Endgame (30 page)

The animated image of Jill—just an artificial intelligence program, according to itself—dropped its jaw just like the real Jill would do. She leaned over and planted both hands on her knees to view us from a slightly different angle. “God, how did you live for four hundred and eighty-three years? Oh—relativity! Right?”

Arlene nodded, sniffed, then wiped her nose on her military sleeve. “Jill, I . . . look, I don't want to seem ungrateful, in case you have any surprises, but—”

The fifteen-year-old stood tall and folded her arms, taking on that slightly superior look that age is prone to. “Don't worry, Arlene . . . I'm not going to throw an animated Albert at you. I know you wouldn't appreciate it. But I am here to take you downstairs, where there's a present for you.” She waited a beat, then when we didn't move, she impatiently urged us forward with her hands.

We joined her on the platform, which immediately began to sink. I didn't ask her any questions; I didn't know what to ask. I decided it could all wait. . . . I was pretty sure we could always come back later and catch up on what she did with her life—and get autographed copies of the books she wrote! If she didn't save a pair for us, I'd kill her, except she was already long dead and buried, or whatever they did nowadays.

It was a creepy thought, and I stole many a glance at “Jill,” trying not to think that
Jill was dead.
I felt a big lumpy knot in my stomach, even though I had known all along this would be the punishment for hopping around the universe at proxiluminous speeds.
Damn it! I did what I had to do—we both did! Why, in the name of God Almighty, do we have to pay such a terrible price?
Everyone we ever knew or loved, besides ourselves, Arlene and I, was dead and gone, long gone!

We descended for about six minutes. The shaft was totally black . . . but at last, we saw a blue glowing door. But we went right past it without stopping! “First-floor dungeon,” Jill announced out of the blue. “Whips and tortures. Racks, pressings, iron cages, and bats.” She stood in a perfect at-ease posture: feet shoulder-width apart, chest and shoulders squared away, hands clasped behind her back.

Another long interval passed, during which we continued to descend. I put my hand out and felt the walls around the shaft sliding against my fingers. We were moving slowly, not like we were in an elevator in a high-rise, but at a stately pace . . . as befitted a holy place.

Another door hove into view, red this time. “Second-floor dungeon,” Jill recorded. “Iron maidens, thumbscrews, rat cages . . . ladies' underwear.” Arlene snorted, trying hard to look stern and not smile . . . This was a holy place, after all!

The third floor took the longest. I swear, we rode for twelve minutes in silence, but maybe it was shorter. At last, a simple wooden door rolled up into view—and at last, we stopped. The door opened, showing us a nice comfortable hallway. “Third-floor dungeon,” Jill impressively tolled, “ev—ery—bod—y
out!”

Arlene and I stepped through, and I paused, waiting for Jill to join us. She shook her head sadly. “Sorry, Corporal—I mean, Sergeant—”

“Lieutenant,” corrected my ever-so-helpful helpmeet, Arlene.

“Really? Cool! Sorry, Lieutenant, and, um, Lance Corporal . . . all ghosts must stay aboard the elevator. It's like a rule.”

Smiling sadly, Jill faded away slowly . . . starting at her feet and working her way upward, until at last only the smile remained, then even that vanished. Arlene sighed. “I always did love that book,” she said—another one of her patented, semantic-free comments.

The hallway stretched both directions, but right in front of us, where we couldn't possibly miss it, was a chalk scrawl.
J.L.,
it read, and there was an arrow pointing left. “Jill Lovelace,” A.S. and I said simultaneously. We followed the arrow.

There were about a hundred twists and turns, doors to pass through. It was a labyrinth there, on the third-floor
“dungeon” below the Tabernacle! Mostly offices, but a few looked like labs—a far cry from the tanks and artillery pieces below the original Tabernacle, but then, these were happier, more peaceful times. We'd have been utterly lost without the chalk initials and arrows—and I appreciated the reference to our first mission: that was how I eventually realized Arlene was still alive and how I found her.

At last, we were led to the door of a huge lab. Through the clear window in the door, I saw a room as vast as the inner Tabernacle above us, but stuffed full of laboratory equipment. As we approached, a motion detector felt us coming and opened a panel in front of a palm-size touchplate.

Arlene and I stopped abruptly, looking back and forth to each other. I was quite disturbed to see the wild light of hope in her eyes. “Look, don't get your hopes up into orbit, A.S. You know you're not going to find Albert, so
don't even think it!
I don't want you collapsing later, when you finally realize the truth.”

She just looked at me, and I don't think her expression changed a millimeter. “You going to touch it—or should I?” she asked.

I inclined my head. I was sure Jill would have programmed both our palm prints into the doorlock, since both were on file in the old FBI database. Arlene reached her hand out, hesitated a moment, then placed her palm against the plate. I heard a loud click, and the door rolled down into the floor so quickly that I almost didn't see it moving.

We entered the huge lab, and the door slid up and locked behind us. We were probably trapped until Jill's AI program decided to let us leave. We strolled around a bit, taking in the sight: tables, tables, tables, full of elaborate machinery and strange swirls of tubing; rows of tiny devices that looked suspiciously like computers linked together into a neural network; huge tubes big enough for humans,
full
of humans, I
should add, doubtless in some sort of life stasis; and glassware everywhere . . . test tubes, beakers, flasks, you name it—but nobody walking around tending things. It was entirely automated.

And in the center of it all was a huge sarcophagus, like the things they buried Egyptian mummies in. We approached, and Arlene suddenly reached out and grabbed my hand, squeezing so hard she almost cracked my bones! I knew exactly who she expected to find, and exactly who she
wouldn't
find in the case.

Sadly, I was right. We got closer, and it was obvious that whoever was in there, it wasn't Albert . . . who was, after all, about my size. The sarcophagus was much too small.

But neither of us was prepared for what we did find:
the case contained the fifteen-year-old body of Jill!
She looked like she was just sleeping, nude and serene, but I couldn't see her breasts rise and fall, as I would have expected if she were breathing.

Arlene leaned over the case while I was still staring, trying to avoid looking at parts I wasn't supposed to look at. “Jesus, Fly!” said my bud. “It's a
clone!”

“A . . . clone? How do you know?”

Arlene reached over and picked up a nameplate, handing it to me:

*   *   *

Sleeping Cloney—

A prick on the finger shall make her sleep

A hundred years in dreams so deep,

Until she wakes in love and bliss,

Restored to life by a princely kiss.

We stared at Jill, Arlene and I. “Do you think it's the real Jill?” I asked.

Arlene shook her head. “That's not how Jill would do it. She'd want to live her life and die normally, or at least preserve herself as an adult. No, I'll bet you this is a clone, grown to the age she was when we left,
her brain filled only with the memories a fifteen-year-old would have.”

“Does she remember us?”

“Why not? Jill isn't cruel. She wouldn't put that torture on us, Fly . . . to know the new Jill, but not be known, to see her as sullen and withdrawn as she was before, after the monsters killed her parents.” Arlene reached out and gently touched the glass cover of the sarcophagus. “Hang tight, honey, we'll come back, as soon as we've seen the present you left us.”

“Maybe that's it,” I said, nodding at Jill.

But Arlene shook her head impatiently. “Come on, Fly! She's a pest, but she's certainly not
that
egotistical!”

A booklet sat on the case, and I took it down and skimmed it. Then I stopped and said, “Holy cow! You know what this
is,
A.S.?”

I handed it to her. The title was:
The Deconstructionists' New Clothes, Being the Oh-so-secret History of the Galaxy's Most Stupidest War.
The author was Jill Lovelace, PhD, LLD, CIA, MAD.

It was a short story, but we both realized what it really was. Somehow, Jill had managed to pry out of someone, maybe the Klave—Sears and Roebuck's uncles?—the whole freaking mystery that we never could get . . .
what the damned war was all about!
Yeah, right, the Six Million Year War that resulted, eventually, in a strategic chess move by the Freds, of House Deconstructionists, to invade Earth and kill us by the millions. The war that had started the whole thing.

I'm not going to quote the whole story. It was long and pretty damned good, and I don't want Jill's electrifying prose to make my own look lamer than it already does. So I'll paraphrase the intel instead.

Of all the secrets Arlene and I had faced since we first found ourselves under attack by space demons, that was the most frustrating, the most galling . . . or to Arlene, the outright funniest: that a war could
erupt and be prosecuted for
six million years
between two competing schools of literary criticism! But at last we got the full, complete story of how it happened.

According to Jill's book, the same “First Men” who built the Gates and the gravity zones and scattered them throughout the galaxy left behind only one other legacy—eleven fragments of prose.

That's it, the sum total remains of a race that was technologically sophisticated and advanced at least
three billion years
ago: Gates, gravity zones, and eleven pieces of literature. All the races of the galaxy in roughly our own time (six or seven million years ago, which on the three-billion-year scale is negligible) began to analyze these fragments—each used its own most highly refined theories of literary criticism, but because literary criticism is at us core nothing much but a projected map of whatever weird cobwebs infest the mind of the critic, naturally each race painted a different picture of what the First Men were
really
like.

Eventually, the war of words turned ugly, and important literary critics became casualties—not that anyone cared much. But when one coalition, the Deconstructionists, decided to end the argument by deconstructing the Klave homeworld—and they
failed!
—the Great Divide became law and eventually custom, which is a billion times stronger than law. For six million years, give or take a month, the Deconstructionists and the Hyperrealists had been duking it out for control of the literary forms of the galaxy . . . and for the right to reconstruct the past.

And that was it! As Arlene said when she finished reading, quoting some sci-fi book she loved,
Nineteen Eighty-Four:

*   *   *

Who controls the past controls the present;

who controls the present controls the future.

So ever since just around the time the first proto-humanoids were climbing down out of the trees on Earth and looking up at the great white light in the night sky, wondering if it were a divine eyeball, these ginks have been murdering each other over half the galaxy over some artsy-fartsy, lit-crit interpretation of eleven story fragments. Then, when they got tired of fighting in their own backyard, the bloody-handed Deconstructionists decided to take their college literature thesis to our lovely planet! God, this universe is an absolute treasure. I love every centimeter of it—no, really.

I put the book back down, resisting the impulse to fling it across the room. To hell with them all, Hyperrealist and Deconstructionist alike! I didn't give a damn about the stupid fragments—I had more important fish to smoke.

We hunted around for a few minutes, and suddenly Arlene let out a glad cry. Another arrow!
J.L.,
it read, and pointed at a small room.

The room had a regular door, with a good, old-fashioned handle. I turned it and opened her up.

The room was bare, save for a single card table, dust free. On the table was a small black box with a single orange light showing unwinking on the side. We crossed the space together, my lance and I, and together we saw the single sign left on the box.

It was hand-lettered, and I recognized Jill's atrocious handwriting. There was a single word:
Albert.

We stared. Arlene fell to the ground on her butt, but she didn't take her eyes off the black box with the bright glowing eye.

Albert!

Albert?

I didn't know what to say, so, Goddamn it, I decided to just shut up and be a Marine.
Semper fi,
Mac . . . I know when I'm beat!

I
t was Arlene who found the Door, but Slink Slunk was more excited than the rest of us, for she recognized what it was. All of the rest of our apostles—Whack, Sniff, Chomp, and Swaller, our spineys, and Pfc. Wilhelm Dodd, the zombie—had been created within the simulation by the normal “monster-spawn” process that mimicked the vats and genetic programming the Freds used to create the original monsters.

But Slink was the prototype spiney; she was the “firssst and only,” as she put it, generated specially by the Newbies inside their program environment, before the rest of the simulation was even running. And Slink
remembered
her existence before the rest of the simulation was built. The Newbies were better artists than they realized: they hadn't intended to give freaking free will to their program demons, and they sure as hell didn't want the code to remember its own creation!