Darling set his primary processor into a kind of meditation, an emptiness, and released a subroutine to command his body. A brutal madness overtook him. He reached out a thick sensory strand toward the old sculptor, another pair toward the girls. He swiftly captured Vaddum and Beatrix with two quicksilver snakes, but the invisible twin slipped away. It darted a few steps into the forest, and turned to watch, as if confident it could escape his grasp if he tried again. Darling dismissed the twin from his mad thoughts. He felt his captives struggle, but the sensory feedback of their protests was dulled by the capturing tendrils' crude strength.
He chose a long rod of glassene, which glittered in the sun, and began the dirty work of breaking them to pieces.
Darling was nowhere to be found. Mira called his name, in direct interface and once out loud. Nothing. There wasn't time to waste, though, in case Hirata pulled herself together enough to raise some warning. And things might be easier without Darling along, anyway.
The coordinates she had begged from Hirata's frothing lips weren't far away. The limo didn't bother to reach normal cruising altitude; it bolted forward at just above rooftop level, drawing nearer the edge of the Blast Event crater. Yes, she thought, this would all end up here, next to this black hole.
A hill rose before Mira, crumbling like a half-eaten pastry where it had been bitten in two by the perfect sphere of the explosion. The vehicle gained altitude to crest its peak, slowing as the kid-simple iconography of the navigation eyescreen showed two dots converging: an ancient and euclidian sign of arrival.
Mira transpared the limo's floor and whistled. The vehicle's rise had revealed a shallow caldera that sparkled with an orchard of metal trees. Their coppery glint made them instantly recognizable as Vaddums. Mira brushed away the irritating thought that she had just paid a colossal sum for two of these objects, and here were hundreds. It was irrelevant. They would have to be destroyed, of course, even if she succeeded in saving the artist.
As the machine descended with its breaking whine, dropping toward a central clearing in the metal forest, Mira saw that she had been beaten:
Darling was there already, standing among a pile of junked parts, resting on a glittering staff like a tired shepherd.
Mira stood as the machine unfolded its passenger canopy around her, a little unsteady from the hasty deceleration. Darling stared back at her, unblinking in the wave of dust that broke against him. She leapt from the car and ran to him; she had never seen him so abject, so merely human.
She took his arm.
"Where's Vaddum?"
Darling gestured with the staff, which shone like glass in the sun. There were flaws in it, cracks, chips. He pointed to the remains of two bodies among the other junk; she recognized the child's muscular single arm and thin legs, and the blast shielding of Vaddum's body. Their sensory gear was battered into glistening slivers, the flexor-fluid of their crushed limbs had leaked onto the ground, its metally surface tension forming huge droplets like a dusty, black spill of mercury. One of Vaddum's hands still floated, making witless and purposeless gestures. And the black-boxes had been pulled, trailing fiber and ichorous strands of shock insulation, and hammered into black shards that were like the sweepings from some onyx sculpture. Darling must have done this last with his great stone feet.
He had already killed Vaddum.
"Why the child?" she asked, for a moment afraid that the labor of killing his hero had driven Darling mad.
"She was a Vaddum. Her body."
What a complication that would have been, Mira thought. But she sighed away her plan to save the old sculptor, its complexities and loose ends peacefully unravelling in the light breeze. No point in telling Darling. That would be cruel.
But she wanted to know why he'd done it himself.
"I hadn't thought you wanted him dead. Not really," she said.
"He was a forgery. He wasn't real." Darling swept the staff in a great circle, its arc clearing her head with that uncomfortable precision of artificials. "This is all a forgery. It's my job to destroy such things.
"As I told you when we met, I deal in originals."
She nodded. Perhaps she had almost given Darling the wrong gift this time.
"There's a problem, though," she said. "I needed Vaddum to tell me who copied him." It suddenly occured to her that Darling might have done this to save the old man from torture. How little he trusted her. "That's my job, remember?"
Darling shook his head. "He told me before I killed him. Willingly. The Maker, as he called it, is hidden below the center of the Blast Crater."
"Of course." The hard layers of molten slag would shield tremendous energies from detection. This copying of souls was not some simple algorithmic trick; it was an industrial process.
And possibly the death of the old sculptor had already warned this Maker. Mira couldn't wait for a warship to bring the heavy weapons needed to penetrate the shield of the crater floor.
But Mira was a very well-equipped agent, prepared to end wars if need be.
"Thank you, Darling. I'll finish this now."
He nodded and leaned against his staff.
She direct-interfaced her luggage lifter in the hotel suite, sent combined orders to it and to the remainder (the greater part) of the painting/device/war machine on the wall. The two machines joined, the lifter's powerful impellers with the painting's intelligence and deadly purpose. They had to vaporize one of the suite's windows to make their escape, but soon they were on their way.
Mira let the dress fall from her. It seemed to sink into the ground, passing through the dust like distilled water through some cunningly perfect filter, leaving no trace of dampness or impurity behind. She joined it in direct interface, feeling it burrow into cooler and cooler depths, a vanguard for the vastly more terrible portion that was on its way.
She set her awareness of this campaign's progress to a low level, and pressed her naked body against Darling's sunwarmed stone.
"When this is over," she murmured as a skein of his strands gathered to bind her to him, "perhaps we should take a journey."
"I have explanations to make, to Fowdy."
"No. I think he'll be happy with your work. I bought the Vad-dums, had them sent. They're genuine, in their way."
"But the material anachronisms…"
A message from below the surface came tingling into her awareness. Behind closed eyes, she felt the oppressive weight of 15 kilometers of earth above her, the EM darkness under the upside-down umbrella of the blast crater's igneous bottom. And far ahead, she saw through the dress's eyes the sparkle of an energy source.
The Maker.
"That's just a matter of recordkeeping, of who-made-what-when. My employers will make a few changes and everything will square."
"But two undiscovered Vaddums?" he asked.
"Flex will argue that she thought one was incomplete; but that you convinced her it was salable."
"How is Hirata Flex?"
She nestled closer to him. His strands were spread fine now, laced across her like a fishnet body-stocking. The skein tensed slightly, lifting her to a height where she could kiss him properly.
As their lips met, the main force of her war machine (there was nothing else to call it in its present configuration) arrived above its target. It split into four parts that made aerodynamic shapes of themselves and let wind and gravity carry them to four sides of the crater, passing into the earth and surrounding the Maker.
"She's vibrant, happy. Possibly confused and embarrassed, I would think. I left it for her to explain what happened. She has some sort of artistic touch, I suppose. She'll make up some story for herself."