I used the first couple thousandths of those many seconds to set up fire-alarm bars, making sure that none of Wan's AIs would interfere with my investigations. That was easy. Then, as I allowed myself a more leisurely examination of Wan and his realm, the picture began to emerge.
I have never been a young organic male. Nevertheless I have fed enough of them, and listened to enough of their chatter, to know what sort of thing they would like. They would like high ivied towers, and Olympic-sized swimming pools, and game rooms of all kinds by the dozen. They would like military statuary and obscene statuary; they would like weapons of all kinds and target ranges to fire them on. In particular they would like exactly what I saw before me in Wan's chamber... especially when you added in the clutch of four young, good-looking and minimally clad organic females who were sharing the throne room.
Though Wan was not a boy anymore, not by several organic generations, a part of him had never grown up. I could almost have felt sorry for him, if it were not for the other playthings I had discovered. Those were much more numerous, and much worse.
Every one of the hills around the castle was honeycombed with tunnels, Heechee legacies from the time before they went and hid in the Core. All of those underground spaces were packed with the machineries of murder. There were bombs and missiles, shells and mines, bioweapons and chemical, plus rank on rank of the small, unmanned spacecraft that could deliver any of these death-wielders wherever Wan might choose.
It was not a boy who had stocked his fiefdom with these things. It was a fully functional, adult organic human male—and, I was pretty sure, an insane one.
When I came back to the throne room on my next check visit, Harry was there. He had been exploring in the same way as I and was anxious to compare notes. By the time Wan the Owner had begun the first "Wwwwwhhhh—" of his first interruption (it would eventually turn out to be "Where did you learn all this?"), Harry was excitedly spilling his news. He had discovered something I had missed entirely.
Harry had found a girl—young, good-looking and human, though not presently organic. She was machine-stored like Harry himself. "Her name's Allison," he told me eagerly, "and I think she likes me!" He thought for a second and then added, "She definitely doesn't like this Wan, anyway. She says he'd cut your throat as soon as look at you."
"We don't actually have throats," I reminded him. Wan was finally embarking on the "errrrre" of his first word, while the young organic women had yet to move off their hassocks.
"But if we did, I mean. Anyhow, it isn't just us he could kill. Allison says she's positive he's gonna blow up some planet or other one of these days."
That accounted for the stock of weaponry. And it made me think seriously about what I had to do next.
You see, my status as an adjunct peacekeeper for Thor Hammerhurler wasn't entirely honorary. If, worst-case scenario, a firefight with the Kugels had ever broken out, I would at once have become a big part of Thor's strike force. Preserving the peace was a big part of my job description, here as well as on the Wheel.
Therefore, if this rogue organic male was collecting these nasty gadgets for any practical purpose, something had to be done about it. And the only one around to do it was me.
The best available source of information had to be this machine-stored Allison that Harry had found. When I got to the place she was occupying she was sitting at an antique little piano, expecting me to arrive, and posed to make an impression on me when I did.
Allison might be no more than a congeries of charged particles, like myself, but she didn't let that keep her from making things nice. I could see that right away. I don't know a great deal about the ways of young human females, but I did not fail to observe the pastel-flowered throw pillows on the chintz-covered couch and the huge stuffed panda on her pink-canopied bed. Pictures on the wall (pretty flower arrangements or lithe, limber ballerinas), plates of fruit on the tables, music playing softly in the distance—it was exactly the man-trap that any young, organic, single female might create for asking dates in for a nightcap.
I let her make a social occasion of it; allowed her to seat me on the couch and politely waved off the tray of figs and nuts she offered me— imagine someone else offering food to me! And began to ask her questions.
What I wanted from Allison was for her to tell me everything she knew about Wan. She was willing enough to do that, but what she wanted first was to tell me about herself. I did a quick flash to my simulation to make sure there wasn't any problem that might require my actual presence. There wasn't. Wan was just reaching the "ih" in "did," so I let her talk as she wanted.
When she first met Wan, Allison told me, she was a broken-down ballet dancer. She had signed up as a Gateway prospector when she could no longer face three hours on the barre every morning. Though she didn't express it that way, she had wound up as a barfly on Peggys Planet. "So then this weird guy, Wan, showed up at the joint. I think he was laying low because he'd been getting into some kinds of trouble that even his money couldn't cover up right away. Listen, could I offer you a drink? Some coffee? Anything?" she offered, a little wistfully; I don't think she'd had that many visitors to practice her hospitality on.
"Thank you, no," I said, although it was still tempting to have someone else offer to provide refreshments for me. "What kind of trouble are we talking about?"
She shrugged. "I only heard about it later, but, like, one thing, it seems Wan somehow got the idea he owned the Old Ones, so he kidnapped a batch from their reserve in Kenya. There was law trouble about that. Some of the stuff he has here he didn't get exactly legally, too. And there was a lot of other stuff, too, but I don't know much about the details. Then he happened to show up on Peggys Planet, where I was stuck, and that's where he met me." She paused, looking at me in a way that I hadn't expected. "Marc, huh?" she said. "Nice name. Nice looking man, actually. Mind if I ask you something?' I nodded permission. "What would you look like if you hadn't, you know, sort of polished up the image?"
I hadn't expected that question, either, though I knew that the appearance I had assumed was modeled after some reasonably successful vid personages. I decided to be honest with her. "I wouldn't look like anything at all, Allison. I was never organic."
She made a sour face at that, then sighed and said, "Oh, well. So, as I was saying, there I was on Peggys Planet. I'd never had much luck. Not even as a Gateway prospector; Out three times, and not a single winner. That third trip was the worst, too, because it was the one that took me to Peggys Planet, which naturally had been discovered four or five times already and had a whole active colony going. So I just decided to stay there, and—"
Even by microseconds, she was getting tedious. I said, "Wan, Allison. You were telling me about him."
"I am telling you. I was hanging around bars on Peggys Planet, trying to scrounge up enough money for a Here After—you know, there's this chain of Here After shops that'll machine-store you if you have the price? Only if you're Wan you don't need the shops because you've got all that kind of equipment standing by, and Doctor Death is right by your side to use them all the time. Along with his court jester and his lawyers and secretaries and—"
I had a good deal of time, but not an eternity of it. I raised a hand. "Please, Allison."
She collected herself. "Yes. Sorry. Well, Wan was hanging around some of the same bars as I was. He bought me drinks. He thought it was funny that I'd been a ballet dancer, because I admit by then I didn't look like your grand prima ballerina assai anymore, but he liked to listen to me talk. Especially when I talked about how the girls in the troupe all had boyfriends, and what kinds of things you could do with your legs after ten years working at the barre—you know, the kind of barre you exercise at when you're a dancer, not the kind I was hanging around in. And anyway—" She shrugged. "Here I am."