Hansen turned when he heard a mechanical sound over the snorts and murmurs of the Y-horned titanotheres browsing around him on the plateau.
A high-powered unicycle was headed his way. Its hub-mounted motor howled every time the wheel bounced into the air from a pothole. The rider sat easily erect, dressed in black leathers. His mirror-polished visor was a reflective ball. On it a medial horizon separated the rich azure sky from a distorted panorama of the rough terrain.
On that vehicle, the visitor could only be Fortin; and in Hansen's book, there was never a good time to see Fortin.
The unicycle slowed as it neared the titanotheres. The multitonne beasts were loosely spread over the landscape; calves, generally in pairs, close to their mothers, and a huge male stationed downwind of the herd he dominated.
Fortin picked the last thousand meters of his way carefully, trying to reach Hansen at the center of the herd without approaching any of the titanotheres. The ball of his helmet spun from side to side as he tried to look in all directions at once.
A young male titanothere bellowed and did a sudden curvette, snapping at its haunches. Apparently the beast had mistaken the sound of the unicycle for that of a horsefly about to light. Fortin wobbled and almost fell: though the dim-sighted browser was unaware of the vehicle's presence, the titanothere's circular rush nearly trampled unicycle and rider accidentally.
Fortin pulled up beside Hansen and switched off his engine. He stepped to the ground. The sidestand bit into the friable soil, and the unicycle fell over beside its rider.
The drive motor was hydraulic. The smell of hot oil made Hansen's nose wrinkle.
Fortin touched his helmet. The front half snicked back and merged with the rear. His white android features were no paler than usual in the near dusk. "What a bloody place!" he snarled. "Can't you find somewhere decent to be, Commissioner?"
"I suppose if I felt like human company just now," Hansen said, "I'd be back in the Open Lands with Lord Salles."
Hansen smiled. It was not a particularly-pleasant expression, but there was enough humor in it to raise a question of how pointed he meant the insult to be when he added, "Human company or yours, Fortin."
The android laughed. "And here I came to do you a favor, Hansen," he said.
The two men—the man and the android—were close to the same height, but Hansen's build was much solider without being heavy. Despite that, Fortin had a wiry strength—as a weasel does, and it was coupled with a weasel's mad urge to slaughter.
Well, Hansen hadn't always needed much of a reason to kill either; though sometimes he dreamed about it afterward, nightmares in which all the faces became one face with glazing eyes. . . .
"You never did anybody a favor, Fortin," Hansen said without overt emotion. He stepped over to the unicycle and raised it, since its rider wasn't about to.
The little vehicle was extremely dense. Hansen grunted, letting his knees do the work to save his back. His toe teased closer a broad, fibrous chip of titanothere dung, years and perhaps decades old. He slid it under the stand. The chip spread the weight enough to keep the unicycle from toppling when he let go of the handlebars.
Fortin's face hardened as it had not at the verbal insult. "Perhaps," he said to Hansen's back, "you'd rather that I just go away and not bother you with what I've learned?"
"Don't play games, Fortin," Hansen said. He turned and met his visitor's eyes. "I know, duration doesn't matter to us any more . . . but I don't have much taste for silly games."
A titanothere forty meters away drew Hansen's attention when it flopped down. Its ribs boomed a drumbeat against the ground.
The beast rolled on the light soil, kicking its four-toed forefeet in the air and gouging the dirt with its nose horn. Small birds hopped in and out of the dust cloud, snapping at insects the titanothere roused.
Fortin watched, frowning as he tried to divine what it was that Hansen saw in the spectacle to hold his rapt attention. If Hansen had hunted the huge beasts—
—had blasted the animals to gobbets of flesh which lost life and then even the semblance of life—
—the android could have understood; but instead Hansen merely observed. He was so gentle with beasts that Fortin could almost forget the lethal violence gleaming at the back of the ex-policeman's green eyes.
"All right . . . ," Fortin said aloud. "It's simple enough, really. You came here to learn how Captain North made this world vanish from the outside universe, did you not?"
"That's why the Consensus sent me to Northworld, yes," Hansen said. He looked over his shoulder at Fortin. "Do you know the answer?" he added without emotion.
Fortin quirked an ingratiating smile. "I know who does," he said. "Or more accurately, I know where the information is. But I don't suppose you consider that you have a duty to the Consensus of Worlds any longer, now that you've become a god . . . ?"
"I'll worry about my duty, friend," Hansen said softly. "Why don't you tell me what you think you know?"
"The folk on Plane Five are descended from the human crews of the fleet the Consensus sent first to search for Northworld," Fortin said. "When Captain North made us vanish. They're settled in keeps, and they fight each other."
Hansen nodded. "Fight each other within limitations," he corrected. "Armies fight each other, but they pretty much leave each other's homes alone so they don't spoil the game for the future."
He grinned harshly and added, "God forbid that anybody decides to live in peace anywhere on Northworld."
"It used to be that way on Plane Five," Fortin said. "All the millennia since the settlement. But the current Count Starnes is destroying all his neighbors, one by one. So I went to see how."
The dust-bathing titanothere rolled to its feet and woofed like a huge dog. It ambled toward another young male, then charged. The beasts thudded together in a mock courtship battle.
"You would like that, wouldn't you, Fortin?" Hansen said. His eyes were on the great herbivores and his voice was controlled, but the android noticed Hansen's fingers twitched as though reaching for a pistol. "People killed, people left to starve; people chained in labor gangs, all for no reason. . . ."
"I'm trying to do you a favor, Commissioner," Fortin said sharply.
Hansen turned. He was dressed in Open Lands style, a leather jerkin over his wool blouse and breeches. He wore no weapon, but the threat of murder was in his eyes.
"Then do it, Fortin, and get out," Hansen said. He spoke with difficulty, as though his throat were choked with dust. "I decided a long time ago that I shouldn't kill people just because they were evil little bastards . . . but I've been known to make exceptions."
"If you kill me, Hansen . . . ," the android whispered. "If you kill any of us gods, the whole Matrix collapses and there's nothing left."
"Yep," said Hansen. "I've been told that."
Fortin's mind turned inward to a vision of nothingness so icy and perfect that his body shivered in rapture. The very motion drew him back to where he stood, on a plateau on Plane Eight, where titanotheres gamboled in the dusk.
"Yes," the android said to clear his throat and mind.
"All the keeps on Plane Five have powerful computers," he resumed in a voice as light as the breeze. "That of Keep Starnes is the original Fleet Battle Director, an APEX system, that came with the settlement. It outclasses the other systems as the sun does a candle. That's how Count Starnes is able to overwhelm his neighbors."
"Go on," Hansen said. His voice had lost its edge. He didn't see Fortin's point as yet, but he was now sure there was a point.
"Don't you see, Commissioner?" the android crowed. "APEX is powerful enough to determine how North took us beyond the outside universe. But in all the time the unit has sat on Plane Five, nobody bothered to ask it the question!"
The titanotheres began to move off in the direction of the setting sun. The odor of their bodies and the alkaline bite of the dust they stirred filled the muttering gloom. A big female passed within a few meters of the humans, unaware or unconcerned.
Fortin could no longer make out Hansen's features. "I'm telling you this because I thought you'd want to know," the android went on. "But I advise you not to attempt to access the data. It's too dangerous."
He tried to conceal his anxiety that Hansen wasn't going to react; that the ex-Commissioner would ignore the duty that had sent him to Northworld in the first place.
But—when the Matrix gave humans power that made them gods, it also accentuated the primary traits of each human's underlying personality. Duty must have been important to Commissioner Nils Hansen long before the Consensus sent him to Northworld.
Whereas Fortin's personality—
"Count Starnes says he'll let you use APEX," Fortin said, "but it's not really safe to visit Plane Five, is it? Since we can draw power from the Matrix only here and in the Open Lands."
Hansen did not appear to be listening. His eyes followed the titanotheres, black humps against a crimson sky. The fingers of his left hand played across the seat of Fortin's unicycle.
"Besides," the android added, desperate in his fear and his evil, "Starnes says he'll see you only if you come to him unarmed. He's not to be trusted. I'm afraid that if he has you in the center of his keep, he'll strike you down."
Hansen stretched his arms out to the sides, then twisted them behind him and craned his neck back as well. "Will he just?" he murmured. "Quite a boy that Starnes, hey?"
"Look," said Fortin. "I've told you what I surmise and I've given you my recommendation: stay away, it's too dangerous for you. I have nothing more to do with it."
His voice rose without his being aware of it. A titanothere straggling behind the rest of the herd broke into a snorting trot in the direction of the sound.
Fortin's left hand splayed out. A ball of orange sparks devoured a section of the landscape, expanding until it struck a vertical plane separating it from the titanothere. The ball winked out with the hollow whoomp of an implosion.
The titanothere skidded, then galloped off in the opposite direction.
Hansen lowered his own left hand. "He wasn't going to do any harm," he said to the android. "Usually they don't charge home; and anyway, they're too clumsy to chase you down if you dodge."
"I have better things to do than play games with mindless beef!" Fortin snarled. He threw his leg over the saddle of the unicycle and locked his face shield down.
"I'd feel naked, going into a place like Keep Starnes without a pistol," Hansen said conversationally. "T' tell the truth, I feel naked even out here without a pistol. Maybe that's why I come, d'ye think?"
"I think nothing!" the android snapped. "What you do is your own affair, Commissioner Hansen."
He touched a switch on the left handgrip. White radiance fanned across the landscape from the unicycle's headlamp. The wheel spun in the light soil, tilting the saddle forward despite the stabilized suspension. The little vehicle tore off into the night in the direction the titanotheres had gone.
Hansen dusted his palms absently over his thighs, brushing away grit that the unicycle had thrown onto him. He could return to the Open Lands at the moment of his departure, so that he would seem never to have been gone.
He could as easily travel through the Matrix to the dwelling he kept here on Plane Eight, a dozen kilometers in less than an eyeblink.
But duration no longer mattered to him, and he needed to think. He started to walk through the gathering dark, an easy pace that would get him where he was going in the short term . . .
And perhaps by then he would know what he intended to do in the larger sense.