Zelazny, Roger - Novel 05 Read Free Page B

prolongation and interstellar travel ... It seemed
more than a little strange, no matter how delicately Paul put it.
                   As we had eaten oranges in the shade of the
water-processing plant, its doubtless onetime sleek and shiny walls softened
partly by weather and partly by the intervention of lilac and wisteria to a
monastery-like finish, I had stroked her hair and she had plucked the pale-green
hellebore, that ancient remedy for madness, tangling those flowers in my own,
and my thoughts had strayed beyond the severely drawn diagrams of skull and
walls, softened by their froths of blossoms, and into the completely automatic
workings of the installation, whose sounds were repeated to us, softly,
inevitably, as it took in, purified and spewed through underground conduits I
knew not how many thousands of gallons of the sea, and I considered the dual
nature of Herbert Styler, field representative for Doxford Industries on the
planet called Alvo, so far removed from the pale human star we formed as to be
equally inconceivable, but this time she did not notice and say, "What is
it?" as I wondered whether the man who had undergone experimental neural
abridgment of a kind still illegal on Earth, supposedly permitting him full
conscious access to the workings of a great computer complex, whether this man,
who, for his company, stood in the way of COSA's expansion on the choicest of
the outworlds, could be considered a machine with a human personality or a man
with a computer mind, and whether what I had been asked to do was properly
homicide or something totally new—say, mechanicide or cybicide— while the muted
thudding of the sea and the nearer vibration of the waterworks came into us,
along with the fragrances of the blossoms and the touch of salt the breezes
bore.
                   Paul had assured me that I would be given the
best training and equipment available for the fulfillment of the contract. He
had then recommended that I take a trip.
                   "Get away for a time," he had said,
and, 'Think about it."
                   Staring up through the night, feeling the
cold, wondering whether I could kill him, get away, come back and start over,
fresh and clean, belonging here, my other life as dead and sealed then ...
                   "I will try to," I said, and let the
curtain fall.
                   Here, then.
                   . . . Seeing her seated beneath that crazy
holiday-tree, soft hair fixed with a pale, coral clip, head and hand moving as
she transferred her sheep to paper, precise, deliberate; then a brightening of
the day, the fall of my shadow, her attention, the turning of her head, the
movement of her arm as she raised her hand to shade her eyes, me dismounting,
twisting the reins about a branch, starting down toward her, reaching for a
word, a face, her nod, her slow smile ...
                   Here.
                   ... Seeing the fire-flowers unfold all in a
row beneath me, the final blossom covering half of the building, its target; my
vehicle faltering, diving, burning then, myself ejected, the cabin intact about
me and moving with a life of its own, dodging, darting, firing, downward and
forward, downward and forward, coming apart then and dropping me gently, gently
down, my prosthetic armor making the barest of clicks as my feet touch the ground
and the repellors cut off; and then my lasers lancing forward, cutting through
the figures who advance upon me, grenades flying from my hands, waves of
protoplasm-shattering ultrasonics flowing from me like notes from some rung,
invisible bell...
                   How many androids and robots I smashed, mockup
buildings I razed, obstacles I destroyed, projectiles I hurled in the two
months that followed, there on that barren worldlet where I was taken to be
familiarized with all the latest methods of violence, I do not know. Many.