“No,” Shaz replied, as he shifted his gaze from her to a bedraggled Dyson. “Why bother? We’ll have to go through the same process all over again as we exit on Thara.”
Both the humans and the machines left a trail of wet footprints behind as they hauled their disinfectant-soaked luggage into the room beyond. The curvilinear walls were covered with hundreds of video tiles. Each square bore a picture with a name printed below. About half of them were lit, meaning it was still possible to travel there, and the rest were dark. The tile labeled thara showed a butte, with hills in the distance, and blue sky beyond. “That’s where we’re going,” Shaz explained, as he pointed to the square. “Put the equipment at the center of the platform and step aboard.”
Phan did as instructed, and Dyson did likewise, leaving the robots to imitate them. Once the team was in place, Shaz touched the butte, felt it give, and hurried to join the rest on the well-worn platform. The room lights fl?ashed on and off as a woman long dead spoke through the overhead speakers. “The transfer sequence is about to begin. Please take your place on the service platform. Once in place, check to ensure that no portion of your anatomy extends beyond the yellow line. Failure to do so will cause serious injury and could result in death.”
The steel disk was extremely crowded, and Phan had to edge inward in order to clear the yellow line. Her thigh came into contact with one of the androids, and his alloy skin felt cold. Dyson wished that he was somewhere else and closed his eyes. Life after death was a fact—so it was the process of dying that he feared. Shaz knew that the public platforms had not only been a good deal larger but equipped with attendants, and chairs for those who chose to use them. Now, as he prepared to make the nearly instantaneous jump from one solar system to another, the operative wondered if the ancients experienced fear as they waited to cross the void, or were so confi?dent of the technologies they employed that the outcome was taken for granted.
Before Shaz could complete his musings, there was a brilliant fl?ash of light. One by one his atoms were disassembled and sent through hyperspace before being systematically reassembled within the receiving gate on Thara. The variant felt the usual bout of disorientation, followed by vertigo, and a moment of nausea. “Okay,” the operative said briskly. “Grab your gear and enter the decontamination lock. Once the shower is over, you can get dressed.”
It took the better part of twenty minutes for the team to clear the decontamination chamber, get dressed, and rearm themselves. Then Shaz led his subordinates into what had once been a standard passageway but had long since been transformed into a lateral tunnel, as the lower levels of Tryst were condemned and the citizenry migrated upward. Though far from fancy, the interior of the access way was reasonably clean and showed signs of recent use. Shaz took this for granted since there were other Techno Society operatives, some of whom had reason to visit Tryst. The tunnel terminated in front of a circular hatch. It consisted of a two-inch-thick slab of steel, was locked against unauthorized intruders, and controlled by a numeric keypad. Shaz tapped six digits into the controller and was rewarded by a loud whine as the barrier unscrewed itself from the wall. The combat variant looked back over his shoulder.
“Okay, here comes the hard part. . . . The hatch opens into a vertical shaft. Turn to the right as you exit, grab on to the maintenance ladder, and climb. The exit is fi?ve hundred feet above us, so take your time and rest if you need to. I’ll lead the way. . . . Number Four will secure the hatch and bring up the rear.”
“And then?” Phan wanted to know.
“And then we head for the runner’s guild. . . . That’s where the runner, the sensitive, and the heavy are most likely to be. If not, we’ll check all of the hotels until we fi?nd them. Once that’s accomplished, the fi?rst objective is to confi?rm that they have Logos.”
Dyson “felt” a low-grade buzz as the thoughts generated by thousands of minds merged into something akin to static and drifted down through solid rock.
Phan hooked a thumb in her combat harness. “Works for me.”
“Good,” the operative replied, and turned to swing the hatch out of the way. Most of the shaft was fi?lled by the huge pipes that carried water up to the surface, and a ladder claimed the rest. One careless move, one slip, and anyone attempting to reach the top would plummet to the bottom. With that sobering thought in mind, Shaz stepped up to the edge, forced himself to ignore the drop, and turned his eyes upward. The top of the well was open to the sky, and thanks to the fact that it was daytime, the variant could see a tiny pinhead-sized circle of light. A single stomachturning step was suffi?cient to put the operative on the rusty ladder. The metal was cold beneath his fi?ngers as Shaz began to climb. Somewhere, if only in his imagination, the ancients started to laugh.
TWO
The city of Tryst, on the Planet Thara
Would you trade your hammer for a rock? Of course not. Yetyou listen when the priests call upon you to cast out technol-ogy. They fear science because it can dispel ignorance. And ig-norance is the primary thing upon which they feed.
—Excerpt from street lecture 52.1 as written by Milos Lysander, founder of the Techno Society, and delivered by thousands of metal men each day
There was something sad about the Circus Solara. Most of the performers were clearly middle-aged, their costumes were ragged, and the fi?rst fi?fteen minutes of the “most exciting show in the galaxy” were extremely boring. However, there was a signifi?cant shortage of things to do in the city of Tryst, which meant that the seats surrounding the circular arena were packed with people, some of whom had started to doze by the time two fancifully dressed clowns secured the local prefect to a brightly painted disk. But Rebo sat up and began to pay attention as the formally attired ringmaster strutted out to the center of the arena and stood next to the turntable to which the offi?cial was being secured. He spoke through a handheld megaphone. “Ladies and gentlemen! Behold the wheel of death! In a matter of moments this diabolical device will be set into motion . . . Then, once the disk becomes little more than a blur, Madam Pantha will throw her hatchets. Yes! That’s correct! You could have a new prefect by tomorrow morning!”
The joke stimulated laughter, catcalls, and a round of applause. Madam Pantha wore a yellow turban, sported a curly black beard, and was dressed in a loose blouse and pantaloons. Her clothes might have been white once, but had long since turned gray and were patched in places. She waved a hatchet at the audience, tossed the weapon high into the air, and waited for it to fall. Then, having positioned herself just so, Pantha missed the catch. The hatchet generated a puff of dust as it hit the ground—followed by more laughter as the crowd entered into the spirit of the thing. The prefect was an extremely good sport, or that’s what Rebo concluded, as a pair of mimes put the platform on which both the wheel of death and the bearded lady stood into motion. Now everyone could see as the platform began to rotate, and a couple of acrobats began to spin the wheel of death. It took the better part of thirty seconds to get the disk turning at top speed. A drumroll began as Madam Pantha accepted a hatchet from a sad-faced clown, brought the implement back over her right shoulder, and let fl?y. Even the runner stared as the wheel rotated, the hatchet turned end for end, and the somewhat corpulent offi?cial continued to rotate. Then came the solid thwack of metal biting into wood, followed by a gasp of indrawn air as the crowd realized that a second weapon was on the way, quickly followed by a third. Fortunately, the second and third hatchets fl?ew true, both sinking into wood only inches from the politico’s body, even as both the platform and the wheel continued to turn.