Jack Chalker - Priam's Lens

“I don’t have the imprinted information and I don’t think Kat is the best one in a technical situation,” Harker noted. “The kids are getting claustrophobic even in this spaceship hangar of a building. That leaves you, Colonel.”

“Colonel—I can do it,” Kat said. Harker turned to her as if she’d just gone nuts, but he needn’t have worried.

“No, Doctor, Mister Harker is correct. It’s my job.” The mercenary looked down at Hamille. “Rest first or should we just go do it?”

“Let’s do it,” the Quadulan croaked. “I would rather be tired than dying of thirst.”

N’Gana took a deep breath, went over to the shaft, judged the distance as best he could, then jumped over to the indented platform from which the ladder descended straight down into the darkness. Hamille looked down into the pit, then slowly oozed in, the rows of tendrils now extended slightly, giving it a millipedelike appearance.

“I thought with that rotor action of yours you’d just fly down,” Harker said.

“In the shaft?” Hamille responded. “I fly like spear. In there, you fly like rock. Get down fine, but the landing would be messy.”

With that, it oozed further on in and vanished, and those who remained behind could hear N’Gana begin the long slow descent as well.

Harker turned to Kat. “Why in hell did you just volunteer to do something nobody sane would volunteer to do?” She shrugged. “Haven’t you noticed? He’s got problems. Mogutu noticed, after we were down. He went out of his way to do things the colonel might well have done for himself, and he was constantly worrying.”

“N’Gana’s just hiked over a terrain under severe conditions that few others could,” Harker countered.

“Yes, but I’ve seen his face when he didn’t know it, and heard him sometimes in the night. I don’t think he knew it or he wouldn’t have come, but I’m pretty sure it’s his heart. Back in civilization, he’d be put in stasis, they’d clone another heart from his heart cells, and he’d be better than new in months, but here—no. I think his tolerance for pain may be enormous, though.”

“You think he can get back up?”

“I don’t know. I hope so. I don’t think he wants to die, particularly down there, but unless you take physicals every few months and follow the rules all the way, it can always happen. I think he knows it full well, too.” She paused. “He must have been a hell of a soldier in his day.”

“I never used to like him, and he had a reputation as a bloody butcher,” Harker responded. “Now, though, I’m not at all sure.”

They went over and sat on a long crate. Littlefeet and Spotty huddled together, staring at the mysterious shapes suspended all around them.

“Cold,” she said, and he nodded.

It was cold in there, in a relative sense. Littlefeet had been colder, up on the mountain, but this was a different kind of cold. Dry, a little dead, and going right through you.

“Sorry, kids. I warned you not to come along,” Kat said, sitting nearby. “It’s kind of a creepy dump, isn’t it?”

“Dump?” Littlefeet asked. “If you mean strange, yes, it is. As strange as anything the demons build. Was this the kind of place where our ancestors lived?”

She laughed. “No, no. It was the kind of place where they worked, or some of them did, anyway. They had their own kind of power, like the demons have, and their own machines, like the ones demons fly in. The voice is a machine. It was built, not born, and information was fed into it instead of taught like we were. With that information—using all this, and with the aid of just a very few humans—it could build great machines, great ships that could go between the stars.”

It was tough explaining this to a pair who had no technological background at all. Even the word “ship” had no real meaning for them, and the only machines they knew were magical things of the enemy.

Spotty looked around, a little scared, a little awed. “Where is this—thing that speaks in a man’s voice?” she asked. “Why can’t we see it?”

“You are looking at me,” the mentat responded. “I am everything you see here, and much of the rest of the complex. Oh, I have a brain, if you want to call it that, and it’s in one place deep in the center of this complex of buildings, but my eyes, my voice, the things I see and hear come from every part of this place that’s still connected, that still has power. I’m even in another far-off place at the same time. That’s because the man who was here before you turned on the power there. The surge was enough for me to feel it and find it.”

“You mean like the demons talk through their lines in the sky?” Spotty pressed, showing an intelligence than her quiet subservience had concealed.

“Yes, sort of. I don’t know how they do it, and I think they probably would barely recognize how I do it, but the general idea is the same. In fact, at one level, energy is energy, whether it’s my kind, the demons’ kind, or things like the lines in the sky or lightning. I’m awake now because some of their energy proved convertible to what I needed. Unlike you, I do not need food or water, but without energy, electricity of some sort, I either go to sleep or even die.”

“Plants get energy from the sun. Are you a plant?” Littlefeet asked. “The others called this place a `plant.’ ”

“Not that kind of plant, no. But, again, the idea is the same. Flowers and trees and grass get their energy, their food, from the sun.”

“Do you move? Can you walk?” Spotty asked it.

“No, I can’t. I’m stuck here. Anything that comes in I can see, hear, and work with. But they must come to me, as you did. I cannot move.”

“A big rock once spoke to me,” Littlefeet remembered. “When I was a kid and all, I got scared and ran. I guess that was something like you, huh?”

There was a moment’s silence, and then the mentat responded, “That was me. So you were one of the boys who came along after those creatures killed poor Jastrow. I would not have known you had you not spoken of it. Your voice has changed. In these three years you have become a man. And now you are here… How… coincidental…”

Both Harker and Kat Socolov sensed a slight hostility creeping into the mentat’s otherwise bland tones, but it wasn’t enough to start wondering about it. Not yet.

“We might as well try and get some sleep if we can,” Harker suggested to them. “Until we hear from that hole over there, all we can do is worry and wait.”

There was no effective light at the bottom of the shaft, but the moment N’Gana almost slipped on the rubble of the collapsed elevator car and started cursing, a sliver of pale yellow light shone through a small opening in the wall between the car and the shaft itself.

Voice-activated, he thought. Handy.

With even that little bit of light, he could see the remnants of Jastrow’s frustration. So close and no cigar, the colonel thought. There were long, bent pieces of metal, indentations where things had been pounded or attempts had been made to pry open a larger hole, but it had ultimately only damaged the tools.

Jastrow must have been almost mad down here. The hole was a bit jagged, perhaps large enough for one leg. There even seemed to be some dried blood on some of the jagged edges, which meant that Jastrow may well have tried to force his large body into a very tiny hole.

Inside, there were rows and rows of storage consoles. He could clearly see the posts where human agents would sit, with robotic security controls around them. It looked so normal, as if everybody had just shut down and gone to dinner, and yet it was so unapproachable.