For Clifford D. Simak
Contents:
Prologue: Status Report
1. The Trouble With Chanchuk
2. Facing The Inevitable
3. Four Parrots And One Cooked Goose, With Fireworks
4. Reflections Toward An Ending
5. Up A Tree
6. Cowboys And Indians
7. The Ring Of Rings
8. The Malebolge Run
9. The Final Battle
10. The Masks Of The Martyrs
11. The Face Of The Enemy
Epilogue:
About The Author
Prologue: Status Report
THE NICE THING ABOUT BEING DEAD WAS THAT YOU could, without any fear or guilt, do all those things that were dangerous or unacceptable when one was alive. The problem was, they really didn’t have the same effect.
Arnold Nagy was definitely dead. His body had been crushed under the tremendous forces he had unleashed in a fight with a Val death ship. He’d beaten Master System’s killers—robots with the minds and memories of their human quarries—and had been the only casualty. The crew had determined him dead and then buried him in space by shooting his lifeless body out an airlock, there to drift forever around some lonely sun.
Now he sat in his domed, velvet-lined base of exile, far from the battle yet surrounded by all the comforts anyone could wish except, of course, companionship. That came rarely, and when it did come the company was less than joyous and convivial.
He longed for human company, for real people who talked and laughed and cried and did all the things people did. That was the ultimate curse he had to bear. It was why he called his luxurious hideaway hell, in spite of all the comforts it provided. Hell was wherever he was, regardless of the surroundings, even with people about. Humans just made hell more bearable. There was a line from Faust that said it; a line spoken by Mephistopheles, chief agent of Satan, when asked in Faust’s cozy study what hell was like.
“Why, this is Hell, nor am I out of it.”
Nagy went over and sat down at his data screen and punched up the progress report. He’d read it a million times, but he still needed to read it again for his own sake.
Item: Master System—which ruled over Earth and more than four hundred and fifty worlds to which humans had been forcibly transported and then altered to fit the environments—could be turned off only because of a safety mechanism designed into it by its makers. Five ornate gold rings hid the tiny and complex microcircuits that were required by the master program’s core instructions to always be in the possession of humans with authority. Master System scattered the rings throughout the galaxy to make any attempt at uniting them next to impossible, since it alone controlled commerce and trade and space flight. To find all five would be improbable. To get all five was even less likely. To then get them to the master interface where they could be used, and to use them in the correct order, unthinkable. Humanity was ignorant of the rings’ existence, let alone their use.
Item: More than nine hundred years after Master System assumed control, knowledge of the rings was unearthed in the papers of an illegal cult of independent scientists in the South American jungles on Earth. Ambitious humans who had learned to beat some of the system managed to get copies and make a deal with the only possessor of a ring on Earth: Lazlo Chen, the chief administrator.
Item: The courier taking the papers to Chen was intercepted by Vals and shot down over the North American plains, falling into the hands of a Plains Indian, Jon Nighthawk, or more simply Hawks, on leave with his primitive people from his job as a historian at North America Center. He and wife, Cloud Dancer, found themselves pursued by the Vals, the great robot agents of Master System, and by Chen’s agents, including a Crow Indian named Raven. Raven caught them first and transported them first to Chen, then to Melchior, an asteroid penal colony controlled by Doctor Isaac Clayben, regarded by most as a human incarnation of Master System even though he, too, hated the computer.
Item: At almost the same time, Song Ching, daughter of the chief administrator of China Center, discovered in another illegal tech cult’s papers that for some unknown reason Master System had built a human interface into all its spaceships. The recovered documents and research showed just how to tap into that interface and control virtually any spaceship built by Master System. A product of a long-term genetic breeding experiment by her emotionally cold father, she fled China Center rather than become yet another breeder in his grand design and wound up on Melchior, as well.
Item: Nagy, as chief security officer of Melchior, had been playing a double game as the agent of the enemy Master System said it was at war with—a stalemated war no one knew anything about, including the nature and location of either the enemy or the battleground. He had placed the Indians and the Chinese together, along with others already on Melchior—all selected for a possible attempt to locate and steal the rings—and allowed them to escape to an interplanetary ship whose computer intelligence was independent of Master System. Song Ching, blinded by Clayben and turned into a biological breeding machine to keep her father’s experiment going, was allowed to discover the existence of a mothballed fleet of giant ships once used to take millions of humans to other worlds and there to transform them into whatever form necessary to survive on a particular planet. Before Master System raided Melchior and shut it down, Nagy and Clayben also escaped in a smaller interstellar craft prepared for just that purpose. Eventually, Nagy and Clayben joined the group as uneasy allies.
Item: Along with the escapees, there is one who is not at all human but rather a creature of Clayben’s design, a creature capable of absorbing and then mentally and physically duplicating any other organic being. Bred originally as the first of a synthetic army that could bypass Master System’s defenses, it proved impossible to control and had been kept sedated and contained for many years on Melchior. Once free, it agreed for its own reasons to join them—as Nagy and his bosses counted on from the start. Because the leader of the expedition is the Amerind historian Hawks, the security man is Raven, and the ship’s computer who has joined them as an independent ally is called Star Eagle, the creature names itself Vulture.
Item: Spotted by Vals in the freebooter trading post run by Fernando Savaphoong, an oily crook whose greed is surpassed only by his deceit, the renegades were attacked by Master System and the freebooter base was destroyed. Savaphoong escaped by the skin of his teeth and linked up with some refugee freebooter ships with no place left to go. Contacted by Hawks, they joined together to form a pirate fleet named after the huge ship at its center—the Pirates of the Thunder. But during a fight with the Val ships, Nagy was killed and his body disposed of in deep space.
Item: Using Vulture to duplicate a native and scout the target planet, several members of the Thunder band infiltrated the Hindu world of Janipur—where one of the rings lay in a guarded museum—after first being changed into the strange Janipurian form by the same devices that created the original Janipurians. The devices, called transmuters, were deliberately designed so that a being could be changed only once; a second attempt would kill. Together, the infiltrators and Vulture were able to steal the ring and elude pursuit by Vals and members of Master System’s human shock troops, the System Peacekeeping Forces, or SPF. However, to extricate their people and the ring requires the pirates to fight a space battle with the Vals, automated fighters, and the SPF, and this is accomplished only at great cost —and served to put Master System on full alert.
Item: A second group infiltrates the planet Matriyeh the same way: by becoming natives, with Vulture leading the way and spying from the inside. This world is so primitive Master System depends on the limited society and harshness of life there to defend the ring. It is a herculean task to get it, particularly since it is guarded by a semihuman Val in the guise of a beautiful goddess. If the ring or its guardian is removed, all the forces of Master System would be alerted, forcing another battle Master System can well afford but the pirates can’t. They might steal the ring and replace the Val with one of their own crew transformed into an exact replica of the guardian—all so quickly and covertly that none of the SPF or automated alarms on this world are aware that the ring is missing. Again, however, there is cost, as they might lose some of their number in the attempt and others must stay behind to maintain the secrecy of their success.
Item: The pirates of the Thunder are well down in strength, even more so in the number of people who can still be transmuted and still have no idea as to the location of the interface or how the rings must be used. They still have two rings to steal and know the approximate location of only one of them. The impossible odds faced throughout are growing astronomic with the passage of time, and the vast forces arrayed against them become stronger all the time. And as always, Master System waits to pounce on their smallest error.
Arnold Nagy sighed and gulped down the rest of his drink.
So far, so good, he thought nervously.
1. The Trouble With Chanchuk
THE VULTURE SWAM THROUGH THE DARK WATERS OF Chanchuk away from the Lodge of the Reverend Mother. At the moment, Vulture was female, but that would soon change—the new target and identity had already been selected. It was mostly a matter of awaiting the opportune moment when the key elements of the operation would come together.
It was spring in this part of Chanchuk; the covering ice had all long since broken, melted, and flowed away to the Great Sea and the water was now a comfortable six degrees Celsius, not at all bad. Visibility was always poor this close in to the coast and was never very good at any depth. Not that Chanchukian eyesight was poor; the inner, transparent lid on each eye allowed the eyes to be open and alert at all times, but there was only so much light and there were incredible shadows and distortions. One quickly learned to trust sound over sight down here.
Chanchuk had been one of Master System’s more creative inventions, both as a world and culture and as creative biological redesign.
It was probable that, when the great computer decided to disperse humanity throughout a full quadrant of the Milky Way galaxy as part of its imperative to ensure human survival, it always had biological redesign in mind even if the slowness of terraforming hadn’t forced that decision on it. It was not enough to carry off ninety percent of the population of Earth to new worlds; it was also important to make them so different and so unique to their new habitats that they would have little desire to return to Earth even if such a chance were afforded them. The greater the differences—and physiological differences back on Earth far simpler and more basic than these had been the basis for much human hatred and prejudice—the less chance over the passage of time that scattered humanity would ever even dream of reuniting.
Chanchuk had presented particular problems to the great computer. Its land surface was fierce, violent, and not terribly habitable by any great numbers. The tropics were a steamy hell; the rest was desert, tundra, or high and inaccessible mountains, all without any hope of large-scale agriculture. Only the vast seas had any promise, and could become the breeding grounds for hordes of specialized sea creatures who would reproduce in profusion over the whole of the planet’s waters. And to keep their numbers from choking off other marine life, there would have to be large numbers of predators, until the most predatory of all, humankind, could establish itself firmly and permanently on the new world.
Partly because of the predators required at the start, and also because of the need to maintain a humanlike culture under the difficult conditions presented by so vast a seabed, the people of Chanchuk had to be sea dwellers but not creatures of the sea.
Vulture “smelled” rather than saw the entrance to her lodge and made for it, then came up quickly into the entry chamber and back into the air. The average Chanchukian female could hold her breath for up to an hour and dive as deep as a thousand meters without artificial aid, but they were still air-breathing mammals and it was always a pleasure to breathe air again.
An entry chamber was never very fancy; it was like the vestibule of a good home, where you left your mess before entering the decent parts of the house. Like most, it was lined with absorbent dahagi, a giant sea sponge that felt wonderful when you shook off the water and then rolled around for a few moments. Then it was up to the inner entry chamber, where a special fan and heater would finish the drying process thoroughly and quickly. Afterward, one was presentable enough to enter the main lodge. It was an addition only for the elite of the Center; the masses were allowed no such technology and relied on natural breezes or lived with being wet.
Vulture entered the Great Room and noted that the lamps were lit in spite of the fact that it was still day. She looked up at the skylights above and saw dark clouds; the roar of a good rainstorm echoed dully inside as the storm beat upon the solid lodges of the People. Funny how the two worlds hardly interacted from a Chanchu-kian point of view. Vulture had been out all day, but until she’d entered the Great Room she had no idea that it was raining.
Butar Killomen of the spaceship Kaotan was preparing a snack in the kitchen area—it smelled like hai ka, a particularly tasty candy that was a Chanchukian favorite. She looked far different from the muscular, tailed, hairless gray-skinned creature she had been born as, but that was the price of the rings that would bring their freedom. Vulture liked her much better this way, and certainly Killomen didn’t seem particularly upset by the change.
Of course, the key to any success they had to date was that all of them were outcasts and fugitives from their own people. Killomen had been a freebooter, living outside of and between the cracks of the system. Except for those from Earth and some from the late crew of the Indrus, all of them had been pretty much unique.
The people of Chanchuk were covered with a thick, oily fur in shades ranging from golden to red to brown to black. On land they were bipeds, with broad hands and fingers that were linked two-thirds of their length with thick black webbing. The ears, although sensitive, were fur-covered and resembled mere depressions in the side of the flat, squat head. The noses were broad and black, with flaps that closed and sealed when underwater, flanked by thick, long whiskers and a mouth that looked small but could open to swallow something half the size of the head. The twin-lidded eyes—the inner lid transparent as glass and actually increasing sensitivity to light —were brown, rounded, inset balls perfectly suited for the two worlds of Chanchuk, water and air, although it made them nearsighted to a degree and painted their world in patterns of sepia-stained monochrome while bringing any object into startling three-dimensional life. That was what the few on this team missed most: color. But they’d gotten used to it by now.
The bodies were thick, impossibly lithe, almost plastic in their ability to bend any which way. In the water, the legs and long, webbed feet formed a single horizontal tail that could propel them with dolphinlike speed. On land, they bent outward, slightly bowlegged, the feet bent forward to allow a comic, yet quite serviceable, walk, and the thick membrane that bent in the water to serve as a dorsal fin hung down to become a balance-aiding paddlelike tail. Raven said that they reminded him of the Pacific sea otter, but none of those who were actually down here in that form had ever seen or heard of such a creature.