He, She and It (47 page)

“No. But anyplace is better than this. We can get our bearings once we’re out of trouble.”

A blade of some kind of energy swept suddenly across the lighted area. Ahead of them Yod immediately spread himself on the concrete flatter than a skate. Both of them again imitated him. “He knows how to combat the defenses,” Malkah said. “He responds instantly. We’d be dead before we recognized the danger.” Their thought projected as voices, although they were spread like rugs on the cement.

Yod collected himself and sped forward. They hastened to follow. Finally they escaped the blinding glare. What they saw under a low gray sky were rows and rows of warehouses, identical as barracks, stretching to the horizon. “Okay,” Shira said. “This is archives. The realm of backup programs and old information. This part of the Y-S Base has its own independent solar power supply. There are actually two such facilities, one in orbit and one underground in Nebraska. There!” She pointed to an empty road stretching off. “That’s where we must go next.”

Malkah said, “I suggest following it off to one side as far as we can travel and still keep it in sight.”

“If we climb, we can increase that distance,” Yod said, rising.

Every human has had fantasies of flying like a gull, Shira thought, veering after him. This ought to be exhilarating, but because there’s no air against the face and hair, no sense of motion, it felt curiously flat.

They were approaching what looked like a combination of a power station and a honeycomb, crackling with a pale straw-colored light, when Yod ordered, “Drop!” He plunged like a stone, falling to spread himself thinly over the dry earth. They imitated him again, just as another bolt slashed across.

“What would one of those do to us?” she asked Malkah, the glass puddle.

“It would send an electrical charge back through your plug into your brain, sufficient to produce mental disruption and possibly death. I can’t say if your body would hang on in a vegetable state or if your functions would stop, but it wouldn’t much matter.”

“That’s the hub of programming,” Shira said. “We don’t want that. We want planning. This way.”

“On the way out, we must stop here,” Yod said. “We can’t start sabotage till we have the information we seek.”

Those slashing beams crossed the space between different bases within the larger Base. Yod was attuned to them, and each time he gave Malkah and Shira just enough warning. Shira began to think that the defenses would not prove as dangerous as she had feared. From a wasteland, the country they were crossing began to be landscaped. Groves of trees, lawns, farms, country roads. “It ought to be here, but there’s nothing. We should be in it by now.”

Malkah swooped down. “This is it. Under us.” She was heading straight for a landscaped area under them, shrubs set around a pool. As she dived, several winged entities emerged from a hill that opened. They were part bird, part plane, part armored reptile. They came streaking for Malkah. A long tongue of fire licked from the foremost, close enough to Malkah to make her cry out in pain. Yod, armored now and glinting, intervened and tore right through the flock of them so they exploded behind him. He ripped at their wings, he slashed at their metallic beaked heads. He moved almost faster than she could see. He was a blur enveloped in the fire they breathed out, followed by a rain of machine parts. Malkah had resumed her dive. Yod and Shira followed her as she passed headfirst through the pool and then into the undisguised machine imagery underneath. Around them and through the pool fell parts of the harpies, blasted metal littering down.

They were in the machine now, in its representation within the Base. Somewhere the actual nanochips existed, but this was a simulacrum. “Is this the right stuff?” Malkah asked Yod. “Are we on target? I’m pretty sure this is no chimera, but let’s proceed cautiously. It has to be well defended.”

“Wait.” He stared at the busy grid before them, stretching up beyond sight. He seized one of the metallic feathers that had fallen through the chimera of the pool with them. Chunks of metal curiously wrought. He tossed it forward. When it came within half a meter of the machine, it was pulverized in a flash.

“How do we get around that?” Shira asked.

“We don’t,” Malkah said. “I’m beginning to understand what Yod does. We turn ourselves into some sort of digging devices and burrow through the soil. We’ll come up inside. I have never heard of anyone doing what we’re doing, using shape-changing in a Base, but it seems effective. We accept their
metaphors and incorporate them.” Malkah turned herself into a large furry mole. Then she reconsidered, scratching her head, and became instead an armored mining machine. “A mole is too vulnerable and too blind.”

“You had trouble at first, but now you’re faster than I am,” Shira said admiringly.

“I’m a feisty old dog,” Malkah said. “I like to learn new tricks. Especially out-of-the-body tricks. My body is weak, but my mind still has all its teeth.”

“Yod, I don’t know enough about mining machines to become one. Program me.” She held out her hands to him. She remembered how they had exchanged thoughts in the room-sized rose.

He took hold of her. They were both translucent, and she had an odd sensation of their quasi bodies intermingling like smoke and fog. She felt a momentary comfort in his ghostly embrace. Someone you could rely on. Like Malkah that way. A virtue without price. He presented to her mind a clear diagram and picture of a mining machine, which she could emulate. She became a roughly cylindrical machine with shallow treads. Her head was a boring device. She swallowed earth and rock and excreted it up the hole with a violent blast. It was rather fun. She had to remind herself to follow Malkah and Yod and not to twist away on her own, eating rock. Finally they burst through into the machine interior. The women reverted to human shape.

“Now we must access and find what we need,” Yod said. “In real time we have caused some disturbances. Soon more formidable defense mechanisms than we have dealt with will be converging.” He condensed into a ball of light and disappeared into the system.

Shira said, “I don’t much like standing around here without him.”

“We could try to go in after him, but I’m dubious.”

“We might be safer inside. At least we could accomplish something.” The tension of waiting was too great. Whenever Shira paused for a moment and realized where she was, she was terrified. It was better to keep moving. She condensed herself as tightly as she could and projected forward. She could tell that Malkah was behind her. Together they flicked past file names. All around them the system was reacting to commands. She accessed a file being modified. One of the components in the plug embedded in her real body was a decoder that made her able to access machine language, translate it instantly into numbers
and words. Without it she could not have accessed any Base or the Net directly. This file was about plans to redesign the delivery system for the space stations. She dropped it.

She began tasting files as she went, moving fast, pushing. Malkah emulated her, forging ahead. They were streaking through. New products, development plans, research, new stations, investment, infiltration, industrial espionage, security decisions, marketing.

“I have it,” Yod said nearby. “I’ve stored the information. We can access it when we’re out.”

“Then follow me.” Shira could not give way to relief, for she still had one more all-important task. “I believe we can use inner pathways to personnel records. I need to access mine, Josh’s, Ari’s.” Without waiting for their response, she rocketed off. She was an impulse rippling along a pathway of ice. She burned without heat, speeding on. She could feel them behind her. She could feel something behind them. Malkah was following her still, Yod was not. A great wave of energy burst along the pathway, almost knocking her loose. Then Yod was behind her again, following with alacrity.

Shira had always been a conscientious worker who preferred understanding the larger picture into which her work fitted, so she had learned far more about the Y-S system than she had strictly needed. She knew the way now, felt the moment they reached personnel records. Accessing here was easy, for she remembered the file names. It was all by employee number, and she had memorized those numbers—those for her ex-husband, her son and herself—since she had had to use them for routine functions and every request.

Yod ate the files quickly. “Now we must find our way back. At once.”

“Follow me. I’ll take us through the system back to archives.” She went faster than before. She had the knack of it now, the transformations Yod had invented or rediscovered. She had no idea how long ago they had plugged in, sitting in a row in Avram’s lab, but she had the strong feeling it had been enough time to begin to be dangerous. Not for Yod. He could remain plugged in for days without any ill effects she could observe, but she had heard of Net travelers killed because they had got caught in some inner loop and could not escape. While they were trapped in netspace, their bodies died. Presumably their projected minds also died, but it was even worse to contemplate consciousnesses trapped like catatonics within repeating strings in forgotten closed-off sectors of some base.

“We must stop,” Malkah said. “Here I need to introduce a worm.”

“Work quickly,” Yod said. “We have little time. We’re being pursued.”

“You can both help me.”

They worked together, rebuilding the programming. Then they were on their way again. Three times Malkah stopped them. Each time she could feel Yod’s level of apprehension rising. It was not that he grew nervous in a human sense but that he was more alert, more on guard. The fourth time he refused to permit them to loiter.

At archives, Malkah dropped a simple virus, and they fled the system. Now they saw again the representation of the barracks. There was the glare of the concrete field they must cross. “Rockets,” Yod said. “Fastest way to cross. Malkah, do you have the exit in view?”

“Right. I’ll lead.”

They roared across the concrete. Halfway, Yod cried, “Down!” as the blade of energy flashed across their paths. Another. Another. They were stuck plastered on the concrete. Yod began oozing forward without raising himself, and they followed him. It was slow going under the scorching blasts of the energy field. Finally they were climbing the tunnel, soaring up through the darkness illuminated by Yod’s acetylene glare, three rising projectiles. They went up in a third of the time they had taken to descend, and then they were once again in the dump, and then on the dark plain where the city glistened and sparked.

“Fast,” Yod said. “Very fast.” He kept his projectile form and rushed in the direction of the com-con entrance.

“What’s that?” Malkah directed their attention to the right. A wall of fire was moving toward them, much higher than they were flying. “There’s no getting under that. Look, the earth itself is burning.”

Yod stared at it. “What isn’t hurt by fire?”

“Asbestos? Rock?”

“We cannot be sure that fire isn’t hot enough to melt rock. No, we must be fire too. Quickly.”

She could already feel the shock wave advancing before it, the plain itself catching fire, an updraft of intense scorching heat drying her through. She burst into flames as Yod did, rising as far as he could. Then she was in the fire, of the fire. The fire was dancing through her, bright, exciting, and she fed on it and grew longer and larger. For a moment all she felt was a
great intense energy of burning, a burst of power like an exploding drug that consumed her. Then they were once again projectiles, pursuing the wall of fire over the scorched plain to the com-con link. That could not be closed down, even under attack, for business depended on communication. They flung themselves onto the conveyor belt. Shira collapsed into the semi-shutdown mode necessary, imagining herself an inert box. Forward she was carried, careful to permit herself no more thought than was absolutely essential, concentrating on the box shape and nothing else.

Going through the energy field from the Base to the Net was always a tangible sensation. Now they were safe, and they rolled off and stared at each other, once again in their original forms. “Keep moving,” Yod said. “We must return with all the information I’m carrying, so I can load it into our Base.”

When she unplugged, she found herself exhausted. She had a headache all across her temples and neck, an iron cage of pain superimposed on the inside of her skull. Avram was standing there, and his mouth moved, and she heard questions she could not relate to. Yod would deal with him, Yod would explain. Malkah was swaying with fatigue. Shira stumbled toward the cot that still stood against the far end of the lab, flung herself on it and fell asleep.

THIRTY-TWO

Flashes and Dangerous Structure

Every morning Shira went to the Synagogue of Water to say kaddish for Riva, always with that sense of a missed connection. The synagogue was built over a spring that welled up in the garden, one of her favorite places in Tikva since childhood, when she had confused it with paradise. Always there was a sound of water flowing over pebbles. The morning after the penetration, she woke groggy but went anyhow. Yod had taken to attending her for the company he observed she needed, and because a minyon was hard to come by. Usually Avram was not around so early, but this morning he was in the lab, working on the material Yod had absorbed. Since Yod had transferred files
to his storage memory instantaneously, he was as ignorant of the contents as the rest of them. The files had been loaded yesterday into the Base, but to winnow and divide the information into some approachable form was Avram’s next task. Aware suddenly where Yod was going, Avram objected.