Love, Death and Robots. Volumes 2 & 3

Baris shook his head and still smiling he clicked his fingers and walked to the transport. The two women followed him as obediently as dogs. The four came after: hounds of a different breed.

* * *

Out of the rock field reared the first of the stone buttes, carved by wind-blown sand into something resembling a statue of something manlike sunk up to its chest in the ground. In the cracks and divisions of its head, mica and quartz glittered like insectile eyes. Snow led the way to the base of the butte where slabs of the same stone lay tilted in the ground.

“Here,” he said, holding his hand out to a sandwich of slabs. With a grinding, the top slab pivoted to one side to expose a stair dropping a short distance to the floor of a tunnel. “Welcome to my home.”

“You live in a hole in the ground?” said Hirald with a touch of irony.

“Of course not. Follow.”

As they climbed down the slab swung back across above them and wall lights clicked on. Hirald noted that the tunnel led under the butte and had already worked things out by the time they reached the chimney with its rails pinned up the side and the elevator car. They climbed inside the car and sprawled in the seats ringing the inside, looked out the windows as it hauled them up the chimney cut through the centre of the butte.

“This must have taken you some time,” said Hirald.

Snow said, “The shaft was already here. About two hundred years ago I first found it. Others had lived here before me, but in rather primitive conditions. I’ve been improving the place ever since.”

The car arrived at its destination and they walked from it into a complex of moisture-locked rooms at the head of the butte. With a drink in her hand Hirald stood at a polarised panoramic window and looked out across the rock field for a moment, then returned her attention to the room and its contents. In a glass-fronted case along one wall was a display of weapons dating from the twenty-second century and at the centre of this a sword dating from some pre-space age. Hirald had to wonder. She turned from the case as Snow returned to the room, dressed now in loose black trousers and a black open necked shirt. The contrast with his white skin and hair and pink eyes gave him the appearance of someone who might have a taste for blood.

“There’s some clothing there for you to use if you like, and the shower. No problem with it cycling. There’s plenty of water here,” he told her. Hirald nodded, placed her drink down on a glass-topped table, and headed back into the rooms Snow had come from. Snow watched her go. She would shower and change and be little fresher than she already was. He had noted with some puzzlement how she never seemed to smell bad, never seemed dirty.

“Whose clothing is this?” Hirald asked from the room beyond.

“My last wife’s,” said Snow.

Hirald came to the door with clothing folded over one arm. She looked at Snow questioningly.

“She killed herself about century ago,” he said in a flat voice. “Walked out into the desert and burnt a hole through her head. I found her before the crab-birds and sand sharks.”

“Why?”

“She grew old and I did not. She hated it.”

Hirald had no comment to make on this. She went to take her shower, and shortly returned wearing a skin-tight bodysuit of translucent blue material, which she did not expect to be wearing for long once Snow saw her in it. Snow was occupied though; sat in a swivel chair looking at a screen, he was back in his dust robes, his terrapin mask hanging open. She walked up behind him to see what he was looking at. She saw the hover transport on the sand and the two women pulling a sheet over it. The Merchant Baris she recognised, as she recognised the four hired killers.

“It would seem Baris has found me,” said Snow, his tone cold and flat.

“What defences does this place have?”

“None, I never felt the need for them.”

“Are you sure they are coming here?”

“It seems strange that he has chosen this particular rock field on the whole planet. I’ll have to go and settle this.”

“I’ll change,” said Hirald, and hurried back to get her suit. When she returned Snow was gone, when she tried to follow she found the elevator car locked at the bottom of the shaft.

“Damn you, Snow!” she yelled, slamming her fist against a doorjamb, leaving a fist-shaped dent in the steel. She then walked back a few paces, turned, and ran and leapt into the shaft. The rails pinned to the edge were six metres away. She reached them easily, her hands locking on the polished metal with a thump. Laboriously she began to climb down.

* * *

Jharit smiled at his wife and nodded to Trock who stood beyond her strapping on body armour. This was the one. They would be rich after this. He looked at the narrow beam laser he held. He would have preferred something with a little more power, but it was essential that the body not be too badly damaged. He turned to Baris as the Merchant sent his two women back to the transport.