Z-Sting Read online

  “I love you, Keri.”

  “I love you, Dana. When I drove myself to leave you, I died in the morning.”

  Textured silence.

  She whispered: “Dana—

  “Keri?”

  “Think of me cold and old. It will come. Can you think of this?”

  “I asked you for marriage, Keri. My father and mother are cold and old, and they are just beginning to comprehend what love is.”

  Beside them in uptime, Croyd coughed.

  Silence.

  Croyd: “There is a frightening old bit about the running sands of time. You two will grow cold in any event. If you wish also to grow old in a cosmos that includes Erth, I Suggest attention to questions of immediacy. The actuality of this room is luckily empty, and we have to get back to actuality and cut out in the scouter, we have a job of machine-killing to do.”

  Keri seemed momentarily to ignore Croyd. “A while back, Dana, I would have kissed you good-bye, I could not have left my father at this of all times in his life and our living death. But now I know that my father would want me to go with you, if he were sane. Which he has not been for a long time.”

  The Saguni brain-pattern had been blurry for Croyd who had much to learn about reading brain traces in uptime. This much he had gathered: Saguni did know the location of the Penultimate Trigger, at least, although the location itself hadn’t come clear to Croyd; and Saguni’s intent five days ago had been, for some inscrutable Riponese reason, to hole-out beneath the palace ruin at Knossos on Crest, awaiting Erthdoom. The obvious immediacy was to go to Knossos and find Saguni in actuality for mind-milking; but that would be a forty-minute scouter run.

  There was a quicker way, if Croyd hadn’t shot his wad again. At Keri’s window, with Dana and Keri already through it into the invisible scouter, Croyd paused to execute the same test he’d flunked yesterday on Moon. He flunked again: semi-readiness, then subsidence.

  That was possibly fatal. In uptime he could have rejoined Saguni, locked onto Saguni, traveled with Saguni wherever Saguni might have gone, emerged into actuality with Saguni wherever he might be, and twisted the truth out of Saguni with practically no time lost by reason of downtime acceleration. But now he was going to have to use ordinary human methods of finding Saguni—who might or might not be at Knossos.

  He followed his companions into the scouter. ‘Travel,” he told Dana.

  En route, there was hard talk between the men as to whether the Moskov tempopattern had been flaked along with Chihattan and Senevendia. Dana starkly confessed his guilty ignorance, but added unhappy trust that Pete Mulcahy had gone on and done it. But there was also a degree of Marana puzzlement. “Look, Croyd, COMCORD went critical yesterday morning, it should have hit 3•0 and blown hours ago; sure, countdown was suspended this morning. I caught that on radio a few minutes before I caught you with my wife—only, why was it suspended?”

  “I have a shrewd theory, Marana, and it has to do with a Manhattan Astrofleet lieutenant who is buying Senevendia.”

  Keri blurted: “Buying our Senevendia?”

  “Senevendian stocks and stuff, on pre-selected priority. She and I gambled that it would slow the countdown by dampening or even reversing the economic components of grievance, and apparently it has done so. It won’t work forever, though: already she must be running out of credits; this is only a ladyfinger in the dyke. But maybe we still have an hour or two—”

  “Listen” Marana cut in; and he turned up volume on the radio which had been providing mutter-background:

  . . . hear this. Mare Stellarum Internal Security Central, transiently at Moonbase, preempting all official bands. Now hear this. All Internal Security units on the COMCORD mission are directed to relax primary vigilance level and stay on duty at secondary vigilance level. Repeat: secondary vigilance level now operative; primary vigilance no longer necessary. We have located the source of the Z-waves. We have neutralized the Z-sting. Site of Z-sting is South Pole, deduced by analyzing COMCORD feedback fluctuations. Waves had in fact been prepared to target Senevendian tempopattern. Waves will not roll. Repeat: waves will not roll. Even if countdown is resumed and H-hour is triggered, waves will not roll. Stay on duty at secondary vigilance level. Mare Stellarum out.

  Three-way silence in the scouter.

  Keri, timidly: “The sense of the message tells me that we can now forget Saguni and return to care for the self-quieted body of my father. But we women have a thing called—”

  Croyd: “Intuition. It is not mystical. It is a complex of subliminal mental connections which cannot be analyzed by frontal logic. And sometimes it is valid, and sometimes it is not.”

  Keri: “Then my psych prof must have been right, because that is what he said.”

  Marana: “Grabbing wildly at these flying thoughts, I intuit that Croyd still wants to get off at Crest, which is just ahead now. Why?”

  Keri: “We don’t know exactly why, Dana—but we intuit that Internal Security only thinks it has solved the problem.”

  Croyd, having minutes of flight ahead, was pondering a memorized quote from Neocassandra in a 2474 issue of The Constellation Critic:

  Is COMCORD an ironical reality—or a bogey-myth brandished by Erthworld Union to keep over-ambitious constellations cowed by the threat of shroud? There is mounting suspicion that the sting of COMCORD—the implausibly hidden Z-sting, activable by a mysteriously concealed Penultimate Trigger when the Grievance Imbalance against some constellation tips to 3•0—either never existed, or no longer exists, or is no longer functional whether the World President knows it or not.

  Word about failsafes is added by President Aneed and by Chairman Evans—Marta, that is. Both of them assure us that any of three failsafes can stop the Z-waves after the sting is activated and before Erth impact: at Contact minus 43 minutes, at Contact minus 12½ minutes, or even at Contact minus three seconds, should the offending constellation convincingly repent just before receiving its cosmic curse. But such details, by multiplying circumstantiality, reduce credibility.

  Humans being what they are, sooner or later some constellation is going to find out by testing whether—somewhen between 7 hr 54 min 36 sec and 8 hr 36 min 54 sec after occurrence of a 3•0 imbalance (to lean on the suspiciously and inscrutably meticulous time legend)—the offending constellation is going to incur a ten-year frown from the Zeitgeist, the Epoch Spirit, and cease either to offend or to accomplish.

  That sample of Neocassandra’s applauded urbane pungency particularly challenged Croyd because its manifest insights gave a certain amount of weight to its baffling allusions. The passing reference to the Zeitgeist or Epoch Spirit: was it merely allusive—or had Neocassandra seen this, too?

  More to the present point: how about the failsafes mentioned in the second paragraph? Herod hadn’t mentioned failsafes. Were they a recourse which could now be used if needed? And again, with the failsafes, the cryptic suggestiveness of the time-intervals: 43 minutes—12½ minutes—3 seconds . . . And this had to be factual reporting; for an instant later, Neocassandra was quoting the exact time-interval extremes between which, after trigger activation, the Z-waves would strike. What were those time-interval meanings? Croyd should know . . .

  This much he did know: they didn’t square with a South Pole location for the Z-sting.

  In the Bull-Court of Minos it was not unprecedented for a skycab or scouter to drop a passenger, and it might or might not be a VIP, and Croyd had hit on a time during lunch hour and considerably prior to the first afternoon bull-baiting. Consequently there were only a few tourists to gape at the scouter; and when the disembarking passenger turned out to be only a lieutenant for Rab Astrofleet, they quickly lost interest, as he had hoped they might.

  The scouter departed, with rendezvous appointed. Croyd hesitated, considering the prehistoric bull ring which was in fact the broad courtyard of the Minos palace (rather than the minor theater down the hill below the north entry stair). He was not losing time, he was planning tactics; bu
t for him, hard thought moved more fluidly in the aesthetic context of a time-stretchout.

  The palace, whose restoration another Evans had begun nearly six centuries before, was now fully restored, as was every Minoan palace and small house on Crest: fully so, except for labyrinthine subterranean passages many of which remained virginal. The island had become, all in all, a living museum of remote antiquity, presenting the epoch when (as some said) Theseus had commanded a coalition of Mycenean and Kamatic forces to reduce the island empire by fire, or (as others said) a fiery erthquake had terminated the empire’s existence. And that had been about 1400 BC—nearly four millennia ago. Now this disastrous history was about to be replicated worldwide, only not by fire but by shroud.

  Above him, ranging an impressive distance left and right, gaily the windowed palace erected itself: a masterpiece of alabaster, whose multitudinous windows at bull-baiting time had been crowded with sunburned barechested lords, and with beauteous fair ladies in nineteenth-century Paris-type dresses with décolletages plunging so deep that their breasts had been bare until they discovered the superior coquetry of diaphanous dickeys. And he knew that far beneath wound a catacomb of not-completely-excavated passages constituting the legendary labyrinth of Minos, a labyrinth once thought to have been the mystical haunt of the bull-headed Minotaur, later thought to have been earlier labyrinthine palaces, now fully understood as a complex ranging of earlier palaces and far-reaching rock caverns extending outward and downward to below the level of the sea.

  Croyd would have liked nothing better than to be a tourist here, preferably with credentials which would have allowed him to explore all at many-day leisure. He knew what there was in that palace: the broad stairways, the columns of red-stained cedar tapering perversely with broad tops and narrow bottoms (because of the aperçu that you had to plant a tree upside-down to prevent it from growing), the religious craftsmanship which took the trouble to engrave a double-axe symbol in the center of the capital of every column where nobody could ever possibly see it, the unbelievably impressionistic artistry of the murals with octopi and seaweed and lotuses and hunting cats and snake-women, the queen’s megaron, the queen’s toilet-throne with rushing water far beneath, the oddly awkward-austere throne of Minos, the tapered-section system of drain pipes that still worked enthusiastically when (about six hundred years ago) that other Evans had uncovered them after thirty-five hundred years of burial . . .

  And Croyd knew also the island: he had explored much of it. The harsh cliffs along the northeastern shore, faintly recalling the gloom-cliffs of Rab. The taciturn harsh-living harsh-customed natives in the shaley western highlands. The central-southern marshes which, until gases had exterminated the mosquitoes, had been the haunts of the malaria demon. The flat irregular southern shores where prehistoric Egyptian sailors had first discovered the double-axe and the snake-goddess; the delicate summer palace at Hagia Triada . . .

  But there was no time for exploring, not even for more of the reminiscence that had already used more than thirty seconds of his time while with his hindbrain he had been seeking tactical intuition. He had to go straight for his quarry.

  Therefore Croyd reluctantly avoided both the Grand Staircase on the western façade and the Main Staircase hidden behind a bulkhead of alabaster to the east. Instead, proceeding northwest diagonally toward a corner of the great courtyard, he entered a low rectangular doorway created by a row of magical double-horns: entered sunless dimness, moving cautiously along a corridor without artificial lights—it was not a tourist avenue. After a few paces, the left wall was blank stone, alabaster presumably; but he passed five doorways to his right, each opening onto a long narrow chamber without furnishings, these chambers having been storage rooms and containing massive dark shapes which probably were pithoi.

  Past the fifth door, the narrow corridor rectangled right; and he moved northward about ten paces toward a darkness of dead-end stone—wishing all the time that he knew how to uptime four thousand years into the vitality of Minos—if at the instant he could uptime, if he dared now squander his uptime energy; reflecting dismally that so far his maximum uptiming had been forty-four years, cheering himself with the counter-reflection that he could uptime some . . .

  At the dead end there was a broad opening to the left. This wall-end he rounded, finding himself in an indefinitely long corridor leading straight south alongside and far beyond the one he had just traversed, proceeding possibly the whole length of the palace courtyard’s west façade.

  Despite mortal time pressure, he moved with care: his time margin was indefinite, but the cost of a blunder would be incalculable. He counted scarcely visible doorways, no more than hand-feelable wall breaks. After fifty paces, finding the third break to his right, he foot-felt his way into it. Having moved ten paces west in total darkness, he came to another dead end, rounded another wall end to the left, inched eight paces east and just missed falling into a downward stairway.

  It was as anticipated from his 2399 curiosity study of some archaeological sketch-plans. With infinite caution he worked his way down the stair in blackness, keeping a hand on the left wall; and when he was sure that no random guide or policeman above would be likely to notice, he switched on a pencil-torch and had thin light. Below him, the stair continued interminably downward.

  He debouched into the true labyrinth of Minos: the old underground palace built by Dedalus in 2500 BC or thereabouts, recently excavated along lines that the 2399 AD archaeologist had indicated, but as yet obscure and unsafe and therefore not available to tourism. It extended, Croyd was sure, all the way into rock caverns in the cliffs overlooking the Central Sea on the northern shore of Crete.

  Saguni, however, would not have penetrated that far in. There was a little matter of coming out for food and water . . .

  Flashing his light around, Croyd found a long passageway and two doorways, one on either side. He called: “Saguni! I know you are here! If you move, I shoot!” It was a wild guess: if Saguni were hereabouts, he might either disclose himself or freeze; if he were not hereabouts, it did not matter.

  No motion. Saguni was elsewhere, or Saguni had frozen.

  Toe-feeling his way along gravel, Croyd advanced several paces to the doorways, flashed left, flashed right. Barren rooms inadequately disclosed. No motion.

  On a chance, he penetrated the left-hand doorway and reconnoitered the cell with his pencil-beam.

  Only several pithoi deep in the cell . . .

  Momentum hit his back, driving him paces forward while hard arms locked about his throat. He wanted to ejaculate, “There you are, Saguni!” but arm-throttling choked it. Automatically his hands grasped an enemy wrist and twisted it: the wrist didn’t twist: Saguni was wiry-trained, he had surprise, he intended to win. Legs and feet scissor-locked around Croyd’s hips, and Croyd began to feel neural distress complicated by strangulation. He had dropped his pencil-torch, darkness was complete, defeat seemed certain.

  He might have uptimed out of it. He did not; it seemed unsporting. He did cheat to the extent of using his nonbreathing procedure which deferred the strangulation but did nothing to help the neural pain at throat and hips, indeed the neural paralysis.

  He thought, unable to say it: Man to man . . . Reaching backward, he wrapped his arms around the back of Saguni’s neck; but then he remembered that he must neither kill Saguni nor terminate the man’s consciousness. There remained, however, a little matter of Croyd’s own consciousness; and as the scissor-steel tightened on throat and hips, that was wavering.

  Now only about one-third frontal and two-thirds parietal. Croyd switched his counterattack: slipping off one of the Saguni slippers, with both hands he attacked the toes.

  The arms about his throat tightened. The legs about his hips were possibly loosening a little. It was great agony against small agony, in the context of an imminent Penultimate Trigger. Why was this buffoonery necessary, when a little responsible control by Marta and/or by Ziska might have . . .

  C
royd twisted toes. Saguni’s legs went slacker, arms went tighter. Croyd had been unable to breathe for minutes, his neck was racked with paralytic pain that thrust into his shoulders. He dared not uptime to suffocate Saguni, he needed Saguni alive. Between them, no sound had been uttered . . .

  Releasing toes, Croyd gripped Saguni’s neck, bent, and flipped. Saguni flew over Croyd’s shoulders but hung in midair, clinging to Croyd’s neck. Moving to a wall, Croyd methodically swung his own body back and forth, beating against the wall Saguni’s body.

  Saguni let go of Croyd’s neck and fell. Croyd in darkness dropped upon Saguni, pinning him hard, two-man breathing during nearly two minutes. Saguni gasped: “Please let me up. I wish to do hara-kiri.”

  Through his damaged throat Croyd managed to croak intelligibly: “Talk first, and then perhaps I will help you do it.”

  Saguni closed his eyes and clamped shut his mouth.

  “Then,” asserted Croyd whose midbrain was busily restoring control to his larynx, “I will talk to you. President Andhra has a complication of weltschmerz, nature love, man hatred, and death urge. Possibly there is also a negative Oedipus; and surely he was toilet trained too soon, which may account for the negative Oedipus. The main thing is, he couldn’t face a realistic opportunity to play God. He also has some dirt on you: a too-early toilet-trained man can be good at ferreting out dirt on other people, and doubtless his negative Oedipus had sensitized him to the kind of dirt he got.”