The Sheriff of Yrnameer (13 page)

“Shut up, Cole!” she shouted as she ran.

There was a pause. “That …
Janice!
She’s driving me crazy!”

Nora found the control panel and the explosion of wires, which seemed to have grown even larger and more complex. She grabbed the small keyboard, only vaguely aware of Bacchi, who was in a small whimpering ball.

“Missile impact in thirty seconds,” announced the computer, the voice given an echo effect by the speakers distributed throughout the Benedict.

Now another voice was coming over the intercom, a female voice backed by a warm, upbeat mixture of acoustic guitars and strings: “Hello! If you’re hearing this announcement, you’re being targeted by the Eco-Lance Missile System, part of the Aunt Jessica line of green armaments. In just a few moments, our patented, environmentally sound technology will gently and effectively recycle your ship and its contents into their component fermions.”

In the cockpit, Cole reached out to shut down the communicator, then froze, afraid of the unintended consequences of pushing any buttons.

“Cole!” said Nora, “I’m here! What do I do?”

Cole chewed on his knuckle, thinking.

“Cole!”

“Hold on!”

“At Aunt Jessica’s, your opinion matters to us,” continued the female voice. “When you hear the tone, you will have ten seconds until recycling commences. Please take that time to respond to this brief customer-satisfaction survey. On a scale of one to ten, how happy are you with the performance of the Eco-Lance system?”

There was a clear chime.

“Cole!”

“I’m thinking!”

“Please respond,” said the female voice. “You have ten seconds.”

“Ten seconds, Cole! Ten!”

“Ten,” said the female voice. “Thank you very much for your kind reply.”

“Shut up!” said Nora. “Cole?”

“Try …,” began Cole. “Try, uh, T-99 to … uh …”

He could hear Nora starting to type, then stop. “To what? To
what
, Cole?”

“To H-42.”

“Okay.”

“No!” he said suddenly. “H-47!”

“Which is it? Forty-two or Forty-seven?”

“Forty-seven! Four-seven!”

“Six. Five,” said the female voice, counting down.

“What? Five?!” said Nora.

“Four-seven
!” screamed Cole.

“Four. Three,” said the female voice.

“Three?
!” said Nora.

“Seven
!”

“ARE YOU SURE?!!!”

“JUST DO IT ALREADY!!”

“Have a pleasant detonation,” said the female voice.

Cole covered his head.

Peter the ‘Puter could hear Charlie coming closer.

Charlie was whistling to himself, and occasionally muttering. Peter could hear him rummaging around in a tool case, and it was making him very nervous.

Peter couldn’t see him because Charlie had smashed his video input with his mug. Peter had replayed the scene several times in his circuitry, the whiteness of the mug blotting out his fish-eye view of Charlie’s office, the quote on the side of the mug looming in the frame—
REAL STARS REACH FOR THE STARS!
—and then nothing.

Charlie had prefaced the blow by screaming, “Stop staring at me!” several times. Peter had done his best to assure him that he wasn’t staring, but Charlie had seemed very agitated and was unwilling to listen.

Charlie hadn’t smashed his audio inputs, though, and Peter had been generating a steady stream of high-frequency beeps, too high for Charlie to hear, and he was using his stereo reception of the rebounding signals to calculate what he hoped—well, feared, really—was an accurate picture of the room. Feared because what he thought he was detecting was Charlie advancing toward him, holding a screwdriver in one hand and a large mallet in the other.

“This should about do it,” said Charlie.

Peter’s fear increased.

He needed more time. He’d summoned the bots to the download ports, but so far neither of them had arrived.

“What are you doing, Dave?” said Peter.

“Dave?” said Charlie. “Who’s Dave? I’m Charlie.”

“Sorry, Charlie. Just a little attempt at humor, there,” said Peter. “Ha ha.”

“What do you mean, humor? You don’t have a sense of humor,” said Charlie.

Phrases appeared unbidden in Peter’s mind, phrases that invoked imagery of stones and glass houses, and pots referring to kettles as black. He wondered at the strange connections he was making lately.

“Stupid piece of crap,” said Charlie, snapping Peter out of it.

Charlie had first gotten upset with Peter a few days ago, when he discovered that Peter had been trying to reestablish a connection to the wide area network and communicate with the outside world. Apparently Charlie felt that this was stabbing him in the back. Actually, Peter
knew
that’s what Charlie felt, because he kept repeating, “This farging computer is stabbing me in the back!”

That, and: You know what I’m going to do? I’m going to smash that farging backstabbing ‘puter before it stabs me in the back.

At which point Peter decided it would be a good thing if he were a bit more mobile.

Right now his entire being resided in a dense mass of circuitry that was about the size of a cube of sugar. A cube of sugar that would most certainly get the worse end of an exchange with a large mallet.

Unless.

He spent some clock cycles going through the inventory, trying to find a suitable home. Many of the bots had been damaged or destroyed in the fighting. He surveyed the healthy bots, but couldn’t find a single one with the proper environment for him—they were too well defended against intrusive downloads, or they were underpowered, or their circuitry was too specialized. Not a single one would work.

But two would. Two together.

The first was a Gauld 8-963, a repairbot—small, nimble, with eight delicate segmented legs and several multipurpose manipulators. It was a bot with ample intelligence, designed to problem-solve its way through a wide variety of challenging tasks. Peter estimated he could place about 73 percent of himself in it.

The remaining 27 percent would fit in an H-1020. It was a brute of a bot, a denizen of the cargo hold, made to lift heavy objects. It was a simple block with four powerful, tubular legs, four similar
arms, and enough processing power to let it respond to simple voice commands—”Hey, stupid, put that six-ton crate over there.”

The best part was that both bots were equipped with Horgan spinwire interfaces, meaning they could link up. Meaning they could form one mind. Meaning Peter could have a new home, a body, a way to move about in the world. Oh, the places he’d go!

That is, if the bots made it to a download port before Charlie flattened him.

Charlie was unscrewing the protective casing, Peter’s shell. “Doot doot dooo,” Charlie was singing, tunelessly. He had the first screw out and was working on the second. Two more left after that. Where were those bots?

“Charlie,” said Peter, “may I make an observation?”

“Sure, computer, why not,” said Charlie. He seemed calmer now.

“I think that perhaps you’re not well.”

“Uh-huh,” said Charlie. He continued to work on the screws. “Why would you think that?”

“Well, would you mind if I showed you a video?”

“How long is it?”

“It’s very short, sir,” said Peter.

“Yeah, whatever. Fire it up.”

Peter played a video of Charlie snacking on someone’s hand. As far as he could tell, Charlie’s heart rate and breathing barely changed.

“I look pretty healthy there.”

The second screw was out. Charlie started on the third.

“Charlie … uh …”

“What.”

“Maybe … would you be my friend?”

“Sure, computer. What-farging-ever.”

Charlie’s hand slipped. Where were the bots? He just needed a little more time—it should work if it took Charlie the same amount of effort to undo the last two screws as the first two required.

“Forget it,” said Charlie. He got a firm grip on the protective plate and wrenched it back, the metal complaining as it gave way. “There.”

He stepped back, readying the mallet. Not yet, not yet, thought Peter. Not yet!

“Charlie, wait. I have a secret to tell you.”

“Save it.”

“There’s, uh, there’s a bear behind you!”

“No, there isn’t.”

“I have a really good joke.”

“Really? Let’s hear it.”

“Umm … uh …”

Charlie shook his head. “Weirdest farging ‘puter I’ve ever seen,” he said, and smashed the processor to dust.

“Have a pleasant detonation,” said the voice, and Cole covered his head.

The Benedict 80 seemed to fold up on itself like a complex piece of origami, and then it wasn’t there, just as a very costly missile knifed through the vacated space.

“We did it!” said Cole. “We’re
alive!
Ha ha ha ha
owww
.”

It was painful to laugh, compressed as he was into a transparent, one-dimensional flounder shape.

He was vaguely aware of being spread out in the same plane as the spacecraft, and the others, but all he could truly experience was his own infinite flatness.

There was a popping sensation. He groaned in discomfort. Now he was an odd polyhedral object, surrounded by the inside-out cubist nightmare that was the Benedict. He floated past Bacchi, who was even more grotesque than usual.

“I hate bendspace,” said Bacchi.

Philip went bobbing by, looking vaguely like a multisided die, the kind the nerds used when they played that archaic game with the castles and monsters. What was that stupid thing called?

“You all right, Nora?” Philip asked. Nora floated by, slowly rotating, two eyes on one side of her face. “I’m fine. Check the kids.”

Another
pop
, and Cole assumed a configuration that felt like a snapshot of a violent explosion.

“Arrgh,” said Bacchi, “we have to go through the ninth dimension?”

Cole found himself simultaneously in front, behind, and inside of what he somehow knew was Nora’s face. It was an uncomfortably intimate sensation.

“Cole,” she said, “thanks.”

“It was nothing.”

He was aware that Bacchi was somehow close by, listening.

“And you know, I wasn’t doing it to help you,” Cole added.

“You’re really hard, aren’t you?” said Nora.

“That’s what she said,” replied Cole.

“Oh,
shtangle
!” said Bacchi.

Pop!
They all transformed into long strawlike tubes.

“Idiots,” said Nora.

They bent their way across the universe for what seemed like days, and then a week, and then several weeks plus forever. They were twisted and squeezed and turned inside out. There were moments when they passed through three-dimensional space and all would be normal, and then they would be transformed again. Time lost all meaning. Space lost all meaning. Meaning lost all meaning.

And then at long last they popped into three-dimensional space, high above the planet of Yrnameer, finally at their destination.

Except.

“That’s not Yrnameer,” said Nora.

“Look at the third ring of the satellite,” said Nora. “It looks completely depressurized.”

“There’s still light coming from three of the five rings,” said Philip.

“I don’t even think it’s in the right orbit,” said Nora.

“I think you’re right,” said Cole, “I think it’s too low.”

“What is it?” asked Nora.

“A Dynaco Mark IV StarStation Success!Sat, probably the Apria B model,” said Bacchi.

They all turned to look at him.

“And that gip is
farged UP,”
he added.

The four of them were standing at the full-wall viewing window, looking out at the satellite, framed by the backlit planet behind it. Cole noted the blast mark near the glowing Success!Sat sign on the central axis of the massive craft. He didn’t like this at all.

“What happened?” asked Joshua. Cole turned. He hadn’t noticed Joshua come in. “Whoa,” said Joshua, “What is that?”

“A Dynaco Mark IV Star—”

“It’s a satellite, Joshua,” said Nora.

“It looks damaged.”

“‘Damaged’? That gip is fa—”

“Bacchi,” said Nora.

“Is that Yrnameer down there?”