Brass Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

floor.
     
    ‘See, you’re as excited about this as me.’
     
    Now, with the gravity stabilized, Cormac noticed how the corridor had changed. When he had come aboard this ship, the cabins and corridors were new and skeletal, the Jack Ketch not often having had to provide for human passengers. Now his boots came down on pale blue carpet decorated with a nicely repeating pattern of nooses. The spill from spotlights, mounted in ornate brackets, lit the corridor, though their main targets were portraits spaced along walls bearing the uneven look of old plaster.
     
    ‘Very nice,’ said Cormac.
     
    ‘Glad you like it,’ replied the AI.
     
    ‘To make us poor humans feel more comfortable?’
     
    ‘Of course.’
     
    Cormac studied one of the portraits, vaguely identifying it as of some very early premillennial cosmonaut, then he broke into a trot towards his destination. The corridor terminated against a dropshaft slanting up at forty-five degrees, and glaringly of the present time. Locating the touch-plate set in an ormolu moulding beside the slanting entrance, Cormac input coordinates, then reached out a hand to check that the gravity field was operating before he stepped inside the shaft. The irised field wafted him in a direction that was now up, and he soon stepped out into what was called the bridge of the ship, though the vessel was not controlled from there. Jack was pilot, navigator and captain, and controlled the ship from wherever his AI mind was located deep inside it.
     
    This chamber occupied the upper level of the ship’s nose. The ceiling, curving down to meet the floor ahead of Cormac, was not visible, for a VR projector created the illusion that there was no ceiling at all and that he was walking out onto a platform open to vacuum. This platform, it seemed, possessed a low stone wall to prevent the unwary from stepping off the edge into the abyss. There were no instruments for humans to use, nor any need for them, though Jack could easily project a virtual console here. In the centre of this was what Cormac now mentally referred to as the drawing room.
     
    Below a free-floating crystal chandelier, which might have been merely a projection or the real thing, club chairs, a drinks cabinet, coffee table and other items of premillennial comfort were arranged on a large rug, at the corners of which incongruously stood Victorian cast-iron street lamps giving off a soft gaslight. These were all items from Jack’s collection, replicas all, but almost to the molecular level. Now, Cormac saw that off to one side the AI had added something else.
     
    ‘Is that for my comfort as well?’ asked Cormac.
     
    The wooden framework towered against the stars, no doubt perfect in every detail, mechanically sound, its trapdoor oiled.
     
    ‘It is here because I find it aesthetically pleasing,’ Jack told him.
     
    Cormac turned to the localized sound of the AI’s voice.
     
    Seated in one of the club chairs, the hangman looked like a bank manager or a stockbroker from sometime before the twenty-first century. His antique suit was pinstriped and tight on his thin body, his face white and skull-like. The brim of the bowler hat he never removed was pulled low on his forehead, shading his eyes, so that when the light caught the lenses of his spectacles, they glittered in shadow like something insectile. His overfull briefcase, no doubt containing execution orders and probably a coiled rope, stood beside his chair. Cormac suspected he wore sock suspenders and Y-fronts—for every detail of the hangman was meticulous—just like the mind this ancient automaton represented.
     
    ‘Your idea of aesthetics is a little worrying,’ Cormac observed. ‘I take it that this is not just any old gallows.’
     
    ‘No,’ said Jack, ‘it’s the Nuremberg one.’
     
    Cormac fell silent as he allowed himself to absorb that. Using as an avatar an automaton from an age two centuries ago, rather than a holographic projection, was