CHAPTER 23

Resinous tethers, dissolving, filled the chamber with a wet, sticky rain. Beloved’s drums flogged the air, calling for readiness. Twelve’s body cleansed itself internally, prepared for duty. Blood poured through the fat, nourishing umbilicus into his body.

Twelve’s palps flickered out, tasting the heavy resinous scent, tasting also an enzyme meant only for him, an urgent summons tagged with his chemical name. Come to Beloved. His hearts surged at the summons. With half-awakened limbs, Twelve began to flail against his restraints.

His vision slowly cleared. At a great remove, as always, he was aware of pain, but the pain was buffered by Beloved’s specialized analgesics and did not impair him.

Nutrient liquid shot from his mouth as his lungs convulsively emptied, then inflated with air. The umbilicus fell away. Beloved’s improved nonvolitionals began to clean his flesh with their grating tongues. Twelve wrenched out of his restraints and drifted free into the room till he could contact a wall and push toward the exit.

One of his legs had not awakened yet and wouldn’t obey him— his first jump went wide of the door. No matter: he could compensate. He used his arms to navigate between the awakening soldiers and navigators and make his way to the exit; he pulled away the tympanum and thrust his way down the corridor. Beloved’s drumbeat was more urgent here and Twelve made haste, Beloved’s summons driving him to furious exertion. Half a dozen nonvolitionals, busy cleaning, crawled over his body as he swam into the fusion chamber and allowed Beloved’s umbilicus to connect with his mind.

At once the urgency of Beloved’s rhythm moderated. Think carefully, Beloved urged, think carefully, and be of service.

All glory to Beloved. How may this-individual serve his Beloved?

His last service, upon Beloved’s return to Potent 5367, had been everything he had hoped. Prices for the last shipment of AIs had reached preposterous heights, particularly after it had been announced that these were improved models. Already a fleet of ships was building, each to be inhabited by one of Beloved’s children. Half a dozen singularities had been purchased, as had many servants, some of them latest- model research volitionals intended to work on the mysteries of creating artificial intelligence.

Beloved’s tympani rattled for attention.

We have reached the rendezvous star where I anticipated meeting Clan de Suarez. Clan de Suarez is not present, but instead I find Runaway.

Chill dread rolled through Twelve. Glory to Beloved, he replied. How can this be? He feared he already knew the answer.

Bossrider Ubu Roy informs Me that Shooter Beautiful Maria had been placed aboard Abrazo for the purpose of destroying it, and Clan de Suarez with it.

Twelve hung in shock from the umbilicus, his worst fears realized. His mind stumbled dazedly over the new information.

Beloved, this-individual is surprised.

I must evaluate this data, Volitional Twelve. I need to know whether Bossrider Ubu speaks the truth.

Twelve hesitated. Through the umbilical connection he could sense alarm in Beloved, the knowledge that all her schemes might have come apart. Her mind seemed fragmented, each division working frantically on different parts of a larger, yet-unrealized’ whole.

This-individual can only guess, Beloved, Twelve said. This-individual can reason only from the data presented in Bloodbath in Building Four, which is a hype that in itself is only a kind of lie.

Your best judgment is required in this matter.

As presented in the hype, the humans have the ability to place their people within the structure of enemy clans. These humans then act in the best interests of their clans, and their behavior may include violence or sabotage.

In your judgment, is it likely that Beautiful Maria was so placed within the structure of Clan de Suarez?

It is not inconsistent, cautiously, with what they have permitted this-individual to learn of their behavior.

Twelve sensed Beloved’s dissatisfaction with this answer. Bossrider Ubu, she sent, has invited Me to remain in this system for a length of time necessary to confirm that Abrazo will not appear. He appears to make this offer with perfect confidence.

Beloved of course may wait. Twelve offered this carefully, not wanting to presume to give Beloved advice.

Bossrider Marco was expected here before now.

Delays are proverbial in navigation. He may arrive at any moment.

There is evidence that all is as Bossrider Ubu claims. You were aboard the de Suarez ship at the last rendezvous when it began a violent series of evasive maneuvers. Shooter Maria was likewise present.

Bossrider Marco said that Abrazo was avoiding an asteroid storm.

We detected no asteroid storm. Runaway likewise made no evasive maneuvers. Could it be that Beautiful Maria had seized control of Abrazo in order to take advantage of the confusion so as to give you a message for Bossrider Ubu?

Twelve made the reluctant concession. That is possible, Beloved. His hands and feet trembled in terror.

If Shooter Maria could control the de Suarez ship in such a manner, she could likewise seize control of it to destroy it.

Glory, Beloved. This-individual can but praise your reasoning.

Suddenly Twelve sensed the fragments of Beloved’s mind assembling itself into a vast, awesome, and implacable whole. You have aided this plot against My interest, Beloved transmitted. Twelve thrashed in terror as he sensed Beloved’s resolution, as Beloved’s drill-tipped neurons made further penetrations of his mind. You have been contaminated by human thought and sympathy. You are dangerous. Your use is at an end. You will destroy yourself immediately.

Glory glory glory. Beloved was making a mistake— give him another few moments and he could explain why. But Twelve had only time to chant a few words of praise before Beloved’s chemical onslaught struck at his brain and all rational thought dissolved. In an instant he felt his will shatter beneath an overwhelming conviction of his own worthlessness. Even though he knew the emotion had been planted within him, the experience was nevertheless genuine, an overwhelming, bitter surge of despair. A wail of hopelessness burbled from him. Beloved had declared him void. He knew himself unworthy. Alkaline tears beaded from his pores as his flesh contracted in an involuntary spasm of self-loathing.

The umbilicus withdrew, but not fast enough to satisfy Twelve’s impulse to self-destruction. Frustrated by his inability to annihilate himself instantly, he clawed at himself with his inner fingers, drawing blood. The umbilicus finally withdrew, and he kicked and launched himself for the exit. He could feel the nonvolitionals abandoning him, leaping out into the light, their reaction triggered by the bitter taste of his weeping skin.

Clawed hands seized him. Beloved had sent several of her soldiers to hasten his end. “Thank you, brothers,” he tried to say as the soldiers’ arms pinioned him, but his voder was paralyzed. Still he was grateful as the fighters drew him down the blue-lit corridor.

The tympanum covering the dissolution chamber was torn aside. Twelve’s palps were stung by the scent of decay, that and a heavy odor of complex enzymes. The soldiers flung Twelve into the darkened chamber.

In a tangle of limbs Twelve struck the far wall. The moist, fleshy lining of the chamber squelched as it absorbed the impact. A furious, despairing rage consumed him. His light had failed, he had become contaminated, all that he was should be destroyed. He pressed himself against the moist, greedy flesh of the wall, exposing as much of his body surface as possible to its destructive enzymes. The wall held him in place. The tympanum behind him drew shut, and he was left alone in darkness.

His skin, where exposed to the wall, began to tingle, then experience sharp jabs of pain. Ecstatically, Twelve welcomed the sign that his dissolution was near. His only joy remained in his own annihilation. His dismay was that it could not be accomplished instantly.

The pain increased, spreading like fire along his limbs, his trunk. Beloved had no further use for him, no reason to buffer the agony as she had when he was awakened from transit-sleep. The enzymes of the chamber were dissolving his flesh, breaking him down into amino-acid chains that might be safely recycled. The process would take many hours.

Gradually the agonizing self-hatred ebbed as Twelve metabolized Beloved’s final chemical attack. Unending pain lanced through his mind. He tried to flail away from the wall, but the sticky flesh had already encircled his limbs with tough, fast-growing filaments. He tried to scream, but no sound resulted— Beloved had neatly severed the links between his brain and voder. He realized that Beloved would not wish the echoing sound of his screams distracting her other servants.

There was an ebbing of the pain as many of Twelve’s nerve endings were consumed. The enzymes were pausing in their work, summoning reserves before working deeper into the muscle tissue. Thoughts reassembled in his mind, the thoughts that, had they been expressed, might have saved his life.

Anguish tore at him. Beloved, he thought. You may have just destroyed yourself along with me.

She had fallen victim to a human scheme. The details hardly mattered, whether Runaway and Clan de Suarez were working in concert, whether Maria had really destroyed Abrazo, whether any of Ubu’s scenario was really true or not— the crucial fact was that Beloved’s attempt to seize control of her situation had failed. The humans now had the upper hand.

The opportunity to take control might come again, but if it did Beloved would probably miss it. Her pattern was too limited.

Twelve had not entirely understood his decision to aid Beautiful Maria and Ubu, had only felt an obscure rightness in the act. Likewise he had instinctively opposed Beloved’s scheme to deal with Clan de Suarez and cut off Runaway’s trade. Beloved had assumed these attitudes to be the result of human contamination, and she was right. Twelve, her servant, had been polluted by human contact.

What Beloved failed to realize was that she required servants who had been so polluted. She needed servants who could instinctively recognize human schemes, who could warn her away from actions that might worsen her situation. Her own icy rationality was not flexible enough to deal with the human threat.

She needed Twelve. She had thrown him away. Now she was more vulnerable than ever.

Twelve shuddered as a new wave of enzymes began assaulting his frame, burning deeper into his flesh, reaching new nerve endings with their chemical claws. Beloved! he thought. I can still save you! And then his thoughts were swept away by a blazing wave of hot, retching agony.

This time there was no respite.

Think, ordered Beloved’s drums. Think carefully, and all will be well.

*

I understand your music, Ubu thought, and I understand you.

A hot river of triumph burned through his veins. Beloved’s answer glowed above the comm board. She had agreed to his terms.

The ships would shoot to another star, Santos 439, eight light-years distant, which would be used in future for all face-to-face meetings and exchanges of cargo. It was there that Beloved would build her chemical factory and warehouse. Montoya 81 and Santos 448 would be declared off limits to both parties. To seal the agreement Runaway would receive one full cargo, the pharmaceuticals intended for Abrazo, which Beloved had been synthesizing and storing in resinous containers since she left Santos 448.

Ubu had presented Beloved with a version of reality, and compelled Beloved to believe it. He hadn’t made a single false move, betrayed a single weakness.

He had encompassed Beloved in his mind, imprisoned her in a structure of his own making.

Beloved hadn’t even questioned his insistence on abandoning the sites of previous meetings. Ubu had been worried about that point— he knew Marco would show up at Montoya 81 eventually, and if he and Beloved were to meet again under uncontrolled circumstances, Ubu’s agreements could unravel— but Beloved hadn’t balked.

She hadn’t dared. Ubu had been right: Clan Lustre needed the trade with Runaway more than Runaway needed Beloved.

The leap to Santos 439 took only a few subjective hours. The two ships ended their final shoots within two weeks of one another, Beloved within two days of a candy-striped red-and-white gas giant, one lacking only a little more mass to become a sun in its own right. Ubu suggested Beloved begin assembling her chemical factory in orbit, and Runaway would join her there. Beloved agreed.

Ubu spent the transit time with Beloved’s drumbeats thundering in his ears, his chord structures bringing her existence swimming into his senses. He had presented her with a reality she didn’t dare deny; now he needed to present her with a future she couldn’t live without.

A future in which her servants would expand trade, build ships for humans, assemble habitations and worlds... where human AIs would manage her new empire, as well as help it to expand across the sphere occupied by her own species... where humanity and Beloved’s servants would interpenetrate, spiral into one another until they were no longer discernible as separate species...

He would have to make this future live in Beloved’s mind as Beloved now lived in his. Beloved had to need it as much as Ubu did.

And Beloved had to be prevented from noticing that, buried within this vision, it would be humans who would manage the data, keep the books, maintain control of the relationship.

The structure Ubu created had to keep her from observing this. For that he needed more concrete knowledge of her.

He needed to know if he was right, if his chords and experimentations had built a true picture of Beloved.

He had to see her. In person.

The candy-striped protostar grew nearer. Ubu sat in the upper lounge, surrounded by instruments, speakers, computers programmed for notation and recording. Dizzy with the music of Beloved, he played till his fingers bled.

Bossrider Ubu desires to meet Beloved, he sent. Beloved may take whatever precautions she deems necessary for her own protection.

Dry-mouthed with anticipation, he licked his lips. Tambors rattled in his head.

The answer, affirmative, printed itself above the comm board in holographic letters the color of molten gold.

*

There were conditions. Ubu would go through decontamination before he left Runaway and would stay in his vac suit throughout. Beloved would have her guards present.

The conditions didn’t matter, Ubu knew. The fact of the meeting did.

Beloved thundered in his blood as Ubu left Runaway and hung outside, plotting his course. The huge protostar dazzled his eyes with its brilliant scarlet and white bands. Beloved’s ship rolled atop the giant’s equator, its black silhouette surrounded by the bright atmosphere craft that were plundering the giant’s moons for raw material.

Beloved’s ship had changed its outline. A shiny bubble grew from one cargo bay— a delicate-looking resinous lattice, gleaming silver in the bright sun, that would become the framework for Beloved’s station. Nonvolitionals, some very large, crawled gracefully over the silver fretwork, augmenting the frame with thin, strength-enhancing layers of exudate. Eventually the station would be larger than Beloved, filled with factories and living quarters and cargo bays, would feed itself raw material from the protostar’s moons and manufacture the elements of Runaway’s commerce.

Beloved’s airlock beckoned with its flashing strobes. Ubu’s hand touched the joystick of his maneuver pack and he fired himself like a bullet, a bullet aimed at Beloved’s heart.

*

When the airlock cycled and the inner door clattered open— whatever system Beloved used to draw up the hatch, it was still noisy— Ubu saw the dark form of a volitional hovering outside. Somehow he knew at once that it wasn’t Twelve.

“Glory to Beloved,” Ubu said. A rapid drumbeat pattered over his voice. “I am Bossrider Ubu Roy.” His voice was fed into speakers he’d clipped to his helmet. He wondered for a moment if he should have used the old system of holographic translation, whether this new volitional understood his speech.

“Glory to Runaway. I am General Volitional Twenty-six. It is an honor to apprehend the form of Ubu Roy.”

The words were perfectly articulated, the voice alto, pitched to carry over Beloved’s drumbeat.

“Pleased to meet you,” Ubu said. “I expected Volitional Twelve.”

“General Volitional Twelve is no longer living. Please follow me, Bossrider Ubu Roy.”

Surprise lurched through Ubu’s mind as he guided himself through the hatchway. He wondered if he should ask how Twelve had died, or why.

Natural deaths, he thought, are not common here. Beloved, therefore, had Twelve killed.

Because he helped us? Ubu wondered. Because his mind was polluted? Because Beloved’s plans didn’t work out, and one of her servants had to serve as scapegoat before she could accept any new arrangement?

Maybe, Ubu thought as he swept down the corridor, braked, pivoted, and followed Twenty-six down a new, wide tunnel, maybe Twelve was killed just to keep me off balance.

Ubu’s mind hardened. He wasn’t going to let Beloved throw him.

Twenty-six regarded Ubu from his rear set of mild brown eyes. Tympani of all size lined the corridor’s irregular walls. Drumbeats high and low beat the air, each rapping out a different pattern, the totality becoming ever more complex.

A large gap appeared in one wall, unsealed by a tympanum. Blue light poured through the gap, intense as a carbon arc. Ubu dialed up the polarity of his helmet visor. Twenty-six caught the edge of the gap with one hand, checked momentum, pulled himself through. Ubu braked with his handset. Drumbeats rattled through his helmet, throbbed in his pulse. Air vents hissed below his chin.

The room was large, maybe ten meters across. A strong wind tugged at Ubu as he entered, and he countered it with careful spurts of his jets. Shiny bodies limned by the intense light, black soldiers were braced against the walls by strutlike limbs, taloned, armored, carrying mother-of-pearl firearms that seemed as much exudate as their helmets and shells. The rest of the room at first seemed to be cluttered with random organic debris... tympani, lighting strips, long banks of pale whiplike flagella, each several meters long, that flailed against air, throbbing pumps like disconnected animal hearts, each half Ubu’s size, bound in place with strips of pale sinew and connected to one another by long flexible conduits of crossgrained arterial tissue. Multilegged nonvolitionals, types Ubu hadn’t seen before, crawled like swarms of scavenging insects through it all, busily performing tasks of uncertain purpose. There were tympani everywhere, of all sizes, and the drumbeats were incredibly complex, layered, impossible to follow. Though Ubu couldn’t feel it in his vac suit, he knew the room was incredibly humid— everything, the nonvolitionals, Twenty-six, the soldiers, was covered with a precipitate dew, and droplets flew like shooting stars in the path of the strong cold wind.

Beloved, Ubu thought. Everything in the room was Beloved. And this room was only a part of her.

His mind spun. Beloved throbbed in his pulse with greater complexity than he had ever heard. His music had never encompassed this, he knew. He had never thought of Beloved as being this alive.

“Greetings, Bossrider Ubu Roy. Welcome to Myself.”

The voice was a resonant tenor, issuing simultaneously from several of the tympani in the room.

Ubu swung in the wind, lost in the gusting breeze. He performed the corrections necessary to remain in place, and the ease and familiarity of the motions helped calm him. An organic body this large had to generate enormous heat, he thought. The cold wind carried excess heat away. That was why Beloved’s ship was black, because black bodies radiate heat as efficiently as they absorb it.

The thought gave him confidence. I am in charge here, he told himself. Beloved has permitted me to come here because I am dictating her reality.

The layered drumbeats hammered at him. Dimly, he began to follow some of the patterns. He realized that the black soldiers, overwhelmed by the nearness of their Beloved and the immediacy of her drumming, were moving their free limbs, their fingers and toes, in time to one of the patterns.

The nonvolitionals on the floor were moving to another pattern. The flagella to yet another.

Beloved’s pattern encompassed all her creatures.

Twenty-six, he saw, had hooked one set of toes around a wall extrusion that looked a lot like a castoff bar. Ubu maneuvered himself next to Twenty-six and thrust one boot through the bar. He could feel the resin stretching, taking the strain as he swayed in the wind, then steadied at a different angle. He looked again at the array that was Beloved, saw everything alive, everything in motion. He would understand this, Ubu thought, he would encompass its existence.

Chords rang in his mind, building the structure he needed. He blinked sweat from his eyes.

“Glory to Beloved,” he said.

He told her what he wanted her to know.