrotted toward the windowless structure, and, as they trotted, brought out small, long-range laser pistols with telescopic sights. That was her final view of them; at that point panic and flight swallowed her and it was only darkness. And a darkness into which people of all sorts -- she glimpsed, felt, them dimly -- ran alongside in company with her; she was not alone: the future radiated. Mat, she thought. You will not have your police state here at Whale's Mouth, and I warned you; I told you. But, she thought, maybe now they won't either. If that encoded message can be put through. If. And if, on the Terran side, there is someone smart enough to know what to do with it. |