Shadow of Alpha (v1.0), page 14
McLeod agreed. “That’s exactly the word: ugly.
And as far as I can tell, before the comunit blinked out, we’re in a relatively stable position compared to, say, Eurecom and some of the others. If the Gov will only get settled and come out of hiding, maybe things will get normalized soon.”
“Assuming there’s anything left of the Cabinet or Executive,” Parric said.
“Cheerful, isn’t he?” said Jessica.
“He’s probably right, though,” McLeod said. “It’s been a week, and all I’ve seen is a medicopt buzzing around.”
“Me,” Peg said unenthusiastically. “It was probably my team.”
A lull, then, punctuated by the frustrated grinding of McLeod’s chair, and Parric soon excused himself to change out of his useless clothes. The kitchen, he noted in passing, was similar to his except for the organistove shoved into a corner, another trophy of an android house. In the bedroom, however, he immediately felt out of place. Where his was spartan to an extreme, McLeod had seen to it, no doubt through incessant wheedling, that there weren’t any boudoir luxuries left that he didn’t have. The bed itself took up most of the space, torn from its wall closet and lifted on blocks of wood. It looked large enough to hold all of them comfortably, and he couldn’t help thinking what delights there might be in that possibility. And why not? he thought as he stripped off his shirt and rummaged through the wardrobe, if the world’s going to hell, why shouldn’t we enjoy ourselves?
Disgusted that his friend seemed smitten with exotic colorations and was infatuated with the most loosely fitting tunics, he chose the most drab and tucked it into his trousers, thinking he would rather have the damp muddied pants on in case he should have to run the woods again.
Vanity, he told himself. You just don’t want Jess to see your legs.
In the living room he smiled at Jess’ look of relief at his return, and listened as Peg finished telling McLeod about the tree and the fear that they might have been followed.
“It’s not impossible,” McLeod said when Parric detailed the noises he had heard the first night out and while he was in the Town by the bridge. “Your corn-unit obviously went before mine, and I’ve been in, well, sporadic contact with some of the others. A few of the fools panicked when they got Coates’ warning and let their barriers down to run before they finished deactivation.”
“Renegade androids,” Peg said, clutching the cushion tightly to her chest. “I think I need a drink.”
“No,” McLeod said. “I tore out the damned bar cab months ago. Found it too easy to get drunk. What you really need is some syntabac to calm you down.”
“No, thanks,” she said as he reached for a compartment in the chair’s arm. “That’s bad for my nerves.”
“And this mess is good?” But when the others declined, too, he shrugged and looked at Parric. “So, Frankie, here we are, and what are we going to do about it?”
“Sleep,” Jessica said. “We haven’t had a decent night’s rest since we left.”
“Not yet,” Parric said. “We’ve got to know what we’re going to do first.”
“Seems to me I’ve been through this before,” she said, grinning; then, to McLeod, “He and Ike, they could never agree on what to do next. Frank always 'won, but I could never figure out how he did it.” “Ike was a good man, Jess,” Parric said. “I was just lucky, that’s all. It could easily have gone the other way, you know.”
“Well, I vote we stay right here,”Peg said. “We’ve got company, food, a barrier that still works, and we’re safe from those . . . men outside. I don’t see any point in going anywhere else. Besides, where else can we go?”
"The cities are out, ” McLeod said, “and most of the countryside is either dead or off limits by virtue of local militia. The girl makes sense, Frank.”
“The android,” Parric warned.
“Between the four of us, I think we can handle him. Thanks to you, I’m not as worried as I was.” He laughed, forced and without mirth. ‘‘I think I let myself get a little too soft around the flab.”
“What did you do before you came here, Cam?” Peg said, and Parric suddenly felt as if a ritual screen had been shattered; but McLeod didn’t seem to mind, smiling instead and leaving the chair to sit on the floor in front of her.
“If the truth be known, and I didn’t even tell Frankie, I was, if you’ll pardon the expression, incarcerated for a certain period of years.”
“Jail?” Jessica said, too loudly.
“Rehabilitation, they called it,” he said without looking at her. “I used to work for a subunit of Descago, adding budget figures and trying to figure out where the graft went. I cheated once on my ration credit, didn’t get caught, and figured I could easily eat better than the next sap. Trouble was, I did get caught and spent the next couple of years listening to whitecoats telling me what a bad boy I was, how I was too smart to do such a thing, and I would have gone out of my mind agreeing with them if I hadn’t had the stroke of luck that got me in here. Coates thought I was redeemable.” He grinned and laughed, this time sincerely. “If he only knew what I’ve done to this place."
“He knew,” Jessica said, and added quickly, “I got a rundown of the whole operation before I showed up at Frank’s. He mentioned you two as being the most reliable, and the most unstable, of the lot.”
“Unstable?” Parric wasn’t sure, coming from Coates, whether or not that was an insult.
Jessica shrugged. “Whatever,” she said.
“I think I’ve been had,” McLeod said, would have said more but something thudded heavily against the porch and bounced harmlessly off the windowpane.
Peg yelped and Jessica fell to the floor, one arm flung over the nurse’s back to keep her down. Another thud and McLeod had dimmed off the lighting while Parric ran for the front door, waiting for him before opening it slowly.
Though the wind had increased, the rain had stopped, and Parric squinted in order to see clearly. In the uncannily familiar setting of houses, streetlamps, and slickened road, he could see nothing but crab-crawling leaves racing one another in the gutters. The shadows were deep, and the lack of additional light from the other houses strengthened them, but as soon as his eyes had adjusted sufficiently, he moved to the top of the steps and grabbed the supporting post. McLeod stood beside him.
“You always ease the barrier when there’s a storm?”
“Sure. Didn’t you?”
“I always used the ClimatCon.”
“You always were soft, Frankie.”
“Pal,” Panic said and descended to the front lawn, the muscles in his legs and across his back tensed to spin him around should the attack continue.
And still there was nothing but the wind.
“Cam,” he said, bending, “if this is your boy—” “Who else?”
“—then he’s about to break loose. We might as well stop it here if we can or we’ll never get any rest. And I didn’t come this far just to get myself killed.”
They returned to the house where McLeod despaired at finding weapons heavy enough until Parric pointed out the gently tapering blue metal of the kitchen table’s legs. McLeod protested feebly, Parric insisted, and McLeod fetched a toolkit to unbolt the gleaming, stemlike bars. Jessica wanted to be with them, but Peg declared she had had enough of night battles with robots and didn’t want to stay alone in the house.
“Stick around, Jess,” Parric said. “There’s no sense in the four of us getting our heads knocked off. ” “That’s what I like about you,” she said as she walked with him to the door. “Full of the old confidence.”
On the porch, he and McLeod hesitated until postponement was impossible, then walked side by side down the steps, turning right and crossing the lawn. They had intended to use the grass to muffle their walking, but the rain had softened the dirt and they noticed immediately the sidewalk would be more silent. At the first corner, then, McLeod, through hand signals and facial contortions that almost made Parric laugh, indicated that he would patrol the backyards and hopefully they could time their progress to check on each other at successive intersections. Parric nodded, watched as his friend disappeared into the darkness.
Alone, again, and waiting.
He held the blue leg loosely in his left hand, the right frequently brushing over his face and hair at cobwebs the wind seemed to cast over him. He imagined himself in a corridor of the Alpha, strolling to the bridge to bid greetings to the captain, and he was saddened when he could not remember the man’s name.
He thought himself on a Philayork street, the houses extending themselves into the grimly lighted sky and buzzing with the lives of people turned drones.
He was the emperor of a fanciful country, traveling incognito to observe the melancholy of his subjects and touch them with wands of hope and dreams of star-bright futures.
He arrived before McLeod at their first checkpoint and waited impatiently until the little man paused at the edge of a light and waved shortly.
He was late at the second, saw McLeod pacing nervously until he was noticed.
The third, and the fourth, and finally at the fifth where he turned around, deciding it was a waste of time and entirely too dangerous. He told himself he should have known better and was anxious for Cam to join him.
There was a shout, and McLeod raced from behind a house halfway up the block, grabbing onto a tree and holding to keep himself from slumping. His hands were empty.
Parric ran up to him, held his shoulders until he could stand without aid. There was a dark streak across his forehead that came away damp when Parric reached out a finger to trace it; and over his shoulder he saw the android advancing, its right arm hanging uselessly at its side. McLeod stumbled away as Parric stepped back into the street, knowing it would be futile to look for some dark corner, knowing the android would see him no matter where he went. He lifted the metal club, saw the android hesitate before resuming its steady, unhampered walk. Its feet made slurping noises in the mud and, when it stepped onto the sidewalk, the curb, the street, he saw it was bald.
When they were separated by a bare two meters, McLeod shouted and it turned. Parric instantly lunged, striking at one eye, hearing the lens shatter as he danced away and shook the numbness out of his arm. McLeod shouted again, and Parric darted forward, slipping this time and losing his grip on the club. On hands and knees he scrambled clear, imagining the hum of air as the android’s hand swept past his ankle. A third shout, this one different, and Parric looked up, saw McLeod pointing and turned around. There were two of them now, and Parric was confused, too startled to move when the newcomer grabbed McLeod’s berserker and wrestled it to the ground. He thought of Fabor and Dorski in their silent fatal struggle, and watched it happen again as the two androids, in darkness unrecognizable, clenched at each other’s middle seeking the vulnerability of their hips’ powered source.
“Who—”
Parric waved McLeod silent.
The second android was bent backward, lifting an arm to press against the other’s throat. There was a moment’s statue immobility before a snap made the two men jump, and the first android’s head dangled by threads of its synthetic flesh. Parric f$lt his lungs ache with air he could not release, and his arm began to sting where McLeod was punching it in his excitement.
Suddenly, the second attacker stepped back, whipped out a foot, and brought the other to its knees. It pounced, and a few seconds more sounded the crack Parric knew meant death. With sparkling metal catching the light of the streetlamps, Eagle lay motionless, and the second android pushed itself to its feet.
McLeod, shaking off the hypnotic effect of the struggle, grabbed at Parric’s club, but he was pushed away when Parric walked to the fallen simulacrum and looked into the shadow. Then he held out his hand and the patchkey he had lost a hundred years before was dropped into his palm. As his fingers caressed the cool triangle, he prayed for the right answer to what was now only a sense of things returned to normal.
“Damn it, you took long enough, old man,” he said. “Can’t you do anything right?”
Willard Dix, shambling into the light, ducked his head in apology. “I’m an old man, doc. I can’t move as fast as I used to.”
Parric tried not to sag, forced himself to ignore the chance he had just taken. He smiled as McLeod finally came to his side, his face white, his eyes blinking rapidly. “Goddamnit, Frank, who is this?”
“Name’s Will Dix. Comes from my Town.” McLeod immediately took several paces backward. “Wait a minute! For the Light of Buddha’s eyes, you mean he’s an android?”
Parric nodded, tossing away the table leg and laughing when McLeod took a step toward it. “Relax, Cam, he won’t hurt you. Will you, old man?”
“Not unless he doesn’t like my singing,” Dix said. “Doc, I’ve been following you all over the place. Why wouldn’t you wait for me?”
Parric took the android by the arm and began leading him back to the house. “Will, I just didn’t know it was you. It was damn frightening out there, and I didn’t want to bump into anyone unfriendly.”
“I want to know what’s going on around here,” McLeod said.
“You told me you needed me,” Will said, his stance resuming its characteristic slump, his walk its unhurried amble. “Of course, I was sick for a while, but you should have stuck around and maybe I wouldn’t have had to run through those miserable trees. Lots of bad things out there, doc. Don’t know how you managed to take care of yourself.”
“I have a feeling I had an angel.”
“Well, I couldn’t just pop out a couple of times. You might have done me like you did those others.”
“I guess I did do all right, didn’t I?”
“Frankie, curse the eyes in your head . . .”
Parric stopped and pointed to him. “Will, this is Cam McLeod, the guy I was going to send you to if you didn’t behave.”
McLeod kept a wary pace back even though he nodded and cast a short wave.
“Little,” Will said sourly, “but not like the other one.”
“Ike,” Parric said.
“Him. Jumped around too much, that one. Always trying to take my picture.”
“He’s dead, Will.”
“Know it. From a bad one like that. ” And he turned his head to look briefly behind him.
“Lots of them,” Parric said.
“How do we know he’s not one of them?” McLeod demanded.
“I was sick once,” Will said, as if that explained 'everything. ‘‘Someone’s coming."
Parric and McLeod tensed, then relaxed as quickly when they saw Peg and Jessica coming down from the porch. Peg was holding tightly to Jessica’s arm, trying to stay behind her as she stared at the android; but Jessica, when she recognized him, broke away and ran up to hug him. Dix did not respond, looked down only and waited until she had backed away.
“Oh,” he said. “The pretty one.”
“Oh, the pretty one,” she mimicked. “Where the hell have you been, Willard Dix? Thanks to you, I’ve had to put up with Parric all by myself.”
“Pity,” the android said.
Parric watched as they traded insults directed primarily at him, and then yielded to the tugging of McLeod’s hand. They stood off to one side where Parric explained how Dix had fit into the scheme of the Town. “And it looks like he’s been waiting for a chance to show himself where we wouldn’t kill him, too.”
McLeod looked doubtful, both hands scrubbing at his face and scalp hard enough to make Parric think he’d rub off his skin.
“Relax,” he finally advised, watching as Jessica introduced Will to Peg, grinning at the laconic answers to the nurse’s machine-gun questions. “We’ve got nothing to worry about. Obviously his malfunctions weren’t permanently disabling. And face it, Cam, if we get into more trouble, we could use him.”
"I suppose," he said reluctantly, "but you’ll have to excuse me if I heed the warning of the Prophet and am not overly friendly in his company. I’m beginning to get paranoiac about people with strange insides.” “Look,” he said, laughing, realizing he was again 'soaked to the skin as the storm crested a second wave, “we’ll talk more in the morning. Right now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll get me some sleep.”
"I thought you wanted to decide what to do next?” “God Almighty, Cam, you sound like Jess. And, if you must know, I’ve already made up my mind, but I need some time to be sure I’m not streaking off in a thousand different directions. And,” he added before McLeod could pursue the hints, “I also feel more safe now than I have in days. I’m tired, Cam, and damn but I need the rest.”
McLeod opened his mouth, then raised his arms in an elaborate gesture of resignation. He was, he said, going to suggest that the four of them might find it more comfortable in his own little bed, but if Parric was going to spoil his plans, as he always had, he wasn’t about to argue. Not this time.
"Just give me a couple of chairs face to face," Parric said, “and believe me, the way I feel now, I won’t know the difference.”
Chapter 12
“It seems pretty clear to me what has to be done,” he said to McLeod. “If we’re going to help people like those poor saps in Oraton, I just can’t see any other way.”
It was midafternoon, and they were sitting on the top step of the LottChance Parlor. The storm had finally spent itself against the sides of the mountains and only shards of gray-turning-white clouds remained. The sunlight was fragmented, sweeping by in minute-long waves, and the heat had returned to dry the streets and make Parric wonder if the chill of the rain had been as bad as his nightmares remembered; yet, despite the frequent terror of those disturbing dreams, he had slept well, slept long, and when he had awakened shortly past noon, he was the first one in the kitchen. Not wishing, then, to play the thief to the others’ recuperation, he walked for an hour, looking for sense in the dead charade, examining the natural and manufactured landscape for a supranatural augury that would take the burden of decision from him. He rummaged through several of the deserted houses until he found clothes the proper size and, with only slight qualms about being the first human to wear them, donned tan trousers and a billowed matching shirt. Feeling comfortable for the first time in times unknown, he stepped outside and saw Cam waiting for him at the parlor.
