John DeChancie Castle 04 Castle War

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Castle War dangling like a marionette on biochemical strings.
The contrastingly backward technology of the hospital led him to think. He
watched nurses take oral temperatures with old-fashioned liquid-lead
thermometers, the standby of home medicine chests for ages. Even with the dumb
technology, minimum sanitary measures were followed. Those thermometers were
sterilized, and for a thermometer the only way to do that was immersion in
alcohol; for oral purposes that meant ethyl alcohol, ethanol. Methanol, wood
alcohol, was poisonous.
If his unconscious bodily mechanisms were being monitored internally, was
there something he could ingest that would suppress those mechanisms? Drugs,
maybe. Drugs were here, and he could get to them, but what sort of drugs would
suppress autonomic responses? Tranquilizers? Maybe, but he doubted that any in
use here would be effective enough. Narcotics? Possibly. But he was naturally
wary of those. After all, overdosing was as easy as falling off a ghetto
stoop.
Narcotics were easily available, in the sense that there were no physical
barriers. The drug cabinets had no lock. In this society locks were unneeded.
And for that reason he couldn t touch them. He couldn t approach the cabinets
with the intention of stealing drugs without risking intervention by
InnerVoice.
But the thermometers made him think. He had seen no taverns, no liquor stores.
As far as he knew, this society was teetotal. Why? Perhaps because the effects
of booze could thwart InnerVoice.
There was probably a bottle of ethanol in the drug cabinet, and if not there,
in the supply lockers. But the question was, could he steal the alcohol?
No. The same constraints applied, or would be applied. He couldn t even risk
thinking about it too much.
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Back to square one. He ruefully half entertained thoughts of sidling up to the
bottle, eyes averted, whistling innocently, then grabbing it and chugging as
much as he could before InnerVoice grabbed his gut and squeezed. But the ploy
was absurd. He couldn t very well plan to do something without knowing he was
going to do it. There was no one to fool but himself.
Was there no way out besides hoping for his internal police force to go on the
fritz?
He might have to face up to the possibility that there was no way out of this.
The thought of it was numbing. An eternity here?
What about the castle? They surely had missed him by now. Surely they d send
out a search party.
The thought of castle folk in doublets and tights wandering around in this
universe was incongruous. But
Linda was smart enough to know that a strange universe would call for caution.
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Castle War
Maybe that was the reason for the delay in finding him. Just how would they go
about it, anyway? This was a big world, a complex society, and a very
dangerous one. He couldn t know for sure that the rescuers had not also been
abducted and injected with InnerVoice.
If so, there was no hope. The portal could close, if it hadn t already, and
he d be stuck here forever.
He went home after his first day, made himself boiled potatoes, ate, and sat
down to log screen time.
While he watched, he thought. At length he resolved on a course of action.
Absurd idea though it was, tomorrow he would try stealing the bottle and
downing as much alcohol as he could, neat, before the shakes got to him. He
wouldn t try to fool himself or InnerVoice, he would just do it. He simply
could not think of anything else to try.
The resolution enabled him to sit through the evening s entertainment
without too much distress.
Afterward, he was restless. He decided to go out for a walk. As far as he
knew, it was allowed. Anything that was allowed, he could do.
Maybe he would keep walking. He d had about enough of this place.
Then he considered what might happen if he tried to escape. He had refrained
from daring another attempt out of simple fear. He did not want to experience
again the excruciating psychic pain, the unbearable sense of impending doom,
the unremitting terror that he had felt under InnerVoice s lash.
The very thought of it made his stomach spasm.
No, he wasn t quite ready to face it again, and the bottle-grabbing notion now
struck him as stupid and rash. In time, maybe. For now about all he could risk
was taking a walk.
He was on the stairway between the second and third floors when she came
through the door opening on the landing. He almost bumped into her. It was the
woman he d seen last night.
She seemed startled at first, then burst into the forced smile she d given him
before. Hello, citizen!
Hi, he said. Then he blurted, I m going out for a stroll. Want to walk with
me?
The smile disappeared, and she gave him a penetrating stare.
He stood there, letting her gauge him, taking his measure. She seemed to be
weighing the risk, trying to figure whether this was a test or a trap. Could
she trust him? Should she dare? All this she spoke with her eyes, and he was
vastly relieved to hear it. It was the first evidence he d had of humanity, of
conscious volition, behind the universal facade of robotlike obedience.
Yes, she said finally.
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Castle War
They walked out of the building together.
The night was cool and the city was quiet. Too quiet. It was not yet Lights
Out, but along the stark faces of the high rises there were more dark windows [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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