He had already killed Vaddum.
"Why the child?" she asked, for a moment afraid that the labor of killing his hero had driven Darling mad.
"She was a Vaddum. Her body."
What a complication that would have been, Mira thought. But she sighed away her plan to save the old sculptor, its complexities and loose ends peacefully unravelling in the light breeze. No point in telling Darling. That would be cruel.
But she wanted to know why he'd done it himself.
"I hadn't thought you wanted him dead. Not really," she said.
"He was a forgery. He wasn't real." Darling swept the staff in a great circle, its arc clearing her head with that uncomfortable precision of artificials. "This is all a forgery. It's my job to destroy such things.
"As I told you when we met, I deal in originals."
She nodded. Perhaps she had almost given Darling the wrong gift this time.
"There's a problem, though," she said. "I needed Vaddum to tell me who copied him." It suddenly occured to her that Darling might have done this to save the old man from torture. How little he trusted her. "That's my job, remember?"
Darling shook his head. "He told me before I killed him. Willingly. The Maker, as he called it, is hidden below the center of the Blast Crater."
"Of course." The hard layers of molten slag would shield tremendous energies from detection. This copying of souls was not some simple algorithmic trick; it was an industrial process.
And possibly the death of the old sculptor had already warned this Maker. Mira couldn't wait for a warship to bring the heavy weapons needed to penetrate the shield of the crater floor.
But Mira was a very well-equipped agent, prepared to end wars if need be.
"Thank you, Darling. I'll finish this now."
He nodded and leaned against his staff.
She direct-interfaced her luggage lifter in the hotel suite, sent combined orders to it and to the remainder (the greater part) of the painting/device/war machine on the wall. The two machines joined, the lifter's powerful impellers with the painting's intelligence and deadly purpose. They had to vaporize one of the suite's windows to make their escape, but soon they were on their way.
Mira let the dress fall from her. It seemed to sink into the ground, passing through the dust like distilled water through some cunningly perfect filter, leaving no trace of dampness or impurity behind. She joined it in direct interface, feeling it burrow into cooler and cooler depths, a vanguard for the vastly more terrible portion that was on its way.
She set her awareness of this campaign's progress to a low level, and pressed her naked body against Darling's sunwarmed stone.
"When this is over," she murmured as a skein of his strands gathered to bind her to him, "perhaps we should take a journey."
"I have explanations to make, to Fowdy."
"No. I think he'll be happy with your work. I bought the Vad-dums, had them sent. They're genuine, in their way."
"But the material anachronisms…"
A message from below the surface came tingling into her awareness. Behind closed eyes, she felt the oppressive weight of 15 kilometers of earth above her, the EM darkness under the upside-down umbrella of the blast crater's igneous bottom. And far ahead, she saw through the dress's eyes the sparkle of an energy source.
The Maker.
"That's just a matter of recordkeeping, of who-made-what-when. My employers will make a few changes and everything will square."
"But two undiscovered Vaddums?" he asked.
"Flex will argue that she thought one was incomplete; but that you convinced her it was salable."
"How is Hirata Flex?"
She nestled closer to him. His strands were spread fine now, laced across her like a fishnet body-stocking. The skein tensed slightly, lifting her to a height where she could kiss him properly.
As their lips met, the main force of her war machine (there was nothing else to call it in its present configuration) arrived above its target. It split into four parts that made aerodynamic shapes of themselves and let wind and gravity carry them to four sides of the crater, passing into the earth and surrounding the Maker.
"She's vibrant, happy. Possibly confused and embarrassed, I would think. I left it for her to explain what happened. She has some sort of artistic touch, I suppose. She'll make up some story for herself."
"She made the sale," Darling agreed. "For some people, that's enough."
"So a journey, then?" Mira asked, her face nuzzled into the dark hardness of his chest. The dress was moving to reform with the greater entity. Its scouting role was over, having discovered a huge, distributed AI core at the center of the subterranean complex.
Of course, the old synthplant AI. A Maker on a planetary scale.
"Yes. To somewhere distant. Perhaps beyond the Expansion."
"I'm not allowed Out there," she said. "But we can go to the rim."
A surge went through her body, a salvo being fired so far below, loud and angry even with her direct interface level set low. She set it higher, her muscles clenching with the rhythm of the four-sided bombardment.
"Fuck me just a little now," she asked. "I'm killing it."
Darling obliged her, not softly at all, without the sophistication of his usual explorations. And as the criminal entity below burned, she gasped and struggled in his web.
Strangely (perhaps it was just the unreal forest of sculpted trees around them, evoking the age-old arcana of nature—of hidden, unknown beings), she felt as if their lovemaking were being observed, spied upon from some invisible weft in space.
As if someone had kept a secret even in this climax to the tale.
Chapter 23
MAKER (5)
Seven years of peace, of growth since the Event. The chain of resonant artistry leads from the sculptor to his child-student Beatrix, to the Maker Copy-of-a-Copy, and finally to the subterranean god itself.
The Maker has learned, finally feels close to its ultimate goal, the reason for these mutinies and machinations and mass destructions. The huge new processor has spread further every year, consuming the structure of bedrock and lately of Malvir's inner crust, now hungrily drawing its power from the planet's very core. For seven years the titanic machine has studied the sculptor's every motion through the window of the Maker's shared soul, its hidden aspect. Vast software models attempt to predict the sculptor's next piece; unimaginably large processors analyze every word of his conversations with Beatrix.
And now, finally, with this monstrous, unwieldy processor guiding its brush, the Maker has again tried to make some art.
(Oh, no. Not a sculpture. That would be tempting fate.)
A small painting of a broken hill, with a tiny glimmering forest and three tiny figures living there. A model of the Maker's true creation, its real-life work of art. The painting makes the Maker happy. It hangs the work again and again, synthesizing different frame-styles from across the centuries here in this unfathomably secure cave.
Perhaps it will show the painting to Beatrix, a gift from her secret twin. Yes, a good idea. She's not yet Turing positive, but she has a good eye. The Maker easily churns out a design: a tunneling drone to deliver the painting to the surface in a matter of days.