Alice: The Girl From Earth

Chapter Six: In The Castle on Cape San Bonnifaccio

Alice had never heard about Cape San Bonnifaccio, nor are any of this story’s readers likely to know the Cape’s turbulent history. Cape San Bonnifaccio rises out of the Mediterranean Sea like a shark’s fin; the surrounding lands are parched and uninviting. Once upon a time, about six hundred years ago, the pirate armada of Hassan Bey, comprising some twenty-three quick moving galleys, lay in wait for and smashed a Genoese squadron to smithereens. Hassan Bey himself fastened the noose around the neck of the Genoese admiral before he strung him up from the yard arm. Or so it’s described in the three volume “History of Lawlessness in the Mediterranean and North Atlantic,” by the famous Argentinian historian of piracy don Luis de Diego.

Since then History has passed Cape San Bonnifaccio by. One can hardly consider the construction of a castle at the edge of the cape by an eccentric English baronet an historic event. The Baronet dreamed of having his own Ghost.

But a true ghost would only put in an appearance once the requisite castle had been constructed, however small. Naturally, a real castle would have been best, but the baronet found the English climate cold, wet, and unhealthy, so instead he built his castle on the Mediterranean sea, almost real, with a draw bridge and a not very deep moat where he put the swans. The baronet settled in, and waited for the ghost to begin to clank his chains. Perhaps a ghost did arrive, but only after the baronet grew sick and died. The castle remained masterless. Who in their right mind would settle in this empty corner of the coast?

The castle was empty for half a century. Decayed, its walls leaning at odd angles, the tourists who passed through on the cruise ships may very well have believed the loquacious guides who swore upon their grandmothers’ honors that the castle was built in the Middle Ages by Queen Bella the Pius.

In the second half of the twentieth century the castle came alive once more. Its new owners renovated the interior and redecorated the walls, and encircled the castle and cape with two rows of barbed wire and put armed guards on the gates. Sometimes covered trucks visited the castle, and then a commotion started in the courtyard. Workers and people of unknown nationality unloaded bags and containers from the trucks and carried them into the castle’s enormous vaults.

The peasants from the neighboring villagers gossiped about the castle’s new owners for a time, but by and by the stories died down and were extinguished, like a fire that isn not fed. Once an article about a secret organization preparing for a war was published in a small newspaper, and this article mentioned the names of the castle at Cape San Bonnifaccio, as one of this organization’s bases. But the people mentioned in the article brought the newspaper to court for slander and the newspaper was forced to pay an enormous indemnity, in as much as the newspaper could not provide the court with a single document, and the sole witness was found dead the day before the trial.

More decades passed. People forgot about the supposed organization which had been preparing for a war, and they forgot about the castle itself. The castle, abandoned by its last owners, fell into decay, and the barbed wire was carefully gathered up by the local shepherds and dumped in a cess pit.

As you can see, Cape San Bonnifaccio has no direct connection to our story, except that about ten days or so before Alice flew to the Crimea, Northern Med Tours decided to construct a flyer station and small tourist hotel beside the cape to deal with the submarine tours trade. Northern Med Tours is an enormous organization, and they do not like to waste time needlessly. On the noon of the day the decision was taken three cargo flyers brought in a load of construction robots, and one student.

The construction ‘bots moved out on their enormous treads and set about to clean up the piles of stone left behind from the old castle from the construction site and the student found a single fig tree and sat down in its shadow to read the immortal work of Akhmedzynov “The Introduction of Six Legged Rabbits Into Domestic Situations.” The student was enrolled in a cybernetics-robotics department of the local university, but had found his life boring and decided to enroll in the Genetic Technologies courses as well; the Department was very fashionable and it was hard to get in; there were seventy Earth students and ten off-worlders for every spot.

The construction ‘bots dug up junk, the enraptured student lost himself in Ahmedzyanov’s singularly dry prose, bees swirled about and a light breeze tugged at the fig tree’s leaves. And suddenly one of the construction ‘bots vanished beneath the ground with a large crash.

The racket was sufficiently loud to tear even the student away from his book. He counted the construction robots and it finally dawned on him that one was missing. The student ran to the dark pit that yawned open in the ground. He could hear the construction robot crashing about in the darkness, knocking into unseen artifacts and making even more noise.

The student ordered the construction bot to turn on its head lamp and in the light thus provided descended into the Earth. It turned out the con-bot had fallen into the castle’s basement, a basement filed with artifacts and documents left behind by the last owners. The student was very surprised and, making his way back to the surface, immediately made contact with the nearest city; three historians arrived on a coast guard cutter in an hour and a half.

The find was well beyond anyone’s expectations. The castle’s last inhabitants had, in point of fact, been preparing for a war. The evidence of this was in the bags of documents, the infantry weapons from a century past, the mountains of dried batteries, the bullets, the uniforms for non-existent armies, the field rations, and even the parts of a disassembled tank with anti- radiation armor. In one corner of the basement stood the robots.

These were astonishing robots. The historians only knew of one utterly rusted-out example of the specific type. These were robot soldiers. They were able to obey military commands and, if they heard the order ‘Kill,” they could kill people as well. These robots simply had been built without the restraints and restrictions that protected human beings. The robots were extremely dusty and rusty in spots, but when one of them was dragged to the surface and turned on, it slowly rotated its head, took in the parched valley, the sea and the shark’s fin shape of Cape San Bonnifaccio, and said in a scratchy voice:

“Ready for your commands, Sir!” Then it was silent, examined the dumbfounded historians with its single eye, and added: “Where is your commanding officer?”

The robot spoke Russian and was clearly intended for action on the Eastern Front.

The world’s leading authority on the history of robotics and cybernetics was immediately called from Antarticburg. Cynthia Komatsu examined the robots, and asked them a number of leading questions, and declared that it would be impossible to use them now. They were programmed as soldiers, and it was really far simpler to melt them down as scrap metal than repair and re-program them.

Four robots were immediately grabbed by the museums that had already expressed an interest in the weapons and documents, and the remaining robots were shipped off to a scrap metal factory.

To do this they used the coast guard boat that had carried the historians to the castle at Cape San Bonnifaccio. They attached a medium sized plastic barge to the coast guard boat and put the student on the boat along with the books, from which he refused to be parted and loaded the robots onto the barge. No one noticed, during the loading, that one of the robots was, accidentally, turned on. The student continued to read about six legged rabbits and was so entranced that he never heard the warnings of the Force Six gale that was about to hazard his navigation. The sky unexpectedly grew dark, the winds rose to a howl, and white, foamy waves ran across the sea in series. The student noticed nothing of this until the first large wave burst through the door to his cabin ad claimed Akhmedzyanova’s book from his hands, along with a number of even less interesting text books.

Only then did the student come to his senses, send out an SOS, and carefully look outside. The barge with the robots was turning every which way at the end of its line, trying to break away from the coast guard cutter, pulling the ship backwards and in general threatening the continuation of the student’s young life. The student immediately contacted the shore and received permission to cut the line and return to port. He did this and, with a great deal of luck, made it home.

But there was something that he only told his best friend (in fact, the best friend did not believe him): when he had wanted to cut the line he saw a tall figure standing up in the barge who had snapped the line from the other end. Most likely, the student maintained, this was none other than one of the metal robots. The young man told no beside his best friend of this: he was afraid that he might be suspected of cowardice.

Everyone concluded that the barge had sunk.

In fact, the barge had not sunk at all. For some days the waves of the frightening storm battered it and transported it across the Mediterranean sea, then swept it, half sunk, through the Bosporus Straits and, with its last gusts, cast the boat ashore on the coast of a small island off the Crimean Peninsula.

The robots, throughly worn and rusted after days of wandering over the waves, important components of their electronic brains damaged by a century of storage, stepped from the half sunken barge onto the land and, having dried out, began to act. One of the ten had, originally, been programmed as robot Chief, capable of making decisions in the presence of the enemy and commanding the others. The Chief-Robot put his command on a military footing and, in his rusted brain arose the thought that, if they now found themselves on the island, that meant the war they had been awaiting a hundred years had at last begun and it was time to engage in the subjugation of the enemy. He gave himself a promotion to General.

In their very first days on the island the robots discovered an enormous steel tub amid the stones. The Robot General sent off two of his soldiers in it to reconnoiter the coast. They returned after several hours, not alone, but with loot two prisoners Alice and the old man-film robot.

Alice knew none of this; she could not even imagine that some time in the past people, here on earth, had been scientists competent enough to make speaking robots, which they then prepared for war with other people, in particular Alice’s own grandfather and great-grandfather.

Nor did Herman Shatrov suspect any of it either; he and the entire group of film makers, as well as Svetlana Odinokaya, spent a sleepless night searching the coastal rocks with flash lights in search of Alice and the old man. Nor did the rescue teams of the Crimean Emergency Services whose flyers, poorly equipped for night flights, cruised over the shores; nor did the tourists from the near-by camp, all twenty three tents of which lay just on the other side of the hills from the film makers, get much sleep. The tourists were also out searching for the little girl and the old man.

Alice’s father, the Director of the Moscow Space Zoo, suspected nothing of this. In fact, he got an excellent night’s sleep, knowing that Alice was in complete safety in the Crimea with his good friend Herman Shatrov. No one had yet told him anything.

….In the middle of the first night Sosnin, Director of Rescue Operations, flying in a wandering course over one of the insignificant small bays that lined the coast, and lighting it up as he went along, saw a number of footprints in the sand, footprints far larger than human size. The tracks led upwards, long the edge of the hill. Following the chain of tracks he saw in one spot a collection of scattered shells and small stones which flashed iridescently in the beam of his search light.