Collected Short Fiction, page 1345
Aissha was not available to discuss these matters with. He was separated from her before reaching Portsmouth and Khalid never saw her again, either. From that day on it was necessary for him to make his way in the world on his own.
He was not quite 13 years old. Often, in the years ahead, he would look back at the time when he had slain the Entity; but he would think of it only as the time when he had rid himself of Richie Burke, for whom he had had such hatred. For the Entities he had no hatred at all, and when his mind returned to that event by the roadside on the way to Stonehenge, to the alien being centered in the crosshairs of his weapon, he would think only of the marvelous color and form of the two starborn creatures in the floating wagon, of that passing moment of beauty in the night.
On the Inside
The coming of the aliens would cause Borgmann’s name to be known forever . . . though not quite the way he’d expected.
In the beautiful city of Praguen which had been the capital of the Czech Republic until that day two years and two months ago when such things as capitals and republics had ceased to be of any real significance on Earth and which since the Conquest, had become the site of the central communications nexus for the detachment of Entities who had occupied the mainland of Europe, the weather on this night, a few days before Christmas, was remarkably pleasant, as things go for midwinter Prague. The temperature had been hovering just above the freezing mark all day, and now, at nightfall, was beginning to slip below zero Celsius. It had snowed yesterday, though not really heavily, and much of the city was mantled now in a thin coating of white; but tonight, the air was clear and still, just the slightest whisper of breeze rising off the river that ran through the heart of the old town, but otherwise all was calm.
On this quiet winter evening, Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, 16 years old, the son of a German electrical engineer who had been living in Prague since the mid-1990s, moved quickly through the gathering darkness, light on his feet like the predatory cat he conceived himself to be, stalking his prey. He was, in truth, something other than cat-like: short and thiek-waisted, actually, flat face with jutting cheekbones, heavy wrists and ankles, dark hair and swarthy complexion, everything about him rather more Slavic than Teutonic in appearance. But in his mind he was a cat on the prowl, just now. His prey was the Swedish girl, Barbro Ekelund, the university professor’s daughter, with whom he had been secretly, desperately, deliriously in love for the past four months, since the time they had met and briefly talked at the chopshop in Parizska Street, near the old Jewish quarter.
He trailed her now, staying 20 meters behind her and keeping his eyes fixed rigidly on her jeans-clad buttocks. This was the day he would at long last approach her again, speak to her, invite her to spend some time with him. His Christmas present to himself. A girl of his own, finally. The beginning of the new beginning of his life.
In his mind’s eye Karl-Heinrich imagined her to be walking naked down the street, He could see with incandescent clarity those two smoot h, fleshy white cheeks flaring startlingly out of her narrow waist. He could see everything. The slim pale back rising up and up above her rump, the thin dark line of her spine plainly visible. The delicate bones of her shoulder blades. The long thin arms. The wonderfully attenuated legs, so slender that they didn’t meet and touch at the thighs the way the legs of Czech girls always did, but left a zone of open air from her knees all the way up to her loins.
He could spin her around to face him, too, if he wanted to, rotating her through a hundred-eighty-degree movement as easily as he could rotate an image on his computer screen with two quick keystrokes. He turned her now. Now he could see those ripe, round, pink-tipped breasts of hers, so incongruously full and heavy on her lean elongated form, and the long deep indentation of her navel framed to right and left by her jutting hip-bones, and the sliver of a birthmark beside it, and the dense, mysterious pubic jungle below, unexpectedly dark for all her Nordic fairness. He imagined her standing there stark naked on the snowy street, grinning at him, waving to him, excitedly calling his name.
Karl-Heinrich had never actually beheld the nakedness of Barbro Ekelund, nor that of any other girl. Not with his own eyes, at any rate. But, he had, through much trial and error, managed to attach a tiny spy-eye to a thin catheter-like metal tube and slide it upward from the basement of her apartment building along the building’s main data conduit into her very own bedroom. Karl-Heinrich was very good at managing such things. The spy-eye caught, now and then, delicious furtive glimpses of Barbro Ekelund rising naked from her bed, moving about her room, doing her morning exercises, rummaging through her wardrobe for the clothes she meant to wear that day. It relayed those glimpses to the antenna atop the main post office that captured them for Karl-Heinrich’s private data box, from which he could retrieve them with a single mouse-click.
Over the past two months Karl-Heinrich had assembled and enhanced and in various ways edited his collection of Barbro shots so that, by now, he possessed an elegant little video of her as seen from every angle, turning, reaching, stretching, unwittingly displaying herself to him with utter candor. He never tired of watching it.
But watching, of course, was nowhere near as good as touching. Caressing. Experiencing.
If only, if only, if only—
He walked faster, and then faster still. She was heading, Karl-Heinrich suspected, for that little coffee shop that she liked down toward the lower end of the square, just beyond the old Europa Hotel. He wanted to catch up with her before she entered it, so that she would enter it with him, instead of going immediately to some table tilled with her friends.
“Barbro!” he called. His voice was husky with tension, little more than a hoarse ragged whisper. He had to force it out. It was always a formidable effort for him, making any sort of overture to a girl. Girls were more alien to him than the Entities themselves.
But she turned. Stared. Frowned, obviously puzzled.
“Karl-Heinrich,” he announced, coming up alongside her, compelling himself now to affect what he hoped was a jaunty, debonair ease. “You remember. From the chopshop in the Stare Mesto. Borgmann, Karl-Heinrich Borgmann. I showed you how to jack the data wand to your implant.” He was speaking in English, as nearly everyone in Prague under 25 usually did.
“The chopshop?—” she said, sounding very doubtful. “Stare Mesto?”
He grinned up at her hopefully. She was two centimeters taller than he was. He felt so stocky, so bestial, so coarse and thick-set, next to her willowy radiant long-legged beauty.
“It was in August. We had a long talk.” That was not strictly true. They had spoken for about three minutes. “The psychology of the Entities as Kafka might have understood it, and everything. You had some fascinating things to say. I’m so glad to have run into you again. I’ve been looking all over for you.” The words were tumbling out of him, an unstoppable cascade. “I wonder if I could buy you a coffee. I want to tell you about some wonderful new computer work that I’ve been doing.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, smiling almost shyly, plainly still mystified. “I’m afraid I don’t recall—look, I’ve got to go, I’m meeting some friends from the university here—”
Push onward, Karl-Heinrich ordered himself sternly.
He moistened his lips. “What I’ve just accomplished, you see, is a way of jacking right into the main computers of the Entities. I can actually spy on their communications line!” He was astounded to hear himself say a thing like that, so fantastic, so untrue. But there was no turning back. Be waved his aim in a vague way in the direction of the river, and of the great looming medieval bulk of Hradcany Castle high on its hill beyond it, where the Entities had made their headquarters in the lofty halls of St. Vitus’s Cathedral. “Isn’t that extraordinary? The first direct entry into their system. I’m dying to tell someone all about it, and it would make me very happy if you—if we—you and I—if we could—” He was babbling now, and knew it.
Her sea-green eyes were dishearteningly remote. “I’m terribly sorry. My friends are waiting inside.”
Not only taller than he, but a year or two older. And as beautiful and unattainable as the rings of Saturn.
He wanted to say—Look, I know everything about your body, I know the shape of your breasts and the size of your nipples and I know that your hair down below is dark instead of blonde and that you’ve got a little brown birthmark on the left side of your belly, and I think you’re absolutely beautiful and if you will only let me undress you and touch you a little I will worship you forever like a goddess.
But Karl-Heinrich said none of that, said nothing at all, just stood mute where he was, looking longingly at, her as though she were a goddess in actual fact, Aphrodite, Astarte, Ishtar, and she gave him another sad little perplexed smile and turned from him and went into the coffee shop, leaving him alone and crimson-cheeked and gaping like a fish in the street.
He felt shock and anger, although no real surprise, at the reaction. He felt great sadness. But also, he realized, a touch of relief. She was too beautiful for him: a cold pale lire that would consume him if lie came too near. He would only have behaved like a fool if she had gone inside with him, anyway. In his reckless hungry overeagerness, he knew, he would have ruined things almost immediately.
Beautiful girls were so frightening. But necessary. Necessary. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. Why, though, did it always end like this for him?
A swirling gust of snowy wind came roaring down the square at him and sent him shivering off toward the north, lost in a daze of bitter self-pity. Aimlessly, planlessly, he went wandering up along Melantrichova and into the maze of ancient little cobblestoned streets leading to the river. In 10 minutes he was at the Charles Bridge, peering across at the somber mass of Hradcany Castle dominating the other bank.
They didn’t floodlight the castle any more, now that the Entities were here. But you could still make it out, the great heavy blackness of it on the hill, blotting out the stars of the western sky.
The whole castle area was sealed off now, not just the cathedral but the museums, the courtyards, the old royal palace, the gardens, and all the rest that had made the place so attractive to tourists. Not that there were any tourists coming to Prague these days, of course. Karl-Heinrich’s mind summoned the image of the gigantic all-conquering aliens whom mankind called the Entities, moving around within the cathedral as they went about their unfathomable tasks. He thought with some astonishment of the boast that had so unexpectedly sprung from his lips. What I’ve just accomplished, you see, is a way of jacking right into the main computers of the Entities. I can actually spy on their communications line! Of course there was no truth to it. But could it be done? he wondered. Could it? Could it?
I’ll show her, he thought wildly. Yes.
Go up to the castle. Break in somehow. Connect with their computers. There has to be a way. It’s only a sequence of electrical impulses; even they need to use something like that, ultimately, in any sort of computational device. It will be an interesting experiment—an intellectual challenge. I am a failure with women but I have a very fine mind that needs constantly to be kept in play so that its edge will remain keen. I must forever improve my own range of mental ability through constant striving toward excellence.
And so. Connect with them. And not just connect! Open a line of communication with them. Offer to teach them things about our computers that they can’t possibly know and want to learn. Be useful to them. Somebody has to be. They are here to stay; they are our masters now.
Be useful to them, that’s the thing to do.
Earn their respect and admiration. I can be very helpful, that I know. Get them to trust me, to like me, to become dependent on me, to offer me nice rewards for my further cooperation.
And then—
Make them give her to me as a slave.
Yes. Yes.
Yes.
ON THE FIRST DAY OF THE NEW YEAR, AT HALF PAST FOUR IN THE HORNING, KARL-HEINRICH.
Borgmann achieved his first successful contact with the communications network of the Entities.
He didn’t expect it to be easy, and it wasn’t. But he wasn’t expecting to fail, and he didn’t.
—Hello, there, he said.
By this time, a good deal of information about the aliens’ data-processing systems had already been accumulated, bit by bit, by this hacker and that one, here and there around the world. And, despite the deficiencies in the old global Net that had been caused by the Entities’ conquering master-stroke—the worldwide interference with the flow of electrical power on Planet Earth, the terrifying global shutdown that had become known as the time of the Great Silence—most of this information had already been disseminated quite extensively by way of the reconstituted post-Conquest hacker network.
Karl-Heinrich was part of that network. Operating under the cognomen of Bad Texas Vampire Lords, he had built up associations with such European and even American centers of information as Interstellar Stalin, Pirates of the Starways, Killer Crackers from Hell, Mars Incorporated, Dead Inside, and Ninth Dimension Bandits. From them, and others like them, he had picked up whatever shards of data about the Entities’ computational modes that he could find, everything incomplete, a scintilla here and a particle there, a morsel here and a scrap there.
A lot of it was wrong. Much of it was excessively hypothetical. Some of it was entirely the invention of its disseminators. But—here and there, in the two years and two months since the Conquest—certain gifted hackers had managed to learn a few things, little nuggets of fact, that actually seemed to make sense.
They had done it by interviewing anyone who had had a chance to observe the doings of the Entities at close range and seen Entity computers in action. That meant dredging through the recollections of anyone who had been taken aboard the Entity starships, for one thing. Plenty of people had had that experience: The Entities, though they never explained a thing about their actions, were plainly curious about the inhabitants of the world they had conquered. Some of these abductees were hackers themselves, who had paid very close attention. There even were hackers who had managed to infiltrate human slave-labor gangs and take part in the incomprehensible reconstruction schemes of which the Entities were so fond. There was much that could be learned from that nasty experience.
And so they had garnered a few clues about the way the invaders sorted and processed and transmitted information; and they had put it all out there on the Net for their fellow hackers to see and ponder. And out of that assortment of crumbs, dribblets, rags, tags, tatter’s, and wild guesses, methodically filtering out the parts that were incompat ible with the rest, Karl-Heinrich had eventually put together his own internally consistent picture of how the Entity computers might operate and how they could be hacked.
—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann of Prague, the Czech Republic.
The Bad Texas Vampire Lords—or, rather, the solitary and peculiar boy who lurked behind that particular nom-de-Net—did not rush to share these insights with the other subversive organizations of the hacker world. It might have been useful to the cause of humanity if he had, because it would have advanced everybody’s knowledge of the situation and, very likely, led to even greater understanding. But Karl-Heinrich had never been good at sharing things. There had never been much of a way for him to learn how to do it. He was the only child of remote, austere, forbidding parents. He had never had a close friend, except via the Net, and those were always long-distance friendships, anonymous, carefully controlled. His love life, thus far, had not progressed beyond electronic voyeurism. He was an island unto himself.
Besides, he wanted full credit for cracking the Entity code. He wanted to be world famous, the best hacker ever. He wanted to be immensely famous. If he couldn’t be loved, he could at least be admired and respected. And—who knew?—if he became famous enough, platoons of girls might stand in line outside his door for a chance to give themselves to him. Which was the thing he wanted above all else.
—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, of Prague, the Czech Republic. I have made myself able to interface with your computers.
Already, beyond any question, it had become clear to everyone who had worked on the problem that the Entities used a digital system of computation. That was welcome news. After all, being aliens, they might have had some altogether alien way of processing data that would be beyond all human fathoming. But it had turned out that even on the far-off unknown star of the Entities the good old binary system was the most efficient way of counting things, even as on primitive little Earth. Yes or no; on or off; go or no-go; positive or negative; open or closed; present or absent; one or zero—there was nothing simpler. Even for them.
The Entity mainframe computers themselves were bio-organic devices with liquid software reservoirs, apparently. In essence, huge synthetic brains. They seemed to be, as human brains are, chemically programmable, responding to hormonal inputs. But that was only an operational fact. In the most fundamental sense they could be understood to be, almost certainly, electrically operated mechanisms: again, just as human brains are. Computations were achieved by the manipulation of charge. The chemical inputs changed electrical polarities; they turned ones into zeros, presences into absences, ons into offs.
The chemical inputs, perhaps, could be duplicated electrically, just as they were in the implanted biochips that had become all the rage among hackers like Karl-Heinrich a year or two before the invasion. Karl-Heinrich set out to try.
—Hello, there. I am Karl-Heinrich Borgmann, of Prague, the Czech Republic. I have made myself able to interface with your computers. This has been the great dream of my life, and now I have achieved it.
He spent a couple of dark wintry days up on the steep hill behind Hradcany Castle, snooping around the deserted streets outside the ancient wall. It wasn’t possible to get into the castle grounds any more, of course, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t tap into electrical conduits that did. Unless the aliens could pull electricity out of the air by alien magic, they needed distribution lines for their power just like anyone else. And unless they had installed their own generating systems within the castle, which was an altogether plausible possibility, the lines had to come in from outside.
