DAW 30th Anniversary Science Fiction Part 35

Relieved, Anya nearly forgot why she had initiated the call. 'So Teaser was right."

"About Govorin's guilt? I think so. The proof is still a little tentative, unless you have some good news for me."

She swallowed twice before answering. She chose her words with care, "Tell Govorin that he underestimated the model 5000's self-protection features." Teaser leaped into her lap. Automatically, she scratched his ears.

Teaser purred loudly.

Sanchez' hesitation lasted even longer than Anya's. "Thanks. I'll tell him."

After another pause, he added, "With luck, we'll coax a confession out of him.

Frankly, I think he wants to confess. He seems to have something of a martyr complex."

"A confession would be good," agreed Anya.

"All those taxpayer dollars saved."

Sanchez is smart, and he is observant, she thought, but he also wants to do good. "Yes. Taxpayer dollars. Thanks, Sanchez."

"Nick."

"Thanks, Nick."

Anya entered the police department headquarters in a buoyant mood, despite her solemn purpose. Anya pondered how much a week could change the small universe that comprised a human life. She could not remember when she had last felt so defiantly happy. Perhaps she had not realized how much it mattered to have someone waiting for her at home until Dusty was gone. She would never repeat the mistake of being underappreciative with Teaser.

Anya greeted the receptionist, "Good morning, Sharon. Is Nick Sanchez in yet?"

The young woman returned the smile. "He's in, though you shouldn't expect too much of him until he's had a few more pots of coffee. He's expecting you."

"Thanks." Anya found him easily. She had visited his desk often in the past few days.

"You're sure you want to do this?" he asked her.

"I'm sure."

"What does Teaser think?"

"He understands the force of curiosity.""I suppose he would," answered Sanchez. He gave Anya a warm smile, acknowledging their conspiracy of silence in regard to Teaser's abilities.

Anya couldn't help herself. She had to try talking to Govorin once for herself. She did not doubt his guilt. She had not doubted it since Teaser told her whose hand had snuffed out Seth Katani's life. Now, of course, Nigel Govorin had confessed. However, her a.n.a.lytical nature longed to understand what could inspire such a drastic act as the murder of someone as n.o.bly-intentioned as Seth Katani.

Sanchez might have tried harder to discourage her, but he recognized her stubbornness. "Just remember," Sanchez told her before she entered the interrogation cell. "He's not sane. You can't expect sane explanations from him."

"I know the diagnosis," replied Anya. "I need to see the reality."

Govorin was such a pale, ineffectual-looking creature. It was still hard to believe that such a pitiful excuse for a man could have taken another man's life.

Anyone stronger than Seth Katani would have fought back with ease. The watery eyes peered at Anya blindly. "You're the a.n.a.lyst, aren't you?" He began to laugh like a bad parody of the lunatic that he seemed to be.

"I'm the sensor system a.n.a.lyst, yes."

"There was no evidence of tampering, was there? Was this Katani's way of bluffing me into a confession, or did the creature persuade you to compromise your professional integrity?"

Anya's expression froze. Perhaps this visit was a mistake. She asked carefully, "Did who persuade me? What are you talking about?"

"It doesn't matter anyway, does it? Not now. Not to me. I'm safe, you see.

Safer than you'll ever be. I'll be locked away in a nice, neat little cell far from them. Clean, well fed, safe. My mind will remain my own."

Govorin's mind is nothing but a maze of confusion, thought Anya, acknowledging that Sanchez was probably right about the futility of this little interview. "Safe from Katani?"

Govorin tilted his head, and the lank brown hair fell across his forehead.

"Safe from Katani's manipulations. Not like you. You're already trapped."

"I don't understand."

"No. You don't understand anything. You sense that you're missing something, and that's why you're here, but it's too late for you. You're already converted. You don't even understand Katani's plan yet, do you?" wailed Govorin. Alarmed by the man's sudden agitation, Anya began to back away, but Govorin flapped his hand at her in appeas.e.m.e.nt. "I'll try to explain. It won't help, but I'll try. Katani couldn't program his ideas of 'good' and 'evil' into humans directly. All of his experiments with human genetic programming failed miserably. His test results were a travesty."

"Then why did you consider him a threat?"

"You can't see it, can you? You have already become the product of his manipulations, but you can't see it.""See what?" demanded Anya, stretching her patience out of pity for this sorry, misguided creature.

Govorin's mouth twisted into a weary smile, and he mustered some of the dignity that the past week had stolen from him. "Katani observed that as society becomes more frantic and dehumanized, people have become more obedient to their pets' demands than to any religion or other ethos."

This was not what Anya had expected, but she prompted Govorin to continue, "That's true for some people, I suppose."

"Some people. Enough people. More people when Katani's plan reaches maturity. People think of them as pets, but they are the ones that rule."

"They?"

Govorin looked ready to cry in frustration. "You're lost already, aren't you?

Don't you understand? It's the cat. Katani created his manipulative, talking animals to 'guide' humans into 'proper' actions. Egyptians worshiped cats openly. Katani believed that such worship could be tapped again with only a little prod-ding."

"You killed Katani because of Teaser?" demanded Anya, torn between a matter-of-fact acceptance of the premise and a sense or revulsion for the man who presented it.

"The problem is not just Teaser," sighed Govorin, and at last he sounded defeated. "There were others. I don't know how many or how various. Katani traveled all over the world. How many colonies of feral cats exist? How many semi-domestic dogs roam city streets? How many 'wild' animals coexist with humans in the congested suburbs that have replaced true wilderness? None of us will know the effects until a few generations have been born. They're breeding, you see. Breeding and inbreeding- Katani bred his animals to have the dominant genes. They'll be ruling us all in a few years. That was Katani's warped idea of tilting the balance toward 'good.' "

Anya was silent for a moment, pondering Govorin's words. Given the clear evidence of Teaser's abilities, what Govorin claimed was plausible. Unlike Govorin, however, Anya did not find the idea repellent. In fact, she found Katani's vision-if that's what it was-rather appealing. "So what did you hope to achieve by killing Katani?"

"Did I kill him?" asked Govorin slyly.

"You confessed."

"Yes. So I did. No choice really, once I knew that the cat outlived him.

Katani warned me what would happen, and Katani was thorough in such matters. I am too much of a coward to face a lifetime of cringing from every animal and animal-worshiper on the planet." He grunted, "If that abomination of a cat hadn't escaped me, we wouldn't be here now, but I chased the wrong animal. Once I realized that Katani's cat had escaped me, I knew that I had lost.

The cat is too persuasive. He was bred that way."

"You wanted to kill Teaser?""Of course. He is the abomination of abominations."

Anya could only shake her head at the man's insane folly. Sanchez was right.

Govorin was beyond her understanding. "You a.s.serted your humanity by murdering your colleague?"

"You would look at it that way. I tried to execute a last gesture of independence. I failed."

"You proved Katani's point about human evil."

Govorin only grumbled, "Fanatics cannot see clearly." Anya did not know whether he referred to himself, to Katani-or to her. "Go away," he said, squeezing his eyes shut. "I put myself here to spare myself from your kind." He reminded her oddly of Teaser, closing out the world.

"I'm going."

She shrugged at Sanchez as she left the building, admitting the accuracy of his prediction. Sanchez acknowledged her with a grin and a nod. She did not stop to talk but hastened toward her car. The supply of cheese crackers was running low, and Teaser would scold her if she served supper without crackers.

eluki bes shahar.

eluki bes shahar is a mult.i.talented author who has written novels and short stories in a variety of genres, and under several different names. But h.e.l.lflower, published by DAW in June of 1991-and the two sequels which followed it, Darktraders and Archangel Blues-offers a truly unique reading experience for any science fiction devotee. So I was especially delighted when eluki decided to return to this universe in "Read Only Memory."

She also provided us with the following words about this series: "The h.e.l.lflower trilogy was my first science fiction novel sale, to Sheila Gilbert at DAW, and all three books are narrated in the first person by one b.u.t.terflies-Are-Free Peace Sincere in an artificial dialect drawn from many different sources [rather as if Doc Smith had written the Lensman saga in the style of A Clockwork Orange, with a little help from Damon Runyon). When I'd finished the h.e.l.lflower trilogy, I realized I had many other stories set in that universe that I'd like to tell, and I wondered if it would be possible to do without recourse to b.u.t.terfly's unique "voice."

'Read Only Memory' is set several years after the end of Archangel Blues. The h.e.l.lflowers have taken Throne, and restored an uneasy peace to the Empire, ruling as advisers to the Princess-Elect. But in the Outfar and the nightworld, the same shadow-war that has been fought between Men and Libraries since the fall of the Old Federation still continues. ..."

-SG.

READ ONLY MEMORY.

eluki bes shahar.

PANDORA is at the edge of the Empire, so far down Paradise Street that the Core and even alMayne-held Throne are a distant rumor. The Hamati Confederacy is closer, and the Hamat ships with their strange inhuman crews keep the humans on Pandora . . . humble.

"The star-swept Rim," the Court poets call it when they speak of it at all, ignoring both the fact that it is nowhere near the edge of its galaxy and that, nevertheless, the stars in Pandora's neighborhood are dim and few. Anything might fall from those indifferent deeps. Anything at all.

Chodillon was a wanderer, a sometime courier of objects that others did not wish to carry. Her ship-called Ghost Dance, by the one who built it, after a ship that had been lost long before she was born-was sleek and efficient and quiet, like its mistress, and Chodillon did not trouble herself to ask whether what she carried had ever belonged to another.

There was someone she had come to meet on Pandora, in a back room of some bar in the dusty, whispering town that was the last footprint on this world of the civilization that had shaped it. A nameless someone-like all the other someones who had sought her out-who would surrender what Chodillon had come to Pandora to carry away. But she had come early to her meeting, and so she had time to spend in the dark dying streets of the port city.

She was a tall woman, and well-armed, and somehow those who met Chodillon's rainbow eyes once hoped never to see them angry. She was not afraid of anything she might meet when she left her ship to walk in Pandora's dusty twilight.

At the edges of Pandora's city the buildings are illusions. All that is left of Man's handiwork are the worthless ceramic sh.e.l.ls of structures that have been abandoned as the city slowly dies. Beyond them is nothing but a desert with sand like mouse-colored silk; above them is the dim and empty sky. It is a place to play at savagery, and Chodillon, who did not play, had looked at the desert and was ready to return when a movement from the direction she had come caught her eye.

The red, running figure was barely ahead of the mob that followed it. In its hand it carried something that flashed intermittently in the dim light. The runner fled toward her-not as if it had seen her, but simply as if there were nowhere else to go.

As it approached, the figure resolved itself into a man. In this world of no-color even the faded scarlet he wore shone like blood. The mob that followed him was the usual sort-born or lost on Pandora and unable to leave-but the energy they exhibited was unusual among Pandorans, especially now, when the hour for serious drinking drew near.

Chodillon did not move.

The runner staggered, dodged a flung missile too late, and recovered, having lost only a stride's length to the mob. But it was more than he couldafford to lose. Hands clawed at him, and he fell, and the tail of the mob came baying forward, sure of its victim. Incredibly, he rose again, and fought them back, and now they were close enough for Chodillon to hear what they were yelling.

"Librarian! Librarian!"

Now she knew what crime had roused Pandora's torpid natives; the crime of which the mere suggestion could raise vengeance as random as the lightning.

A memory, harvested from another's mind, came to the surface of her thoughts. The summery dust of a schoolroom. Outside its windows bright day cloaked the jeweled and artificial glory of the night sky while within the patient pedantry went on: "Librarians caused the Great War by setting monsters to rule Man. Only men may rule Man."

The borrowed memory faded, and now the runner was only a little distance away. Chodillon raised the heavy blaster that she wore, sighted carefully, and burned a neat hole in his chest.

He hung upon the force of the shot for a moment before he fell, lifeless, the living heart charred from his body. Something spilled from his outflung hand and glittered on the paving at Chodillon's feet, but it was not theft that had brought the hunters and the prey so far from the bright lights of Pandora's port.

At the sound of the shot, the mob checked itself as though it had been the victim, and hesitated at the edge of an invisible perimeter barely a stone's toss distant, its violence leached from it by the gratification of its desire. It had what it wanted. The man was dead. The desires of the men who had been its eyes and heart and limbs were of no concern to that many-throated creature.

"That for your Librarian," Chodillon said to the mob.

She stood over the body of the man she had killed until the mob devolved, muttering, into component elements, each keenly aware that it was sober in a time for drinking. As they began to turn away, Chodillon walked forward and picked up the object that had fallen from the dead man's hand.

It seemed to be a necklace of sorts. It was not made to human scale, but the endless loop of ornament suggested no other purpose. The uneven plaques of gla.s.s hung awkwardly from their linkages of gold and plastic, and it was still warm from the hand that had last held it.

At last their leader remained.

"Give me the Library," said the man who had been-as much as any other-the leader of the mob. He was Fenshee, and his slanted eyes glinted in a vulpine face that was, nonetheless, recognizably human-more human on many worlds than Chodillon's own.

"There was no Library," she told him, kind enough now, with the necklace in her hand, to explain. She was used to judging men, and saw harmlessness in him. "If you really thought there were, you would have killed me, too."

Killed her, and perhaps himself, rather than wait for the h.e.l.l-flowers to come. That death would have been a mercy, set against what Throne would have done, or the Starbringer, if word reached Mereyon-Peru first. Tech Policeor WarDoctors, the end result was the same: death and dust. But he wasn't afraid enough for that, and so, there was no Library.

"He was my brother," the Fenshee said, as if this were an explanation.

Chodillon looped the swirling plaques of gla.s.s around her neck and opened her collar to let them fall against her skin. The Fen-shee was still watching her when she turned away and walked along the path that the others had taken.

The Port remained untouched by the rumors of Libraries in its exurb.

Chodillon did not return to her ship. She rented a room, though the time she would be here was vanishingly short, lest unfinished trouble should find her and follow her to her only means of escape from this world. And when she had sealed the door behind her, she took out her dead man's prize to inspect it more closely. Darktrade was not her true business in the Outfar, only the one that gave her an answer to questions, if any might presume to ask them.

Under the harsh chemical lights of her cubicle the object looked more promising than it had on the city's outskirts. Eleven gla.s.s lozenges, a finger's-width thick, a handspan long, bound and linked by gold and the silvery incorruptible Old Fed plastic.

An artifact, certainly. But of what purpose?