Part 38 (2/2)

By mutual unspoken agreement, Michel's conversations with Elly were always guarded, as it was certain that the Co-ordinator would always be listening by one means or another. Outside of their imprisonment, nothing grossly horrible was being done to either of them. But Elly, at least, no longer looked healthy. She had lost weight, so that the gray Temple clothes hung loosely on her body. When Michel mentioned this, she calmly agreed. But she did not seem to think it mattered much.

”How areyoubearing up?” she asked him, reaching to cup a hand under his chin and tilt his face up to the light. At this gesture their respective guardian machines each leaned a few centimeters closer, presumably ready to block any attempt at strangling the Co-ordinator's prize specimen.

”Well enough,” he answered readily. And he really was; he didn't know why or how, but it was so. ”You know, I think I'm growing. This suit is starting to feel tight.” The orange gym-suit, run through his cabin's laundry ducts at intervals, was still the only clothing that he had.

”Yes, I suppose you are.” Elly sounded as if her own idea of time had grown as vague as his. She looked at him strangely. ”But your hair is shorter than it was.”

”The machines cut it.” Reducing the length of each strand by what Michel had decided must have been a standard number of centimeters. ”Elly, if you're really my mother-”

”Yes?”

”Who's my biofather, then?” He had decided that the machines must already have got some answer from her to that question; he couldn't see how it was going to matter that they would overhear her repet.i.tion of the answer now.

But the Co-ordinator, speaking through one of its robots, immediately warned her: ”Give no answer.”

Elly looked wearily away, kept silent.

Michel raised his eyes. ”Why shouldn't I know?” he demanded of the low metallic overhead.

”The future only is alterable. What is past cannot be changed.”

A few hours after that-or was it a few days, perhaps?-Michel was alone in his cabin when one of the robots brought him new clothing, evidently just fabricated aboard. It was a somewhat miniaturized Stal-outfit, even including metallic-looking boots. Casual dress on s.h.i.+pboard did not usually include footwear of any kind, and these . . . Michel considered refusing the whole package. But then another idea suggested itself.

He changed into the other new garments, a loose s.h.i.+rt and short trousers of bright gray. Then, carrying his old orange garb in one hand and the rejected new boots in the other, he walked out of his room without being stopped. With his metal attendant staying just a pace behind him, he paced the few meters of corridor and entered the control room.

”Here,” he said, as casually as possible. ”I don't need these.” And with a double toss he lobbed the boots at the foot of the Co-ordinator's console perch, and the orange suit right at the captain's chair. On that chair Lancelot still lay, unchanged, wave-complexes s.h.i.+mmering through the seamless fabric of entwined forces.

The boots thunked lightly on the deck, the suit came down right in the outstretched hand of the robot standing protectively beside the chair, the robot that had been behind Michel when the toss started.

He was learning a few facts here and a few there. The only attack he was ever going to be able to make on the Co-ordinator would be of a non-physical kind, through what pa.s.sed for the Co-ordinator's mind.

We're human beings. We're the bosses when it comes to any kind of partners.h.i.+p with machines. And also we're gonna win the war. If anyone should ask you.

But first, Frank, I am going to have to learn enough.

”Do you wish to put on Lancelot again?” the Co-ordinator asked Michel suddenly.

”Will you let me, if I do?” And now, he thought, I predict that it will counter with yet another question of its own.

”Not yet. I am not authorized to do so. Perhaps the Directors will allow it. What did you think of, when you first wore Lancelot?”

It had asked him that at least once before, at a time that now seemed long, long ago. What had he answered then?

”I thought of a time when I was in a play.” Having given this answer, Michel was asked to explain briefly what a play was. He did so, though he was not at all sure that his questioner did not already know.

”And what role in the play was yours?”

”I was Oberon.”

”On a stage you played the role of the fifth major satellite of Ura.n.u.s?”

”No, of a-creature. I guess the one the satellite was named for. A story-creature. Fiction. And in the play I wore these robes that looked something like Lancelot. Quite a coincidence.”

”What is coincidence?” the berserker asked.

”You must know the answer to that one better than I do,” he told it. ”Why do you keep on asking me questions where you already know the answers?”

”As you know, I am concerned that your mind does not change a great deal while you are in my care.

Therefore I test your responses. Repeat, what is coincidence?”

Therefore you are losing, he thought. I couldn't keep my mind from changing even if I wanted to. ”I guess,” he said, ”coincidence is things happening at the same time without any good reason for it.”

”Was the story-creature Lancelot in the same play as Oberon?”

”No, in another story. And Lancelot never wore robes like-”

”Here there will be no play.”

”I never thought there-”

”In approximately fifty-five standard minutes this s.h.i.+p will dock at a facility where you will be thoroughly examined. Then within a few standard hours our voyage will resume, with a stronger escort, and aboard a different s.h.i.+p where you will have more room and be more comfortable.”

A dozen tentative plans, more gossamer than Lancelot's outermost fringes, were dissolved to nothingness by a few words. He had not foreseen this. Maybe there was some excuse for the failure and maybe not, but he just had not foreseen this at all. Yet there was nothing illogical about it; berserkers must have their bases, just as did the human fleets. And there was no reason why the first base their flight came to should be the one at which his ultimate interrogators were waiting.

All Michel said was: ”Elly? What about her?”

”Do you wish that your mother continue the journey with you?”

It seemed obvious what was likely to happen to Elly if he saidno; what was not so obvious was whether or not she would be ultimately better off that way. ”Yes,” said Michel at last. Then he asked the machine, ”What is this facility like, where we are going to dock?”

”I will clear a screen and you can observe it as we approach.”

If he had asked for a screen a standard day or a standard month ago, might it have cleared one for him then? But they had been in almost continuous c-plus travel anyway, and there would have been nothing to see but fireworks.

A few minutes later, making adjustments on one of the control room's large screens (while his guardian stood motionless exactly between him and the captain's chair), Michel discovered a darkly ma.s.sive body at a distance of about two hundred thousand kilometers and closing rapidly. Too big to be any ordinary s.h.i.+p, the object radiated enough warmth to be plainly visible in the infrared, while remaining obscure even under magnification in the ordinarily visible wavelengths.

The goodlife s.h.i.+p, having slowed drastically from interstellar speeds, was approaching the thing now at about a thousand kilometers per second, and still decelerating strongly. The image of the berserker base waiting ahead was still largely obscured by dust and noise; and this, Michel was thinking to himself, must be what gave him the sense, in observing it, of something . . . not as it should be.

Something out of phase.

Something-wrong?

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