"Even stranger. Really forceful personality, and die-you-bitch-die gorgeous. In a very odd way . . .
sort of like the most dangerous jock elf you ever saw."
"Oh, come on now, Jenny—in Danielle Steel, maybe, you get gorgeous seductresses starting wildly successful companies and making a mint before they're forty. Even in the romances they're mainly in cosmetics."
Jennifer shrugged.
If you only knew how seductive.
There were some things, however, that you didn't tell even your best friends.
"Every once in a while, truth has to be stranger than fiction," she said.
***
The reception room was empty except for standard office furniture, a stack of used magazines and one of the new voice-recognition computer receptionists. Henry hated them; it was like talking to an answering machine . . . although come to think of it, Lafarge probably had one that could do literary criticism, or even something really difficult like ordering Chinese and making sure the restaurant understood not to add MSG.
"Fortress of Solitude?"
The voice came out of the air. Carmaggio hid a start.
"Local reference," the detective said.
He went through the door behind the desk of the non-existent receptionist and through a corridor flanked by storerooms. Up a flight of iron stairs, and then past a plain bedroom and another, larger space fitted out as a gym. The workroom occupied most of the rear of the building, full of tables and conduits and enigmatic shapes on overhead trackways; Lafarge was bending over a mechanical shape held in a clamp.
Something almost familiar lay on a cloth spread across a bench nearby.
"It's a plasma gun," Lafarge said, without looking up from the workbench. "I'm making a number of them."
Henry picked up a finished model, keeping his hands well away from the trigger assembly. It was about the length of a short rifle, with a butt-plate at the rear and a short stubby barrel at the front. He swung it up to his shoulder, and a LCD display just in front of his eye came live. A red dot appeared on the wall, moving as his hands pivoted the weapon.
"This'll bring her down?" he asked.
"Quite effectively. There's a range next door, and a target set up."
Henry took the hint. Lafarge's workroom gave him a mild set of the creeps, anyway. Not that he knew much about laboratory equipment, but he could
recognize
it. A lot of the stuff around him was perfectly ordinary high-tech gear. Among it were . . . differences. Melted-looking apparatus that gave no clue to its function except that things
happened.
One was about the size of an attache case, with flanged pans on either side. The left-hand pan held an assortment of materials: coins, small ingots, bundles of wire.
The pile shifted occasionally, as if bits were disappearing from beneath. Something was forming on the other pan, small and complex and precise.
"It's a faber—a fabricator," Lafarge said, following Henry's eyes. He could do that, somehow, without looking up. "Just a portable model. What I wouldn't give for a full-scale industrial type! As it is, I'm using it for the absolute essentials and relying on local components for the rest. I'll be through here in a minute."
The detective walked through into the long target range. A rack held local weapons, mostly highly illegal; a Barrett .50 sniper rifle, assault weapons, a couple of machine guns, high-capacity handguns.
Ammunition was stored below. At the other end of the narrow room was a metal plate, with outlines sketched on it. Human figures, for the most part, and something that looked like a giant baboon with a knife.
He brought the plasma weapon to his shoulder. It balanced remarkably well, easy and precise. That put his eye behind what he'd assumed was an optical sight. Instead it was some sort of video display, very clear. The targets leaped up to within apparent arm's length of him, much more brightly lit than the rather dim background.
"Slick," he muttered. He steadied the red dot on the chest of an outline, and his finger stroked the trigger with remembered gentleness.
CRACK
Henry sprang back with a yell, almost dropping the weapon. The sound was stunning in the confined space, but it was the flash that startled him, like close-range lightning. He swore and shook his head, pawing at his eyes and blinking at the afterimages and tears. The air stank of ozone and hot metal, a dry angry smell.
"Sorry," Lafarge said from behind him. "I forgot you didn't have implanted protectors. Here."
He held out a pair of goggles, each eye covered by a hemisphere of some nonreflective material.
"Golly gee, Batman," Henry growled.
If he had any sense of humor, I could
resent
that remark.
But he didn't, so presumably he really had forgotten.
The goggles were simply a pressure on his face, utterly invisible from the inside.
Not quite,
he decided after an instant. The ambient light level had gone up. He looked over at the target again, squinting .
. . and jerked as the point-of-view rushed toward his focus, steadying at about six inches away. A fist-sized hole had been punched in the metal, the edges still glowing a sullen red with the heat. Something paler showed behind.
"What is that stuff?" he asked.
"An absorbent plastic for trapping solid shot, backed by an inch and a half of titanium steel,"
Lafarge said. "With a ceramic baffle behind that."
Henry's lips shaped a silent whistle as he looked down at the weapon in his hands. "Shit," he said reverently. "Now, that's
firepower.
"
He swung it up to his shoulder again.
Line-of-sight,
he thought. That would make aiming dead easy. "What's the range?" he asked.
"Several kilometers, depending on field-strengths in the vicinity."
"This would make infantry work real interesting," Henry mused. "Watch out."
He fired again. CRACK This time the light was only a bar of brightness across his vision. The recoil was a lovetap, about like a .22 rifle. With this sucker you could snipe out tanks and shoot down fighter jets—no lead-off, striking in an absolutely straight line at the speed of light.
"This is sort of like the gun that Ingolfsson's got?"
"Very like, although a little more bulky. Both twenty-first-century designs, quite basic. I analyzed the impacts from the weapon in Bermuda, and it's an antique. Probably
it
was carrying an old model for sentimental reasons, or as a trophy. I did tell you it's one of the first generation of its kind?"
"Yeah," Henry said.
I just shot a fucking ray gun,
he thought. Even now, every once in a while it came up and bit him on the ass.
"How many of these have you got?"
"Half a dozen," the man from the future said. "I can make a few more, perhaps twenty or thirty, in the next few weeks. The bottleneck's the components from my faber, and assembly; I have to do that myself. One torso hit with one of these should kill it. And I'm making some backpack shield generators.
They'll offer some defense against its hand-weapon."
"That doesn't solve our basic problem," Henry pointed out, putting the plasma rifle down reluctantly.
One shot to the head. Sigh.
It wasn't that simple.
"I have to get at its systems," Lafarge said. "Here, and in the Bahamas. Simultaneously. To do that, I have to either get the
drakensis
out of its nest and immobilized for at least a few days, or I have to get someone on the inside to plant some devices of my own. With that, I can disarm the trigger system for the biobomb, and then we can kill it."
Henry grinned. "Well, kemosabe, your faithful native sidekick may just be able to help you with that."
***
Kenneth Lafarge walked through Central Park, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat. The AI scanned again, through the numberless sensors amid the vegetation and life all around him.
no anomalous presences,
it said.
I wonder if I'm being foolish?
he thought.
Unfortunately, that was not a question the quasisentients made of graven atoms could answer.
Knowledge and logic they had, even a kind of consciousness, but neither wisdom nor folly. Those, only the non-algorithmic brains of organo-sentients could produce.
He took a deep breath, cold with the late-spring rains. It brought his attention back from the multiple feed of the nanobugs, like closing a thousand eyes. Even with only his own sight, everything had the laser-cut diamond clarity of the overdrive system laid along his neurons. He could hear the
drakensis
long before he saw it, hear its heartbeat and breathing. When he did see, it was almost shocking. Hardly different from any native human woman, sitting in slacks and roll-necked sweater and long unbuttoned coat.
There was a book on the bench beside her.
It certainly looks human now,
he thought; then remembered to clamp down on subvocalization.
***
She leaned back and set the bag of nuts on the bench, crossing her ankles and her arms.
"It?" she said to the tall blond man. "It? Come now. I
am
a female hominid, if not exactly the same species as you. Surely I rate a
she,
at least."
He lowered his head slightly into his broad shoulders, motionless and silent as none of the primitives she'd met here could ever be. She enjoyed the sensation of danger for a second, a subtle pleasure, then sighed at his boulder-solid patience. He'd be thoroughly buffered against pheromonal dominance, of course.
His scent was as odd as his body language: human, but with overtones of something else. Almost mechanical, in fact.
"Has it occurred to you," she said, after they had studied each other for a moment, "that our little conflict here is a paradigm for the past six centuries? Six centuries of our own history, that is, not this timeline."
He showed his teeth slightly. "It must be frustrating, never being able to get away from us pestiferous Yankees."
"There is that," she said, inclining her head. "But I was mostly commenting on the futility of it all."
His eyes shifted to the book. Wittfogel,
Oriental Despotism.
"Odd choice," he said.
"You recognize it?"
"I've looked through the literature here."
"Interesting analysis," Gwen said. "Very acute. Nothing like it in our history, that I have data on; although if someone had come up with this back when, my ancestors would probably have killed him. They were an intolerant lot."
His brows rose. "You aren't?"
"We
drakensis
don't need ideology, much; we've got genetics instead. Our social order is hard-coded into our nervous systems." She saw the distaste on his face, an infinitesimal movement of his facial muscles.
"What is there to discuss?" he asked.
"We're neither of us constrained to obey the dictates of our societies," she said equably. "Even Draka have free will, of a sort."
"You're offering to surrender?"
At that she laughed, a clear warm sound. "No more than you, cyber-warrior. Come now, though; you must be an intelligent man. Why should we extend the feuds of our respective peoples here?"
"Duty."
She nodded. "Consider the implications, though. I've been giving this 'many worlds' matter some serious thought. There are a near-infinite number of variations on possible outcomes. Ones where I never came here; ones where you never came here. Ones where half of me got chopped off by the transition phase shift, like poor Wulfa's arm. Ones where I've already won, ones where
you've
already won."
"In other words, there has to be an alternate where every possible outcome occurs. What of it?
That doesn't alter the fact that each of
us
has only one world-line to live on and it's the only one we get.
The event wave is deterministic in retrospect."
"A point—yet we live in the present, not retrospectively, and anticipate the future. But it's also true that, practically speaking, nothing we can do here will ever affect our home time-line. Considering the physics . . . there has to be a substantial degree of fuzziness, somehow, in any world-line's location in the universe's wave function. You may well not be from
exactly
the same timeline that I am—if exactly has any meaning, in this situation. And if I succeed in building an anchoring beacon, the world-line I contact may be subtly different from the one I left. I'd probably never know for sure."
The Samothracian went very still, even by contrast with his usual state.
Aha,
Gwen thought.
I hit,
with that
one.
Her hypothesis on the physics must have been correct. That alone made all this trouble worthwhile.
"Interesting," he said at last. "But why set up a meeting to discuss the obvious?"
"Who else is there to talk to?" Gwen said. "The natives?"
He made an angry gesture with his head. "I might have expected you to underestimate them."
"Because they're human? Not in the least. I don't underestimate
you,
I assure you. I assume you've got some of them working under you—"
"
With
me," he corrected.
"—as I do. They're often quite intelligent. They just don't have our knowledge base. Look at the way they're wrecking the planet. It'll be uninhabitable in another century, at this rate."
"'Only on a straight-line extrapolation. There are feedback mechanisms already at work to correct the negative trends; there usually are in an open system. Overcontrol is hubris. You snakes were always prone to that."
"A judgment call." She sat up. "Here's my point," she said. "You're here to prevent me from contacting the Domination, correct?"
"That's one of my mission priorities," he acknowledged.
"Well, then," she said, "why not divvy the place up ourselves? Easier on the locals than fighting over it. You get the Western Hemisphere, I get the Old World. That means you control my only access to the Domination timeline; and you can't access the one you came through, I'm pretty sure it's way off-planet."