The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (55 page)

Deirdre shook her head sharply.

“Do you still think of me as delicate?” she demanded. “Do you know I carried you here at arm’s length halfway across the room? Do you realize you weigh
nothing
to me? I could” – she glanced around the room and gestured with sudden, rather appalling violence— “tear this building down,” she said quietly. “I could tear my way through these walls, I think. I’ve found no limit yet to the strength I can put forth if I try.” She held up her golden hands and looked at them. “The metal would break, perhaps,” she said reflectively, “but then, I have no feeling—”

Maltzer gasped, “
Deirdre—
”

She looked up with what must have been a smile. It sounded clearly in her voice. “Oh, I won’t. I wouldn’t have to do it with my hands, if I wanted. Look – listen!”

She put her head back and a deep, vibrating hum gathered and grew in what one still thought of as her throat. It deepened swiftly and the ears began to ring. It was deeper, and the furniture vibrated. The walls began almost imperceptibly to shake. The room was full and bursting with a sound that shook every atom upon its neighbor with a terrible, disrupting force.

The sound ceased. The humming died. Then Deirdre laughed and made another and quite differently pitched sound. It seemed to reach out like an arm in one straight direction – toward the window. The opened panel shook. Deirdre intensified her hum, and slowly, with imperceptible jolts that merged into smoothness, the window jarred itself shut.

“You see?” Deirdre said. “You see?”

But still Maltzer could only stare. Harris was staring too, his mind beginning slowly to accept what she implied. Both were too stunned to leap ahead to any conclusions yet.

Deirdre rose impatiently and began to pace again, in a ringing of metal robe and a twinkling of reflected lights. She was panther-like in her suppleness. They could see the power behind that lithe motion now; they no longer thought of her as helpless, but they were far still from grasping the truth.

“You were wrong about me, Maltzer,” she said with an effort at patience in her voice. “But you were right too, in a way you didn’t guess. I’m not afraid of humanity. I haven’t anything to fear from them. Why” – her voice took on a tinge of contempt— “already I’ve set a fashion in women’s clothing. By next week you won’t see a woman on the street without a mask like mine, and every dress that isn’t cut like a chlamys will be out of style. I’m not afraid of humanity! I won’t lose touch with them unless I want to. I’ve learned a lot – I’ve learned too much already.”

Her voice faded for a moment, and Harris had a quick and appalling vision of her experimenting in the solitude of her farm, testing the range of her voice, testing her eyesight – could she see microscopically and telescopically? – and was her hearing as abnormally flexible as her voice?

“You were afraid I had lost feeling and scent and taste,” she went on, still pacing with that powerful, tigerish tread. “Hearing and sight would not be enough, you think? But why do you think sight is the last of the senses? It may be the latest, Maltzer – Harris –
but why do you think it’s the last
?”

She may not have whispered that. Perhaps it was only their hearing that made it seem thin and distant, as the brain contracted and would not let the thought come through in its stunning entirety.

“No,” Deirdre said, “I haven’t lost contact with the human race. I never will, unless I want to. It’s too easy . . . too easy.”

She was watching her shining feet as she paced, and her masked face was averted. Sorrow sounded in her soft voice now.

“I didn’t mean to let you know,” she said. “I never would have, if this hadn’t happened. But I couldn’t let you go believing you’d failed. You made a perfect machine, Maltzer. More perfect than you knew.”

“But Deirdre—” breathed Maltzer, his eyes fascinated and still incredulous upon her, “but Deirdre, if we did succeed – what’s wrong? I can feel it now – I’ve felt it all along. You’re so unhappy – you still are. Why Deirdre?”

She lifted her head and looked at him, eyelessly, but with a piercing stare.

“Why are you so sure of that?” she asked gently.

“You think I could be mistaken, knowing you as I do? But I’m not Frankenstein . . . you say my creation’s flawless. Then what—”

“Could you ever duplicate this body?” she asked.

Maltzer glanced down at his shaking hands. “I don’t know. I doubt it. I—”

“Could anyone else?”

He was silent. Deirdre answered for him. “I don’t believe anyone could. I think I was an accident. A sort of mutation, halfway between flesh and metal. Something accidental and . . . and unnatural, turning off on a wrong course of evolution that never reaches a dead end. Another brain in a body like this might die or go mad, as you thought I would. The synapses are too delicate. You were – call it lucky – with me. From what I know now, I don’t think a . . . a baroque like me could happen again.” She paused a moment. “What you did was kindle the fire for the Phoenix, in a way. And the Phoenix rises perfect and renewed from its own ashes. Do you remember why it had to reproduce itself that way?”

Maltzer shook his head?”

“I’ll tell you,” she said. “It was because there was only one Phoenix. Only one in the whole world.”

They looked at each other in silence. Then Deirdre shrugged a little.

“He always came out of the fire perfect, of course. I’m not weak, Maltzer. You needn’t let that thought bother you any more. I’m not vulnerable and helpless. I’m not sub-human.” She laughed dryly. “I suppose,” she said, “that I’m – superhuman.”

“But – not happy.”

“I’m afraid. It isn’t unhappiness, Maltzer – it’s fear. I don’t want to draw so far away from the human race. I wish I needn’t. That’s why I’m going back on the stage – to keep in touch with them while I can. But I wish there could be others like me. I’m . . . I’m lonely, Maltzer.”

Silence again. Then Maltzer said, in a voice as distant as when he had spoken to them through glass, over gulfs as deep as oblivion:

“Then I am Frankenstein, after all.”

“Perhaps you are,” Deirdre said very softly. “I don’t know. Perhaps you are.”

She turned away and moved smoothly, powerfully, down the room to the window. Now that Harris knew, he could almost hear the sheer power purring along her limbs as she walked. She leaned the golden forehead against the glass – it clinked faintly, with a musical sound – and looked down into the depths Maltzer had hung above. Her voice was reflective as she looked into those dizzy spaces which had offered oblivion to her creator.

“There’s one limit I can think of,” she said, almost inaudibly. “Only one. My brain will wear out in another forty years or so. Between now and then I’ll learn . . . I’ll change . . . I’ll know more than I can guess today. I’ll change. That’s frightening. I don’t like to think about that.” She laid a curved golden hand on the latch and pushed the window open a little, very easily. Wind whined around its edge. “I could put a stop to it now, if I wanted,” she said. “If I wanted. But I can’t, really. There’s so much still untried. My brain’s human, and no human brain could leave such possibilities untested. I wonder, though . . . I do wonder—”

Her voice was soft and familiar in Harris’ ears, the voice Deirdre had spoken and sung with, sweetly enough to enchant a world. But as preoccupation came over her a certain flatness crept into the sound. When she was not listening to her own voice, it did not keep quite to the pitch of trueness. It sounded as if she spoke in a room of brass, and echoes from the walls resounded in the tones that spoke there.

“I wonder,” she repeated, the distant taint of metal already in her voice.

TRADERS – . . . With psychohistoric inevitability, economic control of the Foundation grew. The traders grew rich; and with riches came power. . . .

It is sometimes forgotten that Hober Mallow began life as an ordinary trader. It is never forgotten that he ended it as the first of the Merchant Princes. . . .

ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

Jorane Sutt put the tips of carefully-manicured fingers together and said, “It’s something of a puzzle. In fact – and this is in the strictest confidence – it may be another one of Hari Seldon’s crises.”

The man opposite felt in the pocket of his short Smyrnian jacket for a cigarette. “Don’t know about that, Sutt. As a general rule, politicians start shouting ‘Seldon crisis’ at every mayoralty campaign.”

Sutt smiled very faintly, “I’m not campaigning, Mallow. We’re facing atomic weapons, and we don’t know where they’re coming from.”

Hober Mallow of Smyrno, Master Trader, smoked quietly, almost indifferently. “Go on. If you have more to say get it out.” Mallow never made the mistake of being overpolite to a Foundation man. He might be an Outlander, but a man’s a man for a’ that.

Sutt indicated the trimensional star-map on the table. He adjusted the controls and a cluster of some half-dozen stellar systems blazed red.

“That,” he said quietly, “is the Korellian Republic.”

The trader nodded, “I’ve been there. Stinking rathole! I suppose you can call it a republic but it’s always someone out of the Argo family that gets elected Commdor each time. And if you ever don’t like it –
things
happen to you.” He twisted his lip and repeated, “I’ve been there.”

“But you’ve come back, which hasn’t always happened. Three trade ships, inviolate under the Conventions, have disappeared within the territory of the Republic in the last year. And those ships were armed with all the usual nuclear explosives and force-field defenses.”

“What was the last word heard from the ships?”

“Routine reports. Nothing else.”

“What did Korell say?”

Sutt’s eyes gleamed sardonically, “There was no way of asking. The Foundation’s greatest asset throughout the Periphery is its reputation of power. Do you think we can lose three ships and
ask
for them?”

“Well, then, suppose you tell me what you want with
me
.”

Jorane Sutt did not waste his time in the luxury of annoyance. As secretary to the mayor, he had held off opposition councilmen, jobseekers, reformers, and crackpots who claimed to have solved in its entirety the course of future history as worked out by Hari Seldon. With training like that, it took a good deal to disturb him.

He said methodically, “In a moment. You see, three ships lost in the same sector in the same year can’t be accident, and atomic power can be conquered only by more atomic power. The question automatically arises: if Korell has atomic weapons, where is it getting them?”

“And where does it?”

“Two alternatives. Either the Korellians have constructed them themselves—”

“Far-fetched!”

“Very! But the other possibility is that we are being afflicted with a case of treason.”

“You think so?” Mallow’s voice was cold.

The secretary said calmly, “There’s nothing miraculous about the possibility. Since the Four Kingdoms accepted the Foundation Convention, we have had to deal with considrable groups of dissident populations in each nation. Each former kingdom has its pretenders and its former noblemen, who can’t very well pretend to love the Foundation. Some of them are becoming active, perhaps.”

Mallow was a dull red. “I see. Is there anything you want to say to
me
? I’m a Smyrnian.”

“I know. You’re a Smyrnian – born in Smyrno, one of the former Four Kingdoms. You’re a Foundation man by education only. By birth, you’re an Outlander and a foreigner. No doubt your grandfather was a baron at the time of the wars with Anacreon and Loris, and no doubt your family estate were taken away when Sef Sermak redistributed the land.”

“No, by Black Space, no! My grandfather was a bloodpoor son-of-a-spacer who died heaving coal at starving wages before the Foundation. I owe nothing to the old regime. But I was born in Smyrno, and I’m not ashamed of either Smyrno or Smyrnians, by the Galaxy. Your sly little hints of treason aren’t going to panic me into licking Foundation spittle. And now you can either give your orders or make your accusations. I don’t care which.”

“My good Master Trader, I don’t care an electron whether your grandfather was King of Smyrno or the greatest pauper on the planet. I recited that rigmarole about your birth and ancestry to show you that I’m not interested in them. Evidently, you missed the point. Let’s go back now. You’re a Smyrnian. You know the Outlanders. Also, you’re a trader and one of the best. You’ve been to Korell and you know the Korellians. That’s where you’ve got to go.”

Mallow breathed deeply, “As a spy?”

“Not at all. As a trader – but with your eyes open. If you can find out where the power is coming from – I might remind you, since you’re a Symrnian, that two of those lost trade ships had Smyrnian crews.”

“When do I start?”

“When will your ship be ready?”

“In six days.”

“Then that’s when you start. You’ll have all the details at the Admiralty.”