The Timeweb Chronicles: Timeweb Trilogy Omnibus (17 page)

Chapter Thirty-Four

I care nothing if my people love me. The primary emotion I wish to elicit is fear.

—Doge Lorenzo del Velli, as told by the Hibbil Pimyt

Princess Meghina strolled along a narrow path that overlooked the grounds of the Palazzo Magnifico and its fabulous orange-and-yellow Daedalian Labyrinth. A mini-forest formed in an intricate web of natural mazes around a Minotaur statue, it was a great delight to members of the royal court and to scientists as well, who frequently came to study the plants and take samples of them. The only such forest in existence, it was of unknown origin, and resisted all efforts to transplant it.

Meghina had been on Timian One for two weeks following the disastrous funeral on Canopa. Even though she and the Doge had the most famous open marriage in the Merchant Prince Alliance, there had been tension between them over her long-standing relationship with Prince Saito, and even jealousy on the day of the tycoon’s ceremony. Afterward, the Doge had insisted that she come to the capital for an indeterminate period, and he had been displaying her at state functions, making her remain at his side like a living, ornamental doll. It was childish on his part, but no one could defy him when he really wanted something.

Doge Lorenzo had respected Prince Saito, even revered him for his business acumen. As long as the Prince was alive, the Doge looked the other way and said little about the relationship with Meghina. There were important professional connections between the men, and noble princes never let women come between them. Now that Saito was gone, however, the situation was different.

At dinner each evening, with only Lorenzo and his pretty blonde wife seated at an immense table in the Grand Banquet Hall, he continually harped at her, demanding to know personal details about her affair with the dead man. She tried to answer his questions, but no response seemed sufficient, and he kept snapping at her and digging deeper, asking additional questions.

The Doge had been watching her every move, mostly through his agents but often on his own. At the moment he was attempting to conceal himself on the pathway behind her, thinking she would not notice him if he dressed in the garb of an ordinary court noble … royal blue surcoat, leggings, and liripipe hat. She smiled to herself, but it was more a grimace than anything else.

He could behave so immaturely at times. She didn’t understand the double standard involved here. Well, actually, she did
understand
it as the chauvinistic manner of the merchant princes, but it was not fair. Her husband performed sexual acts with more than a hundred women a year, while her tally was a scant tenth of that, and only with noblemen of the highest stations. The sin she had committed in Lorenzo’s eyes, however, had been to care deeply about one of them without making any attempt to camouflage her feelings.

She missed Saito so much that it hurt, and her husband knew it.

Pausing to catch her breath, she pretended to examine a poppy garden, while actually looking peripherally at her husband, at least fifty meters down trail. He had stopped, and was acting as if he was cleaning something off his shoes with a stick.

Part of her wanted to go back there and confront him, shouting her feelings at the top of her voice. But a proper lady would never conduct herself in that manner. The noblewomen of the Merchant Prince Alliance were all trained in civilized behavior … known as
urbanitas
… from an early age. She needed to comport herself at all times as if she was actually one of those ladies. An uncultured, or
rusticitas
person, was not welcome in court society.

All of her life, going back to the early years in which she had grown up as a Mutati princess on Paradij, the Princess had longed to be a beautiful, elegantly-dressed Human lady, socializing with handsome Human men. She had always considered Mutatis ugly in their natural state, with their rolling mounds of fat, tiny heads, and oversized eyes. She had run away from the Mutati Kingdom in order to live out her fantasy, and for years it had gone well. Meghina achieved all of the wealth and social position that a woman could want, and had enjoyed the affections of a man she loved. But after the death of Prince Saito her fantasy seemed to burst. Everything looked dark and dismal to her now, and she wondered if she had made a terrible mistake when she abandoned her roots.

With a deep and abiding sadness, she picked a bright yellow pollenflower to remind her of her lost love, and continued along the path, away from her observer.

* * * * *

At dinner that evening, as expected, Lorenzo lay in waiting for her. A valet reported to the Princess that the aged Doge had been sitting at the table for more than an hour, drinking wine and getting meaner by the minute. He had thrown crystal glasses and candlesticks at servants, shouted epithets at them, and even threatened to kill one on the spot and use his body as a centerpiece for the table.

His behavior hardly qualified as civilized, but in his position he could do anything he pleased.

As Meghina swept into the Grand Banquet Hall she wore a shimmering gown of metallic blue Sirikan cloth, with golden lace at the bodice that revealed her ample breasts. Above her heart-shaped face, her blonde hair rose in an elaborate structure, with wings at the sides and a ruby tiara gracing the front.

Her husband did not rise for her, and hardly looked in her direction when a servant helped her onto a high-backed chair. She sat on the Doge’s right, not a safe distance away.

“Good evening, Your Magnificence,” she said in a melodic tone. Meghina wore a subtle floral perfume that she knew he liked.

Lorenzo gulped a glass of red wine and glared at her with dark, watery eyes that suggested things he did to Mutati prisoners in one of the gaol’s torture chambers. If he ever discovered her true identity, she had no doubt of her fate.

“Are you my wife or aren’t you?” he demanded. His gaze focused on the scant lace over her bosom.

“I am your wife, Sire … and more. I serve nobility.” It was a rather open-ended response, but one that presented her position to him clearly—she had informed him in the very beginning that she wished to be a courtesan and not merely a wife.

A servant came to pour more wine, but had to duck and run for cover when the old man pummeled him with tableware that crashed and broke on the floor.

“Get out!” Lorenzo thundered to the hapless fellow. “Can’t you see I want peace and quiet?”

When they were alone in the great hall, Lorenzo gripped Meghina’s wrist on top of the table and rasped, “After your lover’s funeral, you ordered the restoration of his mausoleum, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she admitted, “but I thought you would want that. He was your friend and an important prince.”

“It is unseemly for you to arrange for the work personally.” He squeezed her wrist tightly. “You see that, don’t you?”

“I had hoped to remove the worry from you, Sire, since you are so busy.”
Busy following me around,
she thought.

A cruel smile cut the features of his leathery face, with a bit of drool sliding from one side of his mouth. “How thoughtful of you,” he said in a low, menacing tone, “toward me and my late friend.”

“I had hoped to be,” she said. Tugging slightly at her wrist, she protested, “You’re hurting me.”

“What?” He looked down, saw his own knuckles white from squeezing, and let go.

She rubbed her reddened wrist to get circulation going again. If she had known how violent Human noblemen could be, she might have taken steps to safeguard herself more after shapeshifting into Human form. Certain protective features could have been concealed in the flesh. As it was now, she could never change back again and was as vulnerable to injury or death as any Human female.

“Is work on the mausoleum finished?” he asked in an annoyed tone. He glanced around, as if looking for an inattentive servant to injure.

“They should be lifting it back onto its foundation about now.”

“And the contractor’s invoices?” He raised his voice. “You aren’t
paying
them personally, are you?”

“I advanced some funds in order to get things going. I was only trying to remove the burden from you.”

“All costs must be born by the state, and not by the wife of the Doge. Have the bills sent to me!”

“As you wish, My Lord. Shall we dine now?” Noting his continued interest in her bosom, she smiled sweetly and asked, “Or would you prefer your dessert first?”

His face provided the answer. Human men were so transparent when they wished to have intercourse. But she would tease this one first, with a sexually-charged dance of bewitchment.

* * * * *

On Canopa, Jimu had been one of hundreds of robots assigned to lift and repair the damaged mausoleum of Prince Saito Watanabe. The mechanical man melted into the background and did as he was told by the Human work bosses.

The structure rested in its proper position now, but the jeweled walls had been fractured, and were undergoing repair by a team of specialists who worked on low scaffolds. The work bosses had described the powerful lightning strike and ground tremor that caused all this damage as a freak act of nature. Jimu didn’t know anything about that. He focused on his assignment, retrieving and listing the priceless gems that were scattered around the site.

At the top of the hill, he added a bucketful of jewels to a growing pile. Security was everywhere, with armed soldiers watching every move that he and his companions made, like the guards for a prison work crew. After a while Jimu peered through a broken wall in the mausoleum. Inside stood a glassy statue of the dead prince, with both arms broken off. Workers were repairing them.

Despite high security, Jimu had the intelligence to circumvent it, and he sneaked away, this time making his way onto a podship bound for the Inn of the White Sun. He had heard about a group of sentient robots that operated a way station there, and wanted to see what it was like for machines to control their own destinies.…

Chapter Thirty-Five

Is there anything larger than the galaxy? And even if there is, what difference does it make?

—Anonymous note, found inside a piece of malfunctioning Hibbil machinery

When Jimu arrived at the Inn of the White Sun, he was astounded by the ingenious architecture of this hivelike way station that had been constructed in an orbital ring. The views of the planet Ignem, far below, were spectacular through bubble windows, and unlike anything he had ever seen before. The world looked like the largest gemstone in the galaxy, and it changed moment by moment, displaying different color combinations in shifting light.

“So you’ve heard of us, eh?” a flat-bodied robot said, as they stood on an observation deck. Within an hour of his arrival, Jimu had been introduced to Thinker, the leader of the mechanical colony. Narrowing his metal-lidded eyes, Thinker added, “What is it you’ve heard?”

“That you control your own destinies.” With one hand, Jimu rubbed a small dent on his own torso. He rather liked the feeling, for it made him think of the adversities he had overcome.

“I mean, what is it you’ve been told we do here?”

“That you run this inn, and make a great deal of money at it. Robots all over the galaxy speak of this place with affection and admiration.”

“Anything else?”

“No, nothing.”

“That is good, very good.”

Not wishing to conceal anything from this important robot, Jimu said, “I was Captain of the sentient machines on the Human Grand Fleet. You may have heard of it … the force that attacked the Mutati Kingdom and lost.”

“Yes,” Thinker said, staring at Jimu’s dented, scratched body. “And a military disaster does not look good on your résumé.”

“I wasn’t to blame for it, but listen to this.” In his concise, mechanical voice Jimu described General Sajak’s suspicion that Doge Lorenzo had sabotaged the fleet.

“Preposterous,” Thinker said. “The Doge would never do that.”

“Nonetheless, General Sajak is convinced of it, and is conspiring to assassinate Lorenzo.”

Without warning, Thinker inserted a flexible probe into Jimu’s control panel. Jimu went numb, like a patient under anesthetic.

“You are telling me the truth,” Thinker announced presently, in a flat voice. He withdrew the probe, then asked, “Who set up your control box? I’ve never seen connections like this.”

“A Human food-service worker. He had only a little experience with machines, I’m afraid.”

“You don’t have full range of movement do you? I noticed considerable stiffness as you walked.”

“You’re right.” Jimu lifted an arm, but not very high, then showed how the elbow didn’t bend as far as it should. He demonstrated similar problems with other joints.

“We’ll have to get you into the shop. But first, I want to show you our operation here. As a military robot, you will appreciate it.” The cerebral leader paused. “In fact, with your credentials, you deserve to be an officer again. Let’s make it Captain, all right?”

“In what force?” Jimu’s glowing yellow eyes opened wide.

He pointed a steely finger at Ignem. “We are building an army down there.”

“And you’ve already decided to make me a part of it?”

“I make quick decisions,” Thinker said. “That’s why I’m in charge here. Besides, nothing eludes my interface probe. In only a few seconds, I learned all about you.”

Later that day, Thinker escorted Jimu down to the surface of Ignem, to a camouflaged headquarters building that had been made to look like no more than a high spot on the surrounding black obsidian plain. There the newcomer was introduced to five other officers, all matching his own rank. One, a tall machine named Gearjok, had served as a technical robot on a Merchant Prince warship, responsible for maintaining mechanical systems. The other captains—Whee, Nouter, Fivvul, and Qarmax—had all worked in various machine supervisory roles for the armed forces of the Humans. In each case the robots had been discarded at the end of their useful lives, and had been salvaged by Thinker.

After a while, Gearjok slapped Jimu on his metal backside and said, “Enough of this. Now let’s introduce you to the others.”

As the mechanical men strolled outside, it pleased Jimu that none of his new comrades seemed to envy him for his quick promotion to their own level. He had seen such feelings of animosity in machine groups before, metastasizing like cancers and destroying the ability of the robots to work together. It was one of the undesirable traits of Humans that some mechanicals had acquired, but here it seemed to have been programmed out.

Jimu followed the others into a vacuum tube, which transported them with whooshes and thumps up to the roof of the headquarters, which they called the Command Center. From the top, he saw volcanoes in the distance, suddenly active and spewing fire and smoke into the atmosphere. Overhead, through the increasingly murky sky, he barely made out the orbital ring of the Inn of the White Sun.

Hearing a rumbling noise, he lowered his gaze and saw black plates slide open on the floor of the obsidian plain. Thousands of machines poured out, like fat, oddly-shaped insects from a burrow. He gaped in disbelief.

The robots began to form into ranks, but a number of them had problems and bumped into each other or stopped functioning. One, a round-backed mechanism who resembled a silver beetle, fell onto his back at the front of the ranks and could not right himself. Very few of them were shiny; most had unsightly dents and patch marks.

“As you can see, we still have some kinks to work out,” Thinker said. “But believe me, we’ve made a lot of progress.”

The worst robots were taken away for more repairs, and soon the remaining machines—around three thousand of them—were arrayed in neat infantry formations, identifiable to Jimu as the boxy ranks of ancient Earthian legions. He had mixed feelings about what he was seeing. In one respect, this was not a very impressive display. But in another, at least it existed.

A machine army!

He noted that only a small number of the troops carried weapons, and those were mostly outdated pelleteers and slingknives, with a few modern puissant rifles. Some of the robots seemed to know how to handle their implements of war, while others did not. This certainly was a motley gathering of individuals and equipment.

“We’ll have to send them back to barracks shortly,” Thinker said. “We keep maneuvers out here to a minimum, to avoid detection by enemies.”

“And who are our enemies?” Jimu inquired.

“There are always enemies. The trick is identify them in time and take appropriate action.”

“I see.” Jimu nodded, but made a creaking sound as he did so. One more thing to fix.

With a sudden clatter of metal, Thinker folded closed, so that he looked like a dull-gray metal box.

“He does that sometimes,” Gearjok said, “when he needs to consider something really important. It gives him absolute darkness and silence. The trouble is, when he thinks about deep philosophical matters he tends to fall asleep in the quiet darkness, with all of his senses blocked or shut off. Whenever that happens, we reactivate him by shaking him gently.”

Moments later, Thinker opened back up, and said, “I’ve been meaning to offer our services to mankind one day, in repayment for inventing sentient machines in the first place.”

“But Humans discarded these machines,” Jimu said.

“We still owe them some loyalty for creating us. Never forget that, Jimu. You and I would not be having this conversation at all if not for Humans. I think they threw us away in error, and I’ve been looking for an opportunity to prove it. I assure you, that despite the fumbling appearance of my troops, it is a skillful deception.” He touched a long scratch on his own torso. “Conventional wisdom holds that a well-run military force should be spotless and polished, thus instilling a sense of pride and personal self-worth into the organization. But there are distinct advantages to a less-than-perfect appearance. It can cause an opponent to underestimate your abilities.”

“That makes sense,” Jimu admitted. “Do you mean to tell me that even the machines that stopped functioning out on the parade ground did so by design?”

Thinker cut a jagged grin across his metal face. “Not exactly, but things
are
getting better.”

“The robots here are independently self-replicating,” Gearjok said to Jimu, “and you can be, too, with a little updating.”

Thinker explained that he had developed a sentient machine manufacturing process that did not exist anywhere else in the galaxy. His metal men were able to make copies of themselves by finding their own raw materials and making their own parts, even recycling old items as necessary. He mentioned what Jimu already knew, that there were other machines that could self-replicate (such as those of the Hibbils), but only in regimented factories, with raw materials provided for them under assembly line conditions.

“Is that why the robots are not uniform?” Jimu asked.

“Precisely. They use whatever materials are available to them.”

“With my own scrapes and dents, I should fit in nicely around here.”

“You’ll get a lot more before you’re through,” Thinker said. He paused, and added, “I am troubled about the assassination plot against Doge Lorenzo. It seems to me that this is the opportunity we’ve been looking for.”

Solemnly, Thinker placed a metal hand on Jimu’s shoulder and said, “I want you to lead a small force of our best fighting robots to Timian One and inform the Doge that he is in danger.”

“Me?”

“I like what I see in you, Jimu. You have experience, but even more importantly you have special qualities of leadership … your own way of solving problems. And you heard the conspirators yourself.”

“I’m honored, but …”

“You will inform him of the danger, and come right back. I need you here, to assist with the army we are forming.”

“I don’t feel ready for such an important assignment.”

“Nonsense. We just need to update your operating systems and data banks, clean you up a bit, and you’ll be ready to go. Another advantage that we have over Humans. With us, the learning curve is almost immediate.”

“You’re going to intervene in Human politics?”

“Doge Lorenzo is in danger, and we must do something!”

“Then I’m your robot. But first I must confess, anxiety is heating up my circuits. Could you ask the programmers to take care of that too, please?”

“Don’t worry. We’ll get you in shape for the assignment.” Exuberantly, Thinker slapped his new comrade on the back, leaving one more dent, a little one.