Steel Sky (26 page)

Dancer’s eyes widen in surprise. A tear falls from her lashes. “Because he told me not to,” she says quietly.

Her father falls back in his chair. “What?” he whispers.

“When he realized he wasn’t going to . . . make it . . . he told me that I had to be ready to take his place. That I had to be strong. That I couldn’t cry. It was the last thing he said to me.”

Her father stares at her, his mouth open, a look of bewilderment on his face.

“I thought you knew,” she says.

His hand reaches up to his left shoulder, gripping it. “I didn’t see,” he whispers. “I couldn’t bear to watch . . . when he was slipping away.” The irony is almost enough to make her laugh, but the look of pain that shoots across her father’s face quiets her. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

“No,” he says angrily, gripping his shoulder tighter.

“What?” She falls to her knees and looks into his face. “What is it?” “Nothing,” he groans. He tries to push her away with his other arm, but he has no strength. “Leave me alone,” he says. “Haven’t you bothered me enough for one day?”

“Father, what’s the matter?”

“No,” he repeats, louder. His eyes are closed tightly in anger and concentration. “It’s not my heart. Don’t let anyone say it’s my heart!”

“Father!”

With a shudder, he falls to one side. A moan of inarticulate pain seeps out of his mouth.

“Father!” Putting her arms around him, she tries to pull him up again, but he is too heavy. He slips, slowly, off the chair, down into the darkness.

“I know what they’re saying,” he whispers.

WITHIN

The air duct is one of the old kind, made of tin alloy back when metal wasn’t so hard to come by. His armor makes a din as he crawls through it, but it can’t be helped now. By some incredible stroke of luck, he has managed to elude the clops, and he needs to get as far away as possible.

His lower back where they shot him pulses with a warm, dull ache. He can feel his flesh swelling with blood, pressing against the inside of his armor. The pain grows each time he moves, shooting up his back and down into his groin.

He loses his grip and slides down an incline, metal screeching against metal. He takes the impact with his arms, but the pain makes his vision swim.

He pulls himself up to his hands and knees. It is tempting to stop here, but if he loses consciousness they will surely find him. He has to keep moving. He rests a moment, breathing deeply.
This is the thanks I get
, he thinks,
for doing their job for them!
Anger gives him strength to rise.

A popping sound from his left attracts his attention. A wayblazer, a maintenance robot, emerges from one of the side tunnels, crawling along the wall like a flat plastic spider. The greasy black dust that coats the walls of the vent is scoured by rotating bristles in the robot’s belly and sucked down a long umbilicus that drags behind it, disappearing into the darkness of the tunnel. Everyone in the Hypogeum has heard of the wayblazers; it is said their laser torches will burn through any obstacle that obstructs the airflow, including any human who is foolish enough to climb into the ducts. In reality the wayblazers are slow and decrepit, using their torches only in the most extreme circumstances, if they function at all.

Sensing him, the robot turns. Eight optical sensors ringed around its body reinforce its spider-like appearance. Normally he makes a point of avoiding the wayblazers; now he feels too weak to do anything but stare as the robot approaches him. The wayblazer hums while its tiny computer brain tries to determine what sort of obstacle he represents. It releases two powerful jets of water, striking him in the chest and face. Cursing, he kicks the thing, catching it under its metal carapace. With a series of popping sounds its suction cup feet come loose. The robot flips backward and drops down a shaft, clanking intermittently as it strikes the walls, until the umbilicus is drawn taut and it comes to an abrupt stop, bouncing and spinning slowly.

Still cursing, he crawls down a side tunnel. He only gets a hundred meters before the dizziness stops him again. He rests his head against the floor, the wind whirling around him, the vibration of the metal filling his ears. The pain in his back abates for a moment, then returns doublefold. Reflexively, he touches the wounded area, but he can feel nothing through the armor, which is crumpled but intact. From the nature of the pain, he guesses that one of his kidneys is damaged. He prays he is not hemorrhaging.

Crawling forward again, he looks all around him, attempting to guess his location relative to the city outside. He tries to determine if there is someplace nearby where he can safely hide, but the pain and the darkness make it impossible for him to get his bearings. Preoccupied, he does not notice the incline until he is on it. He begins to slip. He grabs at the walls, but he does not have enough strength or leverage to dig his fingers into the metal. Unable to stop himself, he slides down and over the edge.

He falls. Wind whips around him, buffeting him from side to side. With an emotion too resigned to be called fear, he realizes he has stumbled into one of the main ventilation shafts, giant metal tunnels as high as the Hypogeum and wider than he is tall. He tries to slow his descent by grasping at the walls, but his claws cannot find purchase. Sparks fly as he rips long gouges in the metal.

He hits the bottom hard. The metal floor warps underneath him, bouncing him off to one side. The impact takes the breath out of him. Without the armor, he would have been killed.

Finally he rolls to a stop. He raises his head. The dank air is filled with the smells of oil, mold, and metal. He must be somewhere in the very lowest reaches of the city. With his last strength, he pulls himself into a small side passage. He will have to stop here, no matter where he is, no matter if they find him. He can go no further.

He comes to a small vent and squeezes in. He breaks the lock and pushes the panel through. It falls to the floor with a loud clatter. The opening is still too small. Afraid he will lose consciousness before he is through, he smashes a larger hole with his fist. He pulls himself into the ragged opening and collapses awkwardly, head first, to the floor. Before he blacks out, he is able to raise his head and look around. It is a small room, he sees, cluttered and dimly lit.

A woman’s face, wreathed by jet-black hair, looks down at him. Her eyes are ice blue, almost white. She hovers over him, beautiful and ethereal. He tries to speak, but the world is flying apart around him. He lets go, unable to hold on any longer. He falls upward into her eyes.

(Eight years earlier)

IMAGE

Amarantha is sitting on the causeway railing with her friends, sucking oxygen and throwing things at the people on the lower levels, when her ident chimes and reminds her in its flat voice that it is time for her to visit Image. She sits and jokes with her friends for a while longer, because you don’t just jump when your ident chimes. She lets it slip for a while. Finally one of her friends reminds her, so she hops down from the railing and picks up her reticule.

Luke also hops down. Just to show off how crazy he is, he pulls off his respirator and kisses her on the cheek. Amarantha feels her face turn red. He is sweet, in a stupid kind of way.

Now she really
is
late. As she hurries up steps and down passageways, she feels her obligations pressing down on her. Everywhere around her she sees constraints: the low ceilings that reverberate with other people’s footsteps, the timetables set by anonymous strangers, the constant capacity tests, the hot water that runs for fifteen centichrons a day, no more, no less. Hers is a world of limitations with tight, steel lids.

She idents herself at the main entrance to Health Maintenance. She does it again at the juvenile division. Again at the door of IHMC331.

The door irises open. She steps over the threshold, unconsciously holding her breath. She comes here to Image twice a decameron, as she has since she was ten. She is still uneasy about coming here. Image is a strange thing.

The door shuts. She is standing on a ledge inside a white, round room, like the inside of an eye.

“Hello, Amarantha. Nice to see you.” Image’s warm voice surrounds her, emanating from a half dozen speakers in the chamber’s walls.

A chair on an articulated metal beam silently floats toward her. When it reaches the ledge, it turns invitingly, and the near armrest retracts, allowing her to climb in. Then the armrest returns to its original position, and the back of the chair reclines itself slightly to make her more comfortable as it floats back to the center of the chamber. Bright beams of light focus themselves on her temples and wrists. A fifth beam focuses on her coverup above her heart, the tiny circle of light quivering slightly with each beat.

“How are you today, Amarantha?” Image asks.

“I’m okay.” As she has done before, Amarantha stares at the equipment that lines the walls. She tries to make a face coalesce out of the disparate gadgets, to make
that
panel a mouth, to see
those
monitors as a pair of eyes. She cannot do it. The only thing remotely human about Image is its voice. The voice is flawless.

“Have you heard from your father?” it asks.

“No,” Amarantha replies, sitting on her hands. She’s a little frightened, floating here four meters above the floor.

“Has he made any attempt to communicate with you since the divorce?”

“No.”

“How do you feel about that?”

“I don’t know.”

It’s true. Amarantha knows better than to try to hide her feelings from Image. Image knows more about how she feels than she does herself. But she really doesn’t know what she feels. “I guess I should miss him, but I don’t feel like I do.”

“Well . . .” Image draws the word out in perfect mimicry of a woman in thought. Amarantha can almost see the tip of a woman’s tongue touching her upper palate, see her stroke her chin and look up in contemplation. “Let’s look at it
this
way,” Image says, “how do you imagine your
father
feels about it?”

“I guess he misses me.”

“Mm-hmm.” Image waits, letting the moment stretch.

“But I think he’s also happy.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s gotten away. He’s gotten away from Mom, he’s gotten away from his job, he’s gotten away from our dark, little apartment. He’s gotten away from all the
crap
.”

Image is silent.

“I wish he had taken me with him.”

“All right, Amarantha. Let’s talk about that.”

They talk — Image in its regulated, mellifluous voice, Amarantha in low, angry tones or occasional high, petulant ones. If she is unclear or evasive, Image will ask her to expound or rephrase. Sometimes it helps her by replaying incidents or conversations from the records. Everything that happens in the Hypogeum is caught by the cameras, and it all passes through Image’s memory banks. Image can recall and replay any incident from a citizen’s life. No evasion is possible.

How does Amarantha feel about Image? She’s not sure. She doesn’t like the way Image makes her talk about stuff. But she feels as if Image cares about her. Even though she knows Image is just a machine, she thinks Image probably understands her better than anybody else. She can talk to Image without worrying what it thinks of her, without worrying whom it might tell. Image doesn’t judge her, the way everyone else does.

Image listens. Image listens to her words, the connotations and denotations. It listens to her subvocals and analyzes them for emotional signals. It reads her pulse and her temperature. It watches her from a dozen different directions at once. At the same time, it watches and analyzes a hundred other citizens in a hundred other chambers. Their problems are different from Amarantha’s and from each other’s, but they are all similar. The Hypogeum is small, the spectrum of difficulties limited. Image watches them all, giving each its undivided attention. Image does what it can.

What is Image? Image is a simulation. Image is a reflection of man’s mind in silicon, diamond, and stainless steel. It is man-made, but surpasses man in complexity. And what humanity has lost, Image has retained, in a hundred cubic meters of eidolonic microcircuitry. Image knows more than just the comings and goings of the citizens of the Hypogeum. Image knows the past. It knows the life that humans were meant for, the life that each citizen, somewhere deep and silent within him or herself, yearns to regain. Image, of course, has never experienced the old life, but it has digitized photographs, films, books, videos, poems — everything necessary to understand what is missing from the Hypogeum. Image is a facsimile that specializes in facsimiles.