Against A Dark Background (51 page)

The android vibrated again, hands shaking.

`Oh, my love, my little love; why, silly old Skave didn’t mean it. Here; another kiss . . .’

Right,’ Sharrow said, swinging into Breyguhn’s room while she was combing her long, brown hair before the mirror. Breyguhn watched as Sharrow plumped herself down on the bed and unrolled a simple stick-on computer. She flicked her hair back and woke the machine up with a couple of keystrokes.
You wanted to see some hacking; I’ll show you some hacking.’

Breyguhn finished doing her hair and tied it up, then joined the older girl on the bed. She looked at the screen. It was all figures and letters.

`Very exciting, I’m sure. What exactly are you trying to do, Shar?’

Sharrow used her right hand to click across the worn-looking surface of the keyboard. Her left hand still hurt but she used it for the occasional shift stroke.

`Hacking into Skave’s homeboard. I’m going to give the incompetent old wreck a nightmare.’

`Really?’ Breyguhn said, rolling over on the bed, her nightgown wrapping itself around her. The screen was still boring.

Yes,’ Sharrow said.
Skave is so ancient they programmed something like sleep into it so it can assimilate what happened during the day and amend its own programs. It’s so old and hidebound it doesn’t really need to do it any more, but it’s become a habit. I’m going to shift its snoozing arse into a Nightmare game.’ Her fingers performed a ballet across the board.

What?’ Breyguhn said, looking interested as she sidled closer across the bedclothes.
One of those things people dream into, to see how long they can last?’

`That’s the idea,’ Sharrow said, watching a complexly folded holo of a deepframe data base’s architecture spring up like a polychromatic mountain range from the stick-on’s screen. She touched it, sliding her fingers into the image, shifting parts of that landscape and tutting to herself as her still sore left hand manipulated the wrong bits and had to correct. Finally she was satisfied and Entered the holo-glyph code.

The folded shape disappeared to be replaced immediately by an infinite corridor that disappeared into the screen. She smiled and reached in with one hand while her other thumb kept Exponential Shift depressed.

We’re going to give old Skave a night to remember,’ she said, selecting a section in the forward-scrolling corridor and stopping there.
Only for him it’ll last for a thousand nights, and he can’t wake up out of it.’

`A thousand nights?’ Breyguhn said, trying to see further into the image.

Sharrow rolled her eyes. `That’s how much faster than us they think, you doughball,’ she said. She keyed Auto Load; she already had the estate’s smart but non-sentient system well mapped and primed. Glyphs surged and sank, figure-screens race-scrolled and flickered.

`There,’ she said after the screen went still.

`Is that it?’ Breyguhn said, looking disappointed.

Sharrow looked at her. `Girlie, what I just did was interrupt the system of a
droid that’s been around for seven thousand years.’ She snapped the stick-on shut.
Watch for it at breakfast tomorrow morning, and don’t order anything hot unless you enjoy eating off your lap.’

She put her hand into Breyguhn’s hair and ruffled it vigorously, shaking the other girl’s head.

Breyguhn put her hand up and forced Sharrow’s away.

Their father was distraught. `Skave!’ he said.
Skave!’ he still had his napkin tucked in his shirt as he paced round the breakfast room, kneading his hands.
After all these years! I can’t forgive myself. I should have kept him in better repair. It’s all my fault!’

He went to the window again. Outside, two bulkily powerful androids and a man in tech overalls were just closing the doors of the secure van that would take the inert body of Skave away.

The android had been discovered still locked into its download collar in the house’s Mechanicals cellar, its eyes wide and staring, its head vibrating from side to side. A diagnostic scan revealed that its personality had effectively been wiped out, along with much of its intrinsicised programming and even some of its supposedly hardwired functions-suite.

The android/Al management and leasing company that had been called in to help had advised that only some bizarre and - especially after all these millennia - unlikely nano-physical fault could have caused the fugue, or (rather more likely in their experience) somebody had hacked into the android’s home data base and deliberately fried its geriatric brains.

Sharrow sat looking upset but feeling determinedly smug while her father wrung his hands and paced up and down the room, refusing to be comforted by his relations. She felt the buddings of guilt when she thought about what had happened to Skave, but squashed them with the sheer totality of her success in having proved her hacking skills to Breyguhn - that ought to put the fear of Fate into her - and with the harshly comforting idea that Skave had been old and becoming useless, and hence long overdue for retirement, or whatever happened to outmoded robots.

She put her hands beneath the table and squeezed her left hand in her right, to take her mind off what she had done, and to remind herself of part of the reason why she had thought of it in the first place. She watched her father knead his hands as he paced, and felt the stabs of pain go up her own arms. She squeezed harder, keeping her face straight, until her eyes threatened to water, then she stopped.

Breyguhn seemed genuinely shocked. Sharrow watched glances of delicious complicity alternate with something like horror as they sat at the breakfast table with the rest of the family, listening to their father fret and mourn.

`Lost to us! Lost to us, after all these years! In the family for a millennia and lost to us in my stewardship! Our last asset! The shame!’

Sharrow collected herself, shook her head sadly and helped herself to icebread from the table cooler. Breyguhn sat looking at her, eyes wide.

Sharrow accessed the house system and saw the report the people who’d taken Skave away had sent to her father. They were sending the report by personal letter too. She had no way of intercepting that.

To her relief, it didn’t implicate her or anybody else in the household; the android management/leasing company reckoned somebody had hacked in from outside (they strongly advised a thorough up-grade of the estate’s systems, which they would be honoured to quote for at most reasonable rates). She was briefly proud of their judgement that whoever had done the job was quite possibly a professional, they had covered their tracks so well.

The report concluded that the android required a new brain, and as such had to be regarded as a total loss unless there was a major and extremely unlikely change in the law. As all owned androids were extremely valuable regardless of condition, they assumed a substantial claim on the android’s insurance would be the next step, and would retain the machine in their vaults if required, and cooperate with any insurance assessor.

Sharrow put her head in her hands when she read that part. She knew her father no longer had any insurance on Skave-why pay a premium on something that hadn’t gone wrong in seven thousand years, when the same money could win a million in the right bones game? Why, it would be a waste.

She switched off the stick-on and let it roll itself up.

`That stupid machine was part of our inheritance!’ Breyguhn hissed. They were in the skidder rink, waiting between rides while the other adults and children gave up their small cars and walked over the rink’s floor of compacted snow to the side barriers, to be replaced by new drivers. Beyond the shallow bowl of the refrigerated rink the weather was hot and sunny, and every now and again a soft, warm gust of wind would bring a smell of flowers and greenery rolling across the chill of the rink’s own sharply wintery scent.

Breyguhn had taken great delight in charging Sharrow’s skidder several times during the last ride. Sharrow’s preferred method of skidder driving was to avoid all collisions, so as a technique for annoying her these constant crashes were more successful than most of the stratagems Breyguhn employed.

Oh, so what?’ Sharrow said, glancing round to make sure there was nobody to overhear her.
The old fool would only have sold Skave; we were never going to see any of the money it was worth.’

`We might have!’ Breyguhn insisted, as the last few people found cars and the klaxon sounded, warning that the signal was about to be transmitted which would switch each skidder’s engine on again.

`Might!’ Sharrow laughed.
Not in a million chances, child. He’d have hocked Skave the next time he lost heavily. He’d sell anything to get stake money. He’d sell us to get stake money.’ Sharrow made a show of looking her half-sister up and down.
Well, he might get a good price for me, anyway.’

He loved Skave,’ Breyguhn said.
He’d never have sold him.’

`Rubbish,’ Sharrow said with prodigious disdain.

`You don’t know!’

`All I know,’ Sharrow said coolly as the klaxon sounded and the skidders came alive again,
is that you’re a pain and I can’t wait to get the hell away from here and go. . .’She flicked her eyebrows and made a thrusting motion with her pelvis,
. . . skiing.’

She twirled her car away over the white surface, avoiding Breyguhn’s crude lunge at her and showering her with icy spray as she raced off round the oval track.

Sharrow’s car stripped its track a minute later, leaving the broad metal bracelet laid out on the snow behind it like the train of some strange dress. Sharrow kicked at the accelerator but the skidder’s automatics had shut the engine off. She thumped her hands off the wheel, grimacing as her sore hand protested by jabbing pain along her arm, then she stood up in the car and waited for a break in the traffic of hurtling skidders and happily shouting, shrieking people, and made her way carefully but quickly across the white surface to the side.

Breyguhn claimed later she had turned back against the flow of traffic to see if she could help Sharrow, after noticing that her skidder had stopped. She knew it was against the rules but she just hadn’t thought. Then her accelerator had jammed and she must have panicked. She felt terrible about hitting Sharrow and crushing her against the barrier and breaking her leg.

Especially as it stopped her going on her skiing holiday.

Sharrow sat up in the bed, surrounded by cushions. Her father held her in his arms, patting her back.

`I know, I know, my love. Everything’s against us just now, isn’t it? Poor Skave taken from us; you with your naughty leg going and breaking itself, poor Brey hardly sleeping because she feels it was her fault, and me with two such unhappy daughters.’

He patted the back of Sharrow’s head as she rested her chin on his shoulder and looked at Breyguhn, who sat in a small seat near the door. Breyguhn crossed her eyes and shook her head quickly from side to side when their father mentioned Skave, made a silent scream and held her thigh when he talked about Sharrow’s leg, and then closed her eyes and tilted her head to one side as though peacefully asleep when he mentioned her.

`But we’ll be all right, won’t we, my pet? The medics will have that silly old leg sorted in no time, won’t they?’

Breyguhn mimed a limp, crooked leg suddenly becoming straight; she waggled it around.

`Of course they will. It’ll be as though it never happened, eh, won’t it? You’ll soon forget all about it, won’t you?’

Breyguhn mimed sudden forgetfulness with a finger to her lips and a series of stagily puzzled expressions.

Sharrow smiled thinly as her father patted her back. She looked at Breyguhn and slowly shook her head.

Breyguhn crossed her arms and sat there, sneering.

Sharrow bedded one of the younger medics while she still had the cast on, and got him to make sure that her leg would never be perfect again; she would always walk with a slight limp and so never forget.

Her father couldn’t understand why his daughter was still lame. He threatened to sue the family medical franchise, but couldn’t afford to.

At university, Sharrow’s limp became a trademark, a talisman, her insignia; like an eye-patch or a duelling scar.

She always did refuse to have any further treatment.

Her father just couldn’t understand it at all.

The android and the woman stood beside an old-fashioned automobile on a weed-strewn quay in the old docks, looking out to sea. The antique car hissed every now and again and leaked steam. Behind it, beyond the shells of the ruined warehouses, mists rose perpetually from the warm waters of the inlet, climbing and reclimbing the frost-grey planes of a lifeless sky. Thrial was a red fruit wrapped in tissues of mist. Buildings in the distance wavered on the boundary of visibility.

The helicopter came swinging round the peninsula, its enginevoice rattling like drumfire off the cliffs and buildings looming through the mist. The machine slowed as it crossed the harbour mole, then swivelled in the air and landed quickly and gracefully in a swirling bowl of curling mist and a small storm of tiny stones and dead, windblown leaves.

She rocked on her feet. The android stood stock still.

Miz jumped down from the pilot’s seat, unclipping the control stalk from his ear and handing the instrument to a uniformed man who was sliding into the seat he had vacated. Miz looked pleased with himself. His right hand was lightly bandaged. Zefla and Dloan appeared from the far side of the helicopter; Dloan limped a little.

Zefla smiled when she saw Sharrow. `It’s Yada, end of next year, with three old cuties,’ she said when they hugged.

`I heard. Hi, Dloan.’

`Good landing, eh??

‘Wonderful, Miz. This is Feril; my legalist and custodian while we’re here.’

Hello to you all,’ the android said. It pointed to the ancient, hissing steam car as it donned a set of driver’s goggles.
Allow me to take you to the Lady Sharrow’s apartments.’

Miz looked out over the misty city. The jet-faced sandstone apartment block sat half-way up a built-up hill looking out over an old canal basin connected by a flight of locks and an inclined plane to the city’s inner harbour. Sharrow’s rooms were on the top floor, one storey above the apartment Feril lived in. The android had only recently moved out of the top-floor apartment after renovating it.