The Web and the Stars by Brian Herbert Read Free Book Online Page B

machines serviced themselves, and made their own energy pellets from raw materials, including carbon and mineral deposits.
    Now, with the high demand for laborers, he was ordered to increase his production rate, adding a new type of machine—a worker-variant—to the fighting units he had been manufacturing. As with everything he did, Jimu completed this assignment with utmost efficiency. In short order, he had full production lines operational, producing both types of machines.
    For this, and for his quick thinking in the Watanabe and Glavine extractions, he was promoted to a fourth-level Red Beret. This gave him access to more of the secret rituals, language, and symbols of the military society. Jimu just memorized them; he didn’t really understand why people were so fascinated with such matters.
    But Jimu had a continuing problem.
    The sentient machines under his command were being mistreated, jeered at and kicked by many of the Red Beret soldiers, especially whenever the Human men drank. Too often, alcohol was thrown at the robots to see if they would short out—a bitter, sticky drink called nopal that the men favored.
    Through it all, the machines still remained loyal to their Human masters, and so did Jimu. Their internal programming did not permit them to do otherwise, and they had fail-safe mechanisms to make sure nothing went wrong.

Chapter Ten
    What is the highest life form?
    What is the lowest?
    The answers defy analysis.
    —Tulyan Wisdom
    In his cell one evening, surrounded by the orange glow of a pattern-changing containment field, Noah had plenty of time to think. The guards had modified the electronic field around him. Instead of traditional bars, now triangles, squares, and other geometric shapes glimmered and danced around him.
    In them, he thought he saw images of Humans being blasted away or maimed, with their arms and legs flying off. Since he had performed amazing mental feats himself, it occurred to him that he might be able to focus and catch what he thought were subliminal messages in the containment field, cruel tricks employed by his captors. Noah tried this for a while, but found himself unable to do so.
    His thoughts drifted to what kept him busy most of the time when he was alone, envisioning ways he might escape from this dismal cell in Max One. Intermittently he had been able to accomplish this, but only in his mind, where he took fantastic but unpredictable space journeys. And always when he returned from those sojourns into the realm of Timeweb, he was faced with a stark reality, the imprisonment of his body.
    As before, the space journeys were like timetrances, and he looked forward to them. They were increasingly unpredictable, though, in that he could never predetermine how long he would remain in the alternate dimension. Sometimes, after only a few moments of mental escape, he felt himself kicked out, dumped back into his cold cell.
    One morning Noah lay on his bunk, staring at the ceiling. A spider was working up there, using its legs to spin an elaborate, wheel-shaped web to trap insects. The spider went down the web, working for several moments with one pair of legs, then alternating with others. Then it went back up.
    From somewhere, Noah heard a terrible scream. His heart dropped. He hoped it was not Anton. He also prayed that the injury was not too severe. But the scream told him otherwise.
    As far as Noah was concerned, the Doge was the worst of all men, not only for his cruelties to prisoners, but for the damage his Merchant Prince Alliance inflicted upon the environment. The ecology of each planet—like the cellular integrity of each prisoner—was a living thing, deserving of respect and care.
    Noah became aware of the spider again. It had lowered itself on its drag line and was suspended just overhead, staring at Noah with multi-faceted eyes. Noah saw intelligence there, and perhaps more.
    This tiny creature seemed, in many respects, superior to a Human being.
    Abruptly,