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  Once at the drawbridge, she watched as a cart approached from the castle courtyard, the iron-shod footfalls of the horses echoing out as they slapped down on the wood. It was perfect cover, and she took advantage of the opportunity, stepping immediately behind the cart as it passed, so close she could have touched the back of the wooden frame of the vehicle. Not one guard unit so much as moved its head. Now clear of the drawbridge and the guards on the far side, she let the cart continue on down the drive while she made for a cluster of bushes. So far, so good.

  Being outside the castle gave Penelope a tremendous uplift, a feeling of happiness greater than any she had previously experienced. Freedom tasted sweet. The sensation was enhanced by the fact that it was a sunny afternoon; she had emerged from the shadows of the castle walls into the bright colors of summer fields. This close to the castle, the fields were mostly uncultivated pasture, whose bright green grass was dotted with clusters of blue speedwells, purple thistles, and yellow ragwort. Even under escort, she really ought to have come out here more often when they blossomed, just for a walk among these signs of life and growth. The dimly lit corridors and dingy rooms of the castle suddenly seemed unbearable.

  Penelope ran for a while, letting the stamina levels of her avatar sink nearly all the way down to zero. It didn’t matter; she could recuperate while she worked. Safely out of sight of the castle, Penelope settled on some sandy ground beside a lone oak tree. There she began to script, using her human fingers inside their gloves to open the menus, selecting and drawing materials into existence in front of her, and using a huge variety of scripting subroutines to shape them. In the course of marching his armies across Ruin, Lord Scanthax had been impressed by the motorbikes of his enemies and desired them for himself as a means of speeding up communication between his troops. Until he conquered their factories, Lord Scanthax’s motorbikes had been Penelope’s creations. Having spent weeks scripting bikes for Lord Scanthax back then, Penelope could create a perfectly good motorbike with her eyes closed. More important, she could do so swiftly. In less than an hour it stood on its rests and back wheel, gleaming, perfect—except, perhaps, that it was a little too new looking. Still, by the time she reached the road, it would probably look like it had been around for years.

  Now this was delightful! Penelope laughed as she mounted the bike and laughed again as she rode it, bouncing and jolting through the grass, revving hard whenever the bike threatened to stall on rising ground. And just as swiftly as the laughter had come, so, suddenly, did a flush of misery. What would her life have been like if she had not been left behind as a baby? One thing was certain: it would not have been a life spent almost always immersed in an electronic world. She would have been able to really feel the wind on her face, the tears on her cheeks; to inhale the scents of the grass and wild flowers. Instead, these joys were all being experienced at one remove, through the medium of the headset and gauntlets placed on her emaciated body. While the avatar registered some of the vibration of the bike and all of the roaring sound of the engine, the scents of the flowers and the feel of the rushing wind were left to her imagination.

  Once she reached the road, Penelope increased her speed, the telegraph poles along the side of the road coming past swiftly, one after the other. Not too fast, she reminded herself. It would be terrible to crash now that she was on her way to Saga, and worse still to lose this avatar and have to create a new one, one that would necessarily appear back at the castle and would no longer have any of her items, including the ring of invisibility. She was not particularly experienced on these bikes, but fifty kilometers an hour seemed safe enough. Having thought the matter over, Penelope slowed down for a moment and removed the invisibility ring from her finger. Did wearing it make the bike invisible also? That would be suspicious: an engine sound without the machine to go with it. Stranger still would be the sight of a bike without a rider. In any case, motorbike messengers were a common enough sight on the route from the castle to Gate One.

  There was not too much traffic on the road, mostly farm carts laden with vegetables destined for various barracks. For a while, though, she was stuck behind a very slow troop carrier. It was strange to see medieval archer units packed inside a Ruin-style half-track truck, but such had been the situation ever since the conquest of the neighboring world and the absorption of its technology. As soon as a long stretch of road allowed her to overtake the truck safely, she twisted the accelerator and surged past.

  What would she do in Saga? It would probably be wise to walk around invisible for a while, to gather information about the nature of their society. How would she find other humans, though? Could she risk talking to whatever sentient electronic beings she found there? And what would their response be? There was a great danger that they would be hostile and simply kill her avatar. But it would be worse if she was too cautious and Lord Scanthax discovered she was missing before she had spoken to anyone.

  The blue of the sky was deepening by the time that Gate One became visible among the hills ahead, or at least the large barracks and set of defenses that surrounded the gate were visible. On her right, the road was currently following the shore of a lake, which was calm and tinged with copper from the colors of the clouds above. It was safe to keep going for a while longer, but with about a mile left before the camp, Penelope stopped the bike and dismounted. Although she was reluctant to leave the bike, she had to go on invisibly from here and even if the bike became invisible, too, while she was on it, the sound of its engine would draw attention to her movements. Once clear of the forces on the other side of the gate, she would script a new bike; it didn’t take long.

  Wearing the ring on the middle finger of her right hand, Penelope walked swiftly toward a checkpoint guarded by a machine gun post. Vehicles were being halted and investigated before they were allowed on, but she simply ducked under the pole that formed the barrier. Another hundred yards down the road between stationary columns of soldier units, and she could see the black glistening emptiness of the gate just up ahead. Good. They hadn’t yet erected a waterfall, although she could see engineering units at work nearby getting the materials ready.

  As she walked confidently up the final stretch of road before the gate, something changed. All the soldiers on either side turned to look at her and they raised their rifles and bows.

  “Halt,” said a voice from farther back.

  Of course, she did not stop, but set her avatar to run.

  “Halt, Princess, or we fire.”

  Penelope stopped. The ring was still on her finger. What had gone wrong? There were only twenty steps to the gate, but it was no good; just one good shot would cut down her avatar and with hundreds of soldier units focused upon her, it was hopeless. She felt sick.

  An officer of the chain-mail-and-sword type came over to her.

  “You do not have permission to use the gate.”

  “Oh, my mistake.” She turned around and began walking down the road. Her human body was sweating, and she had to blink away tears to get her view to stop swimming, but her avatar was composed. There was no point in arguing with these units; they could not be deceived because they had no decision-making intelligence. What mattered now was to act as normal as possible so that the officer did not use the telegraph system to contact the castle. It was extremely tempting to look back at him, but she kept going.

  What had gone wrong? Why had the invisibility ceased to function? Had some kind of interference from the gate affected the magic of the ring? That didn’t seem likely, but it would account for what had happened to both her and the ring’s previous owner.

  Not until she was back at her motorbike, under a darkening sky, with the barracks a distant blaze of light, did she vent her frustration with a massive howl of anguish that went on and on until she had no breath remaining in her lungs.

  Chapter 16

  HARSH REAPPRAISALS

  That evening, while working on the creation of a new gate as close to the data stream of Epic as she could s
afely manage without being seen by the guards of Gate One, Penelope experienced a lag between her physical finger movements and those of her avatar. At first she thought it was one of those rare moments when her interface with Edda lost its usual continuity; when there would be a little jerkiness for a second or two and then everything would become smooth again. But none of her monitors was flashing; latency was fine. When the delay continued and all her status bars appeared to be static, when she could not turn her head or hear the rain falling on the bracken around her, and when even the subtle movements of grass tips had ceased, then she knew what was happening to her, and she shouted with rage.

  “No. Leave me alone!”

  There was no response. Nor could there be. Everything was frozen. She had been unplugged from Edda. Although he had never done so before, Lord Scanthax could forcibly log Penelope out of Edda by the simple expedient of having the robots in her room detach her headset and gloves from the console. That this was exactly what had happened was soon confirmed by the cold touch of a robotic finger pushing at her shoulder. It wanted her to take off the interface equipment, but she just lay there cursing to herself.

  Penelope was so completely helpless that she felt physically sick. All through her childhood she hadn’t fully appreciated just how dependent she was on Lord Scanthax. After all, she’d never had any reason to really press him and the medals he gave her had made her proud to be helping him. Penelope was a princess and, even more wonderful than that, she was the only person in the whole of Edda who could script. Indeed, far from feeling helpless, she had felt powerful. But gradually she had discovered the limits of that power. All her serious work was for Lord Scanthax; the toys and clothes she made for herself were nothing more than a benignly tolerated indulgence. Fundamentally—as had just been proven—her relationship to Edda was entirely in his hands. And worse, as the lone person in a deserted complex hostile to human life, she was a prisoner. Lord Scanthax controlled her life-support systems, her access to Edda, and, as a result, her whole existence.

  The prodding stopped. Penelope lay in darkness on her back, her headset still fastened across her eyes, her hands heavy in their interface gauntlets. The tears descending from the corners of her eyes felt warm as they reached her ears. What would Lord Scanthax do next? Unfasten the drip that was feeding her body? And how would she respond to that? Lie here until she died? That would teach him a lesson. Or would it? Did he really need her still? Those weapons from Saga were powerful, but what Lord Scanthax lacked in technology he made up for in the scale of his dominion, now stretching over most of four worlds. It was doubtful that any real threat faced him from Saga. He always did have a tendency to exaggerate his difficulties.

  Time passed, perhaps an hour, and it seemed as though Lord Scanthax had decided to leave her alone. Penelope’s tears stopped and her heartbeat slowed. But she still refused to remove the interface equipment, preferring to lie in the dark until she knew her own mind.

  It was probably inevitable that at some point her disappearance would be discovered, but she had hoped to complete her new gate and still have time, if the invisibility worked, to get as far as Saga. A few hours might have been all that was needed.

  So Lord Scanthax or one of his manifestations—probably Ambassador—must have discovered her absence. They probably had the castle searched and then Lord Scanthax had done the obvious thing and focused on her human body, which, after all, could not escape him. He had ordered the robot to unplug her from Edda, presumably in order to get her attention and prove his control over her. That’s why she didn’t want to move. She just didn’t want to be forced to return to that grim castle and the scripting work that only made Lord Scanthax more powerful and less interested in Penelope’s wishes.

  What, then, were her options? If she were physically stronger, she could make it to the library and try to find out more about the human world. The people who used to live here—including her mother—surely had not left the planet without a trace. They had deliberately left no record of where they had gone, presumably so that there was no possibility of a sentient being from Edda one day becoming a threat to them again, but even so, perhaps there was a means of contacting the former colonists. Perhaps there was a way to broadcast a message out into space that would reach them.

  As for what happened to the humans who had left the settlement some sixteen years ago, Penelope would have to find that out for herself. She could not accept Lord Scanthax’s version of events; his stories had been designed to keep an eight-year-old girl hard at work for him, and while Penelope had never caught him in an out-and-out lie, she had learned enough about his character to know that he cared for nothing but victory over all other electronic lifeforms.

  Losing her childish understanding of who she was and what her life meant had been painful. It meant seeing all the rewards that she had striven so hard to get as worthless and all the ceremonies and compliments of Lord Scanthax as empty. But at the same time, there was also some comfort in the notion that he had no empathy for his human companion, for it might well be that Lord Scanthax was keeping her isolated from other people. What if there was a simple way of contacting other humans that Lord Scanthax was hiding from her? Had he already encountered them in other worlds, or even through communications to this one that he had never told her about?

  At this encouraging thought, a little energy came back to her body and Penelope no longer wanted to simply waste away in the dark to frustrate Lord Scanthax. Instead, she realized, she wanted to outmaneuver him; to have him on his knees, pleading for her aid and giving her all that she wanted: to have complete control over these robots and over her life-support systems; to come and go as she pleased in Edda; and to access all the library files in this world. Was that possible? Or was it just wishful thinking? It was a revolutionary change in her outlook. Instead of seeing Lord Scanthax as a father figure, she saw him as an enemy, her captor, someone she must defeat.

  This harsh but necessary reappraisal of Lord Scanthax also had implications for Penelope’s attitude toward the sentient beings of Saga. So what if they really did mount an effective attack on Lord Scanthax? To have him in a state of genuine fear for his life would now be something to relish. It could get dangerous, though. On the one hand, she wanted the threat from Saga to frighten Lord Scanthax sufficiently for him to come begging Penelope for assistance. On the other hand, if the conscious entities of Saga really were that strong, they might simply destroy Lord Scanthax, with the consequence that this would lead to failure of the systems keeping her body alive. Penelope reassured herself with the thought that it was unlikely anyone could kill Lord Scanthax. As far as she understood, so long as one manifestation of his was alive, it would eventually accrue all his intelligence and energy. And seeing as there were more than two hundred manifestations, surely some of them would escape an attack on the castle.

  But supposing there was no prospect of the armies of Saga defeating those of Lord Scanthax, what then? She would have to create a situation that would oblige Lord Scanthax to negotiate with her. But how? There was one obvious way to threaten him. If she managed to script an explosive device of sufficient power, Penelope could destroy all his manifestations when they next met in the Feast Hall for a redistribution of his will. As she lay in the dark, trying to picture such a scenario, she became aware of the impractical side of this plan. Even if she could manage the difficulties of scripting such a powerful bomb, she didn’t really want to kill Lord Scanthax—certainly not while the management of the human-world equipment that kept her alive was entirely in his hands. And even if she could kill him at no risk to herself, was that what she desired? She hated him; hated his coldness, his lack of humor and empathy, his manipulation of her childish eagerness to please. But he was still the only family she had ever known, and after all, he had saved the human baby that had been left behind at the exodus. He deserved some credit for that.

  It cheered her up, though, to imagine the scene. Redistribution Day, and all the manifes
tations gathered in the Feast Hall, with Penelope seated among the higher-level versions of Lord Scanthax at the inner table. After their usual self-congratulatory speeches, she would ask to make one. They would listen, curious at first, but then perhaps a little afraid. For she would scream at them, venting at last her pent-up rage at her captivity; at the way Lord Scanthax had exploited her; at his failure to pay any attention to her goals; at his failure to give her freedom to explore the worlds as she liked, to try to find other humans. It was such a small request and it would have been so easy for him to grant it. But his chance was over. With a last long look into his face, which finally, too late, might show some comprehension of her feelings, she would blow up the lot, her own avatar included. A few hours later she would die, either from lack of oxygen or hypothermia, all alone in the cold and dark. Not that she feared being alone; despite the bustle of the castle, she had been alone her whole life.

  Penelope tugged her hands free of their gloves and took off her headset. The robot nearest her turned to face the bed and in its shining plates she saw her reflection: a wan and pale young woman with pink sores for eyes. It was no wonder that she spent so much time in Edda, to the detriment of her human body. There really was nothing for her in this small complex that sustained her. Unfastening the drips and tubes that serviced her body, Penelope sat up with a grimace. At a stretch—and clearly she did not stretch often enough—she could just about touch the roof. The room was about three meters long and only two wide, illuminated dimly by a pale blue striplight in the roof. At the far end was the air lock. Around the bed that dominated the room were units that were mostly drawers filled with equipment, although the one nearest the head of the bed was the Edda console.