CHAPTER 10

AKIND OF METAL SHED known as “the silo” had been put up close to the battle arena, and there Vronsky’s Exterior was to have been taken the previous day. He had not yet seen her there. During the last few days he had not ridden her out for practice himself, and so now he positively did not know in what condition his Exterior had arrived yesterday and was in today.

Vronsky was justifiably proud of his Exterior, Frou-Frou, which he had built and modified to his tastes, in consultation with a brilliant English engineer whom he retained as mécanicien at great cost. Frou-Frou’s every movement was controlled by Vronsky, encased inside her, his body attached to her delicate sensory system by dozens of wires.

“Well, how’s Frou-Frou?” Vronsky asked the engineer in English.

“All right, sir,” the Englishman’s voice responded somewhere in the inside of his throat. “Come along, then,” said the Englishman, frowning and speaking with his mouth shut, and with swinging elbows he went on in front with his disjointed gait.

They went into the little yard in front of the shed. A target boy, trembling a bit in the head-to-toe padded suit he wore, followed them. As they walked through the silo Vronsky knew five other Exteriors stood in their separate stalls, and he knew that Matryoshka, the Exterior belonging to his chief rival, Mahutin, had been brought there, and must be standing among them.

Even more than his own Exterior, Vronsky longed to see Matryoshka, whom he had never seen. But he knew that by the etiquette of the Cull it was not merely impossible for him to see another of the exoskeletons, but improper even to ask questions about it. Just as he was passing along the passage, the boy opened the door into the second stable on the left, and Vronsky caught a glimpse of exactly that fighting machine he was most curious about: Matryoshka was a curiously innocent-looking Exterior, with an immense and rounded bottom, a smaller but equally rounded upper portion, and the crude, clownishly painted face of a bearded old peasant man. He lingered, surprised that Mahutin’s Exterior should be so pleasant, even silly looking; then, with the feeling of a man turning away from another man’s open letter, he turned round and went into Frou-Frou’s stall.

Frou-Frou was an Exterior of medium size, constructed to roughly humanoid shape from a dozen enormous, curved, and overlapping metal plates. He had paid dearly to acquire the masses of groznium alloy required to plate her entire body, and such was the cleverness of her jointures that no enemy ordnance Vronsky had yet encountered could pierce her. As to offensive capability, Frou-Frou was equipped with a trio of rotating heavy-fires set in cones at chest level, plus a grill across the “face” of the machine, from which, when Vronsky wished it, could launch cannonball-sized bursts of globular electricity, directed at the opponent of his choosing.

About all Frou-Frou’s figure, and especially her head, there was a certain expression of energy, of overwhelming offensive capability, and yet of softness. Some Exteriors seem only like deadly furniture, large weapons with a hole to climb inside; but Frou-Frou was one of those Exteriors—less than a Class III but more than a simple Class II—which seem not to speak only because they were built without a mouth hole. To Vronsky, at any rate, it seemed that she understood all he felt at that moment as he looked at her.

As soon as Vronsky was attached to the dozen pulse-point electrodes allowing him to communicate with Frou-Frou’s control relays, she shifted the massive armor plates at the joints, rotated her eyes in their cavernous ocular cavities, and pointed her three heavy-fires in three different directions.

“There, you see how fidgety she is,” said the Englishman.

“There, darling! There!” said Vronsky, speaking soothingly to the suit. “Quiet, darling, quiet!” he said, patting her again over her rear section, which glinted in the dim light of the shed. “Let’s give her a go.”

In another moment the engineer had opened her metal torso, and Vronsky had climbed inside, attaching the dozen wires to the corresponding input points along Frou-Frou’s contact board. Vronsky felt that his heart was throbbing, and that he, too, like the suit, longed to move, to open fire; it was a feeling both dreadful and delicious. As the machine warmed up, and Vronsky felt the familiar delectable tingle of his limbs seeming to merge with the synthetic reflexes of the suit, the target boy made a run for it, but was corralled by Lupo, who growled warningly to hold him at bay until Vronsky was ready to test-fire.

“Please, your Excellency,” said the target boy. “Perhaps—”

The Englishman rolled his eyes and walloped him on the back of the head. “It’s only a half-power round.”

Vronsky, as comfortable in Frou-Frou’s familiar confines as a child in the womb, directed his Exterior to shoot, and shoot she did, loosing a jolt of pure electric force from behind the face grill directly at the target boy. Though it was indeed only a half-power jolt, when Vronsky climbed out of the suit and he and the Englishmen stepped from the shed into the sunlight, they left the target boy behind them, his body shivering as he slowly recovered on the rock-hard floor of the silo.

“Well, I rely on you, then,” Vronsky said to the Englishman. “Half past six on the ground.”

“All right,” said the Englishman. “Ah, where are you going, my lord?” he asked suddenly, using the title which he had scarcely ever used before.

Vronsky in amazement raised his head, and stared, as he knew how to stare, not into the Englishman’s eyes, but at his forehead, astounded at the impertinence of his question. But realizing that in asking this the Englishman had been looking at him not as an employer, but as a combatant, he answered:

“I’ve got to pay a visit; I shall be home within an hour.” He blushed, a thing which rarely happened to him.

The Englishman looked gravely at him; and, as though he, too, knew where Vronsky was going, he added: “The important thing’s to keep quiet before a contest. Don’t get out of temper or upset about anything. And watch the roads. The rumor is circulating that UnConSciya has mined the roads around the arena with emotion bombs.” Vronsky scowled. Emotion bombs were a nasty business: detonators triggered by mood-based physiological surges in passersby, such as their perspiration chemistry.

“All right,” answered Vronsky, and departed, still wearing the set of miniaturized sense-plates attached to his body, with which he would later resume his connection with Frou-Frou—and through which, via vibratory telegraphy, the engineer could monitor his physiological condition until then.

Before he had driven many paces away, the dark clouds that had been threatening rain all day broke, and there was a heavy downpour.