Charles Sheffield - Starfire

“Good. Let’s see if you stay glad.”

He turned and led the way up a steep spiral staircase. Celine followed. A round hatch brought her through into a broad circular chamber bounded by a thick transparent wall. Beyond the wall she saw what seemed to be a wilderness of vegetation, but she paid little attention to that or anything else because of the other contents of the room.

Just a few yards from her squatted a small bipedal dinosaur. It was, she felt sure, a carnivore; a genetically down-bred form from one of the largest meat-eaters, T. rex, or maybe Gorgosaurus. The creature was muzzled and tethered by a short chain to a heavy ring bolt in the floor of the room. The blue-black eyes turned in the oversized scaly head and fixed their dead gaze on Celine. The mouth opened as far as it could against the green muzzle, to show the tips of white needle teeth. The animal growled, deep in its throat, and the smell of rotting meat that gusted out made Celine hold her breath. The animal stood up and moved toward the newcomers until it reached the limit of its chain.

“Place is a bit of a mess.” Rolfe walked, unconcerned, to within two feet of the chained carnosaur. “Come sit down.”

Celine edged after him, and saw that the place was indeed a mess. Rolfe’s desk and a nearby table were covered with a clutter of electronics and test units. On the floor beside the table, upside-down and eviscerated, lay a trio of eight-legged machines.

“Those look like rolfes.” Celine dumped a tangle of wires and a miniaturized scanning probe microscope onto the floor and sat down. The carnosaur was a deliberate attempt to make her ill at ease, but she refused to acknowledge its presence. She wanted Gordy Rolfe to know he had failed.

If he had failed. It was hard to sit calmly with your back to the minisaur, especially when you could hear its harsh breathing and the grating of stressed chain links.

“They are rolfes — of a sort.” Gordy perched on the arm of a chair, so Celine would have to look up at him. “I originally designed them to function in there.” He jerked his thumb toward the wall and the jungle beyond. “Now I’m doing a bit more fiddling, adding a few special functions. The new ones have the same general organization, but they’ll be smarter and more versatile. The sort of things your space dummies say they’re going to need, but won’t get.”

Deliberate provocation, designed to start an argument. Celine delayed her response, swiveling in her chair to add to her original first impression of the chamber. The floor was dust-free and clear of small objects. Cleaning machines would remove those, also the dust and dirt and spilled liquids. These machines — rolfes of the most primitive kind — were clearly in use here. Two moved across the room as she watched, little low-end servers no more than a foot long and a couple of inches off the floor. They would ignore large objects, or at most clean, lift, and replace them exactly.

Part of the room had been partitioned off, and she could see the end of a bed through an opening in the waist-high barrier. There were no doors, beyond one that led through to the encircling area of dense vegetation. A heap of spare machine parts lay in disarray against the wall on the side opposite to the chained carnosaur. She recognized axles, gears, motors, gauges, and metal rods and pipes of many sizes. A bench nearby was a jumble of wrenches, saws, pliers, hammers, and pincers. Stacked against the wall next to that stood a stack of cages, each one the size of a large chest. Changes in light and dark behind narrow slits in the front of the cages showed something moving within, but Celine could not determine what it might be. Next to the chests, incongruously, stood an old-fashioned bicycle.

“Do you ride that?”

“Sure.” Rolfe had his eyes fixed on Celine, as intent and unblinking in his gaze as the tethered carnosaur. The communications unit on his desk was buzzing with an external call, but he took no notice. “Got to stay healthy, you know. Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

Did he ride the bike down here, somewhere out there beyond the tangle of jungle? No. The whole thing was an obscure joke. Gordy Rolfe rode nothing. His face had the gray pallor of a man who shunned all forms of exercise. Furthermore, the bicycle sat in front of a dozen other anachronisms. Celine pointed to a radio that was not of this century, and from its appearance hardly of the last. “I suppose you use that, too.”

“No. Too valuable. It’s a real rarity. The woman who sold it to me guaranteed that Noah used it for ship-to-shore.”

“Why did you really agree to meet with me? You seem to have made up your mind that you won’t make more rolfes available on Sky City.”

“I did so because I owe you a favor.”

“I can’t think what.”

“I’ve owed it to you for a long time. If you hadn’t come here, Pearl Lazenby might not have been captured. I might never have got my start in electronics, never been able to found the Argos Group.”

“But you knew that so far as I was concerned, my visit here would be a waste of time. You’d already decided that you wouldn’t provide the rolfes.”

“I never said that.”

“Would you meet with Wilmer Oldfield and Astarte Vjansander, and hear what they have to say?”

“Waste of time. I know what they told Nick Lopez. Crazy. Somebody out at Alpha Centauri decided humans were a nuisance, so they deliberately destroyed a whole stellar system and made an impossible supernova just to zap us. That about it?”

“There’s more to it than that.” But it was disturbingly close to Star and Wilmer’s view.

Rolfe was grinning down at her from his perch on the chair arm. “I’m sure there’s more. I don’t need to hear it, because the whole idea is pure bullshit. You may believe it, but on this one you’re the person who’s not rational.

And I’ll tell you why you’re not. Fucking scrambles the brain, and you used to fuck old Wilmer.”

Celine wanted to say, How on earth do you know that? Her second thought, That was nearly thirty years ago! was not much better.

She said, “What about Nick Lopez? He heard Wilmer, and he believed him. Are you telling me Lopez fucked Wilmer Oldfield, too?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. But I think he’s more interested in fucking Oldfield’s little black chippie Vjansander, even though she’s female. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Celine stood up. “I’m leaving. I have work to do. This is a stupid waste of time.”

“Maybe not. Sit down. Forget who’s screwing who, and what I believe and don’t believe. I might be willing to provide what you say you need — if the terms are right.”

“What terms? Money?”

“No — though I do run a business.” Rolfe strained forward, eyes gleaming. In intensity there was little to choose between the eager man and the carnosaur heaving at its chain. “I do want something, and it’s not money. Get it for me, and you’ll have rolfes for Sky City. All the rolfes you want.”

“Why didn’t you ask Lopez? He controls more of the world’s resources than I do.”

“Not this particular resource. I want land — this land, here where we sit and all around us. From ground level to the center of the Earth. I’m willing to pay, but the United States has to deed it to me for my lifetime plus fifty years.”

“What do you want it for?”

“That’s my business. But I have to be totally outside U.S. laws and U.S. justice. I must be able to do what I like, on it and in it — and with whatever lies within it.”

Celine glanced at the chained carnosaur. Genetic combination work of that kind was not easy. Within the United States it was also tightly controlled and monitored. If Gordy Rolfe had performed the gene mix himself, without licenses or oversight, he was already in violation of a score of statutes. Celine could remember no recent applications for similar experiments.