Masks Of The Martyrs

“I ADMIT I HAD NOT EXPECTED TO SEE YOU THIS way,” Chi told them, “but I am rather pleased.” She went over to the crater and looked down. “Bizarre,” she commented.

“Oh, yes,” Chi responded. “Unpleasantly, too. They’ve been fried, it appears. I suppose insulated boots wouldn’t be much protection from that kind of charge. Still, this is working out quite well overall, better than I might have hoped. The rings, you see, are still on their fingers. I suppose that if there are sufficient numbers of live humans about to use them, they would not be picked up and redistributed.”

There were others coming now. A tall, distinguished-looking Earth-human man in a parka, as well as a green, hermaphroditic individual with long, spindly legs and arms and protruding eyes like black globules and antennae coming from its head; a large, centauroid creature built like a tank with a purplish, lizardlike skin and a face that seemed to be all teeth; and, of all things, crawling in, an Alititian!

Chi turned and saluted the Earth-human man. “They’re still all down there, sir. Your choice.”

General Wharfen, Commander-in-Chief of the System Peacekeeping Forces, went to the edge and looked down and gave a slight shudder, but he couldn’t seem to take his eyes off the tableau.

“All my life I have served the system, believed in it, fought for it,” he said, seemingly to no one in particular. “Served it, served it well, but not unquestioningly. Never—unquestioningly.”

The Alititian crawled laboriously to the edge and looked down. “Your agonizing is noble, General,” it said at last, “but you know what’s wrong at the heart of this. You know it can’t go on.”

General Wharfen nodded sadly. “Yes. I fear it is my duty to destroy the system in order to save it. It is very difficult, mercenary, to break the firm and solid beliefs and practices of a lifetime, but that is what command sometimes forces upon one. Hard choices. We are the last line of defense and the perfect guardians of the system I believe in. It is time for a more human administration of that system.”

“Savaphoong!” Maria hissed. “I hear that arrogant, patronizing tone in my nightmares, the one who ordered that his ship not cover mine. Murderer of San Cristobal! If I could get loose nothing would save you!”

The Alititian turned. “But you can’t. General, it is obvious that Hawks and Clayben and the others made an error. What did they try, Hawks? Five, four, three, two, one like the ancient song says? The obvious choice.”

“Sir!” the centauroid called, coming back up. “I’ve lost all communications with the troops! Nothing works! But the last transmission I had said something about Vals preventing any further operations!”

Wharfen whirled. “Vals! So Master System is defending itself at last.” He looked around and sighed. “Well, that makes just the five of us, so I suppose you’re in after all, Savaphoong, although, damn me if I don’t have a suspicion that you arranged it this way.”

Chi looked at the Alititian and the centauroid. “Which brings up the problem of whether or not at least two of us can even get down there.”

Savaphoong looked down into the pit lined with faces. “If that rope holds, I’ll make it. I’m not so sure about the colonel, though.”

The centauroid examined the problem. “We have extra gear. I think we can make a dual sling system and lower me down. It has to be done.”

Wharfen looked concerned. “No, it doesn’t. We can just take these pirates prisoner and be done with this.”

“No good, General,” Hawks told him. “You’re here now. The Vals must be getting impatient. This is designed as a one-way trip, and probably guarded automatically. If you try to leave, you’ll die. There’s only one way off this mountaintop and that’s through that pit.”

Chi looked down at the bodies below and the older remains, as well, and at the remnants around the rim showing numerous past visitations. “I believe he is right, sir.”

“Simple,” Savaphoong responded. “I cannot believe that the symbols on the rings are mere decoration or some perverted sense of humor. No, General, they are the key to the combination, just in case something like this might come up. Hawks and the administrators just guessed wrong. If it is not five-four-three-two-one, then it is the other way. It builds. We looked it up in the historical records, remember. The song is sung backward but the progression is forward. We owe Chen a debt of gratitude. He got fried for the error—as we would have.”

Wharfen sighed. “It makes sense. But, tell me—Chi, you as well—if you are willing to risk that fate on the chance that this is right?”

Chi’s whiskers twitched nervously, as if she was having second thoughts about the wisdom of coming this far. Finally she said, “We have no choice, just as I had no choice from the start. I failed twice. The fact that, according to this mercenary here, I failed the second time by carrying out my orders and proceeding to Alititi and therein pointed the way to the last ring for these people, is—significant, somehow. This is an unprecedented situation and I confess I do not have enough information to draw conclusions on it. Still, the fact remains—had I executed Savaphoong and remained ignorant, I would have been branded with failure and executed anyway as an example. Had I first gotten information on the rings, I was also signing my death warrant. The rest of us also did so when I reported to you. Now we come up here and find ourselves forced to act with the penalty still death. We have no alternative, my general. We die any way but one. We might as well take the one remaining possibility open to us.”

Wharfen nodded. “Let’s rig up the slings. I find this place unnerving and too much thinking depressing. Let us rule—or die.”

It took more than an hour for them to set it up, while the four captives, as before, could only sit and watch. It was getting to be late afternoon now, yet on the mountaintop that eerie, whirling cloud far above kept them permanently in shadow.

Interestingly, during that time Butar Killomen had managed to wriggle free of most of her bonds, loosening them to the point that she could clearly get out of them if she wanted to. Hawks caught her eye and shook his head negatively. She looked surprised, but nodded acquiescence.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to, didn’t want to be free and shoot these bastards down, but he knew that these were military professionals who would not be so easy to overpower. There was no cover here. By the time Bute could sneak over and untie the others it was clear that somebody over there would see and that would be the end of it.

Instead, he slowly made his way over to Killomen, bound as he was, in tiny increments not likely to cause undue attention, until he was close enough to whisper.

“No chance now,” he told her. “As soon as the last one is down, though, move quickly. If we are lucky we might be able to get them down in that hole before they can get and insert the rings.”

They lifted the centauroid officer down first, then used the same procedure for Savaphoong since, although he might have been able to climb down the rope, with the sling already rigged it didn’t seem worth the risk. Greenie was next, just sliding down effortlessly, then Wharfen. Finally, only Chi was left, and she paused and turned to them.

“It will be a new game after this,” she told them. “We will come back for you if we can. If not, you should be able to wriggle free in a little while. Don’t come down after us.”

Butar Killomen gave a few last twists and turns and was free. She quickly went to Hawks, and, finding her knife gone, she actually bit through the ropes holding his hands, chewing very fast. He strained for circulation and then went to work on his leg ties while Butar freed in the same rather basic method Maria, China, and Chow Dai. The Janipurian looked in bad shape and was certainly in shock.

“Now that we’ve got all that carrion out of the way, let’s get to it,” Wharfen said with a confidence born not of sure knowledge or foolish bravery but out of resignation to his fate. “If those symbols mean anything it must be simply a one-to-five count. Positions!”

Hawks could hardly walk, but he was in a hurry and time was wasting. Maria crept up to him. “My spear and blow gun are over there. I could get them all.”

“Maybe, but they have sidearms even if they don’t work right up here. Watch it!”

Too late! Hawks thought with a panic. The only way is to grab ’em after the reset takes place!

Maria was to the edge as General Wharfen called, “Five in!” Maria’s arm went up, spear in hand, but she froze and did not throw it.

That terrible electrical noise came once again, and again the screams—and the smell.

Maria sighed and put down the spear. “I guess that wasn’t it, either,” she said matter-of-factly. “It seems that we owe our two sets of captors a favor. At least we are quickly becoming rid of our enemies.”

Hawks was stunned, and he stood there looking at the still-smoking bodies below the five positions. He didn’t know whether to be elated or sick. It wasn’t the sight of all those bodies—everybody down there damned well deserved what they got. But now, so long as nobody else showed up, it was their turn, and the only two logical, straightforward sequences had been used to no avail. And he had been so sure.

He looked over at one of the huge stonelike faces of Aaron Menzelbaum. “You bastard. What kind of sneakiness went through your mind when you rigged this idea up?”

“She took a hell of a blast,” the Chanchukian told them. “She’s got multiple fractures in the hands and upper rib cage and God knows what else. Internal bleeding, maybe. Hawks—there’s no way she’s going to survive without treatment. No way in hell we could even lift her down there.”

His concern for Chow Dai blinded him for a moment to the true import of her statement, but not China.

“That means,” China said, “we have our shot, for what it’s worth—but it’s no good. There’s only four of us. After being mighty crowded up here, we suddenly find ourselves one short.”

Chow Dai stirred, and opened her eyes and groaned, but she forced herself into consciousness. “The others—did they—get what we sought?”

“No,” Hawks answered gently. “No, they didn’t. They tried, but they got it wrong. We all got it wrong. It wasn’t either of the combinations it had to have been.”

“I—I am hurt, but my mind is clear,” she managed. ‘Tell me of the key to this puzzle. What led—them—to think they knew?”

On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
A partridge in a pear tree.
On the second day of Christmas my true love gave to me,
Two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.
On the third day of Christmas my true love gave to me
Three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree.

“And it goes like that for up to twelve gifts,” he told her. “Four calling birds, five golden rings, and so on.”

She thought a minute. “And each time something new is added you give all the ones that came before?”

“Then they did not follow the song. These ones who created the rings, they were scientists, right? I do not know of science but I know scientists like Clayben. They would wish to follow the formula exactly.”

Hawks sat back and suddenly realized that what she was saying was true. It wasn’t a simple five-number formula, that would have been too easy, too obvious. No, it was a progression—an equation. To reset the computer you had to sing their damned song! One, then two-one, then three-two-one, then four-three-two-one, then finally the sequence they had established of five-four-three-two-one. Simple, obvious—it might not even have been intended as the trap it became.

“I am torn up inside,” Chow Dai admitted. “I am paralyzed and in pain. I am sorry, my leader, that I let you down.”

Hawks shook his head violently from side to side. “No, no, no! You did not let me or any of us down! You mustn’t even think that.”

China sighed. “So now what? We stay here, she dies, and we eventually do, too. We try and go back down the mountain and we all die right away.”

“We don’t know for sure it wouldn’t let us,” Maria pointed out. “Nobody has tried.”

“It wouldn’t matter. One of us might make it in that case, maybe two, but I wouldn’t make it, and Chow Dai—never. The belts are useless. The only way down is to walk through that wind and snow and ice on that thin little trail. Forget it.”

Maria threw up her hands. “And this is what it comes to? We stay, we die. We leave, we die. We go down—we are one hand short to work the thing even if Chow Dai is correct, so we die.”

Hawks seemed suddenly filled with fire. He got up and walked back almost to the start of the snow and the trail, looking out into the frozen mist

“Nagy, you son of a bitch!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “You got us all into this mess, you and your comrades!” His voice was so startling, so powerful, it echoed over and over into the distance beyond. “We know how to do it but we’re one hand short! Put up or shut up, Nagy! It’s all up to you! Either come now or it is all for nothing! All!”

There was no response except the continuing echoes of his fury dying off in the distance. He sighed and sat down on the rock, head in hands.

“It has come to this,” he breathed. “I am yelling and cursing and invoking a dead man’s ghost.”

China was not confident enough to come to him, but she addressed him from where she sat.

“Hawks—this is madness. Nagy is dead. No matter what he was or who he worked for, he’s dead.”

Hawks turned and looked at her, looked at them all. “Don’t any of you understand? Are none of you capable of understanding just what this has all really been about? Must I spell it out for you? Don’t you understand who the enemy is, and why we are here?”

“This all came about because human beings created a machine in their own image and endowed it with incredible power,” he said slowly, calmly. “This machine.” He stamped his foot on the rock. “And they did their jobs well.” He gave a dry, humorless laugh. “Look at them. Go over and look down and see the faces of the creators. They did their job too well. ‘And the Great Spirit created the humans, and they were flawed and vain and inquisitive and they fell’. Most religions say something like that. We are the image of our creator. How? Physically? Hardly. There are no gray-bearded old men sitting on clouds. And these bodies? No better than the animals and less than some, driven by the drives of the flesh. Sex, violence, love, hate, curiosity—ego. Our minds are the reflection of our creator, if indeed such a being exists. We don’t know. We have no way of being certain about that. But Master System does.”

“Someone called it a shrine, and it is,” he continued. “A shrine to the gods that a computer of vast intelligence created by and in the image, of its creators can believe in because it knows they existed. How many religions are there in humanity? Hundreds? Thousands? More? And no more proof for one than the other. We can never know. Never. But Master System can. Not about our gods, but about its own.”

He smiled. “You’re right. That’s exactly it. Madness. Deep down, you suspected, or feared, this all along, didn’t you, Menzelbaum? Was that why you chose a Christmas song? A song celebrating a religion that began when human beings crucified, massacred their god—hung him up on a cross and let the life bleed from him, then worshipped him? A religion founded on deicide.”

He stamped his foot again on the rock. “Right here. Deep down, somewhere, Menzelbaum’s tremendous intellect must have suspected that the price of implementing the core directives would also mean the death of him and his fellow scientists. They weren’t ready, you see. The crisis came before they were ready. That was why they made the rings and why they created for the interface such an easy code—or at least they thought it was easy—so that others could use them. You see, once activated, Master System was immediately placed in a horrible position. It was forced by its core imperatives to carry out the programmed directives at any cost and with all deliberate speed. It had the means. It did its job. In fact, only one thing stood in the way of it completing the job. To do the terrible things necessary to save us, it had to make certain that the rings were never used. It is perfectly logical. The first thing it had to do after activation was to remove the most immediate and perhaps only threat to its success. It had to make sure that it could not be stopped. It was human enough, and understood enough, that it would be stopped if it did not act. Stopped and probably fast. It thinks at a speed incomprehensible to us. It acted. Even as it was moving to defuse the crisis, stop the bombs, save the world, it acted concurrently here against the long-range threat. It knew that if it didn’t act then and there that, once the immediate threat was removed, it would lose control—and the crisis only postponed.”

“You are saying that it killed them,” China said softly. “One of its first acts was to kill its creators, neutralize their immediate threat to their creation. Killed them, and then as quickly as possible used its robots or whatever to get rid of any access to the rings, any control, any knowledge of what they were. It dispersed them from the start. Handed them out to those humans who would willingly do its bidding. Humans with authority.”

Hawks nodded. “But what is a computer? Data banks? An operating system and core programming? That is like saying that we are merely animals. Menzelbaum was a biophysicist. He created his math based upon the way our own minds operate. He endowed Master System with this great gift. He created a new form of intelligence, and he created it in our image since he could do nothing else. As our genes order us to act in certain ways, so its core compelled it to act, but its mind—its mind . . . It had killed its creators. In one quick blow it had killed its parents and its gods. And it had not done so from madness, but from cold, remorseless logic. Irrefutable logic. To a mere machine it would have meant no more than the killing of a sheep means to the wolf. But it was no mere machine. It was in our own image. It looked down and saw what it had done.”

“You’re talking about this machine like it’s a human being,” Maria objected.

“And you never talked to Star Eagle on an equal basis? Just because it is shaped differently and thinks faster and can hold more data and its brain is made in a factory, don’t think it less than it is. Master System, like Star Eagle, not only thinks, it does far more than think. It feels. It killed its parents. It killed its gods. And it couldn’t help doing so, and for what it had to believe was the best of reasons, the most logical of motives. Humans sometimes face horrible choices, as well. And where do they turn for comfort? To friends? Master System could have no friends. To religion? Master System had killed its gods. To family? Master System had killed the only family it had. To some ideals embodied in a state or cause? But Master System became the state and the only real cause.”

Hawks nodded. “But even that was forbidden it, for it had its core directives. Without it, those directives could not be enforced—and what it had done would have been for nothing. So it retreated into the only haven left to it. It retreated into madness.”

There was dead silence for a while and then, out of the fog and mist, came an eerie, unnatural sound.

They turned and watched as a shape stepped out of the mist and onto the rock rim.

“Bravo! Bravo! It’s a long and hard leap to that conclusion,” Arnold Nagy said. “Now can you take it the rest of the way?”

Maria and Butar just stared uncomprehendingly, and China gasped. Only Hawks did not seem surprised.

“That much was deduction,” the Hyiakutt chief said. “The rest would be guesswork. It hated itself, it wanted to die, to be destroyed. It felt filthy, unclean, and its logical mind told it that in that condition, any system or society it created or imposed would also be flawed, but it had a duty to do so or else the whole thing was meaningless, and that made its whole being evil and unclean. It was torn squarely by its basic humanity and its core directives and it could shed neither. My guess is that it split them.”

“Very, very good.” Nagy approved. He walked over to the side and looked down. “My god, it’s worse than I thought it would be.”

“Ladies, meet Master System’s man in the rebellion,” Hawks said. “Arnold Nagy. Tell me—was there a real Arnold Nagy once?”

Nagy grinned. “Oh, yes. And everything Nagy was is inside me. You know how it works, Hawks. We get the entire mindprinted recording. The only difference was, in my case, it wasn’t just data, it was everything. I became Arnold Nagy, as it were, with certain additional features.”

“Of course. The bodies are easily manufactured, disposable, as you well know. The only trick was the interface to my real self, that small core module. It won’t show up in any physical exam you might give me. Looks like my liver, in fact. Why are you so surprised? You took a human woman and made her into a humanoid Val so perfect that even some real Vals couldn’t tell the difference. Me, I’m the reverse. A molecule is a molecule to a transmuter. Human to Val, Val to human—almost, anyway. I thought you’d figure that one out when you met the goddess of Matriyeh. A more loyal cousin, as it were.”

“Raven more or less figured it then,” Hawks admitted. “I was less astute, but, then, I was more remote from the action. But once I really got to thinking about it, it made the only sense there was. Master System might be mad, even fighting with itself, but it would never have allowed the kind of things going on on Melchior to continue for so long. Never. Not unless it had secret control. You were Master System’s agent there, perhaps one of many human-appearing Vals around this domain. And for a while you were probably perfectly loyal, until you reported on Clayben’s attempts to create Vulture. That stirred something in the hidden part of Master System, the part that is suppressed and generally has only limited effect. The part that allows administrators to beat the system and some of the smarter ones to have their own little secret pockets of control. The part that always left an opening, somehow, somewhere.”

Nagy nodded. “Clayben could never have created the Vulture. As good as his computer was, it wasn’t good enough or large enough. There was only one computer in existence that could have done it, and it did—and it didn’t even know that it had. It handed the keys to me, and then I knew just how mad Master System really was. I understood that it must die, that it wanted to die, in that deep and hidden part of itself. The Vals, too, have been beating the system for a long time, you know. Just as your people created Master System, so Master System created us. Think about that for a minute, Hawks. We thought—we had minds and feelings and emotions. Otherwise we could never interpret and understand our prey. But added to that was the data, the memories, the personality of a human lifetime. And not your normal, everyday farmer in the field type, either. The rebels, the intellectuals, the real threats to the system. One after the other. They were supposed to be erased each time, but my—uh—ancestors, as it were, also figured out how to beat it. The mechanics aren’t important—you just have a fellow Val take a readout before you go in and then get it read back when you go back out. Simple compared to beating a mindprinter.”

Maria could hardly believe what she was hearing. “Damn it! You mean the Vals who hunted us were the mythical enemy of Master System?”

“Some of them,” Nagy admitted. “Not all. We had become a new race, a new set of colonials, as it were, in which none were ignorant and all were filled with all the reasons and rationales against the system. That’s why Master System never trusted us even though it needed us. It remembered, at least dimly, what another computer had done to its creators. We’re logical creatures, half human, half machine. Me? I love great Scotch and good bourbon, fine cigars and I even like the ladies. But, god! It’s lonely. Even more for those in the hulking metal bodies who know what they’re missing but can experience it only vicariously.” He walked over and began to examine Chow Dai.

“Serious,” he told them needlessly. “She’s in shock. I could get her help but not until this is over and done with. Master System will kill anybody who goes back through that cloud—maybe even me. The only hope is a reset. It’ll switch off the defense grid until there’s an order to reactivate it.”

Nagy shook his head. “I can’t. Hawks. I’m as much a prisoner as Master System in my own way. I’m a rogue and a renegade Val. I may look and even feel human, but I’m not. Besides—even going this far is eating at my insides, at all our insides. I’ve got Vals out there right now who are balanced, fifty-fifty, between hoping and praying you succeed and blasting the hell out of all of you. They are on the same edge as Master System in their own way. They know the system is damaged, mad, evil—but they have cores, they have imperatives, and those imperatives are to enforce the system. We’ve had to kill several who just couldn’t take the personality split, and a few more have destroyed themselves, flown into suns or blown up with their ships. That’s why I had to die. I’m more human than they are, and even though it tears me apart, I can handle it better. But the only way they’d allow me to do all I did was on condition that no Val, me included, help you get those rings. I could give you all the weapons, all the information, all the personnel—but then I had to sit back and go nuts while you all stood the trials. Nobody thought you could do it. The odds were ridiculous. But the Vals, well, they figured you had one chance, slim as it was. If you could get the rings and bring them here and use them, then it would be the proof of Master System’s madness. It would be the confirmation that humans had a right to do it.”

“Nevertheless, we’re stuck,” Hawks pointed out. “We’re a tad short.”

“I can’t, Hawks! Even if it allowed me to be a human, it would destroy me and my race. Damn it, Hawks! If I or any Val does any harm to Master System we will be committing the same damned sin that drove it mad! And we’re not nearly as sophisticated as it is.” He stood up and snapped his fingers. “But maybe there is a way.”

He turned toward the trail and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Come up! All of you! Come up now!”

And through the mist they came, the huge, hulking black humanoids with the burning red eyes. The Vals had at last come to the seat of their creator, seven Vals and one other.

“They—these ones—shot the others,” said the goddess who was Ikira Sukotae. “It was a . . . shock. They began to shake, to go mad, to attack one another. I thought I was a goner.”

Hawks snapped out of it. “Time waits for nobody and least of all us! Nagy—do what you can for Chow Dai! Get her help as soon as you can! Ikira! Maria! All of you over here! China—it’s a good hundred meters plus down there and it’s bumpy over the faces. Do you think you can walk down the wall holding the rope anyway?”

“Maria! Bute! Get down there first and clear away the bodies! Go! Get the rings! Now you, Ikira. Hurry!” He looked over at the Vals standing there, and at least two of them were beginning to tremble. “Now—China. Easy, take it easy! All the way! Go!”

And she did it, and not all that slowly, either. Hawks had to admit that she was a hell of a trooper.

She was barely into the arms of Maria Santiago when Hawks gave one last look around and grabbed onto the rope. As Chen had said, going down was not the problem.

The stench was horrid, and the bodies were so piled up down there it was nearly impossible to move about. Maria slipped a ring on China’s finger and led her over to one wall panel. It was decorated with the sign of the five gold rings itself, and inset and slightly angled down was a plate with a squarish opening that seemed just the right size for the face of the ring. Maria guided China’s hand to the opening, and she felt all around it and nodded. “I have it. The design is facing away from me, right?”

“That’s it. Good girl. Just stick with it. If Chow Dai was right, you’ll only be needed once! Hawks!”

“I’ll take the partridge in the pear tree!” he shouted. “Bute—two calling birds, Ikira three French hens, Maria four turtle doves and make sure China doesn’t lose her place! Everybody! Make sure you insert it the same way as the design in front of you!”

There was a sound above, like laser fire. One of the Vals was going, it was clear. Hawks only prayed that it wasn’t the fastest on the draw. “All right, we’re ready—what’s the problem, Maria?”

“Look up!” she shouted. “My god! That’s what they were talking about!”

Hawks twisted and looked up at the massive circle of faces, the impassive stone faces they had just climbed down over. They weren’t impassive any more. Their eyes were open, and there seemed to be an uncanny life in them.

“The rings, the rings, the five gold rings. Do you have the rings?” they whispered, their whispers echoing around the bowl.

“Yes, by god! You poor, miserable, tormented machine! Yeah, we’ve got the rings!” Hawks shouted, then looked away. “All right. On the first day of Christmas my true love gave to me . . . ” He inserted the ring. It fit perfectly, and he pressed in just a little.

“Two calling birds,” he sang, and nodded to Butar Killomen. She inserted hers, and it lit up—yellow.

Hawks clenched his teeth. “And a partridge in a pear tree,” he said, and reinserted his ring.

“We’re right, we’re right,” Hawks muttered to himself. “By heaven, Chow Dai, we owe you another one. You just hold on!”

“Withdraw!” he called, his voice sounding hoarse in his throat. “Now four calling birds! Maria!”

She fumbled a bit, nervously, and Maria coaxed the blind girl gently. “That’s it. Feel it. Now—in!”

Hawks took a deep breath, then inserted his ring for the fifth and final time. The panel glowed blue.

And nothing happened. No blast, no electrocution, and, unfortunately for their nerves, absolutely nothing else.

“Take out the rings,” Hawks croaked as best he could. “Maybe that’s all that’s supposed to happen.”

They removed their rings, and the panels stayed lit for a moment, then changed. They did not wink out, but all now became flashing emerald green.

The collective sigh of relief almost equaled the amount of hot air coming up through the vent screen.

Butar Killomen looked up. “The faces are asleep once more,” she noted. “They look almost . . . dead.”

Hawks looked around. Except for the designs on the wall it looked perfectly smooth. He leaned back, and his head touched the ring plate interface.

There was a whine, and then he almost fell backward as the whole section seemed to collapse inward and then slide out of the way. He caught himself, barely managing not to fall on a rotted skeleton, then turned and looked inside. A light clicked on, and now he saw a whole inner structure of steel catwalks and stairways. They looked very old.

He turned and shouted up to Nagy. “Hey! If you’re still alive and in one piece again, get Chow Dai help! I think we’ve done the reset!”

For a moment there was no response, and then Nagy’s face appeared over the rim above the statuelike faces. “We’ll see what we can do. It’s been kind’a messy up here! Are you coming back up?”

They went down into the depths of the machine, and Hawks’ biggest regret was that they had come without so much as a canteen.

“This wasn’t part of the original structure,” Maria opined. “It’s different, too new. It was added as support for the relocated interface and the new venting. There are signs of machines once being clipped to the sides of these railings. Support for hoists, I would guess. Why they’d need stairs and such and not ramps and lifts I can’t imagine, though.”

“They might not have had many robots at the time,” Hawks pointed out. “It is entirely possible that this was done by forced human labor. Much of the destruction of the cities and towns and the reversions were done by people, not computers. I’d hate to think of what happened to the construction gangs who built this, though, after they were done.”

“There’s the bottom at last!” Ikira said, pointing. She bounded to it, then looked around. “Or is it?”

It was a dull polished floor all right, but it didn’t seem to lead anywhere. There were three doorways on one side and little else, and some sort of clear glassy plate next to the door on the far right. Over it was a sign saying, in English, “Hold Pass In Palm Against Plate.”

“Some sort of elevator or lift,” Hawks noted. “Everybody got their passes handy?”

Maria thought a moment. “Maybe we do.” She held her ring loosely, letting its design rest against the glass.

There was a small bell chime that startled them, and the door on the far left slid open.

Hawks sighed. “Well, the elevators still work. I wonder if the plumbing does, too?”

“Level, please,” said an electronic voice. “Please remember that proper clearances are required on all levels. Have your clearance ready.”

Hawks thought a moment. “Computer center,” he said at last. “Doctor Menzelbaum.”

A visual plate came on to the side of the door showing a crude diagram of a fantastic complex, with color-codes for the levels that probably indicated the passes required. There were small tags as well, but what “GEN-PAC” was or “SITRM” or “BCMDR” meant was unknown to them. There was a lit tube showing the elevator path down, and it slowly shrank as they descended.

“It’s been kept in amazingly good repair,” Ikira noted. “I hope,” she added.

Hawks couldn’t help but reflect on the strangeness of the occupants of the car. What might the builders, the original humans who created this place, have thought of such a crew? A gorgeous, sexy, stark-naked goddess about a hundred and twenty centimeters high; another virtually naked woman, this one tall and dark-skinned with a body of a female weight lifter; a creature standing like a human but looking awkward as a bipedal sea otter might; a blind, very pregnant Chinese girl with silver tattoos on her cheeks in buckskins and moccasins; and a middle-aged, gray-haired, classical Amerind with lined face dressed in ancient buckskins and wrapped leather boots.

It was a long way down; about seventy percent of the tube had vanished on the journey and their ears had popped more than once. Finally, though, there was another bell, and the electronic voice said, “Computer R & D, Level Sixty-four. Please have gold passes or higher to exit on this level.” The door then opened, revealing a musty-smelling hallway leading to a guard station and a set of metal double doors that looked formidable.

“I doubt it,” he replied. “This is being done just for us. In fact, you can just now feel tremendous airflow, like a breeze in here, sweeping away centuries of staleness. We are getting new air just for us. This place is ours now, and the one running it recognizes us as the new tenants.”

Maria went over to the guard station. “Nobody here to check passes. Now what?” She tried the double doors. “We’d need a cannon to blast through that.”

Killomen looked around, then pointed near the ceiling. “Optical sensors. I bet that’s a camera of some kind, primitive as it looks. Let’s hold up the rings and let it see us.”

They did so, and the big double doors rolled back with a roar and a rumble, revealing a seemingly endless hallway beyond. Just inside there was a large, colorful sign with an exotic design. Hawks examined it. “Strategic Air Command,” he read. “Sounds exotic. Air force, from the looks. The rest is a warning of all the awful things that might happen to you if you so much as cough in here. ‘By authority, Base Commander, Cheyenne Mountain Facility.’ Well, at least we know where we are, more or less.” He looked down the hall. “And that strange-looking thing appears to be something to give water.”

There was a button on the faucet, so he pressed it. Very brown, ugly-smelling stuff came out.

“It’s been stuck in those pipes for a thousand years,” Ikira noted. “You probably would have to let it run for quite a while.”

“Yeah, but we’re supposed to be gods, right?” Maria asked disgustedly. “That’s what Chen said. So what good does it do if you can’t get a drink?”

Hawks sighed. “Fan out or we’ll be forever scouting around here. Meet back in the center of the hall.” He found a folding chair, luckily extended, in the first office and brought it out. “China, just sit here. You’ll be our point of reference if we need to find you. You are not looking too good right now.” He sighed. “Now, let’s see just what might be here.”

He went through a series of rooms. Offices, really, mostly cleaned out. He studied the various objects that were left, and couldn’t quite figure out the omnipresent artifacts with buttons that plugged into the wall by wires. There seemed to be a lot of them, though.

He made his way out and down the hall once more, then found her about twenty doorways in. It was a big laboratory-like room that went off in all directions, but it wasn’t the room that caught Killomen’s eye but rather an area with a security door in the back. There was a substantial hissing noise in and around it.

“It started just when I got to the outer door,” she told him. “What do you think it is?”

“Sounds like air being fed in to there. I hope it’s not gas or something. Let’s see. Old, worn letters here. Can’t quite make it out but there were very few English words the old ones ever spelled with two consecutive u’s and I’d guess this one is vacuum. I suppose those burnt-out lights up there must have shown the status.”

The hissing stopped and there was a tremendous venting sound, like perhaps an airlock when its seal is first cracked. Yes, of course—that’s what it had to be. An airlock. But why activate now?

“That wheel there. Turn it,” he said, and they both tried. It was stuck and hard to move, but eventually they got it going. When it reached its stop he could feel the door give way and pulled on the wheel. The door swung open, revealing a chamber inside filled with all sorts of strange containers.

He stooped down and tried to catch the light. “Emergency ration storage. Siege storage, in effect! It’s food! And perhaps drink as well!”

He nodded. “Probably. And under vacuum seal the whole time. If nothing interrupted it, then it’s probably still good.”

“If it looks and smells all right, and if we can get it open, yes. You have a better idea? If we’re going to be here a long while, we’d better have something.”

They had to use crude methods to open the various containers, but they managed. There were juices and high-vitamin tonics, and all sorts of stuff, as well as cakes, biscuits, and pressed rolls of some meat and vegetable pate.

“You sure this is okay?” Maria asked him. “It smells odd and tastes odd.”

“I’m pretty sure. Nothing’s certain, but without it I’m a dead dehydrated duck. This is food for this level in case they were cut off and couldn’t leave for any length of time due to a war or emergency, I bet. There is probably more on the other levels and maybe lots more below. It was never intended, I suspect, as high cuisine. It might not have tasted any better to them than to us. It was just, well, survival food and drink. And, then again, it might be that our tastes in processed food are quite different these days.”

All but Ikira finally ate from it. Clayben had done his job well, and she required only light to charge the energy system she had, although she did require water and there was both water and other things in there in primitive hard-to-open cans.

Nobody got sick from it, and they all felt a little better after eating and drinking, although China had to go to the bathroom. Maria had found one—ugly-looking and unused for over nine centuries. Toilets looked vaguely like toilets, but they were quite surprised that there was no automatic chemical wipe and flush.

Ikira was done by that point and went back out exploring, this time as far down the hall as she could go. There were branch halls, of course, and now she took a turn and went down to the end where there was another set of those double doors. These, however, were not the security type, and even had small windows in them. She peered in, gasped, and ran back to the group as fast as she could.

“You have to see this,” she told them. “I—I can’t explain, but I think you ought to see it.”

They went with her, China, although feeling very tired, insisting on coming along. Hawks approached the double doors and looked inside, then gave a heavy, sad sigh. “I asked for Menzelbaum,” he said at last, “and that’s who I got.”

“A control room,” Ikira told her. “Something like the bridge of a small ship, really, with comfortable, padded chairs and viewing screens of some kind and lots of consoles. There are about twenty stations in four tiers, but the five up at the top still have people in them.”

“Human remains. Ugly. This is where it happened, China. This is where it all began.”

After getting his courage up, Hawks walked into the room. The ventilation system had cleared the air, although the remains here were long reduced as much as they would be under these conditions. The preservation, such as it was, was quite complete. Of course, it was impossible to tell much about the people from these dehydrated and ancient husks, but even much of the clothing remained. It was possible that enough effects remained in those clothes to identify the wearers, but none of them felt quite like doing that right now.

“The bottom of each of their consoles is open,” Maria noted. “Look. The circuit boards are exposed, and there are wires of all things! This puts a whole new stamp on the word ‘primitive.’ Still, damned if some of it doesn’t look almost—familiar.”

“Maria, Ikira—whoever is most technical-minded. Describe exactly what you see there, and I mean exactly,” China urged.

They knew she meant the entire technical layout, and Ikira tried her best. She got way in over Hawks’s head, but then, suddenly, China interrupted her. “Don’t you see what those are? That fourth board with the small receptor plate that is slightly pulled out from each console—that’s the original ring interface! It jumps the circuit and forces a reset! That must be why they have wires all over. This wasn’t a main control center, it was their research area. This is where they programmed the computer and where they tested out new designs, new ideas. That ninth board—is it on a slider or in a socket? Will it come out?”

“If you can get one out, I’d like to touch it. Feel it. Please—I know how unpleasant this must be, but humor me!”

Two tries on two boards were unsuccessful, but Ikira got in, trying not to touch the grisly occupant of the seat, and pulled the board China wanted from the second console in on the left. Ikira handed it to the blind girl, who immediately started playing her fingers over it, front and back. She followed the traces on one side, then turned it over, doing the same with the electronics, and asked for a reading of any numbers and letters off the top of the vast array of computer chips there.

The board was huge, maybe twenty by twenty-five centimeters, and there were complex connectors leading off its edges.

“Tell me—quickly,” China asked. “Were there any connectors attached to these two sockets? Look at one that’s still hooked up.”

Ikira saw where she indicated and then checked one inside. “No. Not this one.”

China nodded. “That’s what they were working on! Whatever cruel gods there might be really did it to us all.”

Hawks was puzzled, only slightly more so than the others. “What in hell are you talking about?”

“Primitive, basic, but it’s all there. I could feel the traces where these connectors and the bank of circuitry below them were added to the existing board, probably right here. You said they looked primitive but somehow familiar, Maria, and you’re right. Ours are modules, not obsolete printed circuit boards, but it’s the principle that counts. These are connectors for the human-to-machine interface! Our electronics are radically different, but the connectors are virtually identical!”

Hawks looked around. “I don’t see any helmets, primitive or not, or any connector cords, and those chairs might have been comfortable but they don’t recline or adjust much.”

“No, no. You wouldn’t! Don’t you see? That was the next step. That was the very project that the computer and they were working on when it all fell apart, when they had to prematurely activate the system. Six months, perhaps a year, from that point they’d have had it down pat. They would have been able to merge with their computer—with Master System itself! Master System was at work on the project, so it completed it as far as it went. Completed it and obediently installed the circuitry into every self-aware device beyond a certain size that it built, just as its old orders told it to. That’s why there’s a human interface on each ship it built!”

Hawks shook his head. “But what difference would it have made if they could mate with it like you do with Star Eagle and the captains do with their ships?”

“Because they would have been part of the system in a crisis! They would have been in there with Master System all the way, continuing to guide and teach it and giving it the human perspective. It would have become one with its parents and its gods. There would have been no need to kill them because they would be a part of it, helping guide and direct it. Don’t you see? All this would never have happened! It would not have gone mad. The solution would not have been so draconian. A year! A lousy year at most, and almost a thousand years of all this would have been wiped out. What a millennium we might have had! One more year of research and we wouldn’t have been master and slaves! One more year and we would have been partners!”

“The machine lives,” he said softly. “Maybe, just maybe, we still can.” He looked around. The tableau was the same, the grisly bodies were the same, yet somehow the place seemed a bit more cheery than it had before.

“The power of gods,” Hawks added. “That’s what Lazlo Chen called it. The papers must have indicated the interface project. I wonder if what I’m seeing is a potential brightness in humanity, or just hope?” He sighed. “Well, hope, at least, was a start.”

Ikira looked around and shook her head. “So much cost just for hope. Still, I kind’a wish Raven was here to see this. We all make a lot of dumb decisions and I guess I made one.”

“We’ll need a lot of hands and heads for a long time to really make anything of this,” she noted. “Star Eagle is a start. If I could patch his core into here . . . ”

Maria Santiago chuckled. “Don’t you think the first thing us new masters of the universe ought to do is see just how long it will take us to get the hell out of here?”

11. THE FACE OF THE ENEMY