Tron (20 page)

And there was another possibility for intercepting the fugitives soon; Master Control was giving the transmission-beam network its attention, attempting to get a fix on the Sailer and interfere with her operation if possible. Sark repressed his impatience, his desire to come to a reckoning with Tron. He berated himself for not having had the User Champion brought before him on the Game Grid long ago, and slain him. But he’d always found Tron to be a curiosity, and so had increased the odds gradually, to find out precisely where the breaking point would come.

Except that instead of breaking down, Tron had broken out.

Sark’s lieutenant spoke from behind him, quiet and diffident. “Sir, what do you want done with the Tower Guardian, Dumont? Put him in with the others?”

“No, bit-brain,” the Command Program growled. He whirled on his subordinate with a brittle smile. “Prepare him for inquisition. I need a little relaxation.” The idea soothed him; punishing Dumont would be a pleasant diversion until he had Tron in hand. “But first, rez up the Carrier for pursuit.”

He considered his humbled lieutenant. The program might be loyal, but then again, it wouldn’t do to have his servants taking the initiative. Sark’s own status with the Master Control Program was too fragile right then to allow for possible rivals. “And one more thing,” he finished balefully. “Don’t think anymore.
I
do the thinking around here.”

The fear and foreboding in the lieutenant’s face reassured him. Quailed, the officer scurried off to do the Command Program’s bidding. Sark returned to his contemplations in a more positive frame of mind.

Flynn studied the Sailer with great interest, reveling in her. He recognized her, now that he’d had the leisure to, as a simulation for a videogame, one drawn from NASA concepts but operating, here in the System, on different principles from a true Solar Sailer’s. At any rate, Flynn was inclined to wager that it wasn’t photons pushing her along.

The transmission beam entered the wide muzzle of the receiver in the afterbody far astern, to emerge from the ship’s bow projector. In between, as far as Flynn could make out, it filled the gleaming metallic sails and drove the vessel at amazing speed, all in some invisible manner. The details of her construction were as fascinating as the Solar Sailer’s motive power. What, for example, was he to make of the free-floating steps between catwalk and bridge, which stayed conscientiously in place, hanging in the air, without benefit of support or bracing?
Only that they’re not the weirdest things I’ve seen,
he concluded, which he couldn’t have said until recently.

He turned to Tron, who sat next to Yori as she piloted, his arm around her shoulders. He still looked strangely at Flynn, uncertain what to think or say about some of the things he’d heard, or even what questions to ask. “What about our friend Sark?” Flynn asked.

Tron ruminated on that. “Probably decided not to pursue us,” he concluded. The Carrier could never overtake the Sailer; Sark’s probable move, if he was still extant, would be to mount guard over the Central Computer Area. And Sark had failed the Master Control Program, not once but several times; it might have lost patience with him. “Programs have a way of just . . . disappearing, here.”

“Not us, I hope,” Flynn offered, seriocomedic.

Tron shook his head and held up his disk. “Not with this.” It was shining in his hand as if impatient to perform its office. Tron looked to his mate and pilot. “I’m going to check on the beam connection, Yori. You two can keep a watch out for grid bugs.”

Tron paced forward along the slender catwalk that still seemed awfully insubstantial to Flynn, though he knew it to be amazingly sturdy. He gazed after Tron, asking himself what in the world a grid bug was, and hoping that the beam connection—to which he’d given no thought whatsoever until this moment—was healthy and sound. He sure didn’t want to see the Solar Sailer jump her fails, or whatever the term might be.

He looked to Yori. “You know the territory?”

She nodded. “A little.”

Flynn, scanning the terrain below, pointed to a region that was unlit, apparently blighted, its features all two-dimensional and meaningless. He pointed to it. “What’s wrong with that area?”

She rose up a little in the pilot’s seat, saw, and replied with sadness: “The MCP blasted it. There are very few Domains left with any power at all.”

He searched in all directions over the Game Sea, the expanse of liquid coming beneath the Sailer. With the exception of the blasted area, the Sea now stretched in all directions, phosphorescent, before them. It was lustrous, with breaking swells of multiple colors, horsetails of light, spray that resembled myriad stars. A strange, beautiful, mysterious place; he recalled the flatlands, the Factory Domain, the System as he’d seen it from high overhead on his descent, the stupendous megastructure of the Training Complex. The Electronic World was grotesque and menacing at times, but he couldn’t deny that it was beautiful, enthralling at others.

No man had ever seen a more bizarre place, or had a more fantastic adventure. But if all went well, if the light was green at the Central Computer Area and Tron’s disk worked out, Flynn supposed he’d be redigitized right away. With a million questions unanswered and the bulk of this cosmos unvisited, he would go home. It surprised him how much he regretted that part of it.

“They say there are creatures out on this sea,” Yori was telling him. “Huge grid-eaters, and data pirates.”

“Terrific,” Flynn opined wryly; maybe going directly home wasn’t such a bad idea after all. “Can’t
wait
to meet them.”

Yori had returned to her piloting. “Well, in any case, this beam can outpace anything on the Sea, including Sark’s Carrier.”

Thinking about interception courses rather than an aerial drag race, Flynn refrained from comment. The Game Sea, opalescent currents pulling colors this way and that through it, slid by underneath.

Tron stood on the very edge of the Sailer’s forebody, straddling the bow and the beam-emission device itself, the vomiting of power. He held his disk before him, looking down at it, summoning to mind the words of Alan-One, trying to fathom the secrets of its modifications.

The transmission beam issued from the Solar Sailer, beyond the limits of Tron’s vision. At varying distances and angles, other beams intersected it or ran by it in skew fashion, an exotic web of power and speed. Satisfied that the vessel’s beam connection was secure, he drew back, putting all his concentration into the cast. He released, and the disk skimmed out from the ship, up and up, until it was nearly lost to sight.

The disk spun and flew, strobing its power, guided by his throw and will, rising. Tron followed the cast, studied it, evaluated every aspect of it. He hoped that it would serve the purpose for which Alan-One had refurbished it, and that his throw, when the time came, would be fast and accurate. All that Flynn had said, all this talk of Users, Tron knew, he must set aside. He could afford to harbor no doubts, no ambivalence, when time came to use the disk. There must be only Warrior, weapon, and target.

His disk had slowed now; it returned smoothly, as he’d intended. He watched it, squinting, evaluating. The disk picked up speed on its descent, as if keen to return to him. Tron reached out; it slammed into his hand with reassuring impact and a starburst of energy. He held it so for a moment, inspecting it once more, deciding at last that he’d found no fault in it or in his control. Tron was content; Flynn’s being or not being a User was unimportant in this regard. No doubt or revelation had impaired his ability to use the weapon given him by Alan-One.

The Carrier scouted over the Game Sea as it moved toward the Central Computer Area; Sark’s evaluation of the strategic situation was little different from Tron’s. Still, his crew attended their instruments closely and kept vigilant watch from posts on the bridge and elsewhere aboard.

In the craft’s interior, in a compartment reserved for Sark’s most dire work, Dumont was experiencing sensations he hadn’t known in a very long time: shock, fear, and, worst of all, pain. He was no longer the part-program, part-mechanism he had been in the Input/Output Tower. Bereft of his special status, his power drained, he’d reverted to a more conventional-looking sort of program, elderly, arrayed in flowing robes. But he was haggard, and spent from learning the torment of Sark’s inquisition.

Memory Guards’ staffs against his chest, he was imprisoned in two foot sockets that sizzled with punishing blasts, bringing pain that threatened his hold on sanity. But Dumont, face grooved and contorted with determination, denied them any added satisfaction, any show of surrender. It demanded every shred of willpower he could muster to keep from screaming, from begging them to stop, even though that would have done him no good. The ancient, seamed face was hardened with resolve. Another surge of excruciating power climbed from the boot sockets, bringing tortured convulsions; the guards kept him pinned to the wall with their staffs. And still there was no outcry from Dumont; that one thing, he’d sworn to deny them.

He was in a cell in the Carrier’s capacious brig. Above him, the old program knew, Sark gazed down with vast enjoyment, delighting in the spectacle of suffering. Dumont’s eyes, screwed tightly shut during the ordeal of the energy blasts, opened slowly, with great effort. He glanced up at the Command Program, knowing how Sark savored the scene. Cast down from his Guardianship, reduced to helplessness, Dumont vowed that Sark would not have the satisfaction of seeing him break.

“Had enough?” asked the looming, helmeted figure above. The question had little meaning; there was only one way in which this process would end. Dumont lifted his pain-racked, infinitely tired eyes, nearly at the end of his resources.

He croaked upward, “What do you want? I’m busy.”

Anger flared from the hateful face; Dumont knew a fleeting, intense triumph. Sark’s win wasn’t complete so long as the old program refused to give in. The rage that crept into the response indicated that. “Busy
dying
, you worn-out excuse for a program!” The air seemed charged with Sark’s anger. Dumont took meager comfort from that.

“Yes, I’m old,” Dumont admitted, as much to himself as to Sark. Grown old in the service of the Users, grown weary in the ceaseless functioning of the System, grown disillusioned with the wrongs he’d seen. He’d thought he had acquired the necessary defenses to coexist with the MCP and Sark. But somehow Tron and Yori’s idealism, their hope, had stripped those away. The Guardian was surprised at how lightly this ultimate disaster, the storm of Sark’s vengeance, weighed on his sense of self-preservation. Dumont knew he would soon be de-rezzed, but felt that he had rescued a certain part of himself.

Now he looked up again. “Old enough to remember the MCP when he was just a chess program,” he added. His voice gathered certainty, though its volume rose only a little; Sark listened despite himself. “He started small and he’ll end up small,” finished Dumont.

Though Sark recovered almost instantly, there had been that moment’s doubt on his face that made it all worthwhile for Dumont. “That’s very funny, Dumont. Maybe I should keep you around, just to make me laugh.”

And with that, another piercing blast came from the foot sockets. Dumont threw his head back in anguish and, in the all-embracing torment, lost the contentment he’d drawn from goading Sark, regretted it, disavowed it, and wished only for the suffering to end. But when it ended, Dumont, fully aware that his inquisition had only begun, drew peace from the knowledge that he’d thrown his tormentor off stride, if only momentarily, with the truth.

Then the sockets hummed again; the agony returned. Dumont was disfigured with it, misshapen, weeping. He wished only for the nothingness of de-rezzing. But one side of him marked how peculiar it was to feel a sense of satisfaction at having helped Tron and Yori in their hopeless mission, a sense of pride in having done his best in a World gone mad.

T
HE HORIZON HAD
broken; Flynn knew that expectation that comes near the end of a long journey.

“We’ll reach the end of the Game Sea soon,” Yori announced, still at the helm. Her endurance there, her calm control and expertise, had not surprised him so much as reminded him of Lora. Yori exhibited that same commitment to see a thing-through, to do what she was doing as well as it could be done, and leave no room for criticism. She had that same drive to settle for nothing less than excellence, and to settle for that only when perfection wasn’t possible. Flynn, watching her, recalled all that Lora had meant to him.

Then he turned and watched Tron, who strode aft down the catwalk. Flynn thought about his disk cast from the bow, the precision and exuberance of it. Despite all he’d learned, Flynn knew that Tron had an affinity for the disk which he, Flynn, could only guess at.
Am I seeing Alan Bradley?
Flynn asked himself, looking at the gleaming User Champion, other-worldly Warrior in electronic armor.
I understand him. And Dillinger too, but in a different way, and Gibbs. And Lora; most of all, Lora.

Flynn looked to the horizon once more; they were nearing the Central Computer Area, the MCP, and some final resolution—victory or death. Flynn decided that he wouldn’t have had it any other way. He’d come to ENCOM to settle a score in the first place; now he grinned fiercely at the Central Computer Area, where the Master Control Program waited.
C’mon out and fight!