Weird Space 2: Satan's Reach (8 page)

“Port Morris,” he said, “on the world of Tarrasay. I’ve made this place my base for the past two years.”

He indicated the co-pilot’s sling, and she eased herself into its embrace. “And you live here with your co-pilot?”

Harper smiled to himself. “You could say that, yes.”

“I would like to meet her, to thank her for our timely rescue.”

He nodded. “Very well,” he said. “
Judi
, meet Zeela Antarivo. Zeela, I’m pleased to introduce you to
Judi
.”

Judi
said, “I am delighted to make your acquaintance, Zeela Antarivo.”

Zeela looked around, her pretty features pulled into an expression of perplexity. She glanced at Harper. “Is she
hiding
?” she whispered.

He laughed. “‘She’ is not quite the right word to describe
Judi
,” he said.

Zeela’s frown deepened. “Then is she...
alien
?”

“
Judi
,” Harper said, “please tell Zeela who you are.”

“I am a Mark III smartware logic cortex with an integrated self-awareness paradigm,”
Judi
said.

Zeela shook her head. “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

Harper explained. “
Judi
is an artificial intelligence, housed in the starship’s computer nexus system.”

“So... so she doesn’t possess a body?”

“Of course not. Or rather, perhaps, the ship is her body.”

Zeela shivered. “Oh, but that must be terrible! To be locked inside one’s head! To not have a physical body... It sounds like my worst nightmare!”

Harper smiled. “Why not ask
Judi
how she feels about it?”

Zeela looked around, as if attempting to find a focus for her attention while addressing the ship. “
Judi
,” she said tentatively, “what is it like to be... to not have a body, to be just...
brain
?”

“To answer that question,”
Judi
replied, “I would first have to have experienced what it was like to possess a body, so that I could make a comparison. All I can say is that I find my existence infinitely rewarding.”

“But... but don’t you get just a
little
bored, merely running the ship day after day?”

Judi
trilled a very human laugh. “But that accounts for a tiny fraction of what I do, Zeela! For the most part I study the many philosophies, human and alien, that have accrued across space over the millennia, and in my spare time I access and integrate the various happenings in the Expansion and the Reach.”

“Den is very lucky to have you,” Zeela said.

“I owe my existence to Den,”
Judi
said. “When he... acquired me, I had no logic cortex. Indeed I could hardly be said to be self-aware. I was like a small animal, no more. But over the years Den has added to my smartware cortex, allowed me to grow, to flourish.”

Harper said, “I’ve tried make
Judi
the very best I could afford.” He did not add that the reason for this was due, in large part, to self-interest.

“Anyway,” Zeela said, “I’d like to thank you for saving our lives. If not for your timely arrival, Den and I would now be dead, or dying.”

“It was a simple matter,” the ship said, “and the correction of a terrible injustice.”

Judi
banked, sailing in slowly over the bay. Buildings passed below, tiny as seen from this altitude. Harper made out citizens in the streets, and cars beetling back and forth along the coast road.

The ship approached the headland and came in to land on an emerald greensward overlooking the sea.

Zeela had been silent for a time as she stared through the viewscreen, and now she said, “How old are you, Den?”

“Thirty, by standard reckoning. That would be...” He calculated, “in Ajantan years, almost sixty. And you’re almost eighteen, standard.”

She looked surprised, then said, “Ah, you read that in my mind, yes?”

He smiled, then pushed himself from the sling and ordered
Judi
to open the hatch of hold number one and prepare the ground-effect vehicle.

“Have you ever been married?” Zeela asked.

“Only to my work...” He clapped his hands. “Now, we have things to do. I’m taking you down to the capital, DeVries, where a talented singer like yourself...”

He reached into his jacket and produced the sheaf of Ajantan units. He passed them to her and went on, “Keep them. You’ll be needing funds to set you up, initially.”

She regarded the notes forlornly, then looked up at Den. He glanced away quickly, ill-at-ease with her pleading expression.

“I was rather hoping,” she said in a small voice, “that the money might pay my way across the Reach to Kallasta.”

He kept his gaze on the sea beyond the viewscreen. “A liner fare all the way across the Reach would be almost double that,” he said.

She was silent for a time. Then, “I was rather hoping,” she said, “that you might see your way to taking me back to Kallasta, if I returned the money – and if I cooked and cleaned for you all the way.”

“
Judi
does all that,” he said, “and anyway I’m heading in the opposite direction. Zeela...” He turned and looked down at her, where she slumped in the co-pilot’s sling with a forlorn expression, “I’m sorry, but Kallasta is way off the beaten track. I’m a trader. I have work to do, markets to trawl...”

She nodded. “No, I’m sorry. I understand. I owe you my life, you and the ship, I should be grateful for that.” Unspoken, but weighing heavily between them, was the fact that he owed her his life, too.

But hadn’t they agreed, back on Ajanta, that on that score they were even?

“Come on, you’ll like DeVries. It’s a thriving city, with a lot to do. A young girl like you...”

He hurried from the flight-deck, and presently Zeela followed.

H
E DROVE THE
ground-effect vehicle from the hold, Zeela silent in the passenger seat, and took the coast road south. He elected not to stop off at Port Morris and catch up with events there – he would establish Zeela in DeVries, head straight back, and phase out immediately. The Ajantans might not have traced his ship to Tarrasay, but he was taking no chances.

The road hugged a scalloped coastline like a series of bites taken by some vast and voracious creature. To their left was the silver-blue expanse of the ocean, dotted with boats and ferries, and to their right a series of rolling vales with the odd farmhouse or village. A greater, more pacific contrast to Ajanta he could not imagine.

“Den,” Zeela said a while later. The silence until then had been uncomfortable, but Harper had been unable to come up with an opening line that did not seem trite. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course?”

“Have you killed before?”

He gripped the wheel at its apex and stared at her, surprised. “What a strange question. Why do you ask?”

She looked at him, her head tipped to one side. “You’re an odd person, Den. A telepath, yet a star trader. An educated man – I saw the old books aboard the ship, and your music files and all the artwork... And yet the way you handled yourself in the Ajantans’ lair, the way you killed the creatures without turning a hair...”

“It was a case of kill or be killed, Zeela. In those situations, it doesn’t pay to consider the morality of one’s actions. The Ajantans were attempting to kill us, eventually – a state of affairs I did not view with delight.”

“You acted like a practised fighter. You must have had training?”

He frowned. They were straying into territory he would rather leave untrod. “Many years ago,” he said in a tone of finality.

“With the Expansion authorities?”

He sighed and remained tight-lipped.

“Come on, Den. Open up. You told me you’re a telepath. I’m not a complete idiot – I know you must have worked for the Expansion, and received combat training.”

“It’s a time of my life I’d rather not talk about, if it’s all the same to you, Zeela.”

She asked quietly, solicitously, “Why not, Den?”

“Hell... because it’s painful, okay? It hurts. What happened back then, how it happened.”

“How
what
happened?”

He turned to look at her. “You’re persistent, aren’t you? Okay, if you must know... when I was four my mother sold me to the Expansion authorities. I’d tested psi-positive – that is, I was potentially telepathic. I underwent an operation to release that potential, fitted with software up here.” He stopped, then went on, “I never saw my mother again. Years later I tried to trace her... I found where she’d last lived, that she’d been a singer, but she’d died a month or so earlier. Can you begin to imagine what it was like, to be brought up by a loving mother... or so I thought at the time... and then sold to the militaristic Expansion?”

She stared at him. “I’m sorry. No, I can’t imagine.”

“I wanted to know why my mother sold me, why she felt she had to. I’ve since found out that they paid her fifty thousand units for me... so it might have been that she was desperately poor and needed the cash – but we never seemed that poor back then.” He shrugged. “But what do kids know about things like that?”

“Nothing,” she whispered. “The adult world is a mystery to children, isn’t it?” She was quiet for a time, then said, “It’s a pity you didn’t find her before she died, Den. Things might have... I don’t know, turned out differently.”

“Maybe,” he said. “Who knows? Maybe I wouldn’t have liked the women she was. Maybe I would have discovered that she’d sold me because she was greedy and didn’t really want a snivelling brat holding her back.”

He stared straight ahead, wishing that the girl had not made him dredge up all the memories, the bitterness.

“You said your mother was a singer.”

“I’ll tell you something else, too, while you’re so intent on psychoanalysing me–”

“Hey, who said anything about–?”

“
Judi
’s voice is copied from my mother’s.” He told her about the recording of her singing, and how he’d had the ship synthesize his mother’s voice. He went on, “It’s all I have of my mother, other than a few memories. I find it... comforting.”

“I’m sorry,” she said. “And you said that working for the Expansion was hell...”

“They work you hard, make you do things you’d rather not do. And all the time they’re indoctrinating you, so that you believe that the terrible things they do are done for a cause, for the right reason.” He laughed without humour. “But as a telepath, Zeela, you can see right through all their lies and propaganda, even though all the trainers and high-ups are shielded. You read the minds of the underlings, the desk-jockeys and hangers-on... and you see what a vast organ of repression the Expansion is.”

“So how did you get away, if you don’t mind me asking?”

“And there I was, saying that I’d rather not talk about what happened... How do you do it, girl?”

She shrugged. “Maybe it’s not me. Maybe it’s you. Maybe it’s just the right time to talk, to tell someone all about it.”

He slid a quick look at her as she stared ahead at the road. He’d underestimated her, patronised her. She might be young and pretty, but she was also as sharp as hell.

“One day,” he said, “something happened which was the final straw, as much as I could take. It pushed me over the edge. Let’s just say that it was painful, and afterwards I considered killing myself. Death seemed preferable to what I’d gone through. But I was too much of a coward to kill myself – so I did the next best thing. I took some leave and stole a starship –
Judi
, here – and took off across the Gulf to Satan’s Reach. It was the only thing in my life up to that point that I was proud of doing, and it wouldn’t matter if they caught me and killed me. I’d defied them, made a stand.”

“And they sent someone after you?”

“You bet they did. They sent a trained killer. A rogue telepath is a dangerous person in the eyes of the authorities. They know too much, and can get to know much more. They’re a liability, and rather than just capture them, have them retrained or jailed... it’s quicker just to summarily execute the rogues. I knew this when I got out, and it didn’t give me a second’s hesitation.”

Zeela opened her mouth with sudden understanding. “Ah... now I get it. The Expansion sent a killer. He found you, right – and you killed him?”

He gripped the wheel. “
Her
,” he said.

“Oh.”

The silence stretched. “Like I said,” he went on, “it was a case of kill or be killed. Me or her. I didn’t like what I did back then. I’m not proud of it... But there was no other way. She came after me, made a mistake, and I took advantage of her slip and...” He shrugged. “It’s strange, but for months, maybe even years afterwards, a part of me even wished she’d succeeded and killed me. I know, I don’t even understand it myself.”

“Life is mysterious,” Zeela said. “I’m sorry. That’s a platitude, but it’s something that my parents said all the time. They were pacifists, and they brought me up to be the same.”

He stared at her. He considered her questions about his past, the killing; it didn’t seem mere prurient curiosity on her part now, but genuinely interested enquiry from someone to whom killing was anathema.

“That’s something I’ve never really understood,” he said. “Pacifism. It seems to me the idealism of people who have never faced the dilemma of having to fight for their lives.”

She regarded him and smiled, it seemed, sadly. “But that’s just it, Den. My parents did face that dilemma, and they held by their creed. It happened long after they left Kallasta and settled on Ajanta. They had very little money and certainly not the means to leave the planet, once they found out how things worked with the Ajantans.”

“What happened?”

“They became addicted to dhoor. Every human does, given time. The Ajantans supply the drug, and it has a magical effect on humans, gives us a euphoric, perpetual high for many years. My father worked as a carpenter, and a third of his earnings went to paying for his and my mother’s, and then my own, addiction.”

He said, “You? But...”

“I took my last dose of dhoor five days ago. I should be suffering the effects of withdrawal pretty soon, now. It can kill people, if they’re not strong.” She stared at him. “But I am strong, Den. I’ll survive.”