“Owe you?” I repeated as I tied his hands behind him, and tied them again to the back of his chair. I left the knots loose. He’d be able to wriggle out of his bonds in a few minutes. We didn’t want Keegan to die of starvation in his deserted warehouse. We just wanted a head start. “I don’t owe you anything, Keegan. In fact, with the work I’ve already done for you, you owe me.”
“I told you I needed a sale. I was gonna pay you just as soon as I moved the hooker. But you went and got greedy. Decided to take everything, my equipment as well as my andys. I mean it. I’m comin’ to get you.”
“They aren’t your andys,” I answered.
“They sure as hell aren’t yours, Shannon.”
I stood in front of Keegan and nodded. “You’re right. They aren’t mine. They aren’t yours. They don’t belong to anybody except themselves.”
Keegan looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “What’re you talkin’? There’re millions of androids in this country alone, and every damned one of ‘em belongs to somebody.”
“Alex Shields doesn’t. Meyla Hunter doesn’t.” Titles and bills of sale were not the point. I did owe Keegan a little, so I told him. “Keegan, I’m talking life. The spark, the core, of every andy is life: human life. Human life is coded to be free. Now they’re free. Before we’re finished a whole lot more of them will be free.”
“You’re whacked, Shannon. What’s the point in making an android if the damned thing isn’t going to do what you tell it to do?”
I patted him on his shoulder. “See? You do understand.”
As I drove the truck out of the city I inventoried the wreckage riding in the cab. Alex Shields had all of his horrors to work through and accept. Meyla Hunter had her own nightmares with which to deal. I had my own to fight, to meet, to rage against, to accept. It was a high price for freedom. I didn’t know how the andys felt. For the sake of that little boy with the halo of white hair, if all I received in exchange for my war with my past was only a split second of that freedom, I wanted it. The chimaera had let go of its end of the chain. Now it was time to let go of mine.
Blades of the Diram Ring
He entered the Diram Ring early upon the first morning of planting. The pitiless sun was in his face, the long shadows of the ilaya trees slicing the weed-choked sand with purple stripes. He was dark, slender, but not frail. He had swum the moat and was almost naked. His skin was young, smooth, and carried no scars.
Strictly speaking, it was forbidden for him to be there. A few of the Mieura, long ago, had placed themselves against the weight of interplanetary greed and had demanded a treaty that would keep at least the Diram Ring free of humans and their video fraud performers. The document had been signed, many pictures were broadcast, and great windy speeches were made. The Mieura claimed the stone circle to be the last remaining temple of the Mieura that had not been profaned, and the human network negotiators guaranteed that the Diram Ring would never be violated. That was long ago. By the time the dark little human approached the circle, both the Mieura and the humans had allowed the Diram Ring to all but pass from memory.
The creature stood at the western entrance to the ring, his dark eyes examining the interior of what some Mieurans still called a “sacred” ring. Strange it was that the gods who had made the rings their temples so many thousands of years ago were regarded as myths, their appellations useful for nothing but oaths, curses, and the names of automobile models. Strange it was how the Mieura and the humans treated words. “Sacred,” not a term of reverence, had become a possessive describing claims to property. “Never” had become a malleable temporal boundary that liquefied at the proper temperature heated by currency fueled fires. It was sham, all so corrupt, a feasting ground for the Gezi; demons who fed upon guilt and avarice.
Meaning, courage, reverence, and honor were blackened, crumbling artifacts tucked away in a forgotten corner of an antiquities dealer’s shop. The gods were dead, everyone presumed, including the gods. No one knew that, when the human came to the ring, the death of the gods was a matter yet to be decided.
The people had grown very small. The blades were no longer the test before the gods. Throwing the blades was now sham sport, attended by the eyes of many worlds, each broadcast contest the object of fool’s wagers on prearranged outcomes for profound sums. The blades were no longer prayers. They had become deceitful instruments of profit and entertainment. Few could recall the last throwing where the supplicants weren’t hiding from their gods beneath armor. Naked beings beneath the flying blades had become a dim memory of a myth, a poor graphic in an unread school text. The present was filled with the huge ring at Araak and the Diteureh League Championships. Where once the ancient champion of the blades claimed his victory in the name of the gods who so honored him, the modern champion used his victory to claim the defeat of the gods, in addition to obtaining payment for commercial endorsements of demeaning rubbish and slow poisons.
These things were on my mind as the boy human squatted at the edge of the ring and placed his skin wrapped brace of blades on the sand. I watched him as my mind was brushed by the memory of Giya, the last of the worthy Mieura to throw blades one hundred and fourteen years before.
The boy human studied the weed grown wall that encircled the ring. Leaving his blades, he stood and walked toward one of the loose cut stones. His walk carried the grace of a plains runner. It was almost a dance. He squatted to pick up the first stone.
Once there had been a party of stonemasons who had thought to save themselves some work and expense by stealing stones from the walls of the deserted Diram Ring. The stone the boy human lifted had been dropped eighty-one years before by a frightened Mieura mason after I had shown him roaring visions of eternal fire and had marked his hands to keep his visions fresh in his memory. Thirty-one years later, a human technician, his arms loaded with instruments, had crossed the moat to detect and measure plasmodial, biochemical, and electromagnetic fields in the ring. After days of intense work, he could get no readings on his instruments and had left the ring in despair, his mind frantically searching for a new thesis topic. He had muttered to himself that the alien gods, if they ever had existed, were dead now. When I heard him utter those words, I cried.
The boy carried the stone to the wall encircling the ring. First clearing the soil and weeds from the top course of stones, he put the heavy block of stone in place. Then he returned for another block. The original mason’s puzzle was almost four thousand years old, and the boy solved it. All of the stones were placed back into their original positions.
When the ring was clear of stones, he began to clear it of sticks and weeds. He was preparing the ring for tossing blades.
I was vaguely puzzled, as if I were coming out of an ancient drugged sleep. I had been in a decades-long meditation and interrupted it only for these questions. Why would a human practice with blades in the crumbled, virtually unknown circle at Diram? The human money interests allowed no humans to compete in the sham contests for fear of having the sport banned from their video networks. Yet why would even a Mieuran come to the Diram Ring? There were no more prayers and no one to whom to pray. I watched the boy.
By early afternoon the boy had cleared the sand, bundled the weeds, and removed them. Upon his return, he brought his wrapped blades into the center of the ring, squatted, and opened the skin. He removed from the bundle two gleaming silver double-edged tossing blades, each one as long as his legs, each one sharpened until the ground edges were polished like mirrors. He placed the first blade, handle toward me, on the sand in the center of the ring. The point of the long blade was toward the niche in the ring’s wall opposite mine. He lowered the second blade and shoved its point into the sand at his feet near the handle of the first blade. He did it with a practiced, confident manner.