Strings (36 page)

Then the second cart appeared also, with one man already on his feet and aiming. He had his visor down, but Cedric saw a tiny spot of bare flesh below it and fired. That was tricky—the visor could have reflected his own beam back at him, but his aim held true, and he kept the crosshairs dead on target as the man obligingly toppled straight back, his gullet starting to blacken and smoke. That would give him another hole to whistle through. Then his cart swerved to avoid the bodies, and he also fell free.

Not bad at all, champ!

The third cart gave him a tricky eye shot, and after that the range was too great; but the corridor was jammed with stalled golfies and writhing bodies; the air full of shouts and the screech of tires. No wonder Bagshaw had not thought much of Earthfirsters.

Cedric’s cart cornered again, and he lost sight of the pursuit. He would draw ahead anyway, probably, because there was only one of him in the golfie, and the enemy would have to clear the road. Having a good day, aren’t we? Two dead, three blinded, one wounded…His insides heaved, and he told them sternly to behave.

Of course, the chase was far from over, for now there was blood on the scoreboard. At least some of the intruders would certainly tell System to take them to Cedric, just as he had ordered that he be taken to Alya. Or they might just follow his trail, for the back of his golfie was still smoking, and there was much worse smoke streaming out from the motor vents, also. The engine was screaming like a maniac. Maybe he should not be leading the danger to Alya like this.

Or maybe he could interfere? “
By what authority are you obeying the visitors’ orders
?”

The golfie skittered around another corner, almost tipping him out and reminding him that he had a historically significant headache. “Data confidential,” it said smugly.

“
Override
.”

“Data confidential.”

So much for that idea—the real deputy directors had higher authority than Cedric’s Grade One. But obviously the traitor had been of high grade, and therefore Devlin.

Then Cedric yelped as the cart dived through a still-opening door and went clattering down a flight of stairs. He whimpered as his headache came thundering back, blindingly. Then, mercifully, he was on the flat again, and his wits began to seep back.

He wondered how literally his instructions would be obeyed. Suppose Alya were in a bathtub?

“
Call to Dr. Fish
.”

“Dr. Fish is not presently accepting calls.”

“
Does he know about the Earthfirster invasion
?”

“Data confidential.”

“
I must report an emergency
!”

“Emergency calls are not being accepted at this time.”

“
Why not
?”

“Because of an emergency.”

“
Arrrggh
!”

“Message not understood.”

Then he yelped again and hung on tight as the cart made a series of fast bends, zipping through circular openings where great armored doors stood open. Cedric peered back incredulously. Surely that had been a decon chamber? He had not recognized it, but there must be dozens of them, several for each dome.

Then the golfie balked like a spooked pony, almost throwing him. Another of the massive armored ports was swinging open.
He had no bubble suit on
! He could not believe that his authority would overrule standard quarantine regulations—he would be surprised if even Gran could do that.

With smoke still streaming from its motor, the golfie lurched forward again, into the gloomy vastness of a transmensor dome. It snapped on headlights—for others’ benefit, surely—and purred decorously down the slope, angling around to the right. Cedric heard the door thump shut behind him. Of course the transmensor was not in use. There were no cranes or gantries in evidence, so most likely he was in Bering Dome. He knew all the others, either firsthand or on holo.

Then he registered the people, lots of people, hundreds of them. The center was packed with bedding and canvas fences.

His lights had attracted attention. People were scrambling to their feet in dozens and scores, many of them leaping and jumping like kids. In fact, many of them were kids. A group ran forward to meet him; the golfie slowed and beeped angrily at them. That attracted more attention. Voices were shouting. Some of them seemed to be pointing out that his cart was on fire. Alya must be somewhere in the crowd.

“Mister, you’re on fire!” The cry echoed back and forth as he rolled on through a gathering crowd of spectators. The golfie slowed even more and made angrier noises at them. Then it shuddered, gasped, and jerked to a stop. It hissed and crackled for a moment, turned out its lights and died. Smoke continued to curl upward.

“
System, acknowledge
!”

Silence.

A wizened old man in a white bed sheet and a turban stepped forward and said something urgent, pointing at the smoke.

“Yes, I know,” Cedric said. “Do you have a bucket of water handy?” He held up his left wrist and rattled his chain, to show why he was not dismounting. The spectators muttered among themselves, rubbing sleep-blurred eyes. They were crowded tightly in a dense wall, staying warily back from the burning cart. Its power supply would be flywheels running in hydrogen, and if those got loose, they could create mayhem all across the dome. He coughed as the smoke billowed back at him. Alya? He needed Alya.

“Cedric!” A youngster squeezed through the throng of adults and ran forward. He was chubby and oriental, and his grin was as wide as a sunrise. “You’re on fire, you know?
Phew
! What did you fall into?”

“Gavin! Wong Gavin!” Cedric gaped at the boy. That certainly was Gavin’s grin.
Gavin
! Cheung’s clone! Cedric looked around at the crowd and then back to Gavin. “How’d you get here?”

“You’re on fire, Cedric—did you know that?”

“Yes. I’m also tethered.”

Gavin frowned, then stepped closer. “I can fix that!” he said, and began unscrewing one of the knurled knobs that held the ends of the handrail.

“Oh!” Cedric said, feeling extremely foolish. “Tell me how you got here. Are the others here?” His head still hurt.

Gavin tried to reply, but he was drowned out as more voices began shouting “Cedric!”

Lew and Jackie and Tim and Bev—they all came popping out of the crowd like gophers out of burrows, some even wriggling through between adult legs. They shouted and laughed at seeing him, they jumped up and down, and they all wanted to hug him until they got close, and then they all told him he didn’t smell good; but by then Gavin had unfastened the rail and Cedric was free. He left the smoking golfie, taking the Winchester with him. He shouted at everyone to stand farther back; he reached out to ruffle hair on small heads, touch hands with adolescents. The crowd of brown-faced adults in bed sheets was being pushed back, muttering, by the influx of children. Cedric had a lump in his throat, and the smoke had made his eyes prickle. Meadowdale—looted! The kids were not going to be butchered after all.

“Is Ben here? Or Madge?” he demanded.

A chorus of voices said no, they weren’t—all the kids and none of the adults. He was glad. Apparently the older ones were in charge—Sheila and Sue and Roger—and then Sue herself appeared with a howling baby on each arm, and she was obviously very, very relieved to see Cedric.

“The day after you left!” she shouted over the racket. “We were raided—rounded up!”

“Who by?” It hurt to shout.

“Men in red. 4-I men.”

Gran
! That must be what Cheung had meant when…

Crowds were no obstacle for Cedric. Over heads he saw a swirl approaching and recognized high-piled black hair. He plunged forward to greet her, spectators retreating rapidly out of his way.

“Alya!”

“Darling!”

“Hold it!” he said, raising a warning hand. “I’m not very sanitary.”

“So what!” She looked just as happy to see him as he was to see her. “I stink of baby!” She leaned over the particular baby she was clutching and they kissed briefly; but he noticed that she wrinkled her nose and backed away a couple of steps afterward. “There are dozens of these little tykes here…” She stared up at Cedric blankly. “You look awful! You’re white as death. What’s wrong?”

“Lots,” he said, knowing suddenly how beat he was. He was reeling. “But all the Meadowdale kids are here!”

Obviously Alya felt as he did—her smile would have melted granite. “And not only Meadowdale! At least a dozen others. Two lots at least are from Neururb, and a lot of brown faces—I haven’t placed them all yet. We should have guessed—your grandmother couldn’t just threaten exposure, or all the—” She stopped, conscious of the large audience of big-eared children. “Or she might have provoked what she wanted to prevent?”

He nodded—early harvest, kill the evidence.

“So she just sent her army and picked them up!” Alya added triumphantly.

Maybe Gran was not quite so bad, then. He would have to think about that when he got his head glued together. Meanwhile he desperately wanted to take Alya in his arms, but the open space around him was evidence of how little he inspired intimacy. He would have liked to lie down, too; even more, sleep for a month…

“So by the time she was lampooning you at the press conference,” Alya said, “her troops were already moving in—all over the place. She must have been planning this for years!”

“And—the others?” He gestured at the characters in white.

“Refugees. From Banzarak, and Zaire, I think. And Bangladesh.”

But Cedric was staring at the two kids who had pushed in beside her. One was adolescent, maybe sixteen, the other a couple of years younger. They both had shaggy ochre hair and freckles, and they were skinny—and both obviously tall for their ages. They were glaring back at him with very resentful expressions.

Alya noticed his gaze and bit her lip. “This is Oswald,” she said. “And this is Alfred. The one strangling the guitar over there somewhere is Harold—he’s about seventeen.” She smiled again, much less certainly, and indicated the baby. “And this one is Bert. I think that’s short for Egbert, but I’ll stick to Bert. He looks like he’s another of you, darling. Guys—this one’s Cedric.”

It was too much. For moments that seemed like hours, Cedric’s brain could do nothing except register overload. Clones! How many clones had Hastings wanted? But as he stared at them—at his own younger selves—he saw that they didn’t really look like Hastings Willoughby at all. The old man had great flappy ears, and neither he nor these youngsters had. He remembered Bagshaw saying something about ears.

“There may be others,” Alya said. “I haven’t had time to—”

A skinny blond boy of around eight had emerged from somewhere to stare up at Alfred with a very puzzled expression.

“Why?” Cedric whispered. “What’s been going on? Who am I?”

Suddenly the whole dome began to brighten. Then he saw heads turning, and he swung around to see what they had seen. The door he had entered by had opened again, and golfie head-lights were pouring through it, but it was overhead spots coming on that were making the place lighter. The Earthfirsters had taken control of the dome.

Between Gavin and Alya and all his own clones, he had forgotten the pursuit. He wailed. “Quick! Your mike! Give me your mike!”

“I haven’t got one,” Alya said, frowning. “I’ve been trapped in here for over an hour.”

He wanted to ball his fists in fury, but the right one hurt too much. “I need a com! Any com!”

“Cedric, dear? Who are all these men? Bulls? Blue?”

Golfies were still streaming into the dome, the whole line heading straight for Cedric—but that might have been accidental. The ceiling spots were up to full, merciless brilliance.

“They’re Earthfirsters. They’ve invaded—killed off the Institute’s bulls and a lot of others. And at the moment they’re after me!”

“What? Why?”

“I killed one of them. And wounded four others. And I also killed the president of BEST. And I want a mike!”

Alya gave him a strange look. “Do you think anyone would refuse you after that?” she asked. “Nobody here has a wrist mike. There are coms by most of the doors, but they aren’t working. No response. I was expecting Baker to come for me, but he hasn’t.”

Cedric sank to his knees to be less conspicuous. He did not want to die yet.

“Use the mike on your golfie?” Alya said, puzzled.

“I can’t. It’s dead.”

“Oh.” She adjusted the baby and gazed over toward the army of golfies. “Lots of mikes there.”

“They’ll shoot me on sight!” Cedric yelled. “How come you’re not worried?”

Alya gasped. “I hadn’t—oh, Cedric! You’re in danger?”

“Danger? All those hundreds of men after me, wanting my blood, and you ask if I’m in danger?”

She shook her head, puzzled. “I was worried sick until a few minutes before you arrived—then I felt better. Oh, darling! I thought you were important!”

Glaring up from his knees, smelling so bad that he sickened himself, and hurting in numerous places, Cedric did not feel very dignified. “I’m important to me!”

“I didn’t mean that! I mean, why aren’t I worried about you?” She looked idiotically happy.

“Are you worried about anything right now?”

She shook her head, astounded at the realization. “No! I should be, shouldn’t I?”

Nothing but her damned intuition would ever worry Alya, and it obviously was not bothering her at the moment.

The crowd had begun to move, shimmying around him, people backing up. With a stupendous effort, Cedric rose to a crouch, feeling the dome sway around him. He looked cautiously between heads. The golfies had spread out abreast in line to herd the crowd before them. The occupants were standing up, peering around, and they had their guns ready. If shooting started, then all sorts of kids and women were going to get hurt. He ought to give himself up and prevent further bloodshed.

“Alya!” The voice was familiar. “What’s going on?”

Cedric looked around and it was like seeing a mirror—himself in a blue poncho with a guitar round his neck. The newcomer gaped back at him.